In spite, however, of his ardent republicanism, he was very fond of speaking of his own noble descent.  Again and again he styled himself “a peer of France;” and he and his family made frequent allusions to the knights and bishops and counselors of state with whom he claimed an ancestral relation.  This was more than inconsistent.  It was somewhat ludicrous; because Victor Hugo’s ancestry was by no means noble.  The Hugos of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not in any way related to the poet’s family, which was eminently honest and respectable, but by no means one of distinction.  His grandfather was a carpenter.  One of his aunts was the wife of a baker, another of a barber, while the third earned her living as a provincial dressmaker.

If the poet had been less vain and more sincerely democratic, he would have been proud to think that he sprang from good, sound, sturdy stock, and would have laughed at titles.  As it was, he jeered at all pretensions of rank in other men, while he claimed for himself distinctions that were not really his.  His father was a soldier who rose from the ranks until, under Napoleon, he reached the grade of general.  His mother was the daughter of a ship owner in Nantes.

Victor Hugo was born in February, 1802, during the Napoleonic wars, and his early years were spent among the camps and within the sound of the cannon-thunder.  It was fitting that he should have been born and reared in an age of upheaval, revolt, and battle.  He was essentially the laureate of revolt; and in some of his novels—­as in Ninety-Three—­the drum and the trumpet roll and ring through every chapter.

The present paper has, of course, nothing to do with Hugo’s public life; yet it is necessary to remember the complicated nature of the man—­all his power, all his sweetness of disposition, and likewise all his vanity and his eccentricities.  We must remember, also, that he was French, so that his story may be interpreted in the light of the French character.

At the age of fifteen he was domiciled in Paris, and though still a schoolboy and destined for the study of law, he dreamed only of poetry and of literature.  He received honorable mention from the French Academy in 1817, and in the following year took prizes in a poetical competition.  At seventeen he began the publication of a literary journal, which survived until 1821.  His astonishing energy became evident in the many publications which he put forth in these boyish days.  He began to become known.  Although poetry, then as now, was not very profitable even when it was admired, one of his slender volumes brought him the sum of seven hundred francs, which seemed to him not only a fortune in itself, but the forerunner of still greater prosperity.