Victor Hugo himself explains the object of the work: "I wished to describe a girl who might realise the ideal of all fresh and poetic imagination, the girl of my dreams ... you, Adèle, my beloved.... And beside her I wanted to set a young man, not such as I am but such as I would wish to be." He has certainly succeeded so far that his characters are entirely French, and he seems rather to have made a mistake in placing the scene so far from France. The nightmare, gruesome character of the book is bloodcurdling enough, but decidedly overdone, and though the work is very well worth reading as the early effort of one of the greatest of writers, it contributes little to his fame and still less, perhaps to the interest of a visit to Trondhjem. The local colour is extremely poor, a fact that is hardly surprising when it is remembered that the author had never visited Norway. The hills stand about Trondhjem, as indeed about all other Norway towns; some of them display, five hundred feet above the sea, marks of former beaches where waves lapped cliffs unnumbered years ago, before the movements of the globe had raised the land so high. And from places within an easy walk of the city, there is a magnificent panorama, westward over hills riven in all directions by the jagged edged sea, and eastward to the snowy mountains of the Kiolen range that form the frontier of Sweden. Superbly beautiful at all times is the prospect of wooded hill and inland sea, particularly when seen in softer outline as the long Arctic twilight gradually gives place to the paler illumination of the moon, and little lights begin to sparkle over land and sea. But even in such dreamy conditions the city, beautiful from its verdure and striking from its position, declines to look like a mediæval or even a historic town. Though for more than a thousand years the landscape below has been the scene of the varied activities of mankind, and from it has gone out power by which the life of half Europe has been quickened, even yet there is rather the restless atmosphere of new settlements in a country still only half subdued, than that of quiet peace and sense of satisfied repose, such as broods over an ancient Italian seaport, where every corner has been transformed by untold generations of man and centuries ago even the rough hill-sides were terraced to enlarge his domain.