Ode to Victor

OLYMPIO: THE LIFE OF VICTOR HUGO 540 pp.) -- Andre Mourois -- Harper $5.95).

In 1822, France was not quite ready for Romanticism. When a British company came over with Othello, the pit howled: "Down with Shakespeare! Just one of Wellington's toadies!" Only six years later, "the atmosphere had completely changed." An artistic revolution had changed France from the last outpost of Classicism to a spearhead of Romanticism. Shakespeare was all the rage, closely followed by Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Schiller. France's poets, painters, sculptors and novelists all joined hands in this insurrection, but one and all acknowledged as their leader one of literary history's most spectacular figures--Victor-Marie Hugo.

Victor Hugo was born (1802) to lead, and France still groans under his leadership. Asked who is France's greatest poet, Andre Gide made a famed reply: "Victor Hugo, alas!" His answer sums up precisely the pain and resentment still felt by many Frenchmen when they bow the knee to the man who wrote an end to the old traditions. In this excellent biography, Andre Maurois explains why. Subtlety, precision, restraint are French gods, but enthroned above them all sits the immortal Hugo, passionate antithesis of subtlety, precision and restraint.

A poet he was, but a public one. In politics he ran a banner-waving, pamphlet-strewn, populace-stirring course--monarchist, Bonapartist, finally a rebel and exile who came to be called "Grandfather of the Republic." "It is ill praise to give a man that his politics have never changed for 40 years," he explained. "That is no more than to praise water for being stagnant, a tree for being dead."

He was a sometime pacifist who wrote some of France's finest war poetry, a good family man who grew into an aged satyr, a penny pincher who showered generosity on many. He was a shaker of culture and an object of curiosity and adulation rarely equaled. On his 79th birthday 600,000 Parisians paraded past his home. When he died, just 71 years ago this month, he was laid in state beneath the Arc de Triomphe, then escorted by 2,000,000 of his countrymen to his tomb in the Pantheon.

A Lawyer Tomorrow. Hugo was the third son of a Napoleonic general--and so vivid was his imagination that he had spells of marching about like a soldier and in some of his youthful plays he wrote for himself parts as Napoleon. He was (his father assured him) "conceived ... on one of the highest peaks of the Vosges, in the course of a journey from Luneville to Besanc,on"--and this, to Victor, was topographical confirmation of his title to eminence in life. His very name was a triumphant blend of conquest and personal identity, and his war cry was Ego Hugo! "If I had any doubt of my ability to take the foremost place, and to rank above all my rivals," he said, "I would give up writing and become a lawyer tomorrow."

At 15 he entered a 334-line poem in an open contest of the French Academy, took ninth place. At 16 he won the Academy of Toulouse's first prize, the Golden Lily. At 20 he published his first book of poems, Odes et Poesies Diverses, received a royal pension, and married his childhood sweetheart, Adele Foucher. By then he was one of the most mixed characters that ever walked the earth--a tempestuous rebel, a lover of kings, a bourgeois who could account for every sou he spent, a fanatical moralist, an insatiable sensualist. He came virgin to his marriage and apparently never strayed from his wife until, nine years later, his excessive demands so exhausted her that she shut her bedroom door against him. The virility of his poems and dramas was found equally exhausting by most of his public, and his friends urged him to be more restrained. Hugo was horrified. "Restraint--a. curious word to use in praise of a writer!" he said.

The danger of extreme Romanticism is, as Cervantes showed, that it is apt to seem highly comical--and this is why comedy clings closely to everything that Victor Hugo did. Cold-shouldered by his wife, he chose as his mistress the courtesan Juliette Drouet. In return for his ecstasy, Hugo made Juliette respectable. He confined her to her room (for ten years she was never allowed to leave it except on his arm), and made her sell all her pretty clothes and underwear. "A bowl of food, a kennel and a chain--that is my lot," said Juliette. But she worshiped the grim master who had imposed such a penance upon her.

Fresh Without Parsley. Hugo, having made himself the first poet of France, craved further honors. First, he aspired to (and got) the green uniform of a French Academician ("I can keep you fresh without any sprigs of parsley," complained Juliette). Next, he affronted his disciples by persuading King Louis Philippe to make him a vicomte. Three months later the new peer was caught in bed with the wife of a fresco painter, and that ditched his hope of becoming a minister. "Adultery at that time was severely dealt with," and Peer Hugo would have been prosecuted if the King (as the wits said) had not hastily commissioned from the angry husband a series of frescoes, which caused him to forgive his wife. Hugo was downcast, but agreed with the friend who said: "One can rise again, even from a divan."

"The man who has made his mark is caught up in an eternal process," says Biographer Maurois. "The social machine, so cunningly contrived, passes him from cylinder to cylinder, from roller to roller, from ball to ball, from dinner to dinner, and, with each day that passes, flattens him out a little more." The genius of the Romantic movement had "lost his way" and might never have found it again if the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon (which Hugo fought in the Assembly, then in the streets) had not caused him to flee into exile.

Stripped of his social functions, his sprigs of parsley, his actresses and courtesans, Hugo flourished in his romantic role of "Great Exile." "I am living the life of a monk," he wrote exultantly from Belgium. "I have a bed which is about a hand's-breadth wide . . ." From his narrow couch, Hugo fled on to the Channel Islands, after leaving most of his sizable fortune in investments in a Belgian bank and accepting from the Belgian Prime Minister "an offer of shirts" to soften the road of poverty.

Byron Spoke English. Victor Hugo in the Channel Islands is one of the rarest interludes of literary history. By day the master poured out broadsheets of superb invective, streams of immortal poetry, completed his titanic Les Miserables, as well as other novels. By night he seduced the flower of Guernsey's chambermaids and, in table-tapping seances, had long discussions with "Moliere, Shakespeare, Anacreon, Dante, Racine, Marat, Charlotte Corday, Latude, Mahomet, Jesus Christ, Plato, Isaiah . . . the Dove of the Ark, Balaam's Ass." All these apparitions agreed that Hugo was acting for the best; many spoke in excellent Hugo-istic verse. Lord Byron, however, insisted on speaking English.

Hugo spent 18 years in Channel Island exile, with his wife, children, and Juliette Drouet (when their combined ages came to 125, Mme. Hugo and Mistress Drouet actually exchanged a few words, eventually became quite good friends). When Napoleon the Little fell, the "prophet of the Republic," white-haired and bursting with emotion, returned to Paris with the more-than-vague hope that the Republic would reciprocate by making him its head. That was not to be. Through the siege of Paris by the Prussians and the bloody uprising of the Commune ("Both sides are mad"), Hugo wrote and loved on. One of his late conquests: Actress Sarah Bernhardt, then 28 to Hugo's 70. As age advanced, he grudged the speechmaking demanded of him by his grateful country. "To make a speech is more exhausting for me than making love three times," he said--adding, after a moment's reflection, "--or even four." He died at 83, after writing a charming book called The Art of Being a Grandfather, and dedicated the last few months of his life to "eight sexual performances."

Victor Hugo has survived primarily because everything he did, no matter how ludicrous, was translated by him into inimitable poetry. But he has survived, too, as Paul Valery said, as "the very embodiment of power"--a power that no French poet since his day has been able to shake off. "Never," concludes Maurois, "has a nation been so closely knit with one single body of writing . . . Paris, whole and entire, sounds one great consistent Ode to Victor Hugo's honor."

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