But as a minor, he cannot marry her without his mother’s consent, which is denied. The three Hugo brothers found a literary journal called Le Con servateur littéraire.

1820 1821Hugo writes over one hundred essays and more than twenty poems for Le Conservateur.
1821Victor becomes friends with the famous priest Félicité de Lamennais, who preaches a socially committed Christianity. Victor’s mother dies on June 27. In July his father marries his mistress, Catherine Thomas. Victor becomes reconciled with his father, who does not oppose Victor’s marriage to Adèle.
1822Granted a small pension by Louis XVIII for his first volume of Odes praising the monarchy, Victor marries Adèle Foucher on October 12. Eugène Hugo, who also loves her, has a psychotic breakdown at the wedding; he will never re cover.
1823Hugo publishes a pioneering historical novel, Han d’Islande (Han of Iceland, sometimes translated as The Demon Dwarf), a bloodthirsty melodrama. He helps found the periodical La Muse frangaise and attends weekly gatherings hosted by the then leader of the French Romantic movement, Charles Nodier (1780-1844).
1824Hugo publishes the Nouvelles Odes. His first child, a daugh ter, Léopoldine, is born. Charles X assumes the throne, and Victor serves as the historian of the coronation.
1826Odes et Ballades is published, as is the full version of BugJargal, noteworthy for its altruistic black hero. Adèle gives birth to Hugo’s second child, Charles-Victor.
1827Hugo becomes best friends with the critic Sainte-Beuve. The play Cromwell is published; its famous preface proposes a Romantic aesthetic that contrasts the sublime with the grotesque, in emulation of Shakespeare. Hugo declares his independence from the conservative, divine-right royalists.
1828General Léopold Hugo dies unexpectedly on January 29. Hugo’s third child, François-Victor, is born.
1829Hugo’s prodigious literary output includes the picturesque verse collection Les Orientales (The Orientals), the tale Le Dernier Jour d‘un condamné à mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), opposing capital punishment, and the histor ical play Marion de Lorme, censored by the French monarchy because it portrays the sixteenth-century ruler François I as a degenerate.
1830Hugo’s fourth child, a daughter, named Adèle after her mother, is born. Mme. Hugo wants no more children, and from then on sleeps alone. Sainte-Beuve betrays his best friend, Victor, by telling Adèle he loves her. Hugo’s play Hernani (which served as the basis for the libretto to Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s 1844 opera Ernani), defiantly Romantic in its use of informal language and its violation of the classical “three unities” of time, place, and action, causes riots in the theater where it is performed.
1831Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482 (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), a tale of the era of the cruel, crafty Louis XI, is published and becomes a best-seller. The visionary poetry collection Les Feuilles d’automne (The Leaves of Autumn) is published. In it Hugo displays a profundity and a mastery of the art of verse that rival the greatest European poets of the era, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
1832Hugo’s play Le Roi s‘amuse (The King’s Fool), which will in spire Giuseppi Verdi’s great opera Rigoletto (1851), is banned after opening night owing to its disrespectful por trayal of a king. Hugo occupies an apartment in what is today called la place des Vosges, where he will remain until 1848.
1833The minor actress Juliette Drouet enters Hugo’s life. He pro vides her with an apartment near him, forbids her to go out alone, and occupies her with making fair copies of his manuscripts. The couple will continue their liaison until her death fifty years later. The first version of George Sand’s feminist novel Lelia is published.
1834Hugo ends his friendship with Sainte-Beuve.
1835Hugo’s great verse collection Les Chants du crépuscule (Songs of Twilight) appears.
1837Hugo is made an officer of the Legion d’honneur (Legion of Honor). Les Voix intérieures, the third of four collections of visionary poetry during Hugo’s middle lyric period (1831-1840), appears. Victor’s brother Eugène, confined in the Charenton madhouse, dies.
1838Ruy Blas, Hugo’s best play, outrages the monarchists by de picting a queen and a valet in love.
1840Les Rayons et les Ombres (Sunlight and Shadows), the last great poetic collection before Hugo’s exile, is published.
1841After several failed attempts, Hugo is elected to the French Academy, the body of “Forty Immortals”—the greatest honor a French writer can receive.
1843A tragic year is punctuated by the failure of Hugo’s play Les Burgraves and the drowning of his beloved elder daughter, Léopoldine, her unborn child, and her husband, a strong swimmer who tried to save her after a boating accident. ugo will dedicate his poetic masterpiece, Les Contemplations, to her.
1844Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) appears.
1845Hugo is made a pair de France, an appointive position in a body roughly equivalent to the British House of Lords. Ten weeks later, his affair with Mme. Léonie Biard (from 1844 to 1851) comes to light when they are arrested in their love nest and charged with adultery. She goes to prison. Hugo’s rank saves him from prosecution.
1847Honoré de Balzac publishes La Cousine Bette.
1848The monarchy is overthrown and the Second Republic pro claimed. Hugo is elected to its Constitutional Assembly, with the support of the conservatives.