And, approaching the Pope, Napoleon held out his hand. Pius took the hand which was offered to him, but shook his head sadly, and I saw his fine eyes cloud with tears.
Bonaparte cast a hurried glance at the tears which he had wrung from the old Pope, and I surprised even a rapid motion in the corners of his mouth much resembling a smile of triumph. At that moment his intensely powerful and overbearing nature seemed to me less admirable than that of his saintly adversary; I blushed for all my past admiration of Napoleon; I felt a sadness creep over me at the thought that the grandest policy appears little when stained by tricks of vanity. I saw that the emperor had gained his end in the interview by having yielded nothing and by having drawn a sign of weakness from the Pope. He had wished to have the last word, and without uttering another syllable, he left the room as abruptly as he had entered. I could not see whether he saluted the Pope or not, but I do not think he did.
CLAUDE GUEUX
BY VICTOR MARIE HUGO
Victor Hugo, greatest and most versatile of the French poets of the nineteenth century, was born at Besançon in 1802. He published a succession of monumental romances, plays, poems, until he was elected in 1844 to the Academy. After that he threw himself into the political turmoil of the period, becoming chief of the opponents of Louis Bonaparte and of the reconstruction of the Empire, and was exiled for eighteen years to Jersey and Guernsey, where he wrote, in 1862, “Les Misérables.”
All contemporary poetry has been said to take its inspiration from Victor Hugo. Besides a wonderfully fertile and monumental mind, dignified, dramatic, satiric, he had a special genius for expressing by the sound of a phrase what could not be directly expressed in words.
“Claude Gueux,” which means ragamuffin and simpleton, written about 1828, is an indignant pleading in favor of the numerous classes of outcasts who would be useful citizens if not led to crime by misery.
