Victor-Hugo-House is located at 6 Place des Vosges, in the 4th arrondissement of Paris. It is the former Hôtel de Rohan-Guémené. Victor Hugo rented the apartment on the second floor for sixteen years, from 1832 to 1848. After his return from exile in 1870, Victor Hugo lived from 1878 in his apartment on avenue d'Eylau where he died in 1885.
Note on the Victor Hugo Museum of Hauteville House, Guernsey (Channel Islands).
Hauteville House is a house, now the Victor Hugo Museum, located at 38 Hauteville Street in Saint-Pierre-Port, Guernesey.. It was the home of Victor Hugo during the last fourteen years (1856 to 1870) of his exile, which lasted nineteen years. It was in this house that the author wrote or completed a number of his masterpieces such as: Les Misérables, Les Travailleurs de la mer, L'Homme qui rit, La Légende des siècles, Théâtre en liberté…
Victor-Hugo-House at Place des Vosges: 16 prolific years
It was in the study of this apartment that Victor Hugo wrote several of his major works: Lucretia Borgia, The Burgraves, Ruy Blas, Marie Tudor, The Twilight Songs, The Inner Voices, The Rays and the Shadows, a large part of Les Misérables, the beginning of The Legend of the Centuries and The Contemplations. He was elected to the French Academy, appointed Peer of France, then deputy of Paris
But also 16 years of social and political life and a family drama
Victor Hugo spent sixteen years of social, political and family life. He received his friends Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Prosper Mérimée and Sainte-Beuve.
It was also the time when his daughter Léopoldine married Charles Vacquerie (1817-1843) on 15 February 1843. On Monday morning, September 4 of the same year, at about ten o'clock, Charles Vacquerie embarked on a sailing boat on the Seine river in the company of his uncle, Pierre Vacquerie (1781-1843), his eleven-year-old son Arthur (1832-1843) and his wife Leopoldine. They went to Me Bazire, the notary of Caudebec, half a league from Villequier. On the way back, between two hills, an unpredictable gust of wind suddenly capsized the canoe. Charles' desperate efforts were unsuccessful. Thus, seeing that he will not bring his wife back to life, not wanting to be saved, he dives one last time and stays with her in death. Léopoldine was only nineteen years old
The premature and tragic death of his daughter and son-in-law will have a great influence on the work and personality of Victor Hugo. He dedicated many poems to her memory, including Demain, dès l'aube... and À Villequier in Pauca meae, the fourth book of the Contemplations, as well as: "She had taken this fold...". Léopoldine's death will greatly impress her 13 year old sister Adèle, to the point of shaking the teenager's mental health. She died five decades later in a psychiatric hospital.
Exile from 1852 to 1870. Victor Hugo against Napoleon III
During the coup d'état of December 2, 1851 of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Victor Hugo tried without success to organize a resistance. Having become an opponent of the power, he left on December 11 for Brussels where he stayed 8 months. This marked the beginning of an exile that would last nineteen years, first three years in Jersey and then in Guernsey. One month later, the decree of proscription of January 9, 1852 ordered the expulsion of sixty-six former representatives to the Legislative Assembly, including Victor Hugo, from French territory for reasons of general security. Initially forced, the exile will become voluntary in 1859, Victor Hugo refusing to return to France despite the amnesty from which he benefits.
The presentation of the Victor-Hugo-House: chronologically the journey of the writer
The Victor-Hugo-House is a museum. Its collections were established on the initiative of and around the donation made by Paul Meurice to the City of Paris in 1902. He was the friend and executor of the poet's will. 1902 was the centenary of Victor Hugo's birth.
The visit of the museum allows to discover the apartment of the 2nd floor occupied by the Hugo family. The life of Victor Hugo is presented simply before the exile, during the exile, since the exile.
The antechamber presents his youth, the first years of his marriage to Adele Foucher; the red room evokes his stay at the Place Royale (former name of the Place des Vosges).
The Chinese salon and the two rooms that follow evoke his exile from 1852 to 1870.
The penultimate room of the Victor-Hugo-House, named the Cabinet de Travail, evokes the return of the family to the capital in 1870, and the last years of the writer in his apartment on the Avenue d'Eylau. One can contemplate his famous portrait by Léon Bonnat. The last room recreates the death chamber in 1885, avenue d'Eylau.
The apartment on the first floor regularly presents temporary exhibitions, and, on a rotating basis, the six hundred drawings that the museum possesses, out of the three thousand that the writer executed. The drawings evoke architectural and maritime elements. The print room and the library, which houses eleven thousand books on the life and work of Victor Hugo, are open, by appointment, to researchers
The transfer of the remains of Victor Hugo to the Panthéon in Paris
It is on June 1, 1885, ten days after his death, that the remains of Victor Hugo, was led directly to the Pantheon.
In accordance with his last wishes, it is in the "hearse of the poor" that the ceremony takes place. The decree of May 26, 1885, voted by 415 votes out of 418, grants him a national funeral and secularizes the Pantheon again.
Before being transferred there, his coffin was exposed during the night of May 31 to June 1 under the Arc de Triomphe, veiled obliquely by a black crepe. On the day of the transfer, the procession to the Pantheon stretched over several kilometers, with nearly two million people and 2,000 delegations coming to pay their last respects. He is then the most popular French writer of his time and is already considered for several decades as one of the monuments of French literature.
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