Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Monday, 25 October 1880

On returning we found Kiki. Every visit is a source of terror to me.
I am reading Les Châtiments. It is true, Hugo is a genius. And I do not even know if I should say that some of his lyrical flights astonished me, not to say wearied me. No, I do not think so — it is beautiful, it is sublime, and despite the great arms and the shrouds and the belfries, etc., it is human, it is natural, it is beautiful. But I love him above all in his touching simplicity.
The last act of Hernani, when Dona Sol pleads with the old man. And the language of the grandmother in “L’enfant avait reçu deux balles dans la tête.”

Notes

Les Châtiments (“Castigations”, 1853), Hugo’s collection of political poetry attacking Napoleon III. ↩
«L’enfant avait reçu deux balles dans la tête»: the opening line of «Souvenir de la nuit du 4», a poem in Les Châtiments about a child killed in the repression that followed the coup d’état of December 1851. ↩