Victor Hugo, choses nocturnes

The text is accompanied here by a selection of his ink drawings - a universe we would undoubtedly qualify as being dreamlike, hallucinated, mysterious – and takes its sense. Indeed, the author traced back in the Romantic writer’s oversized corpus all the mentions, day after day, in his experiments with unexplained phenomena. “Unique sounds”. “At dawn, a woman’s voice said loudly in my room: Me”. “Napoleon razor rusty and stained with soap”. “A thump was heard twice over my head”, “As of five in the morning, soft, rapid thumps all over my room and all the way over to me”. These words, written between 1827 and 1885, define a very sensitive and anguished person, far from the calm and rational colossus with the white beard. Would he have taken a break, during his agony, with one last alexandrine – “Is this where the combat between day and night takes place”?

• Victor Hugo, choses nocturnes, by Gérard Pouchain, Le Vistemboir publishing house, 2018, 304 p., €28.