Complete Romance History Poems of Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist who was the most well-known of all the French Romantic writers.


Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831, (also known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).

 

Table of Contents

Les Misérables, Complete in 5 Volumes

The Last Day of a Condemned Man

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris)

Napoleon the Little

Toilers of the Sea

The Man Who Laughs

The History of Crime

 Poems

 

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame -

The French title refers to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, on which the story is centred. The Notre Dame Cathedral is one of the largest and most well-known cathedrals in the world.

The story begins on Epiphany (6 January), 1482, the day of the 'Feast of Fools' in Paris, France. Quasimodo, the deformed hunchback bell-ringer of Notre Dame, is introduced by his crowning as King of Fools.

 

Esmeralda, a beautiful Gypsy with a kind and generous heart, captures the hearts of many men, including those of Captain Phoebus and a poor street poet, Pierre Gringoire, but especially those of Quasimodo and his adoptive father, Claude Frollo, the Archdeacon of Notre Dame. Frollo is torn between his obsessive love and the rules of the church. He orders Quasimodo to kidnap her, but the hunchback is suddenly captured by Phoebus and his guards who save Esmeralda.

 

Quasimodo is sentenced to be flogged and turned on the pillory for one hour, followed by another hour's public exposure. He calls for water. Esmeralda, seeing his thirst, offers him a drink. It saves him, and she captures his heart.

 

Esmeralda is later charged with the attempted murder of Phoebus, whom Frollo actually attempted to kill in jealousy after seeing him about to have sex with Esmeralda, and is tortured and sentenced to death by hanging. As she is being led to the gallows, Quasimodo swings down by the bell rope of Notre Dame and carries her off to the cathedral under the law of sanctuary. Clopin, a street performer, rallies the Truands (criminals of Paris) to charge the cathedral and rescue Esmeralda.....

 

The Last Day of a Condemned Man -

The novel recounts the thoughts of a man condemned to die. Hugo sees the book as a renunciation of the death penalty.

 

Toilers of the Sea -

The story concerns a Guernseyman named Gilliatt, a social outcast who falls in love with Deruchette, the niece of a local shipowner, Mess Lethierry. When Lethierry's ship is wrecked on the Roches Douvres, a perilous reef, Deruchette promises to marry whomever can salvage the ship's steam engine.

 

Gilliatt eagerly volunteers, and the story follows both his physical trials and tribulations (which includes a battle with an octopus), as well as the undeserved opprobrium of his neighbours.

 

The Man Who Laughs (also published under the title By Order of the King) is a novel by Victor Hugo, originally published in April 1869 under the French title L'Homme qui rit. Although among Hugo's most obscure works, it was adapted into a popular 1928 film, directed by Paul Leni and starring Conrad Veidt, Mary Philbin and Olga Baclanova.