By VICTOR HUGO.
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is most highly regarded in France as a poet and dramatist, while in foreign countries his novels are best known and hold the highest place.
Hugo was the son of a soldier of the First Republic and of a lady who was a royalist of the most enthusiastic type. The son, therefore, showed a blend of the two traditions whose clash has made France what it is to-day. His most striking quality was his wealth of imagination. His creations were always imaginative—sometimes superbly so and sometimes grotesquely so—but his thoughts and imagery were always vast and gigantic, even when monstrous.
Hugo's second trait was his egotism, which prevented him from having the saving grace of humor. He thought himself to be almost more than mortal, and he lived in an atmosphere of hero-worship. When the Emperor of Brazil visited Paris and expressed a wish to meet him, Hugo disdainfully remarked:
"I have no time to waste on emperors."
When the Germans were besieging Paris, Hugo seriously proposed that the war be settled by a single combat between himself and the newly crowned Kaiser of Germany. He wrote to the emperor:
"You are a great monarch; I am a great poet. We are therefore equals."
His notion of himself was summed up in a single epigram: "France is the world. Paris is France. Victor Hugo is Paris."
Amiel called him "half genius and half charlatan."
Hugo's novels read like prose epics—overwhelming and at times almost convulsive in their effort to give expression to his tremendous imaginings. One of the most striking of them is "Ninety-Three," from which the accompanying passage is taken. The book is a great drama of the breaking out of the French Revolution, a time when every passion was at its height and was exhibited with utter unrestraint.