No More Learning

Louis XVIII. granted the boy-poet a pension of
1,500 francs.

It was the windfall for which the youth had been waiting to enable him to
gratify his first love. In his childhood, his father and one M. Foucher,
head of a War Office Department, had jokingly betrothed a son of the one
to a daughter of the other. Abel had loftier views than alliance with a
civil servant's child; Eugene was in love elsewhere; but Victor had fallen
enamored with Adele Foucher. It is true, when poverty beclouded the Hugos,
the Fouchers had shrunk into their mantle of dignity, and the girl had
been strictly forbidden to correspond with her child-sweetheart.

He, finding letters barred out, wrote a love story ("Hans of Iceland") in
two weeks, where were recited his hopes, fears, and constancy, and this
book she could read.

It pleased the public no less, and its sale, together with that of the
"Odes" and a West Indian romance, "Buck Jargal," together with a royal
pension, emboldened the poet to renew his love-suit. To refuse the
recipient of court funds was not possible to a public functionary.
M. Foucher consented to the betrothal in the summer of 1821.

So encloistered had Mdlle. Adele been, her reading "Hans" the exceptional
intrusion, that she only learnt on meeting her affianced that he was
mourning his mother. In October, 1822, they were wed, the bride nineteen,
the bridegroom but one year the elder.
The dinner was marred by the
sinister disaster of Eugene Hugo going mad. (He died in an asylum five
years later. ) The author terminated his wedding year with the "Ode to
Louis XVIII. ," read to a society after the President of the Academy had
introduced him as "the most promising of our young lyrists. "

In spite of new poems revealing a Napoleonic bias, Victor was invited to
see Charles X. consecrated at Rheims, 29th of May, 1825, and was entered
on the roll of the Legion of Honor repaying the favors with the verses
expected. But though a son was born to him he was not restored to
Conservatism; with his mother's death all that had vanished. His tragedy
of "Cromwell" broke lances upon Royalists and upholders of the still
reigning style of tragedy. The second collection of "Odes" preluding it,
showed the spirit of the son of Napoleon's general, rather than of the
Bourbonist field-marshal. On the occasion, too, of the Duke of Tarento
being announced at the Austrian Ambassador's ball, February, 1827, as
plain "Marshal Macdonald," Victor became the mouthpiece of indignant
Bonapartists in his "Ode to the Napoleon Column" in the Place Vendome.

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.