"Victor Hugo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... jests and indecencies, their follies and their fears, are all writ large upon the pages of a book that was ever open to every passer-by, and that remains for us to read. It is no rhetorical exaggeration, that "Ceci tuera cela" of Victor Hugo. Our smaller doings are recorded in the perishable print of fading paper, and we have no care to stamp what little we have left of character upon our buildings. No one, at least it may be fervently hoped, will try in the future ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... reading and repeatedly interrupting each other they took up the cudgels for the "good old school." I soon discovered, however, that their range was limited to a small number of authors, whose names they uttered with great gusto and to whom they returned again and again. These were Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Coleridge, Edgar Poe, and one or two others. If the lawyer added a new name, like Walter Pater, to his list, the real-estate man would hasten to trot out De Quincey, for example. For the rest they would parade a whole array of writers rather ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... "Tableau de la poesie francaise au seizieme siecle," the century of the "Pleiade," and of Rabelais and Montaigne. It is a still more significant fact that the members of the "Cenacle," the circle of kindred minds that gathered around Victor Hugo—Alfred de Vigny, Emile Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, David d'Angers, and others—"studied and felt the real Middle Ages in their architecture, in their chronicles, and in their picturesque vivacity." Nor should we overlook ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... arose in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, holds at present the first place in France. Its chief exponents have been Victor Hugo, the two Dumases, Sardou and Octave Feuillet. Between them and the followers of the Classic School there was for some time a lively war. The latter wanted to exclude the Romanticists from the Theatre Francais, but without success. In spite of the beauty of its French, and ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... square shoulders, and got up to represent the description which Victor Hugo has given us ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... background. He sought from it an accompaniment, in the musical sense of the term, to the movements of his soul; and being somewhat prone to melancholy, his taste seems to have favoured sombre landscapes, stormy and tragical. The entire romantic school was born from him, Victor Hugo and George Sand, Theophile Gautier who draws from the French tongue resources unequalled in wealth and colour, and even M. Zola himself, whose naturalism, after all, is but the last form and, as it were, the end of romanticism, since it would be difficult to discover in him ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... and see Notre Dame converted into a horse-stable; do you want a picture of the "bread riots" and mob violence that terminated in the French revolution of 1848; in short do you want a tale of French life and character in its brightest, gloomiest, and intensest period, read "Les Miserables," by Victor Hugo. To-day one must read current history. It is not enough to plan, work, and economize, one must make and seize opportunities. And this he can do only as he is alive to passing events. In a few years one may outgrow his usefulness through losing touch with advancing ideas and ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... a man of my acquaintance, sound in every sense and splendid in physique, and his wife, who has been blind from her birth. For weeks after I first met this couple there rang in my ears that expression of Victor Hugo's, "To be blind and to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... wealth would be. A far healthier doctrine to inculcate among the nations would be that of Self-Help; and so soon as it is thoroughly understood and carried into action, Caesarism will be no more. The two principles are directly antagonistic; and what Victor Hugo said of the Pen and the Sword alike applies to them, "Ceci tuera cela." [This will ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... genius labouring to give birth to perfection, one should consult the later editions of Victor Hugo's works and note the countless emendations he made after their first publication—here a more fitting word substituted, there a line recast, elsewhere an entire verse added, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... day this summer (when the Brontes had been for about four months receiving instruction from him) he read to them Victor Hugo's celebrated portrait of Mirabeau, "mais, dans ma lecon je me bornais a ce qui concerne Mirabeau orateur. C'est apres l'analyse de ce morceau, considere surtout du point de vue du fond, de la disposition de ce qu'on pourrait appeler la charpente ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... miris rerum imaginibus ... ideoque magna parte noctis, vigiliae cubandique taedio, nunc toro residens, nunc per longissimas porticus vagus, invocare identidem atque expectare lucem consueverat.' This is the very picture of Ennui that has become mortal disease. Nor was Nero different. 'Neron,' says Victor Hugo, 'cherche tout simplement une distraction. Poete, comedien, chanteur, cocher, epuisant la ferocite pour trouver la volupte, essayant le changement de sexe, epoux de l'eunuque Sporus et epouse de l'esclave Pythagore, et se ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... In a small bookcase beside the fire were a number of volumes in French bindings. They represented either the French classics—Racine, Bossuet, Chateaubriand, Lamartine—which had formed the study of Julie's convent days, or those other books—George Sand, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Mazzini, Leopardi, together with the poets and novelists of revolutionary Russia or Polish nationalism or Irish rebellion—which had been the favorite reading of both Lady Rose and her lover. They were but a hundred in all; but for ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... auditory, visual or tactile images in his mind. Swinburne often impresses us as working primarily with the "stuff" of word-sounds, as Browning with the stuff of sharp-cut tactile or motor images, and Victor Hugo with the stuff of visual impressions. But in each case the poet's sole medium of expression to us is through verbal symbols, and it is hard to get behind these into the real workshop of the brain where each poet is busily minting his own ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... plain truth. The republic was possible with MacMahon, for after all he was a personality. It was possible with Thiers, for though he was a little rascal and the greatest literary liar of the century except Victor Hugo, he was a personality, and a very positive personality. It might have been possible with Gambetta, for he too was a personality, odious and flatulent if you like, but still a personality. It was not possible with Grevy. It is not ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... not jesting. I worship Victor Hugo. I love to dream of the universal republic—it has immense artistic attractions—the fierce yelling crowd, the savage faces, the red caps, the terrible maenad women urging the brawny ruffians on to shed more blood, the lurid light of burning ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... contained allusions to huge species of cephalopods, often accompanied by more or less fabulous and usually exaggerated descriptions of the creatures. . . . The description of the 'poulpe,' or devil-fish, by Victor Hugo, in 'Toilers of the Sea,' with which so many readers are familiar, is quite as fabulous and unreal as any of the earlier accounts, and even more bizarre. . . . Special attention has only recently been called to the frequent occurrence of these 'big squids,' as our fishermen call them, ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... possibilities was present in our most primitive tree-climbing ancestors. But as much difference as there is between the intellect of an Australian bushman and the intellect of a Spinoza, a Shakespeare, a Darwin, a Victor Hugo, a Goethe or a Gauss, so much difference is there between the love of a primitive savage and the love of the highly cultured modern man. The love or so-called love of the primitive or ignorant man (and woman) is a simple matter and is ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... where I found (over a substratum of history, encyclopaedia, and family Bible) some worn old volumes of Godey's Lady's Book, an early edition of Cooper's works; Scott, Bulwer, Macaulay, Byron, and Tennyson, complete; some odd volumes of Victor Hugo, of the elder Dumas, of Flaubert, of Gautier, and of Balzac; Clarissa, Lalla Rookh, The Alhambra, Beulah, Uarda, Lucile, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ben-Hur, Trilby, She, Little Lord Fauntleroy; and of a later decade, there were novels about those ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... by Chateaubriand, and La Legende des Siecles by Victor Hugo, complete the tale of ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... of this celebrated man, the most characteristic and entertaining perhaps are those presented by Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas in their respective memoirs. Chateaubriand is there shown in undress, and the portrait drawn of him is vivid and interesting. Victor Hugo describes him as he appeared in 1819 at his fine hotel in Paris, wealthy, influential and renowned. The author-to-be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... William Tell, William Wallace, Simon de Montfort, Rienzi, Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, Shan O'Neill, William the Silent, John Hampden and Pym, the Highlanders of the Forty-five, Robert Emmet and Wolf Tone and Parnell, Bolivar, John Brown of Harper's Ferry, Kossuth, Mazzini and Garibaldi, Danton, Victor Hugo, and the Russian revolutionists? These are haphazard figures of various magnitude, but all have the quality of rebellion in common, and all have been honoured with affectionate glory, romance, and even a ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... an artist there, Cadet: that description of the fight with the loop garoo was as good as a thing from Victor Hugo. Hugo must have heard just such yarns, and spun them on the pattern. Upon my soul, it's excellent stuff. You've lived, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity. Like his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made, from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. If he lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he certainly "came eating and drinking," ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Ranke, Green and Freeman; biographies of Caesar, Leo, Lorenzo, Frederick, Elizabeth, and Napoleon! How they will feed on the literature of modern nations, from Chaucer through Tennyson; from Luther through Goethe; from Rabelais through Victor Hugo; from Bryant and Irving through Hawthorne and Longfellow! How much they will translate from Homer and Virgil and Tacitus; from Schiller, Racine, Fenelon, and Moliere! How much philosophy they will read from Darwin, Spencer, Huxley! How they will trace the stars in the heavens, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... His hand in history, guiding and shaping the affairs of nations. Victor Hugo said: "Waterloo ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... freedom, born of long oppression, were stirring the souls of men. The French armies were everywhere welcomed as deliverers. Thus was France enabled to surround herself with a girdle of commonwealths. She conquered Europe not by her armies, but by her ideas. "An invasion of armies," says Victor Hugo, "can be resisted: an invasion ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... overshadows, though in a less insistent and tragic manner, the whole human interest of Edwin Drood almost as much as Notre Dame overshadows the human interest in Victor Hugo's romance, preserves some remains of the original Saxon and Norman churches on the site of which it was erected. Its Early English and Decorated Gothic came off lightly from three restorations, but the tower is nineteenth-century vandalism. The Norman west ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... me try it on!" And he was so gratified by his appearance in it that he barely winced at the thought of the expense. "I am improving my position," he soliloquised; "if I have not precisely inherited the mantle of Victor Hugo, I have, at any rate, hired the dress-suit of the Comte de ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... as we were quitting the Straits of Bonifacio, some one remarked at dinner that, though Victor Hugo was born in Paris, the earliest impressions of his life were received in Corsica, close to which we were passing. Ten or twelve of us lingered after the meal was finished to talk of the great French poet. One of the party spoke of him ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... is astonishingly beautiful," said Mike; "I only speak of the subject; no one, not even Victor Hugo or Shelley, ever conceived a finer theme. But they had execution, I have only the idea. I suppose the world to have ended; but ended, how? Man has at last recognized that life is, in equal parts, misery and abomination, and has ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... another by imperceptible shades. They are affected by the well-known historic conditions for romantic feeling in the different European countries. The common factor, of course, is the man with the romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier with his love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured with the sound of words, Heine with his self-destroying romantic irony, Novalis with his blue flower, and ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... spreading abroad among the people of Europe the feeling which issued, at length, in the arbitration of the dispute between the United States and Great Britain, an event which posterity will, perhaps, consider the most important of this century. He heard Victor Hugo say at the ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... terrace on their roofs, to which you ascend by several handsome staircases. The terrace forms a very popular promenade of an evening, and from it are enjoyed lovely views of the bay and mountains. Between these two rows of houses is the fish-market, where are frequently seen displayed monsters like Victor Hugo's famous pieuve sprawling out their dozen glutinous legs fringed with eyes and deadly weapons in almost supernatural hideousness, to the admiration of a group of English or American tourists. Hard by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... execution. He also showed me a number of the newest works, which had been presented to him, through the medium of David, as gifts from the most distinguished men of the romantic school. I saw works by St. Veuve, Ballanche, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Alfred de Vigny, Jules Janin, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... great and startling a genius, rather than to draw it close and exclude him. His work is practically certain to stand as archetypal for many future poetic efforts—so great is his power as an originator, so fervid his initiative. It forms incomparably the largest performance of our period in poetry. Victor Hugo's Legende des Siecles alone might be named with it for largeness, and even that with much less of a new starting-point in conception and treatment. Whitman breaks with all precedent. To what he himself perceives and knows he has a personal relation of the intensest kind: to anything ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... be conceived by him as embodying a phase of civilisation. When Mrs Trollope called at Casa Guidi, Browning was only reluctantly present; she had written against liberal institutions and against the poetry of Victor Hugo, and that was enough. Might it not have been more truly liberal to be patient and understand the grounds of her prejudice? "Blessed be the inconsistency of men!" exclaimed Mrs Browning, for whose sake he tolerated the offending authoress until by and by he came to like in ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Victor Hugo, after all criticisms have been made, stands as a literary colossus. He had imaginative power which makes his finest passages fairly crash upon the reader's brain like blasting thunderbolts. His novels, even when translated, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... qu'on enseigne aux petits garcons et petites filles de cinq a six ans, on leur apprend aussi le francais. Qu'il est beau de voir ces jeunes intelligences se developper an son de la belle langue de Bossuet, de Fenelon, de Lamartine et de Victor Hugo. Vous verrez a Concord un spectacle peut-etre unique dans les Etats-Unis: une douzaine de petits Americains et Americaines chantant la Marsellaise et dansant des rondes de Bretagne et de Vendee avec une voix aussi douce et un accent ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... the desk. His letter was nearly the first document he saw. It looked affrighting, awful. He dared not read it, to see whether its wording was fortunate or unfortunate. He departed, mystified. Upstairs in his bedroom he had a new copy of an English translation of Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame," which had been ordered by Lawyer Lawton, but would not be called for till the following week, because Lawyer Lawton only called once a fortnight. He had meant to read that book, with due precautions, in bed. But he could not fix attention on it. Impossible for ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... at the subject of these verses, but we do not. Why not an ode on a knocker? Does not Victor Hugo's tragedy of Lucrece Borgia turn on the defacement of a doorplate? Mr. Furlong must not be discouraged. Perhaps he will write poetry some day. If he does we would earnestly appeal to him to give up calling a cock 'proud chanticleer.' Few synonyms ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... were concluded on the 26th of February between the Imperial Chancellor and Jules Favre. Intense excitement prevailed when the terms of the treaty became known; they were dark days in the annals of French history. But in spite of the opposition of the extreme Republican party, led by Quinet and Victor Hugo, the Assembly recognized by an overpowering majority the necessity for the Peace, and the preliminaries were accepted by 546 to 107 votes. Thus ended the mighty war between France and Germany - a war which has had few equals in the history of ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... "M. Victor Hugo wrote the lines out instantly on a sheet of paper, which he folded, and simply despatched them to the King of the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a novel in the way that Charles Reade's, or Eugene Sue's, or Victor Hugo's books are novels. The nearest English model, in the matter of style and quaint presuming on the reader's patience, is Sterne. But if one wishes to see how Richter is not sentimental, in spite of his incessant and un-American emotion, let him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Victor Hugo has pictured a man committing suicide through poverty, and deserting the duty and dwelling where God has placed him. But waking in the next world, the man perceives a letter on the way to himself announcing a large inheritance which would have been his had he but been patient. Therefore the great ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... a fool who, with Lycidas, or Gray's "Elegy," or certain choruses of "Prometheus Unbound," or page after page of Victor Hugo in his mind, should assert it to be in itself inimical, or a hindrance, or even less than a help, to sublimity; or who, with Dante in his mind, should assert it to be, in itself, any bar to continuous and sustained sublimity. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... his own grandson, Xenophon the son of Grylus, is the prototype, and Xenophon himself a sort of ancient Victor Hugo in this matter of ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... been as foolishness and as a stumbling-block, and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount have been openly derided as too good for this world. In that wonderful picture of modern life which is the greatest work of one of the great seers of our time, Victor Hugo gives a concrete illustration of the working of Christ's methods. In the saintlike career of Bishop Myriel, and in the transformation which his example works in the character of the hardened outlaw ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... of true love in a young man is timidity, in a girl it is boldness. The two sexes have a tendency to approach, and each assumes the qualities of the other.—VICTOR HUGO. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... happiness. He read much, often aloud in the evening—fairy-tales, of which he was devotedly fond, legendary lore of different countries, mediaeval romances, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Benvenuto Cellini's Memoirs, Victor Hugo, Heine; and also Mark Twain. Later, in the spring, the days were devoted partly to composition and partly to long walks with his wife in the beautiful Frankfort woods, where was suggested to MacDowell the particular mood that found embodiment, many years later, in one of the last things ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... a druggist's son, in Mme. de Bargeton's house was nothing less than a little revolution. Who was responsible for it? Lamartine and Victor Hugo, Casimir Delavigne and Canalis, Beranger and Chateaubriand. Davrigny, Benjamin Constant and Lamennais, Cousin and Michaud,—all the old and young illustrious names in literature in short, Liberals and Royalists, alike must divide the blame among them. ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... the delusion that gas and oiled silk may yet prove the Palladium of French liberty. I have remonstrated unavailingiy against this singular infatuation. I held up to the Rump Council now sitting in this city the example of VICTOR HUGO as a fearful warning. He came from Guernsey under a pressure of gas; he entered Paris with the volatile essence oozing from every hair on his head; he loaded the artillery of his rhetoric with gas; he blazed, away ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... American history only, but claims it now as one of the proudest scenes in her own history, too. So the American will no more view Wyclif and Shakespeare and Cromwell and Milton and Gladstone as chiefly Englishmen, but as fellow-citizens,—as he views Victor Hugo and Kant and Tolstoi and Mazzini. The American is to be pitied who does not feel himself native to Stratford and to London, as to St. Louis or St. Paul,—native to Leyden and to Weimar and Geneva. Each narrower circle only gains in richness and in sacredness ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... of Seneca did not bear up under exile as we would have wished. Unlike Victor Hugo at Guernsey, he was alone, and surrounded by savages. Yet even Victor Hugo lifted up his voice in bitter complaint. Seneca failed to anticipate that, in spite of the barrenness of Corsica, it would some day produce a man who would jostle his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... disbelieve in its own irksome discipline, and to sigh for the flesh-pots of a modified Presbyterian monarchy. Cromwell, indeed, was at the height of his glory, his honours lie thick upon him, and now, if ever, he is the regal Cromwell that Victor Hugo has portrayed, the uncrowned King of England, trampling under foot that sacred liberty, the baseless ideal for which so many had fought and bled. He is soon to be Lord Protector. He is second to none upon earth. England is again at peace with herself, and takes her position as one of ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... blood—whatever we may say to the thick rouging and extravagance of gesture. There is a beauty, a tenderness, too, in the organ scene, which is worthy of the gilliflowers. But my admiration for 'Boz' fell from its 'sticking place,' I confess, a good furlong, when I read Victor Hugo; and my creed is, that, not in his tenderness, which is as much his own as his humour, but in his serious powerful Jew-trial scenes, he has followed Hugo closely, and never scarcely looked away from 'Les ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... and small, during all the intervening centuries, had bowed their heads and spoken words of reverence in the presence of the only sepulchre remaining in situ and intact of the world-conquerors of antiquity! Of all these reputed soliloquies, that of Don Carlos, in the spacious Alexandrines of Victor Hugo in "Hernani," Gard remembered as being the most famous. He had heard what a long and impressive recital it always is as one of the tests of the dramatic ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... the French Senate of the plenary amnesty demanded by Victor Hugo, in his speech of July 3rd, for the surviving exiles of ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... turns on him, even after he has abused it for a lifetime, compared with the ascendency possessed by opium over the unfortunate habituated to it for but a single year, is as the clutch of an angry woman to the embrace of Victor Hugo's Pieuvre. A patient whom, after habitual use of opium for ten years, I met when he had spent eight years more in reducing his daily dose to half a grain of morphia, with a view to its eventual complete abandonment, once spoke to me ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... of the Romantic movement. It did not affect only creative literature, it occupied speculative thinkers and stimulated historians. For Guizot, Michelet, and Auguste Comte, as well as for Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, the Middle Ages have a significance which Frenchmen of the previous ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... with her work, and completed preparations for the Whole World's Temperance Convention, which was held in New York, September 1 and 2. Her zeal is amusingly illustrated by her proposal to invite Victor Hugo and Harriet Martineau to speak. It was a splendid assemblage, addressed by the leading men and women of the day, the large hall packed at every session, the audience sitting hour after hour, orderly but full of earnestness and enthusiasm. The New York ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Sweden; yes, and in Finland and in South America. Or, for the matter of that, look at the French and Italians, who drink all day and all night. Aren't they all right? Aren't they a musical people? Take Napoleon, and Victor Hugo; drunk half the time, and yet ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... been to his father's home before starting for the Chapelle Expiatoire. A stealthy entrance into the great house on the avenue Victor Hugo, and then up to the first floor like a tradesman. Then he had slipt into the kitchen like a soldier sweetheart of the maids. His mother had come there to embrace him, poor Dona Luisa, weeping and kissing him frantically ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... closed my eyes, and when I looked again I thought an angel stood on the threshold, as I had seen it somewhere in Victor Hugo—a happy angel with finger ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... tell ye I was a poor scholar,' said the young Irish sham-student-beggar to the gentleman who refused him alms because he could not read. In the same strain, as it seems to us, Victor Hugo might reply to the wearied readers of these tales: 'Why, do they not call themselves miserable?' Miserable indeed is the 'Marius' installment now before us—a mere sensation plot, brilliantly patched here and there with the purpureus pannus, or purple rag of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... every morning plans the transactions of the day," says Victor Hugo, "and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life. The orderly arrangement of his time is like a ray of light which darts itself through all his occupations. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... French people under Louis Philippe. Balzac said of himself that he described people as they were, while others described them as they should be. A few months before his death Balzac improved his circumstances by a marriage with the rich Countess Hanska. On his death Victor Hugo delivered the funeral oration, while Alexandre Dumas, his rival throughout life, erected a monument to ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... romantic song. A Gothic cathedral like Antwerp or Strasburg,—what is it but a striving upward of the soul to lose itself in God? A symphony of Beethoven,—what is it but the same unbounded longing and striving toward the Infinite and Eternal? The poetry of Wordsworth, of Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Byron, Victor Hugo, Manzoni, all partake of the same element. It is opposed to classic art and classic poetry in this, that instead of limits, it seeks the unlimited; that is, it believes in spirit, which alone is the unlimited; the infinite, that which ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... such conditions, therefore, meant constant embarrassment, if not unceasing humiliation. These reasons were carefully presented to Richmond. Moreover, Seymour was conscious of inherent defects of temperament. He did not belong to the class of politicians, described by Victor Hugo, who mistake a weather-cock for a flag. He was a gentleman of culture, of public experience, and of moral purpose, representing the best quality of his party; but possessed of a sensitive and eager temper, he was too often influenced ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... simile: they come forth from slime and mud,—fetid and crawling, unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ever spawn forth a ——-! And with these rickety and drivelling abortions—all having followers and adulators—your Public can still bear to be told that they ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... which, indeed, he attains incredible dexterity. The specialist may also be likened to a man who lives in his own house and never leaves it. There he is perfectly familiar with everything, every little step, corner, or board; much as Quasimodo in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame knows the cathedral; but outside it, all is strange ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... which allows him, as I have heard, less than five hundred dollars a year. In what manner, now, would Humboldt be benefited by international copyright? I know of none; but it is very plain to see that Dumas, Victor Hugo, and George Sand, might derive from it immense revenues. In confirmation of this view, I here ask you to review the names of the persons who urge most anxiously the change of system that is now proposed, and see if you can find in it the name of a single ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... to be completely forgotten forty-five years after his death. But this was not the case. Some young men of letters had discovered him, mostly as a remarkable translator of Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny, to whose drama Chatterton, translated by himself, he had written an eloquent Preface defending the poet's deep humanity and his ideal of noble stoicism. The political side of his life was being ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... by the abolition of such private property. The answer is very simple. It is true that, under existing conditions, a few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality more or less completely. Not one of these men ever did a single day's work for hire. They were relieved from poverty. They had an immense advantage. The question is whether it would be for the ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... to mak the words, fause loon, When minstrels we have barely twa; And Lamartine is in Paris toun, And Victor Hugo far awa?" ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... future, and even the name of the future husband or wife, and of deceased relations, as well as my client's present and future circumstances. I have performed before crowned heads. The Emperor of Brazil came to me, with the illustrious poet, Victor Hugo.... My charge is five francs for telling your fortune from the cards or by your hand, and twenty francs for the whole lot.... Would you ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Victor Hugo, in a passage of almost unparalleled pathos, has pictured in Jean Valjean a kind of big human beast who, when half awake, steals a loaf of bread to save others from starving, but who is startled into fullness of manhood by the sympathy and consideration of the good Bishop whose ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... said: "You see that; it is worth five sous now; but if I sign my name to it, it will be worth nothing!" This was a speech made by Junot's eldest son, known in Paris as the Duc d'Abrantes, and as the intimate friend of Victor Hugo, from whom at one time ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... Velleius Paterculus, Sulla fixed up the eloquent orator's head at the Rostra, a thing not unlikely to have been done by a man to whose nature such grim irony was thoroughly congenial. [Sidenote: Stories of Sulla.] He evinced it on this occasion in another way, which may have suggested to Victor Hugo his episode of Lantenac and the gunner. He gave the slave who betrayed Sulpicius his freedom, and then had him hurled from the Tarpeian Rock. After this he set to work to restore such order as would enable him to ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... be possible that this Captain Brown should have his Pinturicchio? Well, might it not be so since Victor Hugo, living in exile, had also given Brown an apotheosis? Abigail also had Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, who was preaching the doctrine of brotherhood, democracy, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... lyrics range from liveliest humour to deepest pathos, and all are thoroughly artistic. Widely known are "Sans Toi," "Mignon," "Vos Yeux," "Say Yes," "Chanson de Ma Vie," "La Fermiere," "Valse des Libellules," and many others. Her favourite poets are Victor Hugo and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, a rather strange mixture. Her only attempt in larger form is the operetta "Elle et Lui." She is a great friend of Mme. Calve, who is especially fond of her songs. She has accompanied Calve on an American ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... volume, containing the best collection extant, of Pieces for Declamation, New Dialogues, &c. Illustrated with excellent likenesses of Charbam, Mirabeau, Webster, Demosthenes, Cicero, Grattan, Patrick Henry, Curran, Sheridan, Madame Roland, Victor Hugo, Calhoun, Hayne, Everett, Tennyson, Longfellow. O. W. Holmes, Bret Harte, Epes Sargent, Thackeray, Dickens, and many ...
— The Nursery, No. 165. September, 1880, Vol. 28 - A Monthly Magazine For Youngest Readers • Various
... Napoleon and the First Empire seem to be more than a lifetime away from us; and yet it was in that day that Victor Hugo lived as a child in the old convent of the Feuillantines so graphically described in "Les Miserables." Here he and his two brothers lived with their mother in the strictest seclusion, while the father, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... gathered into dictionaries, and survive to become the sport of philologists. For the worst of their kind special lexicons are designed, which, like prisons and workhouses, admit only the disreputable, as though Victor Hugo's definition—"L'argot, c'est le verbe devenu forcat"—were amply justified. The journals, too, which take their material where they find it, give to many specimens a life as long as their own. It is scarcely possible, for instance, ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... very well believe it, that he was excessively annoyed at Lamb's delightful parody of his Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected; and, on the whole, I should say that no great man of letters in this century, except Balzac and Victor Hugo, was so insensible to the ludicrous aspect of his own performances. This in the author of the Essay on Murder may seem surprising, but, in fact, there are few things of which there are so many subdivisions, or in which the subdivisions are marked off from each other by such ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... think my reason would have suffered in that thick darkness and solitude. I repeated thousands of lines of Homer, Virgil and the Greek dramatists; then I came to Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine and Victor Hugo; then I tried to think of a text and compose a sermon; but the minutes seemed hours, leaden hours, and they weighed my head down and my heart down, and so did the Egyptian darkness, till I sought refuge in prayer, and there I ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... according to the system, as her mother explained, of the famous Signor Ruggieri—a scene of high fierce sound, of many cries and contortions: she shook her hair (which proved magnificent) half-down before the performance was over. Then she declaimed several short poems by Victor Hugo, selected among many hundred by Mrs. Rooth, as the good lady was careful to make known. After this she jumped to the American lyre, regaling the company with specimens, both familiar and fresh, of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, and of two or three poetesses now revealed to Sherringham for ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Oct. 9. Saint-Saens's ballad on Victor Hugo's "La Fiancee du Timbalier" given by the Boston ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... is not the deeds of Florence Nightingale and Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade? Who can tell most of the Battle of Waterloo, he who has read the facts of history or he who has read Byron's thrilling poem and the description by Victor Hugo? Who knows the English home as it was? He who reads Goldsmith's ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... was horribly realistic, and the aftermath is likewise. Romance is only another name for idealism; and I contend that life without ideals is not worth living. Never in the history of the world were ideals needed so terribly as now. Walter Scott wrote romance; so did Victor Hugo; and likewise Kipling, Hawthorne, Stevenson. It was Stevenson, particularly, who wielded a bludgeon against the realists. People live for the dream in their hearts. And I have yet to know anyone who has not some ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... to these thrilling revelations that Victor Hugo intended to apply these so wonderfully appropriate lines? Was it he who bestowed upon Fabre, according to a poetic tradition, the name of "the Homer of the insects," which fits ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... this tale into the French, M. Victor Hugo will please twig the proper meaning of the word "spray"; I shall be very angry if he make it appear that ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... frequently to change residences in order to find room for the ever increasing number of objects was acquired by me through reading Victor Hugo in my childhood. It is not so ardent now, I regret ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... contemporaries he saw his stories attain to the very wide circulation that brings both celebrity and wealth. Beyond the borders of his own language he swiftly won a popularity both with the broad public and with the professed critics of literature, second only to that of Victor Hugo and still surpassing that of Balzac, who is only of late beginning to receive from us the attention he ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... dramatists, is between Victor Hugo and Jerome K. Jerome. Sudermann follows Harriet Beecher Stowe. Maeterlinck shoulders Percy Mackaye. Shakespeare is between Sardou and Shaw. Euripides and Clyde Fitch! Upton Sinclair and Sophocles! ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... We all know how Victor Hugo transformed the Firth of Forth into the First of the Fourth, and then insisted that he was right; but this great novelist was in the habit of soaring far above the realm of fact, and in a work he brought out as an offering to the memory of ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... are asking me these questions," he said, "for I believe that the more fully and more exactly I answer them, the better for you and the better for me. Victor Hugo, in one of his romances, speaks of the pensive somnambulism of the animals. 'Somnambulism,' sometimes pensive and sometimes playful, is the very phrase I should use in characterising your condition when you first came here and down to your recovery ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... hast made us, O Lord, for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it find rest in Thee." And if we would have a modern commentary upon this saying of the fourth century writer, Augustine of Hippo, here are a few words of Victor Hugo, spoken in the French Parliament of the forties: "Dieu se retrouve a ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... force which enables nerves to triumph through the sorrows, through the labors, through the diseases of later life. Every mouthful of wholesome food that a child eats, at seasonable hours, may be said to tell on every moment of his whole life, no matter how long it may be. Victor Hugo, the benevolent exile, has found out that to be well fed once in seven days at one meal has been enough to transform the apparent health of all the poor children in Guernsey. Who shall say that to take once in seven days, or even once in thirty days, ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... that I have read, I like Moliere and Racine best. There are fine things in Balzac and passages in Merimee which strike one like a keen blast of sea air. Alfred de Musset is impossible! I admire Victor Hugo—I appreciate his genius, his brilliancy, his romanticism; though he is not one of my literary passions. But Hugo and Goethe and Schiller and all great poets of all great nations are interpreters of eternal things, and my spirit reverently follows them into the regions where ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... day or the world will plunge on into a darker night. There is no other course in sight. I know of no finer words penned in any language—this time it was in French—to express an unvarying truth than these words by Victor Hugo: "There is one thing that is stronger than armies, and that is an ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... only level valley between the Mediterranean and the Garonne, and even if one had read nothing concerning it one would understand why it has filled all the legends of the return of armies from Spain, why Victor Hugo could not rest from the memory of it, and why it is so strongly woven in with ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... to few men, in modern times, who exceed Victor Hugo in all that is noble and great. He is not simply a man of genius, a poet, and an orator, he is in its full sense a man. Too many of the brilliant men of France have lacked principle, have been ready ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... without hesitation the school of Dickens, that it has been the first to strike the key-note with a firm and skillful hand. Its excellence would stand out with undimmed lustre had it not, as its gloomy background, the French school of Victor Hugo and Balzac, that opposite of "the poetry of despair," as Goethe calls it. Here again, in this new English school, has the genius of Kingsley alighted. Most of his novels belong to it. And, besides himself and Dickens, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... we may note that a favourite effect of romantic drama is an upward reversal of fortune through the recognition—the anagnorisis—of some great personage in disguise. Victor Hugo excelled in the superb gestures appropriate to such a scene: witness the passage in Hernani, before the tomb of Charlemagne, where the obscure bandit claims the right to take his place at the head of the princes and nobles whom the newly-elected Emperor ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... appeared. Professor William Milligan Sloane, of Princeton University, has entered the lists which may be said to have opened with Walter Scott and finished with the McClure Syndicate, passing meanwhile by way of such personages as De Stael, Las Cases, Victor Hugo, and Lanfrey, and such drudges as Bourrienne and Meneval, to lodge at last with the miscellaneous hacks who get three dollars a column for their boiler-plate philosophy in American ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... single historian had been historical, and with still greater satisfaction that M. Thiers had been the least accurate of all these historians. I had already suspected this, but was not certain. The only one who had been accurate, with absolute accuracy, was Victor Hugo in his book called "The Rhine." It is true that Victor Hugo is a poet and not a historian. What historians these poets would make, if they would but ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... increased his dream-revenue by 60l. a year. This extraordinary result was due, not to any merit in the nuts, but to an ancient and imaginary custom of the village which compelled the inhabitants to deposit round its foot a material defined by Victor Hugo as 'du guano moins les oiseaux.' The most singular story, however, and which we presume is to be received with a certain reserve, tells how he roused two of his intimate friends at two o'clock one morning, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... abbe Delille and his followers. Under Auger it did battle with romanticism, "a new literary schism.'' Auger did not live to see the election of Lamartine in 1829, and it needed ten more years for Victor Hugo after many vain assaults to enter by the breach. The academy is professedly non-political. It accepted and even welcomed in succession the empire, the restoration and the reign of Louis Phillppe, and it tolerated the republic of 1848; but to the second empire it offered a passive ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... strong sense and vivid expression. Their principal feature is the just and animated protest they contain against the literary taste of the present day in France; a taste for the perverted, the horrible, the monstrous; a taste that welcomes Victor Hugo with outstretched arms, and retains but a frigid recollection of Racine. With this literary taste is intimately connected an unhealthy and feverish condition of the moral sentiments, against which the lecturer directs his most eloquent attacks; so that his book may be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... The whole meaning of literature is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy are never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like Victor Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... the study of French all day. Anecdotes at breakfast respecting the pride of Victor Hugo. Walked along the Seine, then across the river into Notre Dame—the Westminister Abbey of Paris—worthy ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... Edinburgh. The garden is but little clothed yet, for, you know, here we are six hundred feet above the sea. It is very cold, and has sleeted this morning. Everything wintry. I am very jolly, however, having finished Victor Hugo, and just looking round to see what I should next take up. I have been reading Roman Law and ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... other times the great half-human shape seems to swell like the 'Pan' of Victor Hugo, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... City, connected with Ogden by a branch road; and they spent two hours in this strikingly American town, built on the pattern of other cities of the Union, like a checker-board, "with the sombre sadness of right-angles," as Victor Hugo expresses it. The founder of the City of the Saints could not escape from the taste for symmetry which distinguishes the Anglo-Saxons. In this strange country, where the people are certainly not up to the level ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... Dantes has by a former wife a son and daughter, who rival in good looks the celebrated children of our friend Victor Hugo," returned Louis Blanc. ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... Victor Hugo says somewhere in his works that he who drains a marsh must necessarily expect to hear the frogs croak. I had graduated, and of course the newspapers had to have a say about it. Some of the articles are really amusing. I couldn't help laughing at them when I read them. ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... was caught in a corner of the staircase; she did not worry about it, but pulled the stuff which split, and went on climbing, holding it up. She wanted very much to ring the bells. From the top of the tower she declaimed Victor Hugo (he did not understand it), and sang a popular French song. After that she played the muezzin. Dusk was falling. They went down into the cathedral where the dark shadows were creeping along the gigantic ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... pleasure; of a popular conscience anaesthetized; the cry of sensualism and selfishness popular with shallow minds and bloodless hearts; the incarnation of that fatal effeminacy that springs from a union of wealth and superficial intellectuality; the voice of a human automaton without a soul. Victor Hugo has made no utterances more grandly true than when he pleads for the beautiful being made the servant of progress as voiced ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... epic, written during Pushkin's early banishment to Bessarabia, an old Russian theme of the heroic times of Kiev was treated much after the manner of Byron's romantic examples. In France the romantic period in literature was inaugurated by young Victor Hugo, who, but the year before, had been crowned as "Maitre des jeux floraux" for a prize poem on Henri IV. Now Chateaubriand, in his journal "Le Conservateur," welcomed him as "Un enfant sublime." By his own romantic followers Hugo was hailed as chief of their poetic "Bataillon Sacre." During ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... dangerous ones, and of this type is Victor Hugo's famous tragedy Lucrezia Borgia, a work to which perhaps more than to any other (not excepting Les Borgias in Crimes Celebres of Alexandre Dumas) is due the popular conception that prevails to-day ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... Wordsworth Keats Shelley Robert Browning Tennyson "In Memoriam" Victor Hugo Longfellow Thomas Bailey Aldrich Edmund Clarence Stedman To James Whitcomb Riley Richard Watson Gilder The ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... romantic loves of rebellious flesh, of Lancelot and Abelard. That stricter, imaginative medievalism which re-creates the mind of the Middle Age, so that the form, the presentment grows outward [215] from within, came later with Victor Hugo in France, ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... fragrance. For the moment my own books seemed a trifle heavy, and perhaps I would have found the day tedious if Kermit had not lent me the Oxford Book of French Verse. Eustache Deschamp, Joachim du Bellay, Ronsard, the delightful La Fontaine, the delightful but appalling Villon, Victor Hugo's "Guitare," Madame Desbordes-Valmore's lines on the little girl and her pillow, as dear little verses about a child as ever were written—these and many others comforted me much, as I read them ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... great deal better, but still have to take care. I have got quite a lot of Victor Hugo done; and not I think so badly: pitching into this work has straightened me up a good deal. It is the devil's own weather but that is a trifle. I must know when Cornhill must see it. I can send some of it in a week easily, but I still have to read The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... star fish and their parasites, and, curiously, a large wolfish fish that had built a nest and was watching it and him—watching him with no agreeable or timid expression in its angry eyes. He was just expecting Victor Hugo's devil fish to complete his horror when a sudden, sharp, bone-breaking shock struck him from an electrical eel or marine torpedo. This was a real and sensible danger, and as he struggled to ascend the hulk to the rotten half-deck, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... Mystery of Death,' by Eugene Benson, is an able treatment of a repulsive subject. As we gaze, we cannot but admire the genius that has so far overcome the intrinsic difficulties of the situation; and, while congratulating the artist upon his success, must add that the Victor Hugo style of morbid horrors, however popular in some species of literature, can never, we hope, become so in the purer domain of visible ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Dame de Paris, Les Derniers Jours d'un Condamne, Bug-Jargal, Marian Delorme, &c." "I never heard of any of them," said Collard. "Will you do me the honour of accepting a copy of my works?" said Victor Hugo. "I never read new books," was the ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... but the eager face of a child asking for stories is too much for me, and my vow has been often broken. All the time I was in England Nora claimed the twilight hour, and, in France, Lisette was equally pertinacious. When Victor Hugo grew tired telling his grandchildren stories, he would wind up with the story of an old gentleman who, after a few interesting experiences, took up his evening paper and began to read aloud. The children would listen a few moments and then, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... who furnish me all that excellent information about Balzac and those others.—["Now the style of M. Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone. Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan? Has he read Gustave Droz's 'Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe', and those books which leave for a long time a perfume about you? Has he read the novels of Alexandre Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac? ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... know I am deathless." Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he came at the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it. In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott's poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his "inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than sixty years." Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... was a sort of free-for-all. Half a dozen sprang to their feet, each seeking to out-talk his neighbour, and it was with difficulty the chairman obtained order and established a sequence of events. An old man in the gallery read loudly from Victor Hugo while a speaker in the orchestra declaimed on Single Tax. Finally the old man was silenced, and Dave began to learn that all the economic diseases to which society is heir might be healed by a potion compounded by Henry ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... Romanticism—in spite of what it may or may not have owed to Chenier—became often distinctly, deliberately, wilfully anti- classical, whilst for example [Footnote: As pointed out by Brunetiere, Evolution de la Poesie lyrique, ii, p. 147.] Victor Hugo in that all-comprehending Legende des Siecles could find room for the Hegira and for Zim-Zizimi, but did not consecrate a single line to the departed glories of mythical Greece, the Romantic ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... are very familiar to me: I have often observed them. Man is nothing but contradiction: the less he knows it the more dupe he is. In consequence of his small capacity for seeing things as they are, Quinet has neither much accuracy nor much balance of mind. He recalls Victor Hugo, with much less artistic power but more historical sense. His principal gift is a great command of imagery and symbolism. He seems to me a Goerres [Footnote: Joseph Goerres, a German mystic and disciple of Schelling. He ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... form some not very inaccurate conception of what insanity may be. Politics and literature, Mexican bonds and Noblet's legs, Pates de perdreaux and the quarantine laws, the extreme gauche and the "Bains Chinois," Victor Hugo and rouge et noir, had formed a species of grand ballet d'action in my fevered brain, and I was perfectly beside myself; occasionally, too, I would revert to my own concerns, although I was scarcely able to follow up any ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... most part ignored by those writers who have treated it pre-eminently as the [25] "Age of Faith"—this rebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of which has made the delineation of the middle age by the writers of the Romantic school in France, by Victor Hugo for instance in Notre-Dame de Paris, so suggestive and exciting—is found alike in the history of Abelard and the legend of Tannhauser. More and more, as we come to mark changes and distinctions of temper in what is often in one all-embracing confusion called the middle age, that ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... which take place successively, without necessarily arising one from another. Some of the characters are not distinctly brought out, the style has often been found fault with, by Voltaire and other competent judges, [Footnote: Victor Hugo appears to be of another opinion. M. Paul Stapfer, in his les Artistes juges et parties (2nd Causerie, the Grammarian of Hauteville House, p. 55), states:—"the opinion of Victor Hugo about Moliere is very peculiar. According ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... unities preserved. Further, there is in both of them exactly that resolute comprehension and exposition of tragic meaning which is the virtue of the short epics. The tragic contradiction in them could not be outdone by Victor Hugo. It is no wonder that the story of Rosamond and Albovine king of the Lombards became a favourite with dramatists of different schools, from the first essays of the modern drama in the Rosmunda of Rucellai, passing by the common way of the novels of Bandello ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... from her mother, Madame Sallambier—we can hardly be astonished when Balzac writes to Madame Hanska, in 1835, that if her misfortunes do not kill her, it is feared they will destroy her reason. Nevertheless, she outlived her celebrated son, and is mentioned by Victor Hugo, when he visited Balzac's deathbed, as the only person in the room, except a nurse ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... lately sent forth her poets in great force, to travel, and to write travels. Delamartine, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and others, have been forth in the high-ways and the high-seas, observing, portraying, poetizing, romancing. The last-mentioned of these, M. Dumas, a dramatist very ingenious in the construction of plots, and one who tells a story admirably, has travelled quite in character. There ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... doubtless familiar with Victor Hugo's description of the marine monster said to be found in the vicinity of the Channel islands, and known as the Devil Fish. It is apparently formed of an almost transparent jelly, colorless, almost indistinguishable from the water which surrounds it, armed with ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... responsive nature delighting in the splendour of the Temple, with its fluted Corinthian columns, its noble entablature, its massive pediment, its perfect proportions; reluctantly turned down the Boulevard Victor Hugo, past the Lycee and the Bourse, made the circuit of the mighty, double-arched oval of the Arena, and then retraced his steps. As he expected, M. Bocardon had left the bureau. It was the hour of absinthe. The porter named M. Bocardon's habitual cafe. There, in a morose ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... more to her works, which encouraged the study of foreign literatures; almost all translations were due to her works. Michelet, Quinet, Nodier, Victor Hugo, so much influenced by German literature, owe their knowledge of it mainly to her. Too much credit may be given her when it is stated that all Mignons, Marguerites, Mephistopheles, etc., proceeded indirectly from her work, as well as nearly ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... or one may end as a corpse or a cripple. So with one's soul under shock or stress. Personally, I can imagine nothing more cruel than the action of two women, one a story-teller of great repute among the "goody," who, to a specially stricken and lonely young widow, tendered as "bed-side books," Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and Browning's poignant The Ring and the Book. If they had wished to make her realise to the bitterest depths the awfulness of the world wherein she was left alone, and the blackest depravity ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... and resolution are often shown by men who have passed the allotted limit of life. Victor Hugo and Wellington were both in their prime after they had reached the age of threescore years and ten. Gladstone ruled England with a strong hand at eighty-four, and was a marvel ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... and as for me I never had any need to urge him on. If I pointed out to him an error in his task he began it over again of his own accord. We did grammar, analysis, dictations, and compositions, and he got over his difficulties by sheer perseverance. For example, if he was reading a fine page of Victor Hugo, or the like, he hated to be interrupted, so deeply was he interested in the subject he was reading. Style and poetry had a great effect upon him; he expressed admiration for the form and was aroused to enthusiasm by generous or noble ideas. Frederick ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... novelist motioned. "Ten Eyck Jones now! It doesn't rhyme with Victor Hugo or even with Andrew Carnegie, but it has a lilt. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Victor Hugo might have taken his character of Quasimodo from the wild figure who now enters the Greco, with a pair of horns for sale; each horn is nearly a yard in length, black and white in color; they have been polished by the hunchback until ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... which the General had recovered a vertical position, placing his head where his legs had been, and vice versa, then intoned a hymn to Providence for having so solicitously guarded those sacred bones. The paragraph turned out to be so perfect that his Excellency appeared as a hero, and fell higher, as Victor Hugo said. ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... conflict and death ... who will make the gallows glorious," and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recorded in his diary, "This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new revolution." Far away in France, Victor Hugo declared, "The eyes of Europe are fixed on America. The hanging of John Brown will open a latent fissure that will finally split the union asunder.... You preserve your shame, but ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... from seventy to seventy-five years old are well preserved, both physically and intellectually, makes it impossible to regard that age as the natural limit of human life. Philosophers such as Plato, poets such as Goethe and Victor Hugo, artists such as Michael Angelo, Titian, and Franz Hals, produced some of their most important works when they had passed what some regard as the limit of life. Moreover, deaths of people at that age are ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Paris to Mentone, to receive instructions from a Mysterious Nobleman who is shortly to be raised to ducal honours? Is it true that until quite recently he had never heard of JOAN OF ARC and thought that VICTOR HUGO was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... certainly something very "Frenchy" in this scene,—a remark, though, which can hardly be considered as derogatory, when we remember that altogether the most readable fiction of the day is French itself. Our author is evidently a great admirer of Victor Hugo, though he is no such careful artist in language: he seldom closes with such tremendous subjects as that adventurous writer attempts; but he has all the sharp antithesis, the pungent epigram of the other, and in his freest flight, though he peppers us as prodigally with colons, he never ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the Cephalopods, to which belong the cuttle-fish and the octopus (sacred to Victor Hugo), may be, for all we can say to the contrary, an order with a future. Their kindred, the Gastropods, have, in the case of the snail and slug, learnt the trick of air-breathing. And not improbably there are even now genera of this order that have escaped the naturalist, or even well-known ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... as an instance, I will utilise him a little further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all. There is no "ought" about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be assimilated by a man of ordinary limited leisure in his leisure and during the ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... plot, which he also was acquainted with; but as Pillet seemed to like it—though he would probably lose it—he advised me to accept anything for it, as Monsieur Paul Faucher, a brother-in- law of Victor Hugo's, had had an offer to work out the scheme for a similar libretto. This gentleman had, moreover, declared that there was nothing new in my plot, as the story of the Vaisseau Fantome was well known in France. I now saw how I stood, and, in a conversation with Pillet, at which M. Faucher was present, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the Chateau d'Eau the crowd surrounded me. Some young men cried out, "Vive Victor Hugo!" One of them asked me, "Citizen Victor Hugo, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... grotesque and the sentimental was of course not new. Victor Hugo had broken away from classic tradition when he made a hunchback the hero of a drama. There remained, however, the risk of our Parisian public not accepting the new situation seriously. It seemed to me like bringing the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... able to hold communion with Raphael, Michael Angelo, Murillo, Rembrandt, Rosa Bonheur, Titian, Corot, Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, Fra Angelico, and Ghiberti. In the realms of poetry they will be able to hold agreeable converse with Shelley, Keats, Southey, Mrs. Browning, Milton, Victor Hugo, Hawthorne, Poe, and Shakespeare. And when the great procession of artists, poets, scientists, historians, dramatists, statesmen, and philanthropists file by to greet their gaze, entranced they will ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... regretfully like sinners looking into heaven. They become rapt, unconscious, steeped in worship. There is no spectacle anywhere that is more pathetic than this. It is worth crossing many oceans to see. It is somehow not the same gaze that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or Niagara, or the bones of the mastodon, or the guillotine of the Revolution, or the great pyramid, or distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky, or any man long celebrated to you by his genius and achievements, or thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and pictures—no, that gaze is only ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dates agree. Dickens, most typical of all early Victorians, died in 1870. George Eliot's last great novel, Daniel Deronda, was published in 1876. Victor Hugo's greatest poem, La Legende des Siecles, the imaginative synthesis of all the ages, appeared in the 'seventies. There have been many writers since, with Tolstoi perhaps at their head, in whom the fire of moral enthusiasm has burnt as keenly, nor ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... strongly with all European literatures except the Spaniard's, whose taste for the theatre determined his direction, and the Italian, which in Boccaccio's day had borrowed freely through Sicily from the East. And the remarkable deficiency lasted till the romantic movement dawned in France, when Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas showed their marvellous powers of faultless fancy, boundless imagination and scenic luxuriance, "raising French Poetry from the dead and not mortally wounding French prose.''[FN283] The Two Wazirs is followed by the gem of the volume, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... At Waterloo, General Cambronne is reported to have said, when called on to surrender:—The Guard dies, but does not surrender. But according to Victor Hugo, in Les Miserables, he used the expression Merde! which cannot be put into English ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... bring to them more antagonistic attitudes of mind than Baroja and Blasco Ibanez. For all his appearance of modernism, Blasco really belongs to the generation before 1898. He is of the stock of Victor Hugo—a popular rhapsodist and intellectual swashbuckler, half artist and half mob orator—a man of florid and shallow certainties, violent enthusiasms, quack remedies, vast magnetism and address, and even vaster impudence—a fellow with plain touches of the charlatan. ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja |
