Adèle Foucher was the wife of French writer Victor Hugo, with whom she was acquainted from childhood. Her affair with the critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve became the raw material for Sainte-Beuve's 1834 novel, Volupté. Adèle wrote a biography of her husband, published in 1863.

Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo, sometimes nicknamed the Ocean Man, was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms.