Victor Hugo is very hospitable, and delights in having three or four friends to dine with him, but his appetite, though healthful, is neither very great nor very dainty: he prefers plain food and drinks only light claret habitually. He is a very early riser, and on fine spring or summer mornings he may often be met at six o'clock taking a stroll in the Champs Élysées. Of his fondness for riding on the tops of omnibuses I have already spoken. These long rides, when he traverses Paris from one end to the other, are his periods of composition. He sits plunged in a profound reverie, with vague eyes gazing unseeing into space. So well are his moods understood by the conductors and habitual travellers on those lines that he is always left undisturbed. Sometimes the greater part of the day will be passed in these excursions, nor does any severity of the weather ever daunt the aged poet. Yet with all the quiet simplicity of his habits his daily life has not escaped the shafts of calumny. The Bonapartist press declared that he was a drunkard who used often to be picked up insensible from the floor of his own dining-room. He has been called an assassin because of his sympathy with the proscribed Communists, a madman because of his enthusiastic and impassioned utterances, and he has been said to be a hunchback whose deformity was dissimulated by the skill of his tailor. Any sketch of the poet's home-life would be incomplete did I not touch on his passionate fondness for his grand-children, the two little beings whose prattle and caresses lend a charm of peculiar sweetness to the waning hours of that illustrious career. For them the world-renowned genius is but the most loving and tender of grandfathers. Their games, their studies, their baby caprices, sway the actions of that grand personality as the zephyrs ruffle the surface of the summer ocean. The creator of _Marion Delorme_ excels in manoeuvring a puppet-show and in getting up plays on a dolls' theatre. The author of _Les Miserables_ often lulls these little ones to sleep with improvised tales of wonderful fascination. For their sakes he becomes a sculptor and moulds in bread-crumb most marvellous pigs with four matches for legs. They it is who know best the almost feminine tenderness, the wellnigh maternal love, of which that powerful nature is capable.