Graham Robb won me over with his biography of
Victor Hugo from the introduction, in which he explains that he's basically writing the biography in order to spend four years reading everything ever written by Victor Hugo. YES GOOD. A+ DECISION. When the book later hits the writing of Les Mis, Robb takes a break to tell everyone that, yes, the biography is fine and all, but
really they should just put his book down and go pick up
Les Miserables instead, because it's THAT GOOD.
I mean, it helps that Victor Hugo is an unfairly interesting person; also, unfairly
hilarious. Not, I hasten to add, someone you would probably want to spend time with on a regular basis, despite the massive cult of contemporary worshippers who disagreed. Young Hugo, after all -- well, it's probably enough to just remind everyone that Marius Pontmercy was a self-insert.
(You know who has passionate nostrils, besides Marius Pontmercy? VICTOR HUGO DOES. You know who freaks out when his girlfriend has to lift her skirts a little in order to get through the mud? YEP, YOU GUESSED IT. Better muddy petticoats than immodest ankles, he advises her!)
And then there's Old Hugo, Chief Priest of the thriving Cult of Hugo, with an ego the size of the continent of Europe, who did his level best to seduce anything that moved and subsumed the lives of his entire family into the upkeep of the aforementioned Cult -- and, perhaps even more annoyingly, was the greatest mansplainer EVER TO LIVE, prone to interrupting people's conversations and announcing things like, "I have read neither Goethe nor Schiller, but I know them better than those who have learnt their works by heart!"
SURE, HUGO.
It's also important to note that over the course of his career, Hugo: passionately supported royalty; passionately supported Napoleon; passionately supported Republicanism; passionately led the Romantics; passionately supported the bourgeoisie; passionately charged against a barricade on the side of a repressive government; then, guilt-stricken, spent the next revolution
after that wandering around behind the barricades hoping someone would let him pull an Enjolras and jump around being the leader and waving a flag.
(Sadly, by the time he got to the barricade, it was all over and they were just hauling the corpse of the ACTUAL leader away. OOPS.)
I mean, I actually think all these inherent contradictions are awesome, and so does Robb; without them,
Les Miserables, among others, would be a much more didactic and less inherently fascinating book. But one can imagine it made being a Victor Hugo fan sort of confusing at the time.
There are dozens of LolHugo stories worth relating, but I think my favorite is the year that Hugo spent really, really into Spiritualism. During this period of time, Hugo received supernatural visits from such luminaries as Cain, Moses, Jesus, Mozart, Sir Walter Scott, The Spirit of the Ocean, and The Shadow of the Tomb. Mostly they were coming to tell Hugo that they'd read his books and thought they were AWESOME. A standard night in the Hugo household over that year might look something
( like this )OH VICTOR HUGO.
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