Essential Novelists - Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo
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Author
VICTOR-MARIE HUGO WAS born in Besançon, France, on February 26, 1802, to mother Sophie Trébuche and father Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo. His father was a military officer who later served as a general under Napoleon.
Victor Hugo studied law between 1815 and 1818, though he never committed himself to legal practice. Encouraged by his mother, Hugo embarked on a career in literature. He founded the Conservateur Litteraire, a journal in which he published his own poetry and the work of his friends. His mother died in 1821. The same year, Hugo married Adèle Foucher and published his first book of poetry, Odes et poésies diverses. His first novel was published in 1823, followed by a number of plays.
Hugo's innovative brand of Romanticism developed over the first decade of his career.
In 1831, he published one of his most enduring works, Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Set in the medieval period, the novel presents a harsh criticism of the society that degrades and shuns the hunchback Quasimodo. This was Hugo's most celebrated work to date, and paved the way for his subsequent political writing.
Hugo fled to Brussels following a coup in 1851. He lived in Brussels and in Britain until his return to France in 1870. Much of the work that Hugo published during this period conveys biting sarcasm and fierce social criticism. Among these works is the novel Les Misérables, was finally published in 1862. The book was an immediate success in Europe and the United States. Later reinterpreted as a theatrical musical and a film, Les Misérables remains one of the best-known works of 19th century literature.
Hugo died in Paris on May 22, 1885. He received a hero's funeral. His body lay in state beneath the Arc de Triomphe before burial in the Panthéon. Hugo remains one of the giants of French literature. Although French audiences celebrate him primarily as a poet, he is better known as a novelist in English-speaking countries.
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Les Misérables
BY VICTOR HUGO
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Volume I - Fantine
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Preface
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SO LONG AS THERE SHALL exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.
HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862.
Book First
A Just Man
Chapterr I
M. Myriel
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IN 1815, M. CHARLES-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.
Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty, in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed, though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and to gallantry.
The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed. M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next in the fate of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden days, the fall of his own family, the tragic spectacles of ‘93, which were, perhaps, even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from a distance, with the magnifying powers of terror,—did these cause the ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life, suddenly smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune? No one could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.
In 1804, M. Myriel was the Curé of B—— [Brignolles].