expressed an earnest desire to meet the poet.

When the German army was besieging Paris, Hugo proposed to fight a
duel with the King of Prussia, and to have the result of it settle
the war; "for," said he, "the King of Prussia is a great king, but
I am Victor Hugo, the great poet. We are, therefore, equal."

In spite, however, of his ardent republicanism, he was very fond
of speaking of his own noble descent. Again and again he styled
himself "a peer of France;" and he and his family made frequent
allusions to the knights and bishops and counselors of state with
whom he claimed an ancestral relation. This was more than
inconsistent. It was somewhat ludicrous; because Victor Hugo's
ancestry was by no means noble. The Hugos of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries were not in any way related to the poet's
family, which was eminently honest and respectable, but by no
means one of distinction. His grandfather was a carpenter. One of
his aunts was the wife of a baker, another of a barber, while the
third earned her living as a provincial dressmaker.

If the poet had been less vain and more sincerely democratic, he
would have been proud to think that he sprang from good, sound,
sturdy stock, and would have laughed at titles. As it was, he
jeered at all pretensions of rank in other men, while he claimed
for himself distinctions that were not really his. His father was
a soldier who rose from the ranks until, under Napoleon, he
reached the grade of general. His mother was the daughter of a
ship owner in Nantes.

Victor Hugo was born in February, 1802, during the Napoleonic