Victor Hugo published his Odes et Ballades from 1822 to 1828.  “La Vendee,” “Les Vierges de Verdun,” “Quiberon,” “Louis XVII,” “Le Retablissement de la Statue de Henri IV.,” “La Mort du due de Berry,” “La Naissance du duc de Bordeaux,” “Les Funerailles de Louis XVIII.,” “Le Sacre de Charles X.,” are true royalist songs.  Alexandre Dumas, Fils, in receiving M. Leconte de Lisle at the French Academy, recalled “the light of that little lamp, seen burning every night in the mansard of the Rue Dragon, at the window of the boy poet, poor, solitary, indefatigable, enamoured of the ideal, hungry for glory, of that little lamp, the silent and friendly confidant of his first works and his first hopes so miraculously realized.”  Who knows? without the support of the government of the Restoration the light of that little lamp might less easily have developed into the resplendent star that the author of La Dame aux Camelias indicated in the firmament.

The author of Meditations Poetiques and the author of the Odes et Ballades were sincere in the expression of their political and religious enthusiasm.  These two lyric apostles of the throne and the altar, these two bards of the coronation, obeyed the double inspiration of their imagination and their conscience.  Party spirit should not be too severe for a regime that suggested such admirable verses to the two greatest French poets of the nineteenth century—­to Lamartine and to Victor Hugo.

Let us recall also that in Victor Hugo it was not only the royalist poet that Charles X. protected, it was also the chief of the romantic school; for the government, despite all the efforts of the classicists, caused Hernani to be represented at the Francais, a subsidized theatre.  When the Academy pressed its complaint to the very throne to prevent the acceptance of the play, the King replied wittily that he claimed no right in the matter beyond his place in the parterre.  The first representation of Hernani took place the 25th of February, 1830, and the author, decorated, pensioned, encouraged by Charles X., did not lose the royal favor, when, on the 9th of March following, he wrote in the preface of his work:  “Romanticism, so often ill-defined, is nothing, taking it all in all—­and this is its true definition, if only its militant side be regarded—­but liberalism in literature.  The principle of literary liberty, already understood by the thinking and reading world, is not less completely adopted by that immense crowd, eager for the pure emotions of art, that throngs the theatres of Paris every night.  That lofty and puissant voice of the people, which is like that of God, writes that poetry henceforth shall have the same matter as politics!  Toleration and liberty!”

The first representation of a work that was a great step forward for the romantic school, Henri III et sa Cour, by Alexandre Dumas, had already taken place at the Francais, February 11, 1829.  The 30th of March, 1830, the Odeon gave Christine de Suede, by the same author.