In honour of the 155th year since the last portion of Les Miserables was released on June 30th 1862, Google has dedicated a doodle to Victor Hugo.
Google says the following:
Today we celebrate world-renowned poet, statesman, and human rights activist Victor Hugo. The final chapter of his epic novel Les Misérables was published on this date in 1862.
Before he turned 30, Hugo was already an established poet, dramatist, artist, and novelist. Today’s Doodle depicts some of his best-known works, includingNotre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831) and the poetry collection Les Contemplations (1856). Between those milestones, Hugo began his legendary novel Les Misérables, about social injustice, redemption, and revolution.
By the time Les Misérables was published in 1862, Hugo had been exiled almost 10 years for his political views. During that time, he produced three poetry collections, plus numerous books about social and economic disparity, including Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea) and L’Homme Qui Rit (The Man Who Laughs). Hugo later founded the Association Litteraire et Artistique Internationale to support artists’ rights.
Hugo appeared on a French banknote and is honored with streets, parks, hiking trails, and statues in most large French cities, as well as in Guernsey, where he lived in exile. Today’s Doodle is a fitting addition to the long list of tributes to the venerable Victor Hugo.
it is actually fairly impressive, for someone who has been dead for 130 years, that Victor Hugo still gives the impression that if you disagree with him he will show up at your house and explain to you why you are Wrong
Okay so a previous Victor Hugo post has reminded me of when I went to visit his residence on my home island, Hauteville House.
And I want to tell you about the most extra room in the most extra house of the most extra man.
Since Victor Hugo expected to die on the island, in his house, he furnished one of the second floor (or third floor for you people who don’t have ground floors) rooms to house his deathbed.
Pretty badass looking deathbed.
BUT WAIT it gets better
See this man who slept normally in the servants quarters on the top floor in relative modesty (though those rooms are pretty fucking swish by todays standards), he wanted his death to be something pretty grand and symbolic so THIS FUCKING MAN made his death room a fucking journey from the deathbed to heaven.
So we continue down the room and it turns into a fucking church with pews and all and all these wood mouldings like damn dude!
and tHEN
in the middle of the room is a big ass candelabra which is perhaps supposed to be the Biblical burning bush
AND THEN
You enter the judgement zone where his symbolic soul would be symbolically judged, a big fuck off table with 3 chairs for God, Mary, and Jesus
and we know this bECAUSE HE FUCKING LABLED THE CHAIRS
NOT TO MENTION that this was on the second floor which had a skylight on top of the staircase on which ‘God’s Light’ was written cause it’s meant to be Heaven whereas the very dark area at the very bottom of the stairs is dark as fuck because it’s the unenlightened earth!
LITERALLY LOOKING UP AT HEAVEN YO!
Victor Hugo, the most extra man who ever fucking lived!
omg THANK YOU for all the pictures, I can never get enough details about Hugo’s Amazing Appalling Fantastic Interior decorating choices!
Concept: Enjolras/Grantaire modern AU fic but written as Victor Hugo would have done
Example: Chapter III: In which Enjolras and Grantaire encounter the crowd at the Louvre
Enjolras, striding imposingly up stairs with Grantaire at his heels, exited the Tuileries métro onto the rue de Rivoli. They followed the road east, alongside the Jardin des Tuileries, past the statue of Jeanne d’arc, then crossed through the Jardin…[etc]…and finally arrived in front of the Pyramide du Louvre.
‘It is no less busy than usual,’ remarked Enjolras, his youthful beauty striking even in the crowd of hundreds.
‘That is what I said; even on a Tuesday morning on such an ugly day the tourists will flock to this grand triangle for the purpose of a single photograph. To have such motivation! Had I but an ounce of it for such a thing, my own portrait would be smiling on the wall alongside Mona Lisa herself,’ replied Grantaire. ‘But no matter, we are here for the heart, not the skin. And which is more important? Let us enter. If it is alright with you.’
Enjolras gently clasped his hand with a smile. ‘It is.’
apparently Victor Hugo gave his fiancee Adele a bat
in an envelope
a live bat
this was wasn’t an attempted breakup or anything, he was using it to illustrate a poem about bats he had written
Hugo no
how did he catch a bat, stuff it into an envelope, and keep it in envelope long enough to give it to her? what happened to the poor befuddled bat after she opened the envelope?
I mean I totally believe he would do this, I just want to know how he managed it. did he buy the bat? couldn’t he have put it in a box with holes instead of an envelope?
shoutout to Victor Hugo for publishing Les Misérables in 1862 and portraying Fantine as a sympathetic single mom who truly loved her child, and for placing the blame for her situation on the man who used and left her, not the woman who had premarital sex.
