
Excerpt from La Legende Des Siecles Victor hugo's conception of the scheme of the series of poems to which he gave the title of La Legend: dc: sieele: is thus described in the preface to the first scenes: Exprimer l'humanite dans une espece d'muvre cyclique; la peindre suc cessivement et simultanement sous tous ses aspects, histoire, fable, philosophie, religion, science, lesquels se resument en um seul et immense mouvement d'ascension vers la lumiere; faire apparaitre, dans une sorte de miroir sombre et Clair que l'interruption naturelle de travaux terrestres brisera pro bablement avant qu'il ait la dimension revee par l'auteur cette grande figure une et multiple, lugubre et rayonnante, faible et sacree, L' Homme.' The poet thus dreamt of a vast epic, of which the central figure should be no mythical or legendary hero, but Man himself, conceived as struggling upwards from the darkness-of barbarism to the light of a visionary golden age. Every epoch was to be painted in its dominant characteristic, every aspect of human thought was to find its fitting expression. The first series could pretend to no such completeness, but the poet promised that the gaps should be filled up in suc ceeding volumes. It cannot be said that this stupendous design was ever carried out. The first volumes, which were published in 1859, and from which the poems contained in this selection are taken, left great spaces vacant in the ground-plan of the work, and little attempt was made in the subsequent series, which appeared in 1877 and 1883, to fill up those spaces. In fact, Hugo has left large tracts of human history untrod. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."
Author

After Napoleon III seized power in 1851, French writer Victor Marie Hugo went into exile and in 1870 returned to France; his novels include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). This poet, playwright, novelist, dramatist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, and perhaps the most influential, important exponent of the Romantic movement in France, campaigned for human rights. People in France regard him as one of greatest poets of that country and know him better abroad.