#hugolania

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Trick or treat!

let's see let's see....

Hugo with some Bardic inspiration himself! if this is a treat or not is up to you XD

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I had to share this cover for 'Great French novels'. It's a work of art, especially my man Vicky

omg thank you @ssimsass, you are so right I NEEDED to see this

Hugo being in the Gavroche-inspiration slot is pretty awesome but I can't get over Dumas just

flaunting it

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looking through this mostly delightful set of accounts about Hugo and his barbers on Guernsey, which has interesting info like this:

Victor Hugo always took a keen interest in Mr Le Gallez and his family and unfailingly on holidays such as Christmas and Easter he would say to the barber, ‘Well, how many children have you now?’ and he would thereupon produce a 5-franc piece for each of the children. In contrast to this generosity, he never gave so much as a sou extra for his shave, which was a penny in those days, or for his haircut, which was 2d.

(the barber in question ultimately had fourteen kids!)

but then also there's this:

The poet after a shave would ask for a large basin of water into which he would plunge his head completely, and then he would blow noisily into the water. One day, a customer coming into the shop, saw the ritual in progress, and not knowing who was in the chair, cried out: ’Hey, what do you think you‘re doing, drowning yourself?’

absolutely lethal levels of jokes misfiring oh no

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picture by Daumier; a huckster is telling the crowd to “ Here you see the great celebrities of literary, musical, and artistic France; they are thirty-six feet tall measured below sea level ” , the celebrities in question are, left to right, someone wearing the Journal des Debats like a cape, with a Phrygian cap; a man I can’t idenity; Victor Hugo, on a throne surrounded by books ;a musician wrapped up in giant sheet music; and a guy with a Napoleon-style hat holding a signboard advertising “Jeanne Grey”, “Les enfants d’Edouard”, and “Cromwell”.  The full French text under the picture is: 

Vous voyez ici les grandes celebrites de la France litteraire, musicale et artistique, ils ont tous 36 pieds au dessous du nivou (?) de la mer”

from the Met museum!

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excerpt from an 1862 review of Fantine, on its publication, from a reviewer with the striking name of  Edwin Percy Whipple (bolding mine)

From the bare abstract, the story does not seem to promise much pleasure to novel-readers, yet it is all alive with the fiery genius of Victor Hugo, and the whole representation is so intense and vivid that it is impossible to escape from the fascination it exerts over the mind. Few who take the book up will leave it until they have read it through. It is morbid to a degree that no eminent English author, not even Lord Byron, ever approached; but its morbid elements are so combined with sentiments abstractly Christian that it is calculated to wield a more pernicious influence than Byron ever exerted. Its tendency is to weaken that abhorrence of crime which is the great shield of most of the virtue which society possesses, and it does this by attempting to prove that society itself is responsible for crimes it cannot prevent, but can only punish. To legislators, to Magdalen societies, to prison-reformers, it may suggest many useful hints; but, considered as a passionate romance, appealing to the sympathies of the ordinary readers of novels, it will do infinitely more harm than good. The bigotries of virtue are better than the charities of vice. On the whole, therefore, we think that Victor Hugo, when he stood out twenty-five years for his price, did a service to the human race. The great value of his new gospel consisted in its not being published. We wish that another quarter of a century had elapsed before it found a bookseller capable of venturing on so reckless a speculation.

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The Love Letters of Victor Hugo to Adele Foucher

1820 Saturday Evening, January, 1820. A few words from you, my beloved Adèle, have again changed my state of mind. Yes, you can do anything with me; and to-morrow, were I even dead, the sweet tones…

Three ;ove letters from teenaged Victor Hugo to Adele Foucher! 

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“ Effet de Phèdre sur les bêtes ; Grise, la Mère de Mouche (écoutant Phèdre) “ 

VERY important Hugo  Research today, courtesy @shellcollector and @citoyenneangele--  a photo of one of Hugo’s cats, taken by Auguste Vacquerie, apparently around 1852!

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Ah, here we are! from The Myths and Fables of Today:

When the celebraed Madame Rachel returned from Egypt in 1857, she asked Arséne Houssaye, within a year after, the question: 

“Do you recollect the dinner we had at the house of Victor Hugo?  There were thirteen of us--Hugo and his wife, you and your wife, Rebecca and I, Girardin and his wife, Gerard de Nerval, Pradier, Alfred de Musset, Perrée, of the Siécle, and the Count d’Orsay, thirteen in all. Well, where are they today? Victor Hugo and his wife are in Jersey, your wife is dead, Madame de Girardin is dead, my sister Rebecca is dead, De Nerval, Pradier, Alfred de Musset, and d’Orsay are dead. I say no more. There remain but Girardin and you. Adieu, my friends. Never laugh at thirteen at a table.”

--fwiw , Houssaye died in 1896, and Emile Girardin not until 1881; Mme Rachel , though, died in 1858, just a little after when this supposedly took place.  As for the Hugos, they were fated to move to Guernsey; no word in this account of whether that counted as more or less death-equivalent than Jersey.