(by
the "fault of society," of course) a criminal, though not a serious one,
thinks himself persecuted by the prison director, and murders that
official. The reader who does not know the book will suppose that he has
been treated as Charles Reade's wicked governor treated Josephs and
Robinson and the other victims in _It is Never too Late to Mend_. Not at
all. The redoubtable Claude had, like the great Victor himself and other
quite respectable men, an equally redoubtable appetite, and the prison
rations were not sufficient for him. As he was a sort of leader or
prison shop-steward, and his fellow-convicts looked up to him, a young
fellow who was not a great eater used to give Claude part of his
allowance. The director, discovering this, removed the young man into
another ward--an action possibly rather spiteful, possibly also only a
slight excess, or no excess at all, of red-tapeism in discipline. Claude
not merely asks reasons for this,--which, of course, even if
respectfully done, was an act of clear insubordination on any but
anarchist principles,--but repeats the enquiry. The director more than
once puts the question by, but inflicts no penalty. Whereupon Claude
makes a harangue to the shop (which appears, in some astounding fashion,
to have been left without any supervision between the director's
visits), repeats once more, on the director's entrance, his
insubordinate enquiry, again has it put by, and thereupon splits the
unfortunate official's skull with a hatchet, digging also a pair of
scissors, which once belonged to his (left-handed) wife, into his own
throat. And the wretches actually cure this hardly fallen angel, and
then guillotine him, which he takes most sweetly, placing at the last
moment in the hand of the attendant priest, with the words _Pour les
pauvres_, a five-franc piece, which one of the Sisters of the prison
hospital had given him! After this Hugo, not contented with the tragedy
of the edacious murderer, gives us seven pages of his favourite rhetoric
in _saccade_ paragraphs on the general question.

As so often with him, one hardly knows which particular question to ask
first, "Did ever such a genius make such a fool of himself?" or "Was
ever such an artist given to such hopeless slips in the most rudimentary
processes of art?"

[Sidenote: _Notre-Dame de Paris._]

But it is, of course, not till we come to _Notre-Dame de Paris_ that any
serious discussion of Hugo's claims as a novelist is p