The Arcades Project - Operi

pp. 219-220, cited in Jean Skerlitch, L'Opinion publique en France cl'apres la
poesie (Lausanne, 1901), PI'. 19-20.
[d7,8]
The magnificent seventh book of the fourth part of Les Miserables, "UU'got;'
winds up its penetrating and audacious analyses with a gloomy reflection: "Since
'89, the entire people has been expanding in the sublimated individual; there is
no poor man who, having his rights, has not his ray; the starving man feels
within himself the honor of France; the dignity of the citizen is an interior armor;
he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns:' Victor Hugo, Oeuvres completes,
novels, vol. 8 (Paris, 1881), p. 306 (Les Miserables)Y [d7a,l]
Nettement on the digressions in Les lJ.fiseraz,zes: '"These hits of philosophy, of
history, of social economy are like Gold-water taps that douse the frozen and
discouraged reader. It is hydrotherapy applied to literature. "' Alfred Nettement,
I.e Roman contemporain (Paris , 1864), p. 364.. [d7a,2]
"M. Sue, in Le Jui! errant, hurls insults at l'eligion in order to serve the
antipathies of I.e Constitntionnel, ' . . M. Dumas, in la Dame de Monsoreau,
heaps scorn on royalty . . . to accommodate the passions of this same newspaper,
' .. while in La Reine Margot he conforms to the taste of the gilded youth at
La Presse for . .. risque paintings, . , . and . .. in Le Comte de Monte-Crlsto he
deifies money and inveighs against the Ref:ltoration to please the world of civil
servants who congregated around Le Jow'nal des debats." AU ' red Nettement,
Etudes critiques sur lefeuilleton-r01nan, vol. 2 (Paris, 1846), p. ,1.09. [d7a,3]
Victor Hugo: owing to a law of his poetic nature, he has to stamp every thought
with the form of an apotheosis. [d7a,4]
A wide-ranging remark by Drumont: "Almost all the leaders of the movement of
the school of 1830 had the sanle sort of constitution: high-strung, prolific, enam­
ored of the grandiose, VVhether it was a Inatter of reviving the epic on canvas, as
with Delacroix, of portraying a whole society, as with Balzac, or of putting four
thousand years of the life of Hnmanity into a novel, like Dumas, all . . . were
possessed of shoulders that did not shrink from the burden." Edouard Drumont,
Les Heros el les pilres (Paris