stung him to a frenzied resistance and put
poison in his veins. His country was cheated and betrayed; the liberty
for which she had made so many exertions, both heroic and fantastical,
taken from her; and his own personal liberty and safety threatened.
Victor Hugo's soul then burst into _feu et flamme_. He caught fire
like a volcano long silent, a burning mountain that had simulated
quiet unawares, and clothed itself with vineyards and villages. In the
tranquil days when Louis-Philippe plotted and pottered, and France lay
dormant, amusing her restrained spirit with the outbreak of the
romantic against the classical, and taking pleasure in the burst of
genius which had arisen suddenly and unawares in her midst, the poet
was so little dissatisfied with the _bourgeois regime_ that he
accepted the title of "pair de France." Montalembert had received it
some time before. There must have been something soothing, not
inharmonious to the poetical mind, in the slumbrous reign which
gradually became intolerable to the commonalty and got itself into
contempt with all the world. The young poets of the time were
peaceful, not discontented. Full of energy as they were, they took no
part in the gathering storm. Hugo, a peer, tranquil in the superior
chamber; young De Musset, a courtier of the Duke of Orleans, and
hoping for the king's notice of his verses. The eruption was
preparing, the subterranean fires alight; but the sons of genius took
no notice. When the tremendous awakening came, it must, in the case of
Hugo at least, have gained additional force from the long restraint.
He was in the height of life, a man of forty-six, the leader of the
romantic school, which by that time had overcome opposition and won
the freedom for which it contended, the author of "Hernani" and the
other great plays which form one of his chief titles to fame, and of
volumes of lyrics which had taken the very heart of the French people,
and given a new development to the language. And it was also during
this peaceful period that he had taken in another direction a first
step of unexampled power and brilliancy in the romance of "Notre
Dame." Even among men of acknowledged genius, few have done so much in
a lifetime as Victor Hugo had done up to this break in his career. We
are so accustomed to the attitude of demagogue which he took
afterward, to the violent revolutionary, the furious exile, the
denunciatory prophet of the "Chatiments," that it is strange