The 22-year-old Flaubert, as yet only a bored law student in Paris, writing to his sister in Rouen to tell her of the evening he had spent with, among others, Victor Hugo:

I took pleasure in studying him closely; I gazed at him with astonishment, like a casket in which there were millions and a king’s diamonds, reflecting on all that had come from this man now sitting beside me on a small chair, and fixing my eyes on the right hand that has written so many beautiful things. Yet here was the man who has most set my heart beating since I was born, and the one perhaps whom I liked the best of all those that I don’t know.

A little improbably, this admiration stayed with Flaubert all his life, for a man who out-wrote him many times over, who thought the mot juste was the first one that came to mind, and who poured himself so freely into his verse, his melodramas, his novels, his family, his women and his politics that he presided over the literary world for sixty years. Hugo’s was a carelessness of expression unthinkable for the slow-writing Flaubert, but Flaubert was happy to pay this monster of transparency his respects, perhaps for making his own reserve appear the more virtuous. At the time of Flaubert’s death, in 1880, Hugo, at 78, was still absolutely alive, and Flaubert, never a hopeful man, could not have anticipated that the next century was going to find his role as a hung-up martyr to style a more fitting object of admiration and study than Hugo’s numbing spontaneity.

Hugo has come down to us as the dubious paragon of self-assertion, at home, where he had it easy, but just as much in politics or in literature, as a writer whose pen too readily outran his great intelligence. Too much, however, can be made of this arrogance, as if the satirical purchase that it provides were the one acceptable means to come at such an egotist. To tastes conditioned by the wariness of Modernism, Hugo is indeed oppressive, with his poetry capable of spreading like floodwater across all of human history, geography and the contrary natures of God and Satan; and his fiction tending to the digressive, the morally facile and the operatic – only the great size of Les Misérables can have kept it from being set to music for so long. Add to this his missionary optimism, in the future of human societies once they have been educated out of their present malignant state, and you can see why modern readers prefer the acrid, misanthropic company of Baudelaire or Flaubert.