"Victor Hugo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... such movements, and can understand what words are said by the shape of the mouth in uttering them. But the effect was to make the Senator buck like a man who was making grimaces, to wager, like those in Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame." As such the apparition was so over-powering that neither Buttons nor Dick dared to look up for some time. What made it worse, each was conscious that the other was laughing, so that self-control was all the more difficult. Worse still, each knew ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... graves and the ghosts are not laid yet. As well write the history of a churchyard. Forty years before John Richard Green thus explained why he had abandoned the plan of the graveyard, Victor Hugo lashed the front of England with this very thong. "Ireland turned into a cemetery; Poland transported to Siberia; all Italy a galleys—there is where we stand in this ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... to 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 of ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... possession of the franchise. Beyond the material gains in legislation, we find a general improvement in the tone of feeling and thought toward women—an approach, indeed, to the sentiment recently expressed by Victor Hugo, that as man was the problem of the eighteenth century, woman is the problem of the nineteenth century. May our efforts to solve this problem ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Cristo," the earlier chapters, the prison, and the escape. In later volumes of that romance, methinks, you stoop your wing. Of your dramas I have little room, and less skill, to speak. "Antony," they tell me, was "the greatest literary event of its time," was a restoration of the stage. "While Victor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... and Disraeli, are among the most interesting literary characters of the end of this period. The former of these, like his French contemporary Victor Hugo, had a remarkable gift for expressing each successive phase of popular taste. He resembled Disraeli in acquiring a pre-eminent position in letters in early youth, which was followed by political success at a later age. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... as an inferior form. In all his renderings of verse, he never forgot that it was at the same time speech, the direct expression of character, and also poetry, a thing with its own reasons for existence. He gave La Fontaine in one way, Moliere in another, Victor Hugo in another, some poor modern verse in yet another. But in all there was the same attempt: to treat verse in the spirit of rhetoric, that is to say, to over-emphasise it consistently and for effect. In a tirade from Corneille's "Cinna," he followed the ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... 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 in head-net and gauntlets, sitting on a log by an ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... We cannot originate intellect either. The germ of intellect with all its potential 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 practically equivalent to a ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... more brave was ever led by love of man into 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
... "His 'Alexander's Feast' is an admirable trumpet-blast, in which metre and sound impress upon the nerves the emotions of the mind, a master-piece of rapture and of art, which Victor Hugo alone has come ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... often to the Morgue, where lie the unowned dead; and had pleasant friendly intercourse with the notable French authors of the time, Alexandre Dumas the Great, most prolific of romance writers; and Scribe of the innumerable plays; and the poets Lamartine and Victor Hugo; and Chateaubriand, then in his sad and somewhat morose old age. And in Paris too, with the help of streets and crowded ways, he wrote the great number of Dombey, the number in which little Paul dies. Three months did Dickens ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... the most abject rascality he passed in a moment, as it seemed, to the representation of delicacy of sentiment and grandeur of soul in Alexandre Dumas's play of Richard d'Arlington, and again as Gennaro in Victor Hugo's Lucretia Borgia. Yet the wild dissipation of the man's life was never so great as at this precise period of his career. Harel, the manager of the theatre where he was now playing (the Porte Saint-Martin), was obliged almost every night to send emissaries ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... so racy, idiomatic, and plastic as our own cant, that its metrical capabilities should have been so little essayed. The French have numerous chansons d'argot, ranging from the time of Charles Bourdigne and Villon down to that of Vidocq and Victor Hugo, the last of whom has enlivened the horrors of his "Dernier Jour d'un Condamne" by a festive song of this class. The Spaniards possess a large collection of Romances de Germania, by various authors, amongst whom ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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. But languages ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... just been reading VICTOR HUGO'S Choses Vues. Admirable! Fuite de Louis Philippe! What a pitiful story. Then his account, marvellously told, and the whole point of the narrative given in two lines, of what became of the brain of TALLEYRAND. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... d'Ivry, dies. His father is quite old. The vicomte was born in England. He pointed out to us no end of famous people at the opera—a few of the Fauxbourg St. Germain, and ever so many of the present people:—M. Thiers, and Count Mole, and Georges Sand, and Victor Hugo, and Jules Janin—I forget half their names. And yesterday we went to see his mother, Madame de Florac. I suppose she was an old flame of the Colonel's, for their meeting was uncommonly ceremonious and tender. It was like an elderly Sir Charles Grandison ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... protected him so agreeably; but he is his own keen self where he observes that the signs of the revolution of 1830, what he calls the legend of liberte, egalite, fraternite at the street-corners, had "already been wiped away." Victor Hugo, for his part, did not find it so: he says that the years 1831 and 1832 have, in relation to the revolution of July, the aspect of two mountains, where you can distinguish precipices, and that they embody "la grandeur revolutionnaire." The cooler spectator from Hamburg inspects ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... 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 to sell themselves ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... French 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 poets of England may claim to have restored in freshness and ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... 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 ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... Victor Hugo declares that for every crisis we have in us an instinct to meet it. That is a fine saying. If any man, who has had some moral training, will obey his first instinct of right, it is marvellous ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... 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. Mme. de Bargeton loved art and ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... into one 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
... way, the sea of Jersey has more the character of a real sea than of mere straits. These temperate islands would be better called the Ocean Islands. When Edouard Pailleron was a boy and wrote poetry, he composed a letter to Victor Hugo, the address whereof was a matter of some thought. The final decision was to direct it, "A Victor Hugo, Ocean." It reached him. It even received a reply: "I am the Past, you are the Future; I am, etc." If an English boy had had the same idea the name of the Channel ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... writer whom he much wished to know was Victor Hugo, and I am told that for years he carried about him a letter of introduction from Lord Houghton, always hoping for an opportunity of presenting it. The hope was not fulfilled, though, in 1866, Mr. Browning ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... she possessed an oblong volume which deserved the name of album better than most, as two-thirds of the pages were still blank. The Baronne de Fontaine, who had kept it for three months, had with great difficulty obtained a line from Rossini, six bars written by Meyerbeer, the four lines that Victor Hugo writes in every album, a verse from Lamartine, a few words from Beranger, Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du depart d'Ulysse (the first words of Telemaque) written by George Sand, Scribe's famous lines on the Umbrella, a sentence from Charles ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... in 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
... rock, but speaks to it, and smiles upon it, and the waters gush forth. She descends into Hades with Dante, and ascends Sinai with Moses, and is refreshed and strengthened by her journeys. She sits enrapt as Shakespeare turns the kaleidoscope of life for her, or stands enthralled by Victor Hugo's picture of the human soul. Her sentient spirit is ignited by the fires of genius that glow between the covers of the book, and her fine enthusiasm carries the divine conflagration over into the spirits of her pupils. There is, therefore, no drag or listlessness ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... surprise 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
... line were sought and achieved, sometimes at the expense of the old rules. By 1830 the young poets, who were now fairly swarming, exhibited the general romantic coloring very clearly. Almost from the first VICTOR HUGO had been their leader. His earliest volume indeed contained little promise of a literary revolution. But the volume of Orientales (1828) was more than a promise; it held a large measure of fulfilment, and is a landmark in the history of French poetry. The technical ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... ever had, and writes to the whole family: "Tell them all that I love them, too, and would give my life to unite them with him one day under my roof." Chopin refers to Sand as "My hostess," and signs himself "Ton vieux." In his next he details with much amusement a scandalous escapade of Victor Hugo's, a husband's discovery, and Madame Hugo's forgiving manner. He announces (July 20, 1845) that "le telegraphe electro-magnetique entre Baltimore et Washington, donne des resultats extraordinaires." He ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... even 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 ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... 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 ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 hasten ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... and chiseled like jewels, fine as lace and enormous as mountains, those fabulous, divine monuments which are so graceful that one falls in love with their form like one falls in love with a woman, and that one feels a physical and sensual pleasure in looking at them. As Victor Hugo says, "Whilst wide-awake, I was ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect—as if it were an enormous model, placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun. It has a double enceinte, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... noble, and certainly very true, was the appeal which Victor Hugo made for religious instruction in 1850: "God will be found at the end of all. Let us not forget Him, and let us teach Him to all. There would otherwise be no dignity in living, and it would be better to die entirely. What soothes suffering, what sanctifies labor, what makes man good, strong, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... 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 ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... most Taine, Sainte-Beuve, and Victor Hugo. His love of reading he took with him into the War. A box of books returned to us with his other effects from France included "The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," Macaulay's "Essays," Saint-Simon's "Memoirs," Sainte-Beuve's ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... his last visit to Europe was an odd little drama. He had grown excessively fat, and could scarcely move. He did not attempt to rise from his chair as Longfellow entered, but motioned him to a seat by his side. Talking of Victor Hugo and Lamartine, 'Take them for all in all, which do you ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... nautilus, the argonaut, the squid, and the octopus, first began to make their appearance upon this or any other stage. The cuttle-fishes are among the most developed of invertebrate animals; they are rapid swimmers; they have large and powerful eyes; and they can easily enfold their prey (teste Victor Hugo) in their long and slimy sucker-clad arms. With these natural advantages to back them up, it is not surprising that the cuttle family rapidly made their mark in the world. They were by far the most advanced thinkers and ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Denis, and proceeding southwards observe the establishment of Les Bains St. Sauveur, at the corner of the street of that name, from which a street communicates with the Rue Thevenot, and about here was the Cour des Miracles, cited by Dulaure, and afterwards by Victor Hugo, as the resort of thieves and beggars, where five hundred families lived huddled together in the greatest state of filth that could be imagined; it was not until the year 1667 that they were partly dispersed. ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... 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, one by one, slip out of the room. Longfellow's ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the night could not penetrate the little cell in the heart of the mammoth stone building where he spent his evenings over those masterpieces with which, they said, he was more familiar than the average member of the Senate. When he read those things Victor Hugo said of the vastness of the night, he could only look around at the walls that enclosed him and try to reach back over the twelve years for some satisfying conception ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... Islands. The months passed quietly at home or in town. The poet had written his Lucretius, and, to please Sir George Grove, wrote The Song of the Wrens, for music. Tennyson had not that positive aversion to music which marked Dr Johnson, Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and some other poets. Nay, he liked Beethoven, which places him higher in the musical scale than Scott, who did not rise above a Border lilt or a Jacobite ditty. The Wren songs, entitled The Window, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... 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 resolved that it shall cease. The tide of passion has again risen, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... master-pieces in single poems like Gray's Elegy, may dispense with the whole race of poetasters. Until you have read the best fictions of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, George Eliot, and Victor Hugo, you should not be hungry after the last new novel,—sure to be forgotten in a year, while the former are perennial. The taste which is once formed upon models such as have been named, will not be satisfied with the trashy book, or the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... Milton 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 Valley of ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... an Englishman telling the story of Waterloo entirely from the French side, and speaking, for example, of left and right as if he had been—as in imagination he was—by the side of Napoleon instead of Wellington. Even M. Victor Hugo can see more merit in the English army and its commander. A radical, who takes Napoleon for his polar star, must change some of his theories, though he disguises the change from himself; but a change of a different kind came over Hazlitt ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... real earnest, and the chance of learning the parrot's secret might slip by them irretrievably. "Oh, monsieur," she cried, fitting herself to his humor at once, and speaking as ceremoniously as if she were assisting at a musical party in the Avenue Victor Hugo, "don't decline, I beg of you, on those accounts. We are both most anxious to hear your song. Don't disappoint us, ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... peoples, including the Hebrews, regarded the sea as the abode of evil powers, as certain of the visions in the Book of Daniel strikingly testify. Nor is this feeling of the action of hostile powers yet extinct. Victor Hugo makes fine use of it in his description of the storm in "The ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he played his ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... wise as that word "Methuselahite." 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 defines the paganism ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It is the "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo, and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetiere would surely not deny that Walter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it is lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of romantic which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetiere himself is respectful to the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... fortified by communion with my omnipresent God, I do 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 ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... 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
... 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 ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... on a throne again. Even to-day, however, there are pessimistic Frenchmen who doubt whether their country has ever produced a great poet. Mr. Bennet has told us of one who, on being asked who was the greatest of French poets, replied: "Victor Hugo, helas!" And in the days when Hugo was still but a youth the doubt must have been still more painful. So keenly was the want of a national poet felt that, if one could not have been discovered, the French would have had to invent him. It was necessary for the enthusiastic young ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... to say: "Give! give!" The hollow waistcoat murmured: "Pad, oh! pad me with hot biscuits!" The loose coat swung and sighed for forbidden fruit: "Fill me with fat!" A dry, coppery face found pointed expression in the nose, which hung like a rigid sentinel over the thin-lipped mouth,—like Victor Hugo's Javert, loyal, untiring, merciless. No traitorous comfits ever passed that guard; no death-laden bark sailed by that sleepless quarantine. The small ferret-eyes which looked nervously out from under bushy brows, roaming, but never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... French society under Louis XV, more easily found their interpretation in the almond which in a manner summed up this epoch; then, after the ennui and jadedness of the first empire, which misused Eau de Cologne and rosemary, perfumery rushed, in the wake of Victor Hugo and Gautier, towards the Levant. It created oriental combinations, vivid Eastern nosegays, discovered new intonations, antitheses which until then had been unattempted, selected and made use of antique nuances which it complicated, refined ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... producers was natural, to go forward from the little playlets to great dramas which held the attention for hours. The kinematographic theater soon had its Shakespeare repertoire; Ibsen has been played and the dramatized novels on the screen became legion. Victor Hugo and Dickens scored new triumphs. In a few years the way from the silly trite practical joke to Hamlet and Peer Gynt was covered with such thoroughness that the possibility of giving a photographic rendering of any thinkable theater performance was ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... 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, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... 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 of ideas ...
— 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 ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... both of Tennyson and another current leading literary illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle—as of Victor Hugo in France—that not one of them is personally friendly or admirant toward America; indeed, quite the reverse. N'importe. That they (and more good minds than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the United States over the centuries, fixed in ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Voltaire the heroes of poetry and drama were fine gentlemen; in the days of Victor Hugo they bluster about in velvet and mustachios and gold chains, but they seem in nowise more poetical than ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Lazar. L'Argot ancien (1455-1850). Ses elements constitutifs, ses rapports avec les langues secretes de l'Europe meridionale et l'argot moderne, avec un appendice sur l'argot juge par Victor Hugo et Balzac; par Lazare Sainean, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... heritage and his studies in Germany. After completing the routine of the conservatory in Milan, he spent a great deal of time in Paris and the larger German cities, engrossed quite as much in the study of literature as of music. Had he followed his inclinations and the advice of Victor Hugo, who gave him a letter of introduction to Emile de Girardin, he would have become a journalist in Paris instead of the composer of "Mefistofele" and the poet of "Otello," "Falstaff," "La Gioconda," and "Ero e Leandro." But Girardin was too much occupied with his own affairs to attend ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... might have something nearly equivalent. For Byron, like Heine, was a repentant romanticist, with "radical notions under his cap," and a critical theory at odds with his practice; while De Quincey was an early disciple of Wordsworth and Coleridge,—as Gautier was of Victor Hugo,—and at the same time a clever and slightly mischievous sketcher of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... cycle of pogroms, in an article marked by a lyric strain, so different from his usual style. [1] But Shchedrin was the only Russian writer of prominence who responded to the Jewish sorrow. Turgenyev and Tolstoi held their peace, whereas the literary celebrities of Western Europe, Victor Hugo, Renau, and many others, came forward with passionate protests. The Russian intelligenzia remained cold in the face of the burning tortures of Jewry. The educated classes of Russian Jewry were hurt to the quick by this chilly attitude, and ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... meltingly sweet, and the writer of it was a youth of aristocratic bearing, regular, handsome features, and smooth brown hair, a regular Adonis. The following year he came again, drawn by strong cords to Christian Winther's home, loving the old poet like a son, as Swinburne loved Victor Hugo, sitting at Mistress Julie Winther's feet in affectionate admiration and semi-adoration, although she was half a century old and treated him as a mother does ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... constantly increases its list of prohibited books. Among the works now excluded, Humboldt's Cosmos, Shakspeare, Goldsmith, Heeren's Historical Treatises, Ovid, Lucian, Lucretius, Sophocles, Suetonius, Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, E. Girardin, G. Sand, Lamartine, Valery's L'Italie, Goethe, Schiller, Thiers, A. Dumas, Moliere, all the German philosophers, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... 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 ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Victor Hugo, "I have been writing my thoughts in prose and verse, history, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, song. But I feel that I have not said a thousandth part of what is in me. When I go down to the grave I shall have finished ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... but which I will copy out for you if you have not seen it. Hawthorne seems to me the most of a Man of Genius America has produced in the way of Imagination: yet I have never found an Appetite for his Books. Frederic Tennyson sent me Victor Hugo's 'Toilers of the Sea,' which he admires, I suppose; but I can't get up an Appetite for that neither. I think the Scenes being laid in the Channel Islands may have something to do with old ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... little over their food; and there at the other the pale Padre, questioning his visitor about Rachel. The mere name of a street would bring memories crowding to his lips; and when his guest told him of a new play he was ready with old quotations from the same author. Alfred de Vigny they spoke of, and Victor Hugo, whom the Padre disliked. Long after the dulce, or sweet dish, when it was the custom for the vaqueros and the rest of the retainers to rise and leave the gente fina to themselves, the host sat on in the empty hail, fondly talking to his guest ...
— Padre Ignacio - Or The Song of Temptation • Owen Wister
... Victor Hugo who declares sixty the age of adventure. To the regret of many an adventurous soul past forty-five, this view was not shared by those organizing Uncle Sam's oversea fighting force, and these men, regardless ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... 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 has so ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... 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 ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... still less did the "silent man of destiny" indulge in the idle boasts that had helped to alienate the sympathy of Europe and to weld together Germany to withstand the blows of a second Napoleonic invasion. The nephew knew full well that he was not the Great Napoleon—he knew it before Victor Hugo in spiteful verse vainly sought to dub him the Little. True, his statesmanship proved to be mere dreamy philosophising about nationalities; his administrative powers, small at the best, were ever clogged ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... professorship in the Conservatory. A romantic but sad incident in his life was his violent passion for Miss Smithson, an Irish actress, whom he saw upon the Paris stage in the role of Ophelia, at a time when Victor Hugo had revived an admiration for Shakspeare among the French. He married her, but did not live with her long, owing to her bad temper and ungovernable jealousy; though after the separation he honorably contributed to her support out of the pittance he was earning. Among his great works are the opera, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... 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 at the Germans with gas, and yet, unable to get rid of such afflatus ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... Victor Hugo, in his famous travels on the Rhine, visiting Cologne, gives a learned account of what he DIDN'T see there. I have a remarkable catalogue of similar objects at Constantinople. I didn't see the dancing dervishes, it was ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... All writers, Victor Hugo as much as M. Zola, have insistently claimed the absolute and incontrovertible right to compose—that is to say, to imagine or observe—in accordance with their individual conception of originality, and that is a special manner of thinking, seeing, understanding, and judging. Now the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... 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, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... assurance that he should leave Paris that afternoon. We had arranged the evening before to ascend the Cathedral of Notre Dame, with Victor Hugo's noble romance for our guide. There was nothing in the French capital that I was more anxious to see, and I departed by myself for ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... 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 of the human nature ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... Sanskrit MSS. for him, and he paid me well and so helped me to keep afloat in Paris. Knowing as he did everybody, he was very anxious to introduce me to his friends, such as George Sand, Lamennais, the Comtesse d'Agoult (Daniel Stern), Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and others; but I much preferred half an hour with him or with Burnouf to paying formal visits. I heard afterwards many unkind things about Baron d'Eckstein's political and clerical opinions, but though in becoming a convert to Roman Catholicism he ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... the men determined to resist, and to subvert a government which dared to suggest such a measure. The government was, however, forced to adopt at once some plan to rid itself of the peril and imminent ruin of the atteliers. In the National Assembly, Victor Hugo, M. Leon Faucher, and others, denounced the connivance of the executive committee with a state of things that must speedily destroy France. The number of workmen then engaged in the government workshops of Paris was one hundred and twenty thousand. On the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... I ate nothing and drank nothing during the day, and by nine o'clock I had matured the plan that we carried into execution. It may be that I owed something to the fact that I had just completed the reading of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," containing such vivid delineations of the wonderful escapes of Jean Valjean, and of the subterranean passages of the city of Paris. This may have led me to the line of thought that ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... his achievements, by coercive measures—as, again for example, by means of a praetorian guard of partisans, such as Klopstock first created for himself in the Goettinger "Hain," but which was most effectively organized by Wagner, and such as Victor Hugo, imitating the German model, possessed in the Young Guard which applauded Hernani. Another method of enforcing his mastery is the organization of a systematic reign of terror, consisting of bitter satires, such as Schiller and Goethe (after ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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, are read and reread ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... was the first noteworthy poem of the romantic revival; and the poems and the poets increased steadily in number and importance till, in the age of Wordsworth and Scott, the spirit of Romanticism dominated our literature more completely than Classicism had ever done. This romantic movement—which Victor Hugo calls "liberalism in literature"—is simply the expression of life as seen by imagination, rather than by prosaic "common sense," which was the central doctrine of English philosophy in the eighteenth century. It has six prominent characteristics which distinguish it from ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... George Eliot; she has not Jane Austen's happy gift of making us love in a book what we have overlooked in life; we do not recognise in her the human truth and passion, the never-failing serene bitterness of humour, that have made for Charlotte Bronte a place between Cervantes and Victor Hugo. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... funeral, the glorious yet bitter seal upon his destiny, Victor Hugo delivered a magnificent address, and in his capacity as poet and seer proclaimed with assurance the judgment ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... with great elements in his nature, which were so imperfectly harmonized that what he was found but a stuttering expression in what he wrote and did. There were gaps in his mind; or, to use Victor Hugo's image, "his intellect was a book with some leaves torn out." His force, great as it was, was that of an Ajax, rather than that of an Achilles. Few dramatists of the time afford nobler passages of description and reflection. Few are wiser, deeper, manlier in their strain of thinking. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... judge by the impression made upon her by that scaffold symphony, 'The Last Hours of a Convict'" (the saying was Butscha's, who supplied wit to his benefactress with a lavish hand); "she seemed to me all but crazy with admiration for that Monsieur Hugo. I'm sure I don't know where such people" (Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Byron being such people to the Madame Latournelles of the bourgeoisie) "get their ideas. Modeste kept talking to me of Childe Harold, and as I did not wish to get the worst of the argument I was silly enough to try to read the thing. ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... LIFE OF VICTOR HUGO-By Frank T. Marzials. "Mr. Marzials's volume presents to us, in a more handy form than any English, or even French handbook gives, the summary of what, up to the moment in which we write, is known or conjectured about the life of the great ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... two marvellous instruments: the brain which conceives, and the hand which executes. To brute force man opposed intelligence, a glorious struggle in which he was sure to come off victorious, for in the words of Victor Hugo, "Ceci devait tuer cela." The huge animals of Quaternary times have disappeared for ever, whilst plan has survived, victor over Nature herself. Even before his birth, an immutable decree had ordained that nothing on the ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... artistic." And so it is throughout the whole hierarchy of men of genius. "Beauty is Truth: Truth, Beauty," is the motto which guides their far-faring feet, as they lead us wheresoever they will. With Victor Hugo, we follow, undisgusted, through the sewers of old Paris: his sense of beauty disinfects them for us. With Balzac and Tolstoy we gaze unrevolted upon the nethermost depths of human depravity, discerning moral beauty even there; while ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of departure for the fancy. Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth. If the name were changed, angels ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... went out to Nieuport. It is like some town one sees in a horrible nightmare. Hardly a house is left standing, but that does not describe the scene. Nothing can fitly describe it except perhaps such a pen as Victor Hugo's. The cathedral at Nieuport has two outer walls left standing. The front leans forward helplessly, the aisles are gone. The trees round about are burnt up and shot away. In the roadway are great holes which shells have made. The very ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... idols, tears down illusions, dances gleefully on sacred traditions, and I lay awake half the night reading him,—and forgot the advancing Germans. The book comes down only to 1880, so most of the men he writes about are dead, and most of them, like Victor Hugo, for ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... been often written of, but what I have read of him has never shown him to me in quite the colors I have found him in by personal observation and inquiry concerning his ways of life. He has been somewhat idealized in print, I find. Victor Hugo has presented him in a light not unlike that of Cooper's noble savage—with large difference of color and pose, of course. The average Frenchman knows Cooper's noble savage as well as we know Hugo's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... is the same to-day as it was in the seventeenth century, but it is now inhabited by the small tradespeople of the Quarter; the last great person who lived there was Victor Hugo; his house has been converted into a museum, and it is there that the most interesting relics of the great poet are stored. I unburdened my mind to Mildred, and my enthusiasm enkindled in her an interest sufficient to induce her to go there with me, for I could not forgo a companion ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... 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 him to ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... there 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 George. Another in the audience ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... there will be no need for him to acquire anything; it seems rather as though he would have to give up something. He would simply have to let his ideas hold converse with one another "for nothing, for the mere joy of the thing!" [Footnote: "Pour rien, pour le plaisir" is a quotation from Victor Hugo's Marion Delorme] He would only have to unfasten the double bond which keeps his ideas in touch with his feelings and his soul in touch with life. In short, he would turn into a wit by simply resolving to be no longer a poet in feeling, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... That French demagogue whom Victor Hugo aptly called Napoleon the Little was a prime factor in the history of the Union and the Confederacy. The Confederate side of his intrigue will be told in its proper place. Here, let us observe him from the point of ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... 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 Shakespeare he showed that ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... but little enfeebled. In this case, it is true, the evil is not very great, for Time may be trusted to sift the chaff from the wheat, and though it may not preserve the one it will infallibly discard the other. 'While I live,' Victor Hugo said with some grandiloquence, but also with some justice, 'it is my duty to produce. It is the duty of the world to select, from what I produce, that which is worth keeping. The world will discharge its duty. I shall discharge mine.' At the same time, no one can have failed to observe how much ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Foreign Quarterly Review, contains a paper of much interest to the playgoer as well as to the lover of dramatic literature—on two French dramas of great celebrity—La Marechale d'Ancre, by de Vigny; and Marion Delorme, by Victor Hugo. We quote a scene from the former. Concini, the principal character, is a favourite of Louis XIII.; the Marechale, his wife, has a first love, Borgia, a Corsican, who, disappointed in his early suit by the stratagems of Concini, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... in various parts of their bodies, and yet there is no reason for supposing that these mutilations have been inherited. The Comprachicos, a hideous and strange association of men and women, existed in the seventeenth century, whose business it was to buy children and make of them monsters. Victor Hugo, in a recent work, has graphically told how they took a face and made of it a snout, how they bent down growth, kneaded the physiognomy, distorted the eyes, and in other ways disfigured 'the human form divine,' ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... delightful to hear him talk. I mean it is uncommonly pleasant to hear things one has long thought very vehemently, put to one by a Master!! Par exemple. You know my mania about the indecent-cruel element in French art, and how the Frenchiness of Victor Hugo chokes me from appreciating him: just as we were going away yesterday Mr. Ruskin called out, "There is something I MUST show Aunt Judy," and fetched two photos. One, an old court with bits of old gothic tracery mixed in with a modern tumbledown building—peaceful ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... Grace the cricketer for whom the hundred thousand subscribe their shilling: fancy a writer thus rewarded, even after scoring his century of popular novels. The winning of the Derby gives a new fillip to the monarchy itself. A Victor Hugo in London is a thought a faire rire. A Goethe at the court of Victoria, or directing Drury Lane Theatre, is of a comic-opera incongruity. Our neighbours across the border have a national celebration of Burns' birthday—they think as much of him as of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Continent, but unfortunately passing through Arles, the people in that 'age of faith,' took him for a sorcerer, and burned him and poor Mauroco in the market-place." It was probably from this incident that Victor Hugo took the catastrophe of ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... The more imperative ideals now begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and to utter the penetrating, shattering, {213} tragically challenging note of appeal. They ring out like the call of Victor Hugo's alpine eagle, "qui parle au precipice et que le gouffre entend," and the strenuous mood awakens at the sound. It saith among the trumpets, ha, ha! it smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... always confiding to us their difficulties in getting rid of it) than by seeking out these gardens and endowing them, and so, without pauperising anyone, build for themselves monuments not only delightful, but perpetual?—for, as Victor Hugo said, the flowers last always. So, you may say, do books. I doubt it; and experts, who have discussed with me the modern products of the paper trade, share my gloomy views. Anyhow, the free public ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... contributed to this literary movement. Even before Marryat, our own Cooper had essayed the sea with a masterly hand, while in "Moby Dick," as in his other stories, Herman Melville glorified the theme. Continental writers like Victor Hugo and the Hungarian, Maurus Jokal, who had little personal knowledge of the subject, also set their hands to tales of ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... born and reared under the shadow of Strasburg Cathedral. The majestic spire, a world in itself, became indeed a world to this imaginative prodigy. He may be said to have learned the minster of minsters by heart, as before him Victor Hugo had familiarized himself with Notre Dame. The unbreeched artist of four summers never tired of scrutinizing the statues, monsters, gargoyles and other outer ornamentations, while the story of the pious architect Erwin and of his inspirer, Sabine, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... hand, I have never dealt, substantively and in detail, with Chateaubriand, Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, Beyle, George Sand, or Zola[2] as novelists, nor with any of the very large number of minors not already mentioned, including some, such as Nodier and Gerard de Nerval, whom, for one thing or another, I should myself very decidedly put above minority. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the same story in a novel; he knew everything that was to happen in his play; and the mere writing could be done in a single headlong dash. Voltaire's best tragedy, Zaire, was written in three weeks. Victor Hugo composed Marion Delorme between June 1 and June 24, 1829; and when the piece was interdicted by the censor, he immediately turned to another subject and wrote Hernani in the next three weeks. ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... development, will benefit 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 ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... of The Midsummer Night's Dream. But our greatest bards and sages have often shown a tendency to rant it and roar it like true British sailors; to employ an extravagance that is half conscious and therefore half humorous. Compare, for example, the rants of Shakespeare with the rants of Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo's eloquence is either a serious triumph or a serious collapse: one feels the poet is offended at a smile. But Shakespeare seems rather proud of talking nonsense: I never can read that rousing and mounting description of the ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... 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
... exquisite than the other—the ancient halls of the corporations of Brussels, among which that of the brewers shows supreme by reason of the luxury of its carvings and the care wherewith its beauty and solidity have been maintained throughout the centuries. In one of the simplest houses of the square Victor Hugo first took refuge after the great catastrophe of the coup d'etat. It bore the number 27. A tobacco-shop occupied the ground floor. The poet's parlor was furnished in a style of bald simplicity, with chairs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... rocks called the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the ever-bland Madeira and the over-bright Bahamas. The varied company of the isles embraces even Wight, where Cockney consumptives go to get out of the mist, and the Norman group consecrated to cream and Victor Hugo. The author's good descriptive powers are assisted by a number of drawings, many of which are finely done and well discriminate the local character of the different places, latitudes and circumstances of life. He does not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... Spinning of Literature; Growth of American Taste for Art; The Wills of the Triumvirate; The Duel and the Newspapers; The Industry of Interviewers; Talk about Novels; Primogeniture and Public Bequests; The Times and the Customs; Victor Hugo; Evolutionary Hints for Novelists; The Travellers; Swindlers ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... read the novels of Richter, Thackeray, Dickens, Scott, Eliot, and Victor Hugo. He should know intimately the great verse which involves spiritual problems, and human strife and aspiration,—Milton, Beowulf, Caedmon, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, ballads, sagas, the Arthur-Saga, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... met at St. Louis a year ago in the 50th annual convention of our association, we knew that the end of our long struggle was near. We comprehended in a new sense the truth of Victor Hugo's sage epigram: "There is one thing more powerful than Kings and Armies—the idea whose time has come to move." We knew that the time for our idea was here, and as State after State has joined the list of the ratified we have seen our idea, our cause, move forward dramatically, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... 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. ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... he is not handsome, certainly not beautiful as flowers and the stars and women are, but he has another sort of beauty, I think, such a beauty as made Victor Hugo's monster, Gwynplaine, fascinating, or gives a certain sort of charm to a banded rattlesnake. He is not much like the dove-eyed setter over whom we shot woodcock this afternoon, but to me he is the fairest ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... Mrs. Errington included a definite indifference to the sufferings of those less fortunate than herself. Legacies came to her as often as mendicants to Victor Hugo's Bishop of D——. She received them with a quiet greediness so prettily concealed at first that nobody called it vulgar. As time went on this greediness grew to gluttony. Mrs. Errington began to feel that fatal influence which came upon the man who built walls with his ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... only among those who share in the anti-Romantic reaction but among all the European poets of his time, was one who had in the heyday of youth led the Romantic vanguard—Victor Hugo. Leconte de Lisle never ceased to own him his master, and Hugo's genius had since his exile, in 1851, entered upon a phase in which a poetry such as the Parnassian sought—objective, reticent, impersonal, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Pleiade; they it was who, by their teaching and example, imposed on later writers that majestic line, possessing the most varied powers, capable of the finest achievements, which has yielded itself alike to the purposes of Racine and to those of Victor Hugo. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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, General Hugo, a soldier of the Empire, was off ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... Hernani in school, his fist he brought Like a trip-hammer down on his bulbous knee, And he roared: "Her Nanny? By gum, we'll see If the public's time she dares devote To the educatin' of any dam goat!" "You do not entirely comprehend— Hernani's a play," said his learned friend, "By Victor Hugo—immoral and bad. What's worse, it's French!" "Well, well, my lad," Said Smith, "if he cuts a swath so wide I'll have him took re'glar up and tried!" And he smiled so sweetly the other chap Thought that himself was a Finn or Lapp Caught in a storm ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... the stranger at the gates. The friars tell how a brother resolved, at Shrovetide, to make pancakes, and not only to make, but also to toss them. Those who chanced to be in the room stood prudently aside, and the brother tossed boldly. But that was the last that was seen of his handiwork. Victor Hugo sings in La Legende des Siecles of disappearance as the thing which no creature is able to achieve: here the impossibility seemed to be accomplished by quite an ordinary and a simple pancake. It was clean gone, ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... Naturalistic reaction against the conventional classicism of the Renaissance. Precisely the same contradictions took place in France. Nature was the watchword of Malherbe and of Boileau; and it was equally the watchword of Victor Hugo. To judge by the successive proclamations of poets, the development of literature offers a singular paradox. The further it goes back, the more sophisticated it becomes; and it grows more and more natural as it grows distant from the State of Nature. However ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... point and the splendid audacity to French literature and art,—its vehemence and impatience of restraint. It is the salt of their speech, the nitre of their wit. When morbid, it gives that rabid and epileptic tendency which sometimes shows itself in Victor Hugo. In this great writer, however, it more frequently takes the form of an aboriginal fierceness and hunger that glares and bristles, and ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... is left, the common residuum, to all these literary masters; to Homer, Sappho, AEschylus, Plato, Theocritus, Juvenal; to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere; to Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, in spite of all their manifest differences in subject, and style, in ideas and ideals, in range of thought and knowledge? When we have got behind all the varying and often contradictory criticism of their several epochs; when we have stripped away the characteristics ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... ate for the sake of eating. They drank without toasts or hurrahs. The bold travellers, borne away into the darkness of space without their accustomed escort of rays, felt a vague uneasiness invade their hearts. The "farouche" darkness, so dear to the pen of Victor Hugo, surrounded them ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... agree with this, as I have found them by no means uncommon, though certainly rather locally distributed in Guernsey. One afternoon this summer (1878) Mr. Howard Saunders and I counted forty within sight at one time about the Gull Cliff, near the old deserted house now known as Victor Hugo's house, as he has immortalised it by describing it in his 'Travailleurs de la Mer.' The Swifts use this and two similar houses not very far off for breeding purposes, a good many nesting in them, and others, as in Sark, amongst the cliffs. Young Le Cheminant had ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... prose; then he sank in semi-oblivion, became the curiosity of criticism, died in retirement, and was neglected for a long time, until the last ten years or so produced a marked revolution of taste in France. The supremacy of Victor Hugo has been, if not questioned, at least mitigated; other poets have recovered from their obscurity. Lamartine shines now like a lamp relighted; and the pure, brilliant, and profoundly original genius of Alfred de Vigny now takes, for the first time, its proper place as one of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... whose reputation has suffered some damage in their own country. There are also a few exiles of a more honorable kind,—French liberals, who have taken refuge from imperial tyranny under the shield of English law,—the most illustrious of whom is Victor Hugo. The Emperor would fain get hold of these men, and he is now trying to force upon us a modification of the extradition treaty for that purpose. But the sanctity of our asylum is a tradition dear to the English ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... art belong the sonnet of Arvers, and "The Soul," by Sully-Prudhomme. Musset, in his grace or pathos, is not inferior to Victor Hugo. There are, even in his faults, certain effective boldnesses to which the author of "Notre Dame de Paris" cannot aspire. Whence, then, comes the immense distance between these poets? It lies in the fact that Victor Hugo, while he is a finished ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... There was an enormous rock fish, weighing about three hundred pounds, with hideous face and shiny back, and fins; large ray, and skate, and cuttle fish—the octopus, or pieuvre, described with so much exaggeration in Victor Hugo's "Travailleurs de la Mer," to say nothing of the large prawns for which the coast is famous—prawns eight or ten inches long, with antennae of twelve or fourteen inches in length. Such prawns suit those only who care for quantity rather than for quality; they are of indifferent ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... me that the papal condemnation of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" was a mistake as a matter of policy—as great a mistake, indeed, as hundreds and thousands of other condemnations had been. Of Pope Leo XIII he spoke with respect, giving me an account of the very liberal concessions made by him ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... adjudged insane is not a rare instance in the lives of thinkers. To think thoughts that are different from the thoughts one's neighbors think is surely good reason why the man should be looked after. Recently we have had evidence that the wife of Victor Hugo regarded the author of "Les Miserables" with suspicion, and at one time actually made preparations to let him enjoy his exile alone—she would go back to Paris and enjoy life as every one should. At ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the shelf of 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! Aeschylus ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... so recently left Saxonland, where public opinion is opposed to everything that has the faintest shade of Magyarism, that I felt in the state of Victor Hugo's hero, of whom he said, "Son orientation etait changee, ce qui avait ete le couchant etait le levant. Il s'etait retourne." The transition was certainly curious, but I confess to getting rather tired of the mutual recriminations ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... well satisfied 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 Tribune said of it: "This ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... 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 ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... display of 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 ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... be said that Shakspeare has been translated into all modern languages, in whole or in part. In French, by Victor Hugo and Guizot, Leon de Wailly and Alfred de Vigny; in German, by Wieland, A. W. Schlegel, and Buerger; in Italian, by Leoni and Carcano, and in Portuguese by La Silva. Goethe's Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister is a long and profound critique of Hamlet; and to the Germans he ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... planned to make this an old-fashioned discursive novel, say of the Victor Hugo variety, the second chapter would expend itself upon a philosophical discussion of Fat and a sensational showing of how and why the presence or absence of adipose tissue, at certain important crises, had altered the ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... opened the campaign of romanticism in "Le Globe" with a "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 ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks |
