No More Learning

TENNYSON.




MEMOIR OF VICTOR MARIE HUGO.


Towards the close of the First French Revolution, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert
Hugo, son of a joiner at Nancy, and an officer risen from the ranks in the
Republican army, married Sophie Trebuchet, daughter of a Nantes fitter-out
of privateers, a Vendean royalist and devotee.

Victor Marie Hugo, their second son, was born on the 26th of February,
1802, at Besancon, France. Though a weakling, he was carried, with his
boy-brothers, in the train of their father through the south of France,
in pursuit of Fra Diavolo, the Italian brigand, and finally into Spain.

Colonel Hugo had become General, and there, besides being governor over
three provinces, was Lord High Steward at King Joseph's court, where his
eldest son Abel was installed as page. The other two were educated for
similar posts among hostile young Spaniards under stern priestly tutors
in the Nobles' College at Madrid, a palace become a monastery. Upon the
English advance to free Spain of the invaders, the general and Abel
remained at bay, whilst the mother and children hastened to Paris.

Again, in a house once a convent, Victor and his brother Eugene were taught
by priests until, by the accident of their roof sheltering a comrade of
their father's, a change of tutor was afforded them. This was General
Lahorie, a man of superior education, main supporter of Malet in his daring
plot to take the government into the Republicans' hands during the absence
of Napoleon I. in Russia. Lahorie read old French and Latin with Victor
till the police scented him out and led him to execution, October, 1812.

School claimed the young Hugos after this tragical episode, where they
were oddities among the humdrum tradesmen's sons. Victor, thoughtful and
taciturn, rhymed profusely in tragedies, "printing" in his books,
"Chateaubriand or nothing! " and engaging his more animated brother to
flourish the Cid's sword and roar the tyrant's speeches.
In 1814, both suffered a sympathetic anxiety as their father held out at
Thionville against the Allies, finally repulsing them by a sortie. This was
pure loyalty to the fallen Bonaparte, for Hugo had lost his all in Spain,
his very savings having been sunk in real estate, through King Joseph's
insistence on his adherents investing to prove they had "come to stay. "

The Bourbons enthroned anew, General Hugo received, less for his neutrality
than thanks to his wife's piety and loyalty, confirmation of his title
and rank, and, moreover, a fieldmarshalship. Abel was accepted as a page,
too, but there was no money awarded the ex-Bonapartist--money being what
the Eaglet at Reichstadt most required for an attempt at his father's
throne--and the poor officer was left in seclusion to write consolingly
about his campaigns and "Defences of Fortified Towns. "

Decidedly the pen had superseded the sword, for Victor and Eugene were
scribbling away in ephemeral political sheets as apprenticeship to
founding a periodical of their own.

Victor's poetry became remarkable in _La Muse Francaise_ and _Le
Conservateur Litteraire_, the odes being permeated with Legitimist and
anti-revolutionary sentiments delightful to the taste of Madam Hugo, member
as she was of the courtly Order of the Royal Lily.

In 1817, the French Academy honorably mentioned Victor's "Odes on the
Advantages of Study," with a misgiving that some elder hand was masked
under the line ascribing "scant fifteen years" to the author. At the
Toulouse Floral Games he won prizes two years successively. His critical
judgment was sound as well, for he had divined the powers of Lamartine.

His "Odes," collected in a volume, gave his ever-active mother her
opportunity at Court. 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.