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THEFRENCH Vol. 68, No. 2, December 1994
REVIEW, Printedin U.S.A.

Michel Tournier and Victor Hugo:

A Case of LiteraryParricide

bySusanPetit

WhenaskedwhowasthegreatestFrenchpoet,
Andre Gide reluctantlyanswered,"Victor
Hugo,alas."If askedtodaywho is the most
excitingnovelistnow writing in French,I
wouldanswerwith alacrity,"MichelTour-
nier,paradoxically."
-Roger Shattuck(218)

IFINNOVATING IN LITERATURE is in some sense killing a father, radically re-

writing a famous work by a famous author is still more parricidal.1But

even parricides must come to terms with their ancestry. A recent case of
literary parricide is shown in the filiation from Victor Hugo's "L'Aigle du
casque" (1877) to Michel Tournier's Angus (1988), a tale which Tournier
wrote, or at least published, partly for children, and which he has said fills
in various blanks in Hugo's poem and thus, implicitly, corrects its "errors."
Tournier's re-imagining of the story gives it a radically different theme, so
that the story is not merely about its overt content, Jacques d'Angus's
hidden parentage and unintentional parricide, but also about its own crea-
tion: the way in which Jacques struggles with his paternity symbolizes
Tournier's own struggle with the influence of Victor Hugo, whom he has
acknowledged as one of his literary masters (Bouloumid 21).2
Before discussing Tournier's revisions to Hugo's work, I would like to
consider Hugo as literary and human father. In admitting Hugo as a liter-
ary father, Tournier is claiming a particularly difficult ancestry, for Hugo is
archetypally patriarchal, bestriding nineteenth-century French literature
with his massive output of poems, plays, novels, essays, and political writ-
ings, not to mention his voluminous correspondence. In fact, his production
was so immense that when he virtually stopped writing after a stroke in
1878, he continued to publish a book a year until his death in 1885, drawing
on unpublished material (Houston 12). His personal life was equally vigor-
ous; he simply overwhelmed everyone around him with a self-absorption
and force indicated by his motto, Ego Hugo (Maurois 370). At sixty he
251
252 FRENCHREVIEW

seemed only forty (Gregh 292), and his sentimental life included his wife;
five children-all of whom he outlived except the gently insane Addle-;
Juliette Drouet, his "official"mistress for fifty years; and innumerable other
women, notably Leonie d'Aunet Biard, who was jailed on her husband's
insistence when caught in flagrantewith Hugo. (Hugo himself escaped ar-
rest because he had just been named a peer of France and was thus "inviola-
ble" [Maurois 327-28].) His political activities made him a kind of father to
his country: a vicomteafter 1837 by virtue of a Spanish title (Maurois 274),
he was elected to the National Assembly during the Second Republic, and
under the Third Republic was first a member of the Assembly and later a
senator. In between, during the Second Empire, he was of course one of the
most famous of political exiles. As if all that were not enough, he was a
talented sketch artist, a chevalierof the Legion d'Honneur, a member of the
Academie Franqaise,and the first person to be buried in the Pantheon.
Hugo seems to have coped easily with both his real father and his literary
ancestors. He loved his father (Gregh 47 and 50, Houston 69) and became
close to him in his father's last years, but he largely disagreed with his
politics. Hugo had similarly ambivalent feelings about his literary fathers.
Though he said once that he did not want to rewrite the works of others
(Gregh 50), he took material from many sources, often without regard to
accuracy, and transformed it through his extraordinary gift for language.
"L'Aigle du casque," which appeared in 1877 in the second series of La
Ugende des siecles,derives from the twelfth-century Gestede Raoul de Cam-
brai, which is based in turn on actual events of the middle of the tenth
century (Rouche 18-29; Lagarde and Michard, Moyen Age 40). Hugo's im-
mediate source, however, was a version written by his contemporary Jubi-
nal and published in 1846 in the Journaldu dimancheas "Quelques Romans
chez nos aieux" (Dumas 838, n. 187, and 832, n. 144), while Hugo, under
the influence of Ossian and Sir Walter Scott, set the action in Scotland
(Lagarde and Michard, XIX 190; Dumas 837, nn. 183 and 186).
The link between "L'Aigledu casque" and these sources is tenuous, quite
unlike that between Hugo's poem and Tournier's Angus. The Gestede Raoul
de Cambraiseems to be a fairly realistic account of feuds between powerful
Medieval knights. Raoul is given in fief Vermandois, which has belonged to
relatives of Bernier, Raoul's former squire. To keep it, Raoul fights against
the dispossessed heirs and their relatives, including Bernier, whose mother
burns to death in the course of the battles. In the section Hugo drew from,
Raoul chases Ernaut de Douai, who pleads for mercy, promising to give his
lands to Raoul and become a monk. By swearing to kill him even if God and
His saints should defend him, Raoul "vient de prononcer des paroles qui le
perdront, car il a renie Dieu" (Histoirede Raoul CLII, 103). Ernaut cannot
defeat Raoul, but Bernier, "qui a le droit pour lui" and whom God is pro-
tecting (Histoirede Raoul CLIV, 104), breaks open Raoul's head, and then
Ernaut kills Raoul. This section of the geste emphasizes Bernier's moral
conflict, an element Tournier used in his Angus.
TOURNIERAND HUGO 253

Hugo, however, was interested not in internal struggles but in the melo-
drama of unequal combat between a fleeing young knight pleading for
mercy and an older warrior carried away by his fury, and in God's involve-
ment in the events; and around these themes, he created his own plot.
Unlike the geste,"L'Aigledu casque" ostentatiously keeps secret the motive
for the unequal battle: "Le fond, nul ne le sait. L'obscur passe defend /
Contre le souvenir des hommes l'origine" (320) of such ancient battles,
though "Les motifs du combat 6taient s6rieux" (325). One knows only that
the aged and dying "comte Strathail, / Roi d'Angus" (321), has made his
orphaned six-year-old grandson Jacques swear to fight the giant Tiphaine
once the boy becomes a knight. Ten years later, Jacques, who is now Lord
Angus, challenges the giant. When they meet on a stormy winter's day, the
boy is unable to hurt the giant and flees; Tiphaine pursues him into a
forest, ignores the pleas for mercy toward the boy made by a hermit, an
entire convent, and a woman with a baby at her breast, and kills Angus in a
"ravin inconnu" (330) despite the boy's own pleas. Then, in the poem's
famous climax, the bronze eagle on Tiphaine's helmet comes to life and, to
revenge the boy, kills the giant, then "s'envolle] terrible" (331).
In entirely transforming his materials, Hugo has not so much killed a
literary father as erased nearly every trace of any relationship. In contrast,
Michel Tournier, in reworking Hugo's materials, calls attention to his sto-
ry's literary ancestry and to his debt to Hugo. In fact, Tournier has ex-
plained in a note to the story that in 1985, spurred by the centenary of
Hugo's death, he "docilement" reread "L'Aigle du casque" ("M6dianoche"
225) and began to wonder why the grandfather made the boy swear to kill
the giant and what had happened to the boy's parents (225-26). Deciding
that these questions were related, Tournier wrote Angus, finishing in the
summer of 1987.3 The story was published in 1988 in a children's edition
and in 1989 in the collections Le Mtdianoche amoureuxand Les Contesdu
medianoche.(In the latter book, also marketed for children, Angus is followed
by all of "L'Aigle du casque," further underscoring the debt and inviting
close comparison of the two.) Tournier calls his revision of Hugo's poem
"un humble hommage au plus grand des pontes franqais" ("M6dianoche"
226), but it is a challenge as well.
Tournier has based many of his novels and stories on the works of
others, but he has never before challenged a predecessor so directly. His
Vendrediou les limbesdu Pacifique(1967) reconceived Defoe's RobinsonCrusoe,
and in other works he has drawn on Flavius Josephus, Dante, Jules Verne,
Alain-Fournier, Robert Musil, Colette, and a host of other writers. Tour-
nier considers natural such a remaniement;if he can treat a theme better
than a previous writer, then he claims that the theme is rightfully his
("Vent" 54-55). He also rewrites his own fiction, partly by revising works
(as by turning Vendrediou les limbes du Pacifiqueinto Vendrediou la vie
sauvage)and partly by carrying themes over from work to work (his Ti-
phaine resembles both the similarly-named Tiffauges in Le Roi des aulnes
254 FRENCHREVIEW

and Gilles de Rais in Gilles et Jeanne).The rewriting of Hugo, however, is

neither ordinary adaptation, unacknowledged quotation, nor playful allu-
sion to a literary equal; it is a direct challenge, based on the premise that
Hugo's poem gives rise to questions that children would naturally want
answered and that Tournier's story does answer (Tome 321).
Tournier has found those answers in part through historical research.
He probably read the gesteswhich were Jubinal'ssources, for in Angus there
is some imitation of their events.4 Certainly he knows something about the
twelfth century, for he begins Angus with a conversation about courtly
love, a subject which would be out of place in the battle-oriented Gestede
Raoul de Cambraiand "L'Aigle du casque" but which is historically appro-
priate: at much the same time as the Gestede Raoul de Cambraiwas being
written, Marie de France, Bertrand de Born, and others were helping to
create the fin'amour.Tournier thus "corrects"Hugo by going back to earlier
material, as in Vendredihe "corrected" Defoe by incorporating elements
from Alexander Selkirk's story, which had been one of Defoe's sources
("Vent"213-18).
Historical accuracy helps to justify the fact that Angus begins with old
Angus's daughter, Colombelle, being lectured on courtly love by her fianc6,
Ottmar, who has learned by heart "les Leys d'amors"of the court of love at
Toulouse, where he participated in the Jeux fioraux (200). This opening is
especially important because it brings Hugo's biography into Angus, for at
age 17 Hugo won first prize, the lis d'or, from the Jeuxfloraux in Toulouse
(Maurois 67-68). This similarity is not coincidence; it is a sign pointing to
how Tournier has encoded Hugo's life into Angus. Like Ottmar, the young
Hugo thought that the best love was spiritual; he wrote to his future wife,
"l'amour immateriel est eternel ... Ce sont nos ames qui s'aiment et non
nos corps," although he did add that "il ne faut rien pousser a l'extreme"
(Maurois 91). Ottmar too has accepted wholesale a Platonic view of love,
ignoring the adultery which, as Tournier knows, was an integral part of the
doctrine of courtly love.5
Angus attacks the naively idealistic young Hugo in the person of Ottmar.
Ottmar's insistence that one must "laver les relations amoureuses de toute
souillure mate'rielle"(200) reflects what Tournier considers the worst of
Plato: "Plato says that when a man loves a boy . .. he mustn't love his body,
he must love his soul, which is nonsense, isn't it? It doesn't mean anything"
(Petit 182). In response to Colombelle's question "Est-ce a dire que les corps
n'ont aucune part a votre fin'amour?" (201), Ottmar agrees that the soul
makes the body lovable, but his spirituality is nevertheless excessive for a
twelfth-century knight, as becomes clear when the giant Tiphaine and his
dwarf, Lucain, encounter the couple in a deserted woods and Lucain kills
Ottmar treacherously so that Tiphaine can rape Colombelle. Ottmar is too
gentle and unworldly to protect Colombelle or himself; his foolish ideas of
courtesy lead directly to his death. Ottmar-whose name in verlan would
be marotte-reflects Hugo's youthful obsession with purity, and his replace-
TOURNIERAND HUGO 255

ment by the sensual Tiphaine reflects Hugo's own change from idealist to
lecher; in Andre Maurois's words, the "adolescent chaste"became a "vieillard
faunesque"(7, italics in original), a "faune aux cent nymphes" (280) and an
"amant farouche" (281).
Tiphaine's brutal sexuality has consequences: Colombelle dies giving
birth to Jacques, Tiphaine's son, although the boy is presumably told, like
everyone else, that Ottmar had married Colombelle and is his father (207).
Tournier has thus provided Angus with the motive missing in Hugo's
poem; Angus makes his grandson Jacques swear to kill Tiphaine in order to
avenge Colombelle. Tournier has also given the boy three fathers he could
emulate, each of them representing Hugo in some way: the official father,
the gentle and chaste Ottmar; the biological one, the brutal but energetic
Tiphaine; and old Angus, who believes in divine intervention, sure that
God will make Tiphaine lose, even if it means God must "renverser l'ordre
naturel en faisant triompher l'enfant sur le geant" (209). This attitude
clearly is the one Hugo takes in "L'Aigle du casque," in which, although
Jacques is killed, a miracle kills the giant. All three men are deficient as
human beings as well as fathers; Hugo's idealism, sensuality, and mysticism
are caricatured in Ottmar, Tiphaine, and Angus respectively.
Angus approaches "L'Aigledu casque" most closely when it recounts the
joust between the sixteen-year-old Jacques and the experienced warrior
Tiphaine, but the meaning of the contest is radically different. "L'Aigledu
casque" recounts a battle between good and evil, and the boy is presented in
strikingly feminine and angelic terms as he enters the lists:
Un cheval d'un blanc rose
Porte un dora, vermeil, sonnant du cor ...
a la garcon
nue
II jambe a la mode d'Ecosse;
Plus habill6de soie et de lin que d'acier...
Autour du comte adolescent,
Page et roi, dont Hebb serait la soeur jumelle,
Un vacarme charmantde panaches se mdle. (324-25)
This description represents what Tournier has called Hugo's "mythology
about childhood" (Petit 177), his creation of "Il'angelisme de l'enfance"which
to
helped inaugurate the Victorian myth of childhood innocence ("Vol"178,
italics in original). Superficially, Tournier's Jacques is similar: "l'enfant
blond, bleu et rose, vetu de soie et de tartan, avait l'6clat irrbel d'une
apparition" (216). But in Angus, Jacques's decision not to wear armor is
foolhardy, not noble; he wants to outdo Tiphaine, who has announced he
will fight without a helmet, and Jacques is "porte par la force irresistible de
son destin" (216). Tournier's Jacques is a real boy, overconfident because he
believes that right is on his side, caught up in heroic illusion.
Tournier's Tiphaine at this point becomes much more complex than
Hugo's, and even his brutality takes on a kind of charm, just as Hugo's own
overbearing nature did. In Hugo's poem Tiphaine is "le lord sauvage des
forits" whose origins are unknown (322), and he is pleased to be challenged
256 FRENCHREVIEW

to fight because he craves action; Tournier disapprovingly calls Hugo's

Tiphaine "un paroxysme de virilite adulte" ("Vol"179). Tournier's Tiphaine
is more sympathetic. When Lucain tells him that someone wants to kill him
in single combat, he does cry, "Enfin!... Quelqu'un qui me veut du bien! Je
crevais d'inaction" (213), but when he learns that his challenger is his own
son, he has mixed feelings: "Bon sang ne saurait mentir. Moi aussi j'aurais
bien volontiers tue mon pere. Seulement ... je n'ai pas la moindre envie de
mourir" (214).6 The humor and the realism in these lines make Tiphaine
come to life as a rounded, complex character.
This more interesting Tiphaine, as I have pointed out, represents the
older Hugo. He even resembles him physically, for Tiphaine's "criniere de
lion" and "barbede prophete" (215) suggest Hugo's beard, which resisted all
razors (Gregh 292), and his hair, which remained thick into old age. In
Rodin's 1909 bust, Hugo has the fierce look of a bearded prophet (Gold-
scheider 19). Both Hugo and Tiphaine belong to the category of "barbus"
who represent to Tournier the violently heterosexual, dominating male.7
Although Hugo's Tiphaine is just forty (326), Tournier's Tiphaine by the
story's end seems closer in age to the 75-year-old Hugo who published
"L'Aigledu casque," for Tiphaine in Angus has hair which is a "buisson gris
de cheveux" (217), and he fears that he will "mourir de d6crepitude et de
pourriture" (221) if he is not killed in battle. Both have outlived nearly
everyone close to them but have not lost their zest for life, though Ti-
phaine's exploits are martial rather than literary: his favorite activities in-
clude "Egorger un cerf . . . forcer une fille . .. pendre un manant ...
saccager la demeure d'un voisin ... brfiler un clerc" (213). Like Hugo, he is
an ambivalent father. Tiphaine has never acknowledged Jacques, but he
secretly has had him watched, and he does not want to hurt him. Some-
what similarly, Hugo kept his children on a very tight leash but always
looked after and supported them.
Tournier replaces Hugo's melodrama with an irony that encourages the
reader to judge both father and son. Rather than taking place on a forbid-
ding winter's day, the contest is held in mild weather (215), and the mood is
lighter. Hugo's Tiphaine is insanely eager to kill the boy; Tournier's Ti-
phaine wants only to humble him but finds it hard not to hurt him because
Jacques is not wearing armor. (So Jacques'soverconfidence, ironically, actu-
ally serves him.) In the combat, rather than fleeing like Hugo's hero,
Jacques splinters his lance on Tiphaine's breastplate, and a shard embeds
itself in Tiphaine's eye, wounding him mortally; there is no need for the
bronze eagle to pierce the giant's eyes and crush his skull. One could say
that Hugo's eagle, rather than having flown away before the story begins
as Tournier says ("Mbdianoche"226), is Tiphaine himself, who is fighting
bareheaded so that his son can see his "regard d'aigle" (215). However,
Jacques's real test comes not in the joust but when Lucain reads to him
Tiphaine's dying letter, telling Jacques that Tiphaine is the boy's father,
TOURNIERAND HUGO 257

legitimizing him, and naming him his heir. Jacques has to accept that the
despised, brutal Tiphaine is his father and that he himself is a parricide.
This twist returns to the plot the internal conflict in Hugo's sources, for
when Jacques learns that he was able to kill Tiphaine only because Tiphaine
refused to hurt him, he loses the "brume dor&e"of youth for a "lucidite
amere et desolke":"il avait tue sans gloire son propre pere" (224). On the
other hand, in accepting his new lands and responsibilities, as well as his
true self, he becomes a man. Tiphaine has killed Jacques d'Angus after all,
by turning him into Jacques de Tiphaine, an adult who accepts and ac-
knowledges himself as a mixture of good and evil. Similarly, Tournier's
Tiphaine-unlike Hugo's-is not the complete villain he seemed, for he has
spared Jacques's life out of paternal feelings. As he says in his dying letter,
qu'unfils tuesonpere-c'estdanslordre. .. le petitboutdemoraleque
"sij'accepte
j'aine permetpasatun parede tuersonfils" (222, italics in original). In his dying
words, Tiphaine becomes sympathetic through his humor, his energy, and
his impatience with the "bondieuseries" (221, italics in original) of the monk
trying to absolve him. Even here there is a resemblance to Hugo, who
refused the last rites (Maurois 563-64) because he had his own idea of God;
in the words of Cardinal Guibert, Hugo "voulait bien aller a Dieu, mais ...
ne voulait pas que Dieu allat chez lui" (Maurois 564).
This portrait of Tiphaine implies Tournier's judgment of Hugo. He ad-
mires him in part for loving life, for Hugo's works have the "moralite
extrinseque" Tournier would like to see in all literature, "l'appetitde vivre"
(Koster 305), but he rejects Hugo's sentimentality, his romanticism, his
egoism, and his ferocious heterosexuality. Hugo's white-hot, passionate
writing and public life seem at the opposite pole from Tournier's cool,
ironic, allusive style and more private way of living, and it cannot have been
easy for Tournier to accept Hugo's literary paternity. Clearly, this ambiva-
lence-which leads Tournier to criticize Hugo as a thinker but also to
admire him as a lover of life and a poet ("M6dianoche"226)-helps account
for Tournier's admiration of "L'Aigle du casque" as well as his desire to
rewrite it.
But where, in Angus, is Hugo the writer? He is represented by the dwarf
Lucain, to whom the illiterate Tiphaine dictates his dying confession and
who is the giant's "ame damn&e,complice de tous ses crimes et t6moin de
tous ses triomphes" (213). Lucain's name even implies that he represents
Hugo's political-literary side.8 The Roman poet Lucan (Lucain in French),
although once a friend of Nero, was forced to kill himself because he had
supported the Piso conspiracy against the emperor. Like Lucan, Hugo
changed his political orientation, being in turn a partisan of Napoleon, a
constitutional monarchist under Louis-Philippe (and friend of his son, the
Duc d'Orl6ans), and a republican; and he was of course an outspoken critic
of the Second Empire. Like Hugo, Lucan was recognized as a poet from his
early adulthood; like Hugo, he wrote about recent politics (his Pharsaliais
an account of the civil war between Pompey and Cesar). Lucan's poem is an
258 FRENCHREVIEW

epic; Hugo's La Lkgende des siecles,in which "L'Aigledu casque" appears, is a

series of small epics. The dwarf Lucain, then, is the last surviving avatar of
Hugo, having killed Ottmar and outlived Angus and Tiphaine. If Hugo the
author, living on in his works, is represented finally by a misshapen dwarf,
Angus now looks like an attack on Hugo as writer.
This picture is corrected, though, when we look in Angus for Tournier,
who must be represented by Jacques. They may even share birthdays, for
Jacques is born "peu avant Nodl" (207), and Tournier's birthday is De-
cember 19. Unlike the heroic and angelic boy of Hugo's poem, Tournier's
Jacques is more often criticized than praised, for he is immature and fool-
hardy, no match for Tiphaine. The lonely Jacques feels himself to be an
outsider despite his privileges, much as Tournier, whose own privileged
childhood involved what he experienced as rejection ("Vent"22-26), thinks
of himself as a literary outsider, a "naturalise, romancier au teint quelque
peu basand par le soleil metaphysique" ("Vent"195) who is committed both
to maintaining and to undermining the tradition of realism. In rewriting
"L'Aigle du casque," he has challenged the giant: a contemporary writer
against a classic, a member of the Academie Goncourt against an "immor-
tal" of the Quai Conti, a writer producing a novel about every five years
against one of the most productive of all authors, who wrote in all major
genres and even illustrated his works himself. It is significant that in Angus,
Tournier represents Hugo by four characters, himself by only one. The
struggle is so unequal that Tournier can seem to overcome Hugo only
because there is no real combat, just as Jacques can win his factitious
victory only because Tiphaine lets him.
In fact, when Tournier rewrites Hugo-or Defoe, or Alain-Fournier, or
Dante, or any other writer-he cannot defeat him, for any rewriting means
that the newer writer is standing on the older writer's shoulders. Like
Jacques, Tournier must acknowledge his descent from a father he would
prefer to reject and many of whose values and beliefs he cannot share, but
one whose force and influence he cannot deny. Or, to use another image, if
a revision is a sort of reflection, there must be something to reflect. Tour-
nier's tale "La L6gende de la peinture" tells of a competition in which a
Greek artist erects mirrors on a wall so that they will reflect the painting of
his Chinese rival ("Medianoche"262-63); the mirrors are judged superior
to the painting because they reflect both the painting and its viewers. In
contrast, in "Les Deux Miroirs," two mirrors, meeting and looking closely
at each other, cannot understand what women find in them which is so
interesting ("Contes" 67). A mirror is nothing if it has nothing to reflect.
Similarly, Angus pleases primarily by reflecting "L'Aigledu casque," and it is
much more dependent on its predecessor than "L'Aigledu casque" is on the
Gestede Raoul de Cambrai;without Hugo's poem, Angus would be a mirror
with nothing to reflect. The parricidal rewriting is, after all, the "humble
hommage au plus grand des pontes frangais" ("Mbdianoche"226) which
Tournier called it, for in challenging Hugo, Tournier is actually calling
TOURNIER AND HUGO 259

attention to and acknowledging their relationship. Like Jacques accepting

Tiphaine as his biological father, Tournier acknowledges Hugo as a literary
father and accepts an ancestry which he both deplores and respects.

COLLEGEOF SAN MATEO

Notes

1There are also literary mothers, but the ancestors concerned in this case are all male.
2Christiane Baroche has said that Angus "fournit aux mechants esprits un meurtre du
pere hors de contestation et qu'on applaudirait presque, surtout quand on a conserve un
coeur plus jeune que soi!" (79). She seems to be referring only to Angus's killing of Tiphaine,
though, not Tournier's "attack" on Hugo.
3When I saw Tournier on July 11, 1987, he told me that he had just finished writing by
hand his final version of Angus and showed me the manuscript.
4In the Geste de Raoul de Cambrai, Raoul's sword slides to the left several times on an

adversary's armor, seriously wounding him in a place at which Raoul did not aim (Histoire de
Raoul CXLII 99, CXLVI 100); in Angus, Jacques's lance twice slides off of Tiphaine's (217),
and Tiphaine hurts Jacques while not meaning to (218). All page references to Angus are to
LeMndianoche
amoureux.
5See his "Tristan et Iseut" in Le Vol du vampire, pages 25-34, and, in the same book,
"Denis de Rougemont," pages 388-92.
6Hugo's Tiphaine never refers to his father, but he does carry an axe "comme Oreste"
(325), the archetypal parricide.
7Occasionally beards are presented in a positive light in Tournier's work, notably in
Barbedorand "Barberousse," but generally they suggest patriarchy, violence, and aggressive
masculinity. See Merllie, "Histoires de barbes."
8Lucain is not only a dwarf, but a hunchback, so perhaps he should be associated with
Hugo's fellow-exile in Guernsey, Hennet de Kesler, whom Maurois almost invariably iden-
tifies as "bossu" when naming him (411, 435, 467, 489). However, this is a slim basis for
identification. He may also constitute an allusion to Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris, but
they seem entirely different as characters.

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