Arizona republican., 1903-07-29
PARIS LETTER
The House of Victor Hugo Now Set
 Apart as Museum.

less interesting than HauteVille house.
 Guernsey. When I went through it in the poets lifetime, one saw there how
 his decorative taste and his love for the
 uncommon worked, and to what a de-
 gree the Gothic utilities of Walter
 Scott sank into his mind. Having but common, not to say vulgar, materials
 to work on did not matter. He gave them a personal stamp that took one
 by surprise. Nobody could anticipate any handiwork of Victor Hugo. His
 fancy broke out in the most unexpected
 ways and places. From youth to age,
 he played with deep seriousness tinged
 with gloom at the childish game of "Only suppose" In playing it his mind
 kept at a sublime pitch. and yet a sort
 of childish innocense or naivete per
 vaded it. At Vaudeville house, all the
 time he busted himself furnishing and
 decorating. 1t was, "Only suppose I am
 a poet of baronial standing in a fear
 back century,: ''only suppose. these
 felt carpets with which line the stair
 case and hall are stamped leather of
 CordOva and antique tapestries; ''only
 suppose, this Georgian brick house Q.
 feudal castle that witnessed noble fes- tivities and narrowing tragedies"
 Victor Hugo had the faculty of so
 arranging the felt carpet bought at
 Manchester as to make them suggest
 what he wanted one to suppose. No
 other poet though aided by the most
 practiced theatrical decorator, could do
 that. One not only thought at Haute
 vile house of barons of old, but of the
 powers of darkness doing their utmost
 to defeat the efforts of heroes and
 stamp out flowers of innocence that
 contained an antidote for their male-
 violence. The world appeared to Victor
 Hugo a huge allegory representing a
 fight between the forces of good and evil. It must have seemed to him as his mother saw it in the time of the
 revolution. The revolutionists struck
 her as monsters of iniquity engaged in
 q war on a divinely set-up monarchy
 and a church sent down from heaven
 and watched over by martyrs, saints
 and angels.
 The museum is arranged as much as
 possible like a private house for living people. The banister handrails are GOV cred with red velvet. Relics are every
 where. Among the most remarkable
 are wainscoting. mantels. and furni- ture the poet made and carved for Mime. Drouets house in Gurnsey. M. Paul Meurice, the creator of this tenn pie to Victor Hugo. collected through sixty years such evidences of his pop
 ularity as cheap clay pipes with Victor Hugo's heads or the heads of Triboulet
 and other characters of his works. cut tings from newspapers. engravings of the actors and actresses who played in drama. caricatures, drawings of the house he lived in; photographs of the ! IT, l,, e-sx
 weeks in 1S42 of the wretched town of Hernani. which gave him the name of
 tragedy. The bed with the four twisted posts and fourteenth-century canopy. in which the poet died. is in what used to be his bedroom on the second floor in the house now called after him.
 It is d pity some of the manuscripts
 of Victor Hugo are not in the room arranged as library. The bookcase is mea gerly furnished, except with the numerous editions of his works. Victor Hugo could not be spoken of as a read CT. He read some books of the Bible, translation of the Had. Scott's nov els, Froissart, some chapters of Ma caulay's history, of Michelet's History of France" of some volumes of histor- ical memoirs. Balzac's works, Eugene Sues "Wandering Jew" and The Mysteries of Paris" which. as he read raised and Hugotised into Les Miserables." His own thoughts kept
 him too busy to care for the thoughts
 of other men. His supreme enjoyment
 was the exercise of his own brain in Interpreting the big allegory of the
 worlds life and in calling up visions. I have sometimes imagined that the Prophet Jonah must have been vatic- mating Victor Hugo of his time, and that his denunciations of Nineveh had something in them of Les Chati ments." The whale, probably was a Hugoesque vision I should regard Gustave Dore as the artist most bitten by the HugOesque taste for the gloomy grandiose and middle-age archaic. His illustrations of Balzac's "Contes Dro- latiques" are more suitable to "Notre Dame de Paris" Gustave Dore's gro | tesqueness IS never mirthful; nor is | Victor HugO's.
 The English writer who in imagina- tiveness comes nearest to Victor Hugo is Buryan. They are almost in touch
 in the Valley of the Shadow of Death and in Doubling Castle. There is, how ever this great difference. Bunyan had a stinted vocabulary and Victor
 Hugo the most copious of any modern writer. Bunyan had extraordinary ! fancies which he expressed in ordinary ! language. The language of Victor Hu- go had this peculiarity: that every
 word seems to live and has in itself
 magical power. He found more in no matter what word than any other poet could. He could be a close observer. and his letters to Mile. Bertin about the Basque country are gems of de- scriptive writing. But to have Ob-
 served much. would have cleared his
 visions. The theologians who tried
 Joan of Arc might as well have re
 quired her to give up her saints and | voices.
 A police passport, giving a descrip- | tion of Victor Hugo at the age of
 twenty nine, tells us that his hair was
 bright auburn. thick, long and wavy, l his eyes light hazel and his complex | ion ruddy He then shaved like a priest or Roman orator, ana went on
 doing so until the coup d'etat, when he let his beard grow the better to dis guise himself. Mime. Drouet on join | ing him in Guernsey. made him again
 use his razor, but he caught a bad cold which brought on quinsy, and he let