a wave of grandeur and beauty in the French ocean of literature

I feel extra French right now.  I’m drinking my 50 cent café that I bought out of one of the many coffee vending machines of Sciences Po and reading about the life and works of Victor Hugo.  Today he was the subject of my ‘Political History: ideas, cultures, and behaviors’ class.  We mainly discussed how his intellectual life leaned on his political life and vice versa.  The man was quite legit.  He published his first poem at 17.  seventeen.  At seventeen I was chasing Moxie through the back yard and spilling nail polish.  Way to outdo me Victor.

Although Hugo is seen as a heroic figure in the support of the republican ideal, his political leanings actually started off as quite conservative, placing him as more of a monarchist.  However by the time the 1848 revolution rolled around, Hugo had witnessed and experienced so much oppression, both in his artistic and political life, that he became a strong supporter of the Republic.  So much so that when Napoleon III undertook a coup d’état in 1851, restoring a second monarchy in France, Victor peaced out to Guernsey, an island in the English channel, for 19 years in protest.  While he was living the island-life, he wrote several pamphlets insulting Napoleon the third.  He only went back to the motherland when Napoleon was ousted with the birth of the Third Republic.

Author of Les Misérables, Notre Dame de Paris, and a bajillion of other works, Victor Hugo’s eloquent words were a wave of grandeur and beauty in the French ocean of literature.  A quote I love from Hernani, a drama he wrote in 1830:

Tout marche, et le hasard corrige le hasard.

De là vient l'équilibre, et toujours l'ordre éclate.

"everything goes on and chance corrects chance.

Thence - balance, and order always bursts from it."

He was also mega into not-the-death-penalty, universal suffrage, and women’s rights.   However, Mister Hugo apparently had a mistress, or lots of mistresses.  What a shame.  He died in 1885 and his body in now at the Panthéon, a former church transformed in to a burial place for the grands hommes of France.  It is about a 6 minute walk from my apartment, so I’m going to go give him a talking-to.

uprooted from the South and thrown in the middle of Paris' Latin Quarter

I went café hopping today.  Okay, well, I only went to two, but that just sounds cool.  I wish I could give you the names of these fantastics... but France doesn't name their cafés, unless I'm a tard (which is mega possible) and just haven't spotted the letters... on the 53 of them that I pass daily.  Anyways.. the first one I have been to before, really quaint.  It's a continuously crowded hole in the wall with dark wooden furniture and delicious patisseries.  You see all sorts of people there - young couples, old couples, lone old people, dads and daughters...  and the staff are appropriately Parisian-stressed workers.  After reading a first chapter in the book I have to lire for my music and politics class -  "L'âme de Hegel et les vaches du Wisconsin" by the italian writer Alessandro Baricco - which is actually proving to be rather interesting, I started feeling the pressure of other customers wanting to sit down, and so I paid for my delish café au lait and made my way out of the cozy establishment.

On the way back to my apartment I decided I hadn't satisfied my café fix and so I stopped at another.  This one I had always been intrigued by, but had never been in before.  It is much more well-lit, less crowded, and not as cutesy as the first, but I fell in love with it nonetheless.  As I savored my pain au chocolat, I realized this place had been uprooted from the South and thrown in the middle of Paris' Latin Quarter.  The staff were humbly dressed, super smiley, and there was a little band of older merry hommes chattering at the bar.  I miss the warmth of the South, it was nice to find it again, in my Parisian backyard.   

{side note: I really love cereal}