The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [3]
1804 apoléon proclaims himself Emperor of the French. Liter ary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve is born.
1807 Leopold Hugo receives a post in Naples, where his family soon joins him.
1808 Leopold Hugo follows a cortege of Napoléon’s brother, Joseph, to Spain. Weary of travel, Sophie returns with her young sons to Paris, where she begins an affair with General Victor Lahorie, a conspirator against Napoleon.
1809 Napoleon promotes Major Hugo to general, and honors him with the title of count.
1810 The police arrest Lahorie in Mme. Hugo’s house on De cember 30.
1811 Sophie journeys to Spain to save her marriage, but problems in the relationship persist. Léopold, knowing of his wife’s in fidelity, asks for a divorce. Sophie and her sons return to Paris.
1812 General Lahorie is executed for plotting against Napoleon.
1814 Napoléon abdicates and is banished to the island of Elba. The monarchy is reinstated, and Louis XVIII is named king.
1815 Napoleon returns from exile. The “Hundred Days” of his re newed reign ends when he is defeated at Waterloo. Louis XVIII returns to power.
1816 A marvelously gifted and precocious writer, Victor Hugo pro claims his ambition to rival François-René de Chateaubriand, the most famous Romantic author of his generation. Es tranged from his father and influenced by his mother, a roy alist by expediency, he skillfully curries favor with the conservative literary establishment and the King, whom he praises in odes.
1817 Hugo wins honorable mention in the national poetry con test sponsored by l‘Académie française (the French Acad emy).
1818 Sophie and Léopold are legally separated (divorce was ille gal in France between 1816 and 1886). Victor composes a first, brief version of his novel Bug-Jargal , an account of a slave revolt in the Caribbean after the French Revolution; this version will appear in 1820.
1819 Despite his mother’s wishes for a more ambitious union, Victor falls in love with—and secretly asks the hand of—his neighbor, Adèle Foucher. But as a minor, he cannot marry her without his mother’s consent, which is denied. The three Hugo brothers found a literary journal called Le Con servateur littéraire.
1820 1821 Hugo writes over one hundred essays and more than twenty poems for Le Conservateur .
1821 Victor becomes friends with the famous priest Félicité de Lamennais, who preaches a socially committed Christianity. Victor’s mother dies on June 27. In July his father marries his mistress, Catherine Thomas. Victor becomes reconciled with his father, who does not oppose Victor’s marriage to Adèle.
1822 Granted a small pension by Louis XVIII for his first volume of Odes praising the monarchy, Victor marries Adèle Foucher on October 12. Eugène Hugo, who also loves her, has a psychotic breakdown at the wedding; he will never re cover.
1823 Hugo publishes a pioneering historical novel, Han d’Islande (Han of Iceland, sometimes translated as The Demon Dwarf), a bloodthirsty melodrama. He helps found the periodical La Muse frangaise and attends weekly gatherings hosted by the then leader of the French Romantic movement, Charles Nodier (1780-1844).
1824 Hugo publishes the Nouvelles Odes. His first child, a daugh ter, Léopoldine, is born. Charles X assumes the throne, and Victor serves as the historian of the coronation.
1826 Odes et Ballades is published, as is the full version of BugJargal , noteworthy for its altruistic black hero. Adèle gives birth to Hugo’s second child, Charles-Victor.
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