HUGO’S HOUSE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 32, 30 April 1927, Page 14

HUGO’S HOUSE

A GIFT TO FRANCE The heirs of Victor Hugo have made a gift of Hauteville House, Hugo’s residence on the island of Guernsey, to the City of Paris. The donors are Hugo’s grand-daughter, Jeanne Hugo (now Mme. Michel Negreponte) and Mile. Marguerite Hugo, M. Jean Hugo, and M. Francois Victor Hugo, the children of M. Georges Hugo, the poet’s grandson. WAS HUGO'S HOME WHILE IN EXILE Hugo lived at Hauteville House from 1555 to 1870, during the period of his exile which followed the coup d’etat of Napoleon 111. He wrote there some of his greatest works, including “La Legende des Siecles, “Les Miserables,” “La Homme Qui Rit,” “Les Travailleurs de la Mer,” and “La Chanson des Rues et des Bois.” The house contains many works of art and personal souvenirs of Hugo. He worked in a highly picturesque room in the roof, looking out over the port and the sea. The fine old house in- the Place des Vosges, Paris, in which Hugo occupied rooms on the second floor, between 1833 and IS4B, is already the Hugo Museum, so that the new gift fittingly completes the memorial to him. FURTHER TRIBUTE TO HUGO’S MEMORY This further tribute to the memory of Hugo coincides happily with the celebration next June of the centenary of the romantic movement in literature, which is to take the form of a cycle of performances at the Comedie Francaise. The organisers took Hugo’s preface to his play “Cromwell,” a militant manifesto written in 1827, as marking the beginning of the movement, but abandoned the intention of giving that play owing to the absence of an actor capable of sustaining the part of the great Protector. Hugo will be represented by “Les Burgraves,” “Marion de Lorme,” “Ruy Bias,” “Hernani,” and “Les Trouvailles de Gallus,” and there will be plays of Alfred de Vigny and the whole of the plays of Alfred de Musset in full versions.