Victor Hugo

1802–1885 · French Romantic novelist, poet and dramatist

Victor Hugo was a French Romantic author, poet, playwright and politician, best known for The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). Les Travailleurs de la Mer followed in 1866 and is dedicated to Guernsey, where Hugo spent fifteen years in exile; the story turns on a Guernsey shipowner, Mess Lethierry, whose vessel is wrecked on a reef. The ladder of despair this quotation completes is very much his register — an abstraction stated as flatly as a fact, dropped into the middle of a story about a wrecked steamship.

Traced to source

1 quote we’ve traced

“Melancholy Is the Pleasure of Being Sad”

Disputed

Not actually Victor Hugo

Often misattributed to Victor Hugo

Famous lines widely pinned on Victor Hugo that we’ve traced to someone else.

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise”

actually Herbert Kretzmer

“He who opens a school door, closes a prison”

actually Louis Jourdan

“To love another person is to see the face of God”

actually Herbert Kretzmer

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Thought Victor Hugo said something else?

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