Page:Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (tr. Shoberl, 1833).djvu/18

x self. Shortly after this, Chateaubriand, in a note to the Conservateur, styled him enfant sublime, and this circumstance led to a friendly intercourse with him, which subsisted several years.

After the death of his mother in 1821, he took a small house in a sequestered quarter, but refused to accept money from his father, and laboured day and night, that he might be the sooner in a condition to claim the hand of his mistress, to whom he was united in the following year. His juvenile friend, Delon, was implicated in the conspiracy of Saumur. Hugo wrote to his mother, offering the fugitive an asylum in his house. This letter fell into the hands of the police; it was read by Louis XVIII. himself, and the first vacant pension was conferred on the writer.

So long as Victor Hugo adhered exclusively to the royalists, he drew upon himself scarcely any thing but censure in Paris, and it must be confessed that his earliest performances, clever as they were, afforded scope for criticism. His poetical compositions were more highly appreciated than his prose. His "Odes" of 1822 gained him more applause than his Han d'Islande and Bug Jargal. The first, which has appeared in English, "is a northern romance, in which the youthful novelist has turned to great account the savage wilds, gloomy lakes, stormy seas, pathless caves, and ruined fortresses, of Scandinavia. A being, savage as the scenery around him, human in his birth, but more akin to the brute in his nature, diminutive but with a giant's strength, whose pastime is assassination, who lives literally as well as metaphorically on blood, is the hero: and round this monster are grouped some of the strangest, ghastliest, and yet not wholly unnatural beings which it is possible for the imagination to conceive, while gentler forms relieve the monotony of crime and horror."

Hugo's second romance, "Bug Jargal," which has also been recently given to the English reader in the Library of Romance, is a tale of the insurrection in St. Domingo; but, according to the critic whom we have just