Few men have ever enjoyed so wide-spread and enduring a popularity as does Victor Hugo among the people of Paris. When, during the dark days of 1870, he returned from his long exile, he was greeted at the railway-station by a vast crowd, which escorted his carriage to his first resting-place, the home of M. Paul Meurice, and he was twice compelled to address a few words to them in order to appease their eagerness to hear his voice. When he appears in public on great and solemn occasions, such as the funeral of M. Thiers, he is invariably made the object of a popular ovation of the most touching character. People climb up the sides of his carriage to touch his hand, mothers lift up their children to the windows imploring his blessing, and the cry of "Vive Victor Hugo!" goes up from the very hearts of the throng. On the day of the funeral of Madame Paul Meurice, as the cortége was going along the exterior boulevards, it passed near a menagerie. Just as the carriage of Victor Hugo came opposite the door the lions within set up a tremendous roar. "They know that the other one is passing by," said an old workingman beside the carriage ("Ils sentent que l'autre passe"). The fondness of Victor Hugo for riding about Paris on the top of an omnibus is well known. It has sometimes happened that on tendering his fare the conductor has put the coin aside with the remark, "I shall keep that as a relic." One day, on returning from a session of the senate at Versailles, he arrived late at the station. It was a snowy day, the train was full, and he was obliged to climb into a fourth-class place, a seat on the top of the cars. The benches were covered with snow. A workingman who recognized the poet would not let him sit down till with his blouse he had wiped the seat clean and dry. Victor Hugo thanked him and offered him his hand, and with a naïve delight the good fellow cried, "Ah, monsieur, ah, citizen, how proud I am to have seen you and touched you!" More than once the cabman employed to take the poet to his house has refused to accept his fare, declaring that the honor of having driven Victor Hugo was recompense enough. On the day of the funeral of M. Thiers so dense a crowd surrounded the carriage of the poet that it remained for a long time motionless and imprisoned, and the shouts that greeted him were so wildly enthusiastic that the coachman who was driving his carriage fairly shed tears, remarking, however, in a shame-faced manner, "A crying coachman! what a silly sight!"
Naturally, beside this passionate love stands a hate as passionate. The vindictive fury of the Bonapartists against Victor Hugo can easily be understood. No writer more than he has contributed to render a restoration of the Empire impossible. Hence insults of all kinds, from the calumny openly printed in an imperialist newspaper to the anonymous letter overflowing with menaces. One of these, received in September, 1877, threatened the poet in no doubtful terms. "Do not imagine, scoundrel, that we will let you escape us a second time:" so ran one of its paragraphs. Under the Second Empire all letters written to or by Victor Hugo were compelled to pass through the ordeal of the Black Cabinet. Many of his Parisian correspondents evaded this surveillance by sending their letters under cover to acquaintances in Germany or by confiding them to travellers who were going to England. But the letters of the poet to his friends in France were invariably opened and read, and many of them were confiscated. In a sarcastic mood Victor Hugo caused a quantity of envelopes to be prepared for his use, in one corner of which was printed an extract from the law forbidding any agent of the government to open or to tamper with any letter that passes through the post-office. On one occasion he wrote across the address of a letter, "Family matters—useless to open it."
It is said that the empress Eugénie, after perusing Les Châtiments, threw the volume aside with this exclamation: "I do not see what harm we have ever done to this M. Hugo." This remark was afterward repeated to the poet. "Tell her that the harm was the second of December," was his reply.
The bottle that contained the ink used in writing Napoleon le Petit had a curious history. That splendid and fiery piece of invective, so amply justified by after events, was commenced on the 12th of June, 1852, and finished on the 14th of July, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastile. With the few drops of ink that remained in the bottle Victor Hugo wrote upon its label—
Out of this bottle
Came Napoleon the Little,
and affixed his signature. The bottle was given by Victor Hugo to Madame Drouet, who afterward presented it to a young physician who had attended her through a dangerous illness. This young physician, Dr. Yvan, owed to the intercession of Prince Jerome Napoleon permission to return to France to visit his dying father. Having invited the prince to dinner after his return, he showed him as a curiosity the famous bottle. No sooner had the prince read the inscription than he insisted upon taking possession of it, and in spite of the remonstrances of Dr. Yvan he carried it off in triumph.
Victor Hugo is very hospitable, and delights in having three or four friends to dine with him, but his appetite, though healthful, is neither very great nor very dainty: he prefers plain food and drinks only light claret habitually. He is a very early riser, and on fine spring or summer mornings he may often be met at six o'clock taking a stroll in the Champs Élysées. Of his fondness for riding on the tops of omnibuses I have already spoken. These long rides, when he traverses Paris from one end to the other, are his periods of composition. He sits plunged in a profound reverie, with vague eyes gazing unseeing into space. So well are his moods understood by the conductors and habitual travellers on those lines that he is always left undisturbed. Sometimes the greater part of the day will be passed in these excursions, nor does any severity of the weather ever daunt the aged poet. Yet with all the quiet simplicity of his habits his daily life has not escaped the shafts of calumny. The Bonapartist press declared that he was a drunkard who used often to be picked up insensible from the floor of his own dining-room. He has been called an assassin because of his sympathy with the proscribed Communists, a madman because of his enthusiastic and impassioned utterances, and he has been said to be a hunchback whose deformity was dissimulated by the skill of his tailor.
Any sketch of the poet's home-life would be incomplete did I not touch on his passionate fondness for his grand-children, the two little beings whose prattle and caresses lend a charm of peculiar sweetness to the waning hours of that illustrious career. For them the world-renowned genius is but the most loving and tender of grandfathers. Their games, their studies, their baby caprices, sway the actions of that grand personality as the zephyrs ruffle the surface of the summer ocean. The creator of Marion Delorme excels in manœuvring a puppet-show and in getting up plays on a dolls' theatre. The author of Les Miserables often lulls these little ones to sleep with improvised tales of wonderful fascination. For their sakes he becomes a sculptor and moulds in bread-crumb most marvellous pigs with four matches for legs. They it is who know best the almost feminine tenderness, the wellnigh maternal love, of which that powerful nature is capable.
I write in the present tense, yet as I write these things exist no longer. The red drawing-room is closed, the dwelling on the Rue de Clichy is deserted. Victor Hugo is in Guernsey, and from that far retreat come sinister rumors respecting his failing health. These are denied by his friends, but are stoutly supported by his enemies. Which of them speak the truth? That is hard to tell. It may be that this grand career, long and lustrous as a summer day, has reached its evening hour at last. Perchance we shall see no more the massive head framed in its snow-white locks and beard, the piercing eyes, the stalwart frame that bore so lightly the burden of wellnigh fourscore years. It may be so, and yet we hope, we pray, for the return of him who lights our century with the lustre of the great creative genius of the world.