Victor Hugo
Victor HUgo was born in 1802 of a much-loved, conservative mother and a distant, heroic soldier father who rose to be a general. He spent much of his childhood on the move following the campaigns of the Napoleanic Wars. his parents seperated when he was 16. Two years later, he received a gift from Louis XVIII for verses he had written on the assassination of the King's nephew the Duc de Berri and was later granted a royal pension of 3,000 francs a year. He wrote prodigiously and profitably, receiving a Sevres dinner service for service for a poem written for the coronation of Charles X and being invested as a Chevalier of the Legiond' Honneur at just 23. He was by this time married to Adele Foucher and had a child (the first of four): a conventional and successful family man. Perhaps only General Hugo detected the transformation to come; "Give it time", he said, "the boy is of his mother's opinion; but the man will be of his father's."
The period 1820-30 was crucial in Hugo's life. A dispute over Napoleanic titles sparked a change in his ideas although he was more of an emotional than a political radical as yet. He was inspired by the theater and became the Captain of the Romantic with his play Hernani. As much a battleground for Romantics and Classics offstage as a drama on, it was performed a hundred times, but never without scuffles and arguements among the audience.
About this time Hugo met the actress Juliette Drouet who was to be his mistress for the next 50 years: by no means the only one, but certainly the most loyal. She never lived more than walking distance away from him and wrote at least a letter a day until she died.
Hugo's huge output of work continued, including the much-filmed story of Quasimodo, Notre-Dame de Paris, and perhaps his best play, Ruy Blas