His self-importance is a continual challenge to our belief in him. Madame Duclaux quotes Heine’s sneer: “Hugo is worse than an egoist, he is a Hugoist,” and his device was the arrogant _Ego Hugo_. But at least he had the courage of his self-importance. In 1851, at the time of the _coup d’état_ of Louis Napoleon, when there was a price on his head, Hugo was driving across Paris to a meeting of the Insurrectionary Committee, and passed a group of officers on horseback: The blood rushed to his head. He flung down the window of the cab, tore his deputy’s scarf out of his pocket, and waving it wildly, began to harangue the General: “You, who are there, dressed in the uniform of a General, it is to you that I speak, sir. You know who I am; I am a representative of the nation: and I know who you are; you are a malefactor! And now do you wish to know my name! My name is Victor Hugo!” This was no doubt theatrical, and both his deeds and his words during the reign of Napoleon the Little were those of a man consciously playing the leading part. But the fact remains that at this crisis he did risk everything and face twenty years’ exile for the sake of his convictions. The last stanza of “Ultima Verba” in _Les Châtiments_ may be rhetoric, but it is not empty rhetoric: Si l’on n’est plus que mille, eh bien, j’en suis! Si même Ils ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla: S’il en demeure dix, je serai le dixième; Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là. There is an energy of fury in Hugo’s political verse that keeps it alive even to-day, when Louis Napoleon, a charlatan without this redeeming fury, has receded into such littleness that the eye scarcely any longer perceives him. Hugo at times seems a painfully vocative poet--the poet, not merely of the vocative singular, but of the vocative plural. But there is always coursing through his verse a great natural force, like that of the wind or the waves, that carries us along as we read. Hugo’s work, like his life, indeed, was the expression of what Madame Duclaux calls “a powerful and a sensual nature, a prodigious temperament.” His barber complained that Hugo’s beard took the edge off any razor. At forty he cracked the kernels of peaches with his teeth; even in his old age ... he ate his oranges with the peel on and his lobsters in their shell, “because he found them more digestible.” His appetite (which was hungry, not greedy) alarmed the good Théo. “You should see the fabulous medley he makes on his plate of all sorts and conditions of viands: cutlets, a salad of white beans, stewed beef and tomato sauce, and watch him devour them, very fast, and during a long time.” “Hugo is one of the forces of Nature!” cried Flaubert, “and there circulates in his veins the sap of trees.”