la légende des siecles

who, obnoxious to Napoleon for the share he had taken in Moreau's plot, lived secretly
in the house, and from an old priest named Larivière, who came every day to teach the
three brothers. There too he played in the garden with the little Adèle Foucher, who
afterwards became his wife. But this quiet home life did not last long. In 1811 Madame
Hugo set off to join her husband at Madrid, and the boys went with her. At Madrid they
were sent to a school kept by Priests where Victor was not very happy, and from which
he got small profit. Next year the whole family returned to Paris, and in 1815, at the age
of thirteen, he was definitely sent to a boarding-school to prepare for the École
Polytechnique. But his was a precocious genius, and he devoted himself, even at school,
to verse-writing with greater ardour than to study. He wrote in early youth more than
one poem for a prize competition, composed a romance which some years later he
elaborated into the story Bug-Jargal, and in 1820, when only eighteen, joined his two
brothers, Abel and Eugène, in publishing a literary journal called Le Conservateur
Littéraire. About the same time he became engaged to Adèle Foucher, and wrote for her
the romance of Han d'Islande, which, however, was not published till later. In 1822 he
and Adèle were married, and in the same year he published his first volume of Odes. He
was now fully launched on a literary career, and for twenty years or more the story of
his life is mainly the story of his literary output. In 1827 he published his drama of
Cromwell, the preface to which, with its note of defiance to literary convention, caused
him to be definitely accepted as the head of the Romantic School of poetry. Les
Orientales, Le dernier jour d'un condamné, Marion de Lorme, and Hernani followed in
quick succession. The revolution of 1830 disturbed for a moment his literary activity,
but as soon as things were quiet again he shut himself in his study with a bottle of ink, a
pen, and an immense pile of paper. For six weeks he was never seen, except at dinnertime,
and the result was Notre-Dame de Paris. During the next ten years four volumes
of poetry and four dramas were published; in 1841 came his election to the Academy,
and in 1843 he published Les Burgraves, a drama which was less successful than his
former plays, and which marks the close of his career as a dramatist. In the same year
there came to him the greatest sorrow of his life. His daughter Léopoldine, to whom he
was deeply attached, was drowned with her husband during a pleasure excursion on the
Seine only a few months after their marriage.
In 1845 Hugo began to take an active part in politics. Son of a Vendean mother, he had
been in early life a fervent royalist, and even in 1830 he could write of the fallen royal
family with respectful sympathy. Yet by that time his democratic leanings had declared
themselves, and he accepted the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe only as a
step towards a republic, for which he considered France was not yet ripe. In 1845 the
king made him a peer of France, but this did not prevent him from throwing himself
with all the ardour of his nature into the revolution of 1848. Divining the ambition of
Louis Napoleon, he resisted his growing power, and when the Second Empire was
established the poet was among the first who were exiled from France. He took refuge
first in Jersey, and afterwards in Guernsey, where he lived in a house near the coast,
from the upper balcony of which the cliffs of Normandy could sometimes be discerned.
Thence he launched against the usurper a bitter prose satire, Napoléon le Petit, and a
still bitterer satire in verse, Les Châtiments, and there he wrote two of his greatest
novels, Les Travailleurs de la Mer and Les Misérables, two of his finest volumes of
poetry, Les Contemplations, the greater part of the first series of La Légende des Siècles,
and the two remarkable religious poems, Dieu and La Fin de Satan. He returned to
France on the fall of Napoleon in 1870, to be for fifteen years the idol of the people,
who regarded him as the incarnation of the spirit of liberty. Several volumes of poetry