It was in this apartment, in the crimson-draped drawing room, that Hugo solidified his position as the father of French Romanticism. The first stop for any Hugophile in Paris is undoubtedly the writer’s home-turned-museum on the second floor of the Hôtel de Rohan-Guéménée, where he lived from 1832 to 1848 with his wife Adèle and their four children. Today, though, it is still possible for travelers to find echoes of the Paris that Hugo once knew, from the house where he lived and the places he frequented, to the subterranean abyss that haunts the pages of the author’s most enduring novel. This was both an effort to quell the city’s rampant congestion and the disease it fostered, and to prevent the building of revolution barricades.
The labyrinth of narrow, interweaving streets and hidden neighborhoods, relics of the medieval age, was leveled into the broad, sidewalk-bordered avenues that define modern Paris. The controversial urban planner, Baron Haussmann, razed much of Hugo’s old Paris in the mid-19th century while the writer was in exile. She notes that at the time of its release, Les Mis was both a call to arms for the French people and a lamentation of the “old Paris” that Hugo loved. “The story is, in many ways, a love affair with Paris,” says Kathryn Grossman, a French professor at Pennsylvania State University who has authored four books on Hugo and Les Misérables. Amanda Seyfried will play Valjean’s adopted daughter, Cosette. It is this stage version of Les Misérables that will be brought to life again this month in director Tom Hooper’s film starring Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean, the redeemed convict who prevails in the face of repeated persecution, and Anne Hathaway as the downtrodden single-mother, Fantine. In fact, many modern admirers may only be familiar with the iconic, 1980 musical production of the story created by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg. The reply: “!”Ī century and a half later, “!” is still an apt description of Hugo’s epic masterpiece, which is still spawning numerous iterations on the page, stage and screen.
In 1862, while in exile on the British Isle of Guernsey for speaking out against Napoleon III, Hugo telegrammed his publisher “?” demanding the reaction to the release of his latest novel, Les Misérables.
Legend has it that Victor Hugo, the prolific French scribbler whose body of published work amounts to seven novels, 18 volumes of poetry and 21 plays, also holds the record for the world’s shortest correspondence.
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