The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [4]
1830 Hugo’s fourth child, a daughter, named Adèle 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 (which served as the basis for the libretto to Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s 1844 opera Ernani ), 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 Louis XI, is published and becomes a best-seller. The visionary poetry collection Les Feuilles d’automne (The Leaves of Autumn) 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, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
1832 Hugo’s play Le Roi s‘amuse (The King’s Fool), which will in spire Giuseppi Verdi’s great opera Rigoletto (1851), is banned after opening night owing to its disrespectful por trayal 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 pro vides 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 crépuscule (Songs of Twilight) appears.
1837 Hugo is made an officer of the Legion d’honneur (Legion of Honor). Les Voix intérieures , the third of four collections of visionary poetry during Hugo’s middle lyric period (1831-1840), appears. Victor’s brother Eugène, confined in the Charenton madhouse, dies.
1838 Ruy Blas , Hugo’s best play, outrages the monarchists by de picting 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 play 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. ugo will dedicate his poetic masterpiece, Les Contemplations, to her.
1844 Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (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 Honoré de Balzac publishes La Cousine Bette.
1848 The monarchy is overthrown and the Second Republic pro claimed. 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 un wisely campaigns to have Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of the former Emperor, elected president.
1849 Hugo presides over the International Peace Conference in Paris and delivers the first public speech that proposes the creation of a United States of Europe. Eugène Delacroix paints the ceiling of the Louvre’s Salon d’Apollon.
1849 1851 Hugo