No More Learning

His "Orientales," though written in a Parisian suburb by one who had not
travelled, appealed for Grecian liberty, and depicted sultans and pashas
as tyrants, many a line being deemed applicable to personages nearer the
Seine than Stamboul.

"Cromwell" was not actable, and "Amy Robsart," in collaboration with his
brother-in-law, Foucher, miserably failed, notwithstanding a finale
"superior to Scott's 'Kenilworth. '" In one twelvemonth, there was this
failure to record, the death of his father from apoplexy at his eldest
son's marriage, and the birth of a second son to Victor towards the close.

Still imprudent, the young father again irritated the court with satire in
"Marion Delorme" and "Hernani," two plays immediately suppressed by the
Censure, all the more active as the Revolution of July, 1830, was surely
seething up to the edge of the crater.

(At this juncture, the poet Chateaubriand, fading star to our rising sun,
yielded up to him formally "his place at the poets' table. ")

In the summer of 1831, a civil ceremony was performed over the insurgents
killed in the previous year, and Hugo was constituted poet-laureate of the
Revolution by having his hymn sung in the Pantheon over the biers.

Under Louis Philippe, "Marion Delorme" could be played, but livelier
attention was turned to "Notre Dame de Paris," the historical romance in
which Hugo vied with Sir Walter. It was to have been followed by others,
but the publisher unfortunately secured a contract to monopolize all the
new novelist's prose fictions for a term of years, and the author revenged
himself by publishing poems and plays alone. Hence "Notre Dame" long stood
unique: it was translated in all languages, and plays and operas were
founded on it. Heine professed to see in the prominence of the hunchback
a personal appeal of the author, who was slightly deformed by one shoulder
being a trifle higher than the other; this malicious suggestion reposed
also on the fact that the _quasi_-hero of "Le Roi s'Amuse" (1832, a
tragedy suppressed after one representation, for its reflections on
royalty), was also a contorted piece of humanity. This play was followed
by "Lucrezia Borgia," "Marie Tudor," and "Angelo," written in a singular
poetic prose. Spite of bald translations, their action was sufficiently
dramatic to make them successes, and even still enduring on our stage. They
have all been arranged as operas, whilst Hugo himself, to oblige the father
of Louise Bertin, a magazine publisher of note, wrote "Esmeralda" for her
music in 1835.

Thus, at 1837, when he was promoted to an officership in the Legion of
Honor, it was acknowledged his due as a laborious worker in all fields of
literature, however contestable the merits and tendencies of his essays.

In 1839, the Academy, having rejected him several times, elected him among
the Forty Immortals.
In the previous year had been successfully acted "Ruy
Blas," for which play he had gone to Spanish sources; with and after the
then imperative Rhine tour, came an unendurable "trilogy," the "Burgraves,"
played one long, long night in 1843. A real tragedy was to mark that year:
his daughter Leopoldine being drowned in the Seine with her husband, who
would not save himself when he found that her death-grasp on the sinking
boat was not to be loosed.

For distraction, Hugo plunged into politics. A peer in 1845, he sat between
Marshal Soult and Pontecoulant, the regicide-judge of Louis XVI. His maiden
speech bore upon artistic copyright; but he rapidly became a power in much
graver matters.

As fate would have it, his speech on the Bonapartes induced King Louis
Philippe to allow Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to return, and, there
being no gratitude in politics, the emancipated outlaw rose as a rival
candidate for the Presidency, for which Hugo had nominated himself in his
newspaper the _Evenement_. The story of the _Coup d'Etat_ is well known;
for the Republican's side, read Hugo's own "History of a Crime. " Hugo,
proscribed, betook himself to Brussels, London, and the Channel Islands,
waiting to "return with right when the usurper should be expelled. "

Meanwhile, he satirized the Third Napoleon and his congeners with ceaseless
shafts, the principal being the famous "Napoleon the Little," based on the
analogical reasoning that as the earth has moons, the lion the jackal, man
himself his simian double, a minor Napoleon was inevitable as a standard
of estimation, the grain by which a pyramid is measured. These flings were
collected in "Les Chatiments," a volume preceded by "Les Contemplations"
(mostly written in the '40's), and followed by "Les Chansons des Rues et
des Bois. "

The baffled publisher's close-time having expired, or, at least, his heirs
being satisfied, three novels appeared, long heralded: in 1862, "Les
Miserables" (Ye Wretched), wherein the author figures as Marius and his
father as the Bonapartist officer: in 1866, "Les Travailleurs de la Mer"
(Toilers of the Sea), its scene among the Channel Islands; and, in 1868,
"L'Homme Qui Rit" (The Man who Grins), unfortunately laid in a fanciful
England evolved from recondite reading through foreign spectacles. Whilst
writing the final chapters, Hugo's wife died; and, as he had refused the
Amnesty, he could only escort her remains to the Belgian frontier, August,
1868. All this while, in his Paris daily newspaper, _Le Rappei_
(adorned with cuts of a Revolutionary drummer beating "to arms! "), he and
his sons and son-in-law's family were reiterating blows at the throne.
When it came down in 1870, and the Republic was proclaimed, Hugo hastened
to Paris.

His poems, written during the War and Siege, collected under the title of
"L'Annee Terrible" (The Terrible Year, 1870-71), betray the long-tried
exile, "almost alone in his gloom," after the death of his son Charles and
his child.