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Henry Esmond: France

The chevalier escaped secretly to France, where Beatrix joined him. Frank married a foreign countess, and Esmond's mistress was left alone. At last, as beautiful in her autumn as maidens in their spring, she listened to him and consented to become his wife. In their Virginia plantation they built a new Castlewood, and found there an Indian summer of serence happiness. HUGO IT is doubtful whether any other books of modern times have won such wide-spread and immediate popularity as Victor Hugo's great romances. America and England thrilled to Dickens, but it was not until later that he captured continental audiences. Hugo's "Les Miserables" was published simultaneously in Paris, London, Brussels, Milan, Madrid, Rotterdam, Leipsic, and Budapest. And across the seas, in the darkest moments of our Civil War, soldiers pored over the English translation by their camp-fires and debated about Jean Valjean and the good Bishop Myriel.

Four years later appeared "Toilers of the Sea," that amazing epic of the deeps, and again the world almost halted its daily work to read about a simple sailor and his titanic hazards among monsters of the sea. This tale Swinburne pronounced "unsurpassed even among the works of its author for splendor of imagination and of style, for pathos and sublimity of truth." Hugo was an exile from his native land when these novels were published. When Napoleon III mounted the throne, the novelist, a fiery republican, found it wise to turn his back upon Paris. He fled to Brussels, disguised as a laborer, and then settled in the Channel Islands. There he lived for nearly twenty years, although each summer he traveled on the Continent. He did not re-enter France until the downfall of Napoleon following the disaster at Sedan. What France thought of him was evidenced at his funeral. More than one million people lined the streets of Paris as the procession moved to the Pantheon, where he was buried in that last resting-place of the great men of France.