Victor Hugo is undoubtedly a far greater figure in French literature than Dumas. In France he is honoured as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of French poets. He was an accomplished artist, and a man of strong and admirable character. Victor Hugo is a large figure in the French history of the nineteenth century, and his one great novel is a colossal monument to his fame that all may understand and read with intense interest. Born of a noble family in 1802, he went to Paris and at twenty published a volume of poems that laid the foundation of his literary and artistic reputation. In 1830 he, like Dumas, produced a successful play, and found himself established in French literature. The next year--long before Dumas thought of writing a story--he published Notre Dame de Paris, his first great novel. It is a many-sided story of Fate, centred about the famous old cathedral of Notre Dame, the “book” of the middle ages. Many years passed before Victor Hugo was again to appear as a novelist. He wrote plays and poems, and took part in politics. As a result of the revolution which brought Napoleon III. to the throne, Victor Hugo was forced into exile, and lived for a number of years in the British island of Guernsey. Here he wrote his one great, monumental novel, Les Miserables, which is as fascinating and romantic as it is great as a work of literary art and a portrayal of social conditions and a study of universal human nature. When it appeared in 1862 Dumas had made his fame and fortune and had fallen into poverty, Thackeray was dead, and Dickens had but a few years to live. Balzac and Poe were already gone some years, and Hawthorne had but two more years to live. In a way Les Miserables is a summary of all these. The principal character is Jean Valjean, a criminal who again and again builds up his little social position, only to see it crumble in an hour when his prison record is revealed. He wanders through Paris, and into the provinces of France, and stops on the battlefield of Waterloo. Everywhere he finds tragedy, human joy and suffering, and incidents that hold the attention breathless. Nothing seems forced or strange or unusual, yet everything is as dramatic as the most fanciful imaginations of Scott or Dumas. And like Dickens, he gave us a long role of notable characters. Les Miserables is an immense book, extending into six large volumes, and would require two or three months to read through carefully. It is a sort of library of fiction, to be compared to Balzac’s Comedie Humaine, or Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series of novels. Few will read it from preface to finis, but it does not need to be read as a whole, for every book, nearly every chapter, is fairly complete in itself. Hugo wrote only three other novels, Toilers of the Sea, which has some fine descriptions of life at the bottom of the ocean, Ninety-three, his last, and the Man Who Laughs, an inferior work.