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Magnificent Pratfalls

Mike Jay: Ballooning’s Golden Age, 8 August 2013

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air 
by Richard Holmes.
William Collins, 404 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 0 00 738692 5
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... hangar, mass-producing craft with Prussian-baiting names such as Garibaldi, Lavoisier, Newton, Victor Hugo and Le Gutenberg. ‘The mighty invention of Montgolfier is destined to come to the aid of La Patrie in this hour of mortal danger,’ Nadar’s fellow-balloonist Gaston Tissandier proclaimed, while Nadar dropped thousands of his business cards ...

Post-Mortem

Michael Burns, 18 November 1993

Death and the After-Life in Modern France 
by Thomas Kselman.
Princeton, 413 pp., £40, March 1993, 0 691 00889 2
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... today’s New Agers. But 19th-century spiritists were not all fogbound crackpots. Napoleon III and Victor Hugo, enemies in politics, were both ‘comforted by mediums who brought spirits back into their homes’: the philosopher Henri Bergson lectured on the topic (and believed in it); and when Captain Dreyfus’s brother, a man of high culture and ...

Diary

Richard Sanger: Nothing ever happens in Ottawa, 21 April 2022

... On the first two weekends of the occupation, the temperature dropped below -20° C. I thought of Victor Hugo on Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow: ‘Deux ennemis: le Czar et le Nord. Le Nord est pire.’ The protesters were winning one battle just by coming out in the cold: for this demographic, being able to deal with the weather is a badge of ...

Oui Oyi Awè Jo Ja Oua

Michael Sheringham: The French Provinces, 31 July 2008

The Discovery of France 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 454 pp., £9.99, July 2008, 978 0 330 42761 6
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... one set of illusions or prejudices for another. Robb, who has written fine biographies of Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud, is most at home in the 19th century, but he doesn’t subscribe to that century’s certainties about progress, or to the Paris-centred vision of those who, like Baudelaire, opposed the period’s shibboleths. At times, The Discovery of France ...

Fumbling for the Towel

Christopher Prendergast: Maigret’s elevation to the Panthéon, 7 July 2005

Romans: Tome I 
by Georges Simenon.
Gallimard, 1493 pp., €60, May 2004, 2 07 011674 3
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Romans: Tome II 
by Georges Simenon.
Gallimard, 1736 pp., €60, May 2004, 2 07 011675 1
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... and with democratic tendencies linked to the ideologies of 1848’ (he had Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo particularly in mind). Simenon’s Maigret novels can be seen as a recovery of that ‘democratic’ impulse, although in conditions that called for a new kind of realism and a corresponding despatch of the mythic hero of the novels of ...

Diary

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Brussels, 29 July 1999

... a restaurant – on the Grand’ Place. A few French writers – Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, Victor Hugo – spent time in Brussels when for one reason or another they had to leave France. Edith Cavell, the English nurse who said ‘Patriotism is not enough,’ was executed by the Germans in 1915 for helping fugitive soldiers escape to Holland. I ...

Destroy the Miracle!

Lorna Scott Fox: Manuel Rivas, 19 May 2011

Books Burn Badly 
by Manuel Rivas, translated by Jonathan Dunne.
Vintage, 592 pp., £8.99, February 2011, 978 0 09 952033 7
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... shutters being closed. ‘Does God Exist? Aurora Library. No more questions, Aurora, darling! Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. Hell’s not miserable. Madame Bovary. One less ovary!’ The books resist being consumed, releasing a viscous, sickening smoke. They are like creatures – ‘he saw it suddenly fan out its fresh pollack’s red gills’; ‘a ...

Verdi’s Views

John Rosselli, 29 October 1987

Verdi: A Life in the Theatre 
by Charles Osborne.
Weidenfeld, 360 pp., £18, June 1987, 0 297 79117 6
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... not only in his choice of subjects (four operas based on Schiller, three on Shakespeare, two on Victor Hugo, two on Byron), but in a breadth of grasp, human and historical, which sometimes outdoes his source: this in both text and music, for Verdi was virtually his own librettist and used Francesco Maria Piave as a mere versifying dogsbody. Verdi and ...

Blow-Up

Richard Fortey, 2 October 1997

Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change 
by Richard Fisher, Grant Heiken and Jeffrey Hulen.
Princeton, 344 pp., £25, July 1997, 9780691012131
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... Fisher and Co show photographs of an archetypal French provincial street, one of a thousand rues Victor Hugo, obliterated by the disaster. Hiroshima is the nearest we surfacedwellers have yet come to duplicating the destruction wrought by magma. Even so, we have failed to manufacture an equivalent of the ghastly lahars: the suffocating mudslides which ...

Diary

Mat Pires: La Princesse de Clèves at the Barricades, 9 April 2009

... Monday, outside the Panthéon, where France’s great and good are buried (Voltaire, Zola, Victor Hugo, but not Madame de Lafayette) which set the ball rolling. The readers included Louis Garrel, Nemours in Christophe Honoré’s film, and lecturers and students from the Universities of Paris. Each person read for five minutes, then passed the ...

John Sturrock

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 21 September 2017

... of John’s professional life that I should have spoken about: his translations – Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Proust, Georges Perec and several others. Or his books: on structuralism, on autobiography; the guide to the Pyrenees. But then he hasn’t been there to advise me. Letters I was very sad to learn of John’s passing. The loss of another link ...

Mrs Berlioz

Patrick Carnegy, 30 December 1982

Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz 
by Peter Raby.
Cambridge, 216 pp., £12.95, September 1982, 0 521 24421 8
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Mazeppa: The Lives, Loves and Legends of Adah Isaacs Menken 
by Wolf Mankowitz.
Blond and Briggs, 270 pp., £10.95, September 1982, 0 85634 119 3
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... suddenly became a central part of French consciousness and the preoccupation of writers such as Hugo and Dumas. The young Berlioz worshipped her from afar, but so intensely that he nearly had a mental breakdown. She became the inspiration and programme of the Symphonie Fantastique. Eventually he married her. But by the time he was introduced to his idée ...

‘I am not dead’

Christopher Prendergast: H.C. Andersen, 8 March 2001

Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller 
by Jackie Wullschlager.
Allen Lane, 506 pp., £20, November 2000, 0 7139 9325 1
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... author that he undoubtedly was, as representative of the European Romantic spirit as Balzac or Victor Hugo’? These are grand claims and, if they’re true, we might well use this lively and informative biography to acquaint ourselves further with Andersen’s life and work. On the face of it, however, the claims strain credulity. I imagine that, for ...

No Fun

David Blackbourn: Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 15 October 1998

Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900-49 
edited by Hans Wysling, translated by Don Reneau.
California, 444 pp., £40, March 1998, 0 520 07278 2
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... progressivism could hardly be more out of season, and Brecht’s favourable comparison of him to Victor Hugo will quicken few pulses. Historians of the Kaiser’s Germany still refer to the character Diederich Hessling from Heinrich’s novel, Der Untertan, but even this wonderful monster of arrogance to those below, and subservience to those ...

I want, I shall have

Graham Robb, 17 February 2000

La Grand Thérèse or The Greatest Swindle of the Century 
by Hilary Spurling.
Profile, 128 pp., £7.99, September 1999, 9781861971326
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... the avenue de la Grande Armée, not far from the last home of that other millionaire republican, Victor Hugo. The ‘Haussmannisation’ of Paris, and the property speculation that supported it, were clearly not confined to the Second Empire. Throughout the 1890s, the ‘château’ at 65 avenue de la Grande Armée, where ‘even the lavatory brushes ...

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