His banishment endured – Hugo refused to return while the farce of Emperor Louis held the stage in France – for 19 years.
Helped by his loyally long-suffering mistress, Juliette Drouet, Hugo and his loyally long-suffering wife, Adèle, fled the country for exile in the Channel Islands. Hugo’s vocal opposition put his own life at threat. On 2 December 1851, Louis Napoleon (famously mocked by Hugo as Napoleon le Petit) staged a coup to retain power and become France’s third emperor. The reason for Hugo’s exile was far nobler. Was he treating himself to a well-earned holiday, or dodging the bullets fired by cuckolded spouses? (Bellos points out that Balzac based Cousin Bette’s Hector Hulot – try rhyming it with Victor Hugo – on his libidinous friend, around the time Hugo himself was caught bed-hopping under the wonderfully improbable alias of “Mr Apollo”.) He finally completed the novel, his greatest achievement, in the rooftop eyrie of a house on the otherwise unremarkable island of Guernsey. He started work on Les Misérables that year in Paris.
In 1845, the 43-year-old author received the ultimate French honour of being made a Pair de France (France’s equivalent to a seat in the House of Lords – back when that was still counted a distinction). (Bellos tells us that Hugo’s descriptions of medieval Notre Dame were so precise that the architect Viollet-le-Duc consulted them for authenticity when undertaking his 19-year restoration project of Paris’s massive – and dilapidated – cathedral.) Goethe’s death in 1832 allowed a very willing Hugo to assume the mantle of Europe’s presiding literary genius. Wearing an all-in-one woollen bodystocking enforced a rare phase of celibacy in the philandering Hugo’s life, and the production in 1831 of an immediate – and impressively well-researched – success. He finished it by locking away his party clothes and donning – a useful tip for dilatory scribblers – 24/7 sleepwear. Hugo wrote while standing, wielding a goose-quill pen, in a glass-walled studyīorn in 1802, Victor Hugo enjoyed a precociously successful career as a playwright before forcing himself, aged 28, to complete his first novel (an overdue commission): The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
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