Victor Hugo [pp. 81-90]

Victor Hugo.
Many books, before and after the definite
fall of Bonapartism, have been written with
the purpose of impairing the force of the
Chdtiments, all in vain. The Memoirs of
M. de Maupas, recently published, have been
the last and strongest effort made by Bonapartists to vindicate an event that disgraced
France, between the years I85i and i870.
Poor M. de Maupas! why, in fifty yearstwenty, ten, five perhaps-nobody will read
his Memoirs, and thus not a line of that
plea of his shall linger in history, in which
truth alone is allowed by time to remain.
The book will be forgotten-not, alas! the
name of its author, for that name has been
engraven in the Chdtimnents by a hand that
engraves for all time:
"Trois amis l'entouraient, ils 6taient a l'Elys&e
Morny, Maupas le grec, Saint-Arnauld le chacal."
and forever will men say, Maupas le grec, as
they will say Napoleon le Petit or Cartouche
le Grand.
To the adversaries of Victor Hugo, known
as Bonapartists, we shall add a class known
as Les Ventrus. They worshiped the empire, inasmuch as this government was to
them a golden calf, and allowed them to fill
their purse with other people's money.
These latter did not go so far, perhaps, as to
hate Victor Hugo, but could not help refusing their admiration to a man who addressed them in those lines:
"Le bon, le sir, le vrai, c'est l'or dans notre caisse.
L'homme est extravagant qui, lorsque tout s'affaisse,
Proteste seul debout dans une nation
Et porte a bras tendu son indignation.
Que diable! il faut pourtant vivre de l'air des rues,
Et ne pas s'enteter aux choses disparues.
Quoi! tout meurt ici-bas, l'aigle comme le ver
Le Charancon perit sous la neige l'hiver,
Quoi! mon coude est trout, quoi! je perce mes
chausses,
Quoi! mon feutre 6tait neuf et s'est use depuis,
Et la Verit6, matre, aurait, dans son vieux puits
Cette pretention rare d'etre &ternelle.
De ne pas se mouiller quand il pleut, d'3tre belle
A jamais, d'etre reine, en n'ayant pas le sou;
Et de ne pas mourir quand on lui tord le cou!
Allons donc! Citoyens, c'est au fait qu'il faut
croire I"
The "Ventrus" are followed by the "Phil istines," and by all those who remain infat
uated with an inordinate, although in some
respects legitimate, admiration of that literature, called by them rather pompously "The
Literature of the Grand Sigcle." Most of
these men are fifty years old or more. No
hatred in them for Victor Hugo; not even
the refusal of some esteem. They are ignorant of his poetry or prose. While they
were school-boys they heard that Hugo
might be permitted to occupy a place of a
certain distinction between Lamartine and
Alfred de Musset. All their poetical ideas
are derived from Boileau and M. de la
Harpe, that strange critic who thought it
necessary to justify Racine for the use of
the word chien (dog) in his tragedy of
-Athalie. Could such people possibly understand a Hugo bold enough to write without blank (en toutes lettres) the real word of
Cambronne on the Waterloo battle-field,
and many other things no less shocking to
their refined taste?
But we must go on; thanks to God, Bonapartists or bourgeois are but a small minority in France, and Victor Hugo is to nearly
all the uncontested king of our literature.
"Victor Hugo was born with the century,"
writes M. Henri Rochefort, "and when he
disappears we shall feel as if he had taken
the whole century with him."
Are there any writers, in fact, bold enough
to divide among themselves the empire of
that other Alexander, who subdued, himself
alone, the whole literary world in writing
dramas, romances, and unlimited verse,
which extends from the Orientales to the
Zegende des Siecles? Will any others re new that prodigious labor by which he trans formed the French language to such an ex tent as to make almost unreadable today
writers who were his seniors by a few years
only, such as Chateaubriand, Casimir Del avigne, or Alfred de Vigny? He marked
with his own stamp and impressed with his
genius three successive generations of writ ers, several of whom submitted to him as by
force, unable, in spite of their will, to escape
this irresistible domination. All, or nearly
all, French writers of the nineteenth century,
whether they know it or not, whether they
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