Victor Hugo lived eighty-three years — and for most of them he was the most famous writer in France. At his funeral, two million people came out onto the streets of Paris.
He was born in 1802, the son of a Napoleonic general, and spent his childhood on the move through Spain and Italy. His first poems came at thirteen, his first successes at twenty. "Hernani" (1830), a Romantic drama, set off a pitched battle in the theatre between classicists and Romantics.
"Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831): the hunchback Quasimodo, the gypsy Esmeralda, the archdeacon Frollo — a triangle of passion played out against a Gothic cathedral. "Les Miserables" (1862): Jean Valjean, an escaped convict trying to become a man. Twenty years of work, twelve hundred pages.
When Napoleon III staged his coup, Hugo went into exile for twenty years. He came back a hero.