The French author Victor Marie, Vicomte Hugo (1802-1885), was the supreme poet of French romanticism. He is noted for the breadth of his creation, the versatility that made him as much at ease in the novel as in the short lyric, and the mystical grandeur of his vision.

Victor Hugo had a nomadic and anxious childhood. He was erratically schooled, a fact which accounts in part for the eclectic and unsystematic aspect of his poetic thought. At age 14 he wrote, "I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing." He had begun to write in every poetic genre--odes, satires, elegies, riddles, epics, madrigals--and to receive recognition while still in his adolescence, never having to fact the long years of obscurity and struggle that are the lot of most poets.

In 1822 Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adèle Foucher, one and a half years after the death of his mother...