hugo, glen coco
Or, the comically erotic and loudly anti-Napoleonic adventures of Victor Hugo.
Hello, friends!
On the day I began drafting this newsletter, the high temperature was -1 Fahrenheit, with a delightful midday windchill of -24. So I hope you all are staying safe and warm and spending your time much as I’ve been lately: making a variety of soups and taking an assortment of naps.
In non-newsletter news, I’m preparing to send the manuscript of Our Rotten Hearts over to my copy editor! That means all the story-level changes are done, and we’re drilling down into the sentence-level stuff to make sure everything is polished and consistent before it makes its way to you next year. I’m very excited, because I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I’m also very nervous, because in an earlier draft my beta reader pointed out the dog lived to be 39 years old. So I look forward to seeing what madness the copy editor discovers.
In the meantime, you can still pick up my other books if you’re looking for a way to pass the cold winter days! If you’d like to try something different, here are a few books I’ve read and enjoyed lately that I did not write:
White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link
These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs
Joan by Katherine J. Chen
October in the Earth by Olivia Hawker
Today’s dirtbag is a real obvious one for me as a person and for a specific subsection of the internet, and I’m desperately curious to discover which citizens of Dirtbag Nation fall into the center of a very niche Venn diagram with me. He’s here:
Victor Hugo, Perhaps the Horniest of the Classic Lit Authors and Believe Me When I Say That Is a Hotly Contested Title
The Venn diagram in question, obviously, being “People who got neurodivergently into world history as adults” and “People who spent their formative years reading Les Miserables fan fiction.” Victor Hugo really said “what if my romantic hero was best friends with a queer anarchistic commune made up of a Canonical Polycule, the Hottest Man Anyone Has Ever Seen, and a Gay Disaster Who Loved Puns”; the man knew what he was doing, and for this the fanfic writers of the world salute him.
Victor Hugo was born in 1802 to Joseph Hugo, a commander in the Napoleonic army, and Sophie Trébuchet, who I assume is a direct descendent of the guy who invented the old-timey catapault thing. Now, to be clear this is not a sentence I enjoyed writing, but: Victor Hugo was convinced his parents conceived him on June 24th, 1801. A number you would write, European-style, as 24-6-01. The prison number he famously gave the protagonist of Les Miserables, Jean Valjean.
This is exactly the style of dirtbag we are dealing with. I will allow the Les Mis girlies in the audience a moment to go vomit in the bathroom.
Victor Hugo’s dad was busy fighting the Napoleonic wars and having affairs with any woman he pleased, so Mama Trébuchet packed up Victor and his siblings when he was about six and moved them all to live in a convent in Paris, where presumably their dickhead philandering father would not follow them.
You’d think a convent would be a safely man-free zone, but instead, Mama Trébuchet started having an affair of her own, this with a man living in a shack on the edge of the property whom she named Victor Hugo’s godfather and who was currently on the run from the law for conspiring to overthrow Napoleon and reinstate the French monarchy. This was all well and good until Royalist Shack Man got caught by the police and was guillotined.
This is all background. We’re two affairs, a strange shack-man, an execution, and an unnecessarily sexual revelation deep and boy ain’t even 10 calendar years old yet. There was a moment when I hesitated picking old Vicky H because I worried there wouldn’t be enough content.
Academie Françwift
In 1815, Napoleon got exiled for the second and final time to Saint Helena (*wild cheering from Dirtbag Nation*), and Joseph Hugo had no choice but to come back from war and start taking care of his goddamn children. He did so by sending Victor to boarding school, as every nineteenth-century father would have done.
Victor was a precocious little fuck who immediately decided he was going to be the greatest poet who ever lived. When he was 15, he entered a poem in a competition organized by the Academie Française, an organization that as far as I am aware has no equivalent in any other country and exists to berate people for using words incorrectly. Hugo did not win but received an honorable mention, which, like every well-adjusted adult with a healthy sense of self, he never stopped bitching about for a single day of his life.
In 1821, Hugo married his childhood sweetheart Adèle Foucher when he was 19 and she was 18. He claimed they had sex nine times on their wedding night, which, as the rest of this story will show, might be true. I personally would like to go back in time and give Adèle a billion francs and a very large house for having what is easily one of the most tedious husbands of all time.
If You Want to Talk About the Goat from Notre-Dame de Paris Meet Me in the Comments, I Wanted to Title This Entire Newsletter “Have a Holly Djali Christmas” But I Exercised What I Consider Heroic Restraint In Not Doing That
From the 1820s through the 1860s, Hugo basically sat down and filled as many pages as possible with the saddest words any human being has ever written. Social justice? Yes, but crushingly sad. God? Yes, but what if God is our only hope in a world that is sadder than you ever imagined. This sad? No, you idiot, so much sadder than that. Would you like a pun? How about a sad pun! Bitch I did not even know it was possible to make a pun sad.
I am a sad girlie in my reading habits, and every so often I have to put down Hugo’s books and say aloud “oh my God, my man, I need a single one of your characters to laugh one single goddamn time.”
Anyway, throughout the mid-19th-century, Hugo was cranking out the emo hits, and France was eating that shit up. He put out a few poetry volumes first, which went as viral as any volume of poetry has ever gone. Then he was pumping out plays at a volume I find truly alarming, several of which caused the crowds to riot, because this was Restoration Paris and literally anything could make a Parisian riot.
One of these plays, which he published under a pseudonym, was called Amy Robsart, about which can I just say:
ADÈLE GET OUT OF THERE MADAME
Ladies, if you ever find your husband writing a play about AMY ROBSART, aka Robert Dudley’s wife who got pushed down the stairs so he could keep banging Queen Elizabeth I in peace, run the FUCK AWAY FROM THAT MAN.
Eventually, Victor Hugo wrote the two things we actually know him for: Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 and Les Misérables in 1862. If you ever get those two books confused, here is a helpful flow chart:
Hugo took 17 years to write and publish Les Misérables, though I argue he probably could have done it in 10 if literally anyone had the balls to say “bruh nobody cares about how the people of Montreuil-sur-Mer used to make their jet beads and what adjoining industries were involved in the glassmaking economy in the year 1817.” (Note: Les Mis is one of my top 5 favorite classic books of all time, so I’m allowed to make fun of it. If you haven’t waded through the La Brea Tar Pits that is “Part Two Book One: Waterloo,” I don’t want to hear a word out of y’all.)
Notre-Dame de PariXXX
Writing books and poems and plays and pamphlets did not take up all of Hugo’s time, of course. He still found enough hours in the day to be a petty little bitch. Specifically, he applied for membership in the Academie Française on four separate occasions until they finally admitted him as a member. I imagine his first order of business was to slam a gavel on the table and demand that everyone go around the room and say the poem he sent in when he was fifteen was “spectacular” and “better than Chateaubriand actually” and “definitely should have won some goddamn prize.”
He also loved having sex so much, you guys. Like, oh my gosh, so much.
He never divorced Adèle, who in fairness did go on to take her own lover at some point, but Victor Hugo very publicly took two mistresses, including the actress Juliette Drouet, who he considered a sort of second wife. But beyond that, there was a string of lovers that could have circled the world. He kept meticulous track of his lovers, racking up about 200 in one three-month span.
More importantly for this newsletter, because it’s wild as fuck: he kept a secret code sex diary. He had little codes for various prostitutes and mistresses he met with, different codes for body parts and sexual positions, mind-bogglingly for me a code for the amount of pubic hair a lady had, and different codes for how happy an encounter left him.
And he just! Kept this diary! All throughout his life! Like it was a normal thing to do!
Listen, as a bullet journaler myself, I respect the meditative practice of tracking how things affect your mood and staying faithful to the habit. But my guy, that is a weird fucking thing to do!
It Goes Napoleon and On and On and On
Other than the sex, Hugo also got into politics, because if you were a man with any money during the Bourbon Restoration I think that’s sorta what you had to do. He was a member of the Assemblée Nationale of the Second Republic in the late 1840s, just doing his thing: giving speeches, banging his fist on things, yelling.
Until 1851, when who should show up but…
NAPOLEON III!
Yes, that’s right: to my deep and abiding annoyance, there is in fact another goddamn Emperor Napoleon. This one being Louis-Napoleon, the original Napoleon’s nephew, who watched his uncle become Emperor of France a few decades ago and said “hmm that looks fun, I would like to try that.”
Victor Hugo was so pissed off that he yelled a bunch of treason at the government and then stomped off to an island off the north coast of France, where he wrote a bunch of political pamphlets titled things like “The Story of a Stupid Little Man Stealing France from Its People” and “Napoleon III Has a Tiny Penis.” (I am paraphrasing much less than you might think here, actually.)
His wife passed away while he was in exile, in 1868. I hope she and her lover had a nice 18 years or so of not being bothered with his nonsense.
Old Man Sex Parade
Hugo didn’t return to Paris until Napoleon III was overthrown by the Prussians in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War, a war I did not know occurred until this very moment and will not be learning about further. The word “Prussia” functions like a factory reset for my brain. Unless someone suggests a dirtbag so absolutely scandalous that it becomes worth my while to learn what Prussia is and why, this status quo will continue.
Anyway. According to some sources, maybe Victor Hugo ate an elephant at the zoo during the Prussian siege of Paris? This reinforces my lack of desire to learn about it. The Dirtbags Through the Ages position on bad things happening to elephants is already well-established. We are strongly against it.
Hugo lived on another 15 years or so as a literary celebrity in France, getting reported on in the newspaper and one time having an entire citywide parade go by his apartment window just for shits and giggles. They named a street after him in Paris, and—as, honestly, I would do—he promptly moved to that street, having all letters addressed to him as “M. Victor Hugo in His Avenue.” This is a boss move and I admire it.
He passed away from pneumonia in 1885 at the age of 83 and received a state funeral that Friedrich Nietzsche (who will be getting his own profile someday, btw) delightfully described as “an orgy of bad taste.” Two million people joined the procession, including, apocryphally, all of Paris’s prostitutes going on strike out of mourning. No word on whether a public reading from the coded sex diary was performed on the Champs-Elyseés, though some claimed all sex workers draped their genitals in black crêpe for a week out of respect for the loss of their best client.
Thank you so much, as always, for joining me on this journey of a story. Until next time, be well, stay warm, and if you ever get the opportunity to name a street after yourself and then move to that street and ostentatiously direct mail to yourself on the street named after yourself, please be sure you do and then let me know so that I can mail you something,
-Allison
A proper dirtbag was M. Hugo, that he was. No comment but I lived in Paris for a year and can vouch for there being something in the water of that city (oh, I guess I did comment, sorry)
BTW, I do have a street named after my family in my hometown in my country... that's a story in itself :). But I never moved there. I probably should.
The Taylor Swift comparison and the description of his godfather as “Royalist Shack Man” absolutely made this for me.