Authors, French -- 19th century -- Biography; Autobiographies; Hugo, Victor, 1802-1885
His person resembles his talent. In appearance he is dignified,
simple and sober. He comes to the Chamber buttoned up in his dark grey
frock-coat, and wearing a black cravat, and a shirt collar that
reaches to his ears. He has a big nose, thick lips, heavy eyebrows, an
intelligent and severe eye, and grey, ill-combed hair.
CHANGARNIER.
Changarnier looks like an old academician, just as Soult looks like an
old archbishop.
Changarnier is sixty-four or sixty-five years old, and tall and thin.
He has a gentle voice, a graceful and formal air, a chestnut wig like M.
Pasquier’s, and a lady-killing smile like M. Brifaut’s.
With that he is a curt, bold, expeditious man, resolute, but cunning and
reserved.
At the Chamber he occupies the extreme end of the fourth bench of the
last section on the left, exactly above M. Ledru-Rollin.
He usually sits with folded arms. The bench on which Ledru-Rollin and
Lamennais sit is perhaps the most habitually irritated of the Left.
While the Assembly shouts, murmurs, yells, roars, and rages, Changarnier
yawns.
LAGRANGE.
Lagrange, it is said, fired the pistol in the Boulevard des Capucines,
fatal spark that heated the passions of the people and caused the
conflagration of February. He is styled: Political prisoner and
Representative of the people.
Lagrange has a grey moustache, a grey beard and long grey hair. He is
overflowing with soured generosity, charitable violence and a sort of
chivalrous demagogy; there is a love in his heart with which he stirs
up hatred; he is tall, thin, young looking at a distance, old when seen
nearer, wrinkled, bewildered, hoarse, flurried, wan, has a wild look in
his eyes and gesticulates; he is the Don Quixote of the Mountain. He,
also, tilts at windmills; that is to say, at credit, order, peace,
commerce, industry,--all the machinery that turns out bread. With this,
a lack of ideas; continual jumps from justice to insanity and from
cordiality to threats. He proclaims, acclaims, reclaims and declaims.
He is one of those men who are never taken seriously, but who sometimes
have to be taken tragically.
PRUDHON.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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