Les Contemplations

Description

Les Contemplations, which Hugo published in 1856, is marked in two ways by distance and separation: because the outlaw who, in Châtiments, had just criticised Napoleon III, was in exile in Guernsey; but also because the collection, at its centre, bears the brokenness of mourning, and its two parts - 'Autrefois' and 'Aujourd'hui' - are separated by the tragic caesura of 1843, when Léopoldine, Hugo's daughter, disappeared in the sea. The poetic word is born in death, and 'this book', the writer tells us, 'must be read as one would read the book of a dead person'.

But Les Contemplations also constructs a destiny. It may borrow from the writer's biography, but it would be a mistake to confuse it with his own. For if Hugo's lyricism touches on the universal, it is precisely because here the poet strips away the bark of the individual to reach the intimate: his own and that of the reader, who will be able to find himself in the mirror held up to him by these Memoirs of a Soul.