Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [6]
1827 Hugo becomes best friends with the critic Sainte-Beuve. The play Cromwell is published: its famous preface proposes a Romantic aesthetic that contrasts the sublime with the grotesque, in emulation of Shakespeare. Hugo declares his independence from the conservative, divine-right royalists.
1828 General Léopold Hugo dies unexpectedly on January 29. Hugo’s third child, François-Victor, is born.
1829 Hugo’s prodigious literary output includes the picturesque verse collection Les Orientales, the tale Le Dernier Jour d‘un condamné d mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), opposing capital punishment, and the historical play Marion de Lorme, censored by the French monarchy because it portrays the sixteenth-century ruler François I as a degenerate.
1830 Hugo’s fourth child, a daughter named Adèle, named after her mother, is born. Mme Hugo wants no more children, and from then on sleeps alone. Sainte-Beuve betrays his best friend, Victor, by telling Adèle he loves her. Hugo’s play Hernani, defiantly Romantic in its use of informal language and its violation of the classical “three unities” of time, place, and action, causes riots in the theater where it is performed.
1831 Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482 (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), a tale of the era of the cruel, crafty Charles XI, is published and becomes a bestseller. The visionary poetry collection Les Feuilles d‘automne is published. In it Hugo displays a profundity and a mastery of the art of verse that rival the greatest European poets of the era, Goethe and Shelley.
1832 Hugo’s play Le Roi s‘amuse (The King’s Fool), which will inspire Giuseppi Verdi’s great opera Rigoletto (1851), is banned after opening night owing to its disrespectful portrayal of a king. Hugo occupies an apartment in what is today called la place des Vosges, where he will remain until 1848.
1833 The minor actress Juliette Drouet enters Hugo’s life. He provides her with an apartment near him, forbids her to go out alone, and occupies her with making fair copies of his manuscripts. The couple will continue their liaison until her death fifty years later. The first version of George Sand’s feminist novel Lelia is published.
1834 Hugo ends his friendship with Sainte-Beuve.
1835 Hugo’s great verse collection Les Chants du crepuscule (Songs of Twilight) appears.
1837 Hugo is made an officer of the Legion d‘honneur. Les Voix interieures, the third of four collections of visionary poetry during Hugo’s middle lyric period (1831—1840), appears. Eugène Hugo dies confined in the Charenton madhouse.
1838 Ruy Blas, Hugo’s best play, outrages the monarchists by depicting a queen and a valet in love.
1840 Les Rayons et les Ombres (Sunlight and Shadows), the last great poetic collection before Hugo’s exile, is published.
1841 After several failed attempts, Hugo is elected to the French Academy, the body of “Forty Immortals”—the greatest honor a French writer can receive.
1843 A tragic year is punctuated by the failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves and the drowning of his beloved elder daughter, Léopoldine, her unborn child, and her husband, a strong swimmer who tried to save her after a boating accident. Hugo will dedicate his poetic masterpiece, Les Contemplations, to her. Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo appears.
1845 Hugo is made a pair de France, an appointive position in a body roughly equivalent to the British House of Lords. Ten weeks later, his affair with Mme Léonie Biard (from 1844 to 1851) comes to light when they are arrested in their love nest and charged with adultery. She goes to prison. Hugo’s rank saves him from prosecution.
1847 Balzac publishes La Cousine Bette.
1848 The monarchy is overthrown, and the Second Republic proclaimed. Hugo is elected to its Constitutional Assembly, with the support of the conservatives. With his son Charles, he founds and edits L’ Événement, a liberal paper that unwisely campaigns to have Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte,