Victor hugo

On the morning of 7 May 1821 an urgent task was performed at Longwood House on St Helena. A day and a half previously, the celebrated prisoner for whom this dwelling had been built had died. Obviously it was necessary to make his death mask, and fortunately a British military doctor, expert in such matters, was at hand to do so. So it was that in times to come every bourgeois home in France ‘had its plaster Napoleon’, as Alain Corbin writes in this brief but highly original book. The proliferation of such casts was a feature of the age. Some homes became ‘virtual museums of the dead’. Artists’ sitting

Recently I visited Hauteville House, Victor Hugo’s home on Guernsey, now magnificently restored, where he spent 15 years of exile in opposition to the autocratic regime of Napoleon III. His third-floor eyrie, a crystal cage with walls and ceilings of plate glass, resembles a greenhouse. Hugo wrote there, standing at a small, flat-topped desk, gazing out across the water at the distant coastline of France. He slept in one of two adjacent attic rooms. In the other slept a chambermaid, summoned by her master with a few light taps on the partition wall. Vulnerable but resilient, Célina accepts the two francs left under her pillow for a night of sexual