The first tongue that the child, who was predestined to be so celebrated, learnt to talk was Italian; and the first word he pronounced—after those two words with which all human voices, lips and tongues begin, papa and mamma—was an apostrophe to his governess: "cattiva!" he called out one day, before anyone knew he had learnt the meaning of the word. Perhaps it may not be generally known that cattiva means naughty. Of the isle of Elba the child remembers nothing, and nothing of his early sojourn among his fellow-men; nothing of this earliest halt on the threshold of his existence has remained in his memory.
In 1806 the plenipotentiary Joseph was made King of Naples; he then remembered his friend the major of Lunéville; he inquired what had become of him, learnt that he was living on the isle of Elba, and that he had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, or, as it was still called in 1806, gros-major. He wrote to him and proposed he should come and join fortunes with him, and aid him in the establishment of his throne in the beautiful city which all ought to see before they die, and leave in order to die as soon as they have seen it. But no one dared venture on such military escapades without the permission of the master. Lieutenant-Colonel Hugo asked leave of the Emperor Napoleon to attach himself to King Joseph. The Emperor Napoleon condescended to reply that he not only authorised this change of service, but that he should be pleased to see a French element in his brother's armies, which were only the wings of his own army.
Frenchmen never take service in a foreign army without certain feelings of regret, but this army was destined to be one of the wings of the National Army. And to ameliorate so far as he could the hardships of this exile, the newly made king promoted gros-major Hugo a colonel, made him an aide-de-camp and appointed him governor of the province of Avellino. When installed in his governorship, the husband sent for his wife and children, whom he longed to have near him. So, in 1807, Madame Hugo and her three sons set out for Naples; and the child continued the life of wandering which had begun in his cradle, and which, continued through his youth, was to be his lot to the threshold of manhood. It is to these long journeys taken in his dawning days that the poet alludes in the following lines:—
"Enfant, sur un tambour ma crèche fut posée;
Dans un casque pour moi l'eau sainte fut puisée;
Un soldat, m'ombrageant d'un belliqueux faisceau
De quelque vieux lambeau d'une bannière usée,
Fit les langes de mon berceau.
Parmi les chars poudreux, les armes éclatantes,
Une muse des camps m'emporta sous les tentes.
Je dormis sur l'affût des canons meurtriers;
J'aimai les fiers coursiers aux crinières flottantes,
Et l'éperon froissant les rauques étriers.
Avec nos camps vainqueurs, dans l'Europe asservie,
J'errai; je parcourus la terre avant la vie,
Et, tout enfant encor, des vieillards recueillis
M'écoutaient, racontant d'une bouche ravie
Mes jours si peu nombreux et déjà si remplis.
Je visitai cette île en noirs débris féconde,
Plus tard premier degré d'une chute profonde!
Le haut Cenis, dont l'aigle aime les rocs lointains,
Entendit, de son antre où l'avalanche gronde,
Ses vieux glaçons crier sous mes pas enfantins.
Vers l'Adige et l'Arno, je vins des bords du Rhône;
Je vis de l'Occident l'auguste Babylone:
Rome, toujours vivante au fond de ses tombeaux,
Reine du monde encor sur un débris de trône,
Avec une pourpre en lambeaux.
Puis Turin; puis Florence, aux plaisirs toujours prête;
Naple, aux bords embaumés où le printemps s'arrête,
Et que Vésuve en feu couvre d'un dais brûlant,
Comme un guerrier jaloux qui, témoin d'une fête,
Jette, au milieu des fleurs, son panache sanglant?"
Happy, a hundred times happy, is the man who is able to embroider the web of his life with such magic characters! I too have had recollections similar to those of my literary brother, but I have expressed mine in humble prose, and I rejoice to find them expressed again in his splendid and sonorous poetry. Thence ascend the earliest recollections of the child, indelible recollections, which still shine clearly when extreme old age has come upon us, as a mirage reflects a vanished oasis.
Hugo, who had only once been across beautiful Italy, often talked to me about the grand pictures of it that remained on his memory; they were as present to his mind as though he had been my companion during my fifteen or twenty journeys therein! But he never remembered things in their normal conditions; they always recurred to him in connection with some momentary incident or accident that happened to have changed their ordinary aspect. Thus, Parma was remembered as surrounded by a flood; Acquapendente's volcanic peak stood out lit with the lightnings of a storm; the Trajan column in connection with the excavations that were being carried on round it. And yet his recollection was as exact as it could be. Florence, with its embattled inns, its massive palaces, its granite fortresses; Rome, with its leaping fountains, its obelisks which make it look like a town of ancient Egypt, and its colonnade of Bernino, twin-sister to that of the Louvre; Naples, with its promenades, its Pausilippe, its rue de Toledo, its bay, its isles and its Vesuvius. The three children had amused themselves on the long journey by making crosses with straw and putting them in the cracks between the glass doors and the grooves they ran in. When the Italian peasants, especially those who lived in the neighbourhood of Rome, saw these simple Calvaries, faithful in their worship of images, they would kneel down or at least make the sign of the Cross. The young travellers had been much terrified at the sight of bandits' heads stuck on poles by the roadsides, shrivelling up in the sun. For a long time the poor children refused to believe they were really human heads, and persisted that they were bewigged masks like those hung outside all hairdressers' shops at that period; but when they were taken down and shown them, in all their hideous reality, they remained very deeply engraved on Victor's memory.
In the case of a man like Hugo, a genius out of the common run, who has already played and will still play a great part in the literary and political history of his country, it is the duty of those who knew him to depict him for his contemporaries and successors, in the light and shade which formed the character of the man and the genius of the poet. Let us hope that the genius of the poet will stand out flawless throughout our narrative: the character of the man will speak for itself by his line of conduct and his accomplished actions.
A home for Madame Hugo and her sons was not prepared for them at Naples, but at Avellino, capital of the province over which Colonel Hugo had been appointed governor. This home was in a palace, a palace of marble, like most palaces in that country, where marble is more common than stone; but this palace possessed a strange peculiarity which was certain to attract the attention and to remain in the memory of a child.
One of those shocks of earthquake which are common in the Italian peninsula had just shaken Calabria from end to end; the marble palace of Avellino had been shaken like the rest of the buildings; yet, being on a more solid foundation than they, after oscillating and trembling in the balance for a moment, it kept upright, but remained cracked from roof to base. The crack extended diagonally across the wall of Victor's bedroom, so that he could see the country through this most original opening almost as plainly as through his window. The palace was built on a sort of precipice, lined with great nut trees, which produce the enormous nuts called avelines (filberts) from the name of the district in which they are grown. When these nuts reached maturity, the children spent their days wandering among the trees, hung over the abyss, to gather the bunches. No doubt this taught Hugo that familiarity with high places, that scorn of precipices and that indifference to empty space, which he possessed beyond most men and which filled me with admiration, for I turn giddy on the balcony of a first storey.
About this time, one of the bitterest enemies of the French was Michel Pezza, nicknamed Fra Diavolo, about whom my confrère Scribe composed a comic opera, although the life of the original was a most terrible drama! Fra Diavolo had begun as a brigand chief, something after the fashion of Cartouche, but with more cruelty. He practised that romantic profession, until Cardinal Ruffo, another brigand chief, only in a higher sphere of society, conceived the idea of reconquering Naples for his beloved sovereign Ferdinand I., who had abandoned his capital, disguised as a lackey, in consequence of the French invasion, which was provoked by his insolent proclamations.