1.
Charles Baudelaire
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Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal, expresses the nature of beauty in modern. Baudelaires highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud. He is credited with coining the term modernity to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in a metropolis. This obsessive idea is all a child of giant cities. Baudelaire is one of the innovators in French literature. He made Paris the subject of modern poetry and he would bring the citys details to life in the eyes and hearts of his readers. Baudelaire was born in Paris, France, on April 9,1821 and his father, François Baudelaire, a senior civil servant and amateur artist, was 34 years older than Baudelaires mother, Caroline. François died during Baudelaires childhood, in 1827, the following year, Caroline married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various noble courts. He stated in a letter to her that, There was in my childhood a period of passionate love for you, Baudelaire regularly begged his mother for money throughout his career, often promising that a lucrative publishing contract or journalistic commission was just around the corner. Baudelaire was educated in Lyon, where he boarded, Baudelaire was erratic in his studies, at times diligent, at other times prone to idleness. Later, he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, studying law and he began to frequent prostitutes and may have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis during this period. He also began to run up debts, mostly for clothes, upon gaining his degree in 1839, he told his brother I dont feel I have a vocation for anything. His stepfather had in mind a career in law or diplomacy and his mother later recalled, Oh, what grief. If Charles had let himself be guided by his stepfather, his career would have very different. He would not have left a name in literature, it is true and his stepfather sent him on a voyage to Calcutta, India, in 1841 in the hope of ending his dissolute habits. The trip provided strong impressions of the sea, sailing, and exotic ports, on returning to the taverns of Paris, he began to compose some of the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal. At 21, he received an inheritance but squandered much of it within a few years
2.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
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Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the woman to win the award for poetry. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work, the poet Richard Wilbur asserted, She wrote some of the best sonnets of the century. Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, to Cora Lounella Buzelle, a nurse, and Henry Tolman Millay and her middle name derives from St. Vincents Hospital in New York, where her uncles life had been saved just before her birth. The familys house was between the mountains and the sea where baskets of apples and drying herbs on the porch mingled their scents with those of the pine woods. In 1904, Cora officially divorced Millays father for financial irresponsibility, Cora and her three daughters, Edna, Norma Lounella, and Kathleen Kalloch, moved from town to town, living in poverty. Cora travelled with a full of classic literature, including Shakespeare and Milton. The family settled in a house on the property of Coras aunt in Camden, Maine. The three sisters were independent and spoke their minds, which did not always sit well with the authority figures in their lives, Millays grade school principal, offended by her frank attitudes, refused to call her Vincent. Instead, he called her by any name that started with a V. At Camden High School, Millay began developing her talents, starting at the schools literary magazine. While at school, she had relationships with women, including Edith Wynne Matthison. Millay entered Vassar College in 1913 when she was 21 years old and she had relationships with several fellow students during her time there and kept scrapbooks including drafts of plays written during the period. After her graduation from Vassar in 1917, Millay moved to New York City and she lived in a number of places in Greenwich Village, including a house owned by the Cherry Lane Theatre and 75½ Bedford Street, renowned for being the narrowest in New York City. The critic Floyd Dell wrote that the red-haired and beautiful Millay was a young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers. Millay described her life in New York as very, very poor, while establishing her career as a poet, Millay initially worked with the Provincetown Players on Macdougal Street and the Theatre Guild. In 1924 Millay and others founded the Cherry Lane Theater to continue the staging of experimental drama, magazine articles under a pseudonym also helped support her early days in the village. Millay’s fame began in 1912 when she entered her poem Renascence in a poetry contest in The Lyric Year, the poem was widely considered the best submission and when it was ultimately awarded fourth place, it created a scandal which brought Millay publicity
3.
Carlos Schwabe
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Carlos Schwabe was a Swiss Symbolist painter and printmaker. Schwabe was born in Altona, Holstein, and moved to Geneva, Switzerland at an early age, after studying art in Geneva, he relocated to Paris as a young man, where he worked as a wallpaper designer, and he became acquainted with Symbolist artists. His paintings typically featured mythological and allegorical themes, as a literary artist. He illustrated the novel Le rêve by Émile Zola, Charles Baudelaires Les Fleurs du mal, Maurice Maeterlincks Pelléas et Mélisande, Schwabe lived in France for the rest of his life and died in Avon, Seine-et-Marne in 1926. Two distinct styles are recognized in Schwabes art, before 1900, Schwabes paintings were more individual and experimental, indicating the idealism of the Symbolists, conventional, allegorical scenes from nature became more prominent in his later work. Images of women were important, sometimes representing death and suffering, other times creativity and his first wife was his model for angels and virgins, and Death in Death and the Grave Digger resembles her. The death of a friend in 1894, when Schwabe was 28 years old. Schwabe created a colour lithograph for the 1892 Salon de la Rose + Croix, Schwabes poster depicted in shades of blue an initiation rite—three women ascending toward spiritual salvation—and is an exemplar of Rosicrucian art. Jumeau-Lafond, Jean-David, Carlos Schwabe, symboliste et visionnaire, Paris, a Sourcebook of Gauguins Symbolist Followers. Jumeau-Lafond, Jean-David, Painters of the soul, Tampere, Museum of Art, media related to Carlos Schwabe at Wikimedia Commons
4.
Wikisource
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Wikisource is an online digital library of free content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project, the projects aims are to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, the project officially began in November 24,2003 under the name Project Sourceberg. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name seven months later, the project has come under criticism for lack of reliability but it is also cited by organisations such as the National Archives and Records Administration. The project holds works that are either in the domain or freely licensed, professionally published works or historical source documents, not vanity products. Verification was initially made offline, or by trusting the reliability of digital libraries. Now works are supported by online scans via the ProofreadPage extension, some individual Wikisources, each representing a specific language, now only allow works backed up with scans. While the bulk of its collection are texts, Wikisource as a whole hosts other media, some Wikisources allow user-generated annotations, subject to the specific policies of the Wikisource in question. Wikisources early history included several changes of name and location, the original concept for Wikisource was as storage for useful or important historical texts. These texts were intended to support Wikipedia articles, by providing evidence and original source texts. The collection was focused on important historical and cultural material. The project was originally called Project Sourceberg during its planning stages, in 2001, there was a dispute on Wikipedia regarding the addition of primary source material, leading to edit wars over their inclusion or deletion. Project Sourceberg was suggested as a solution to this, perhaps Project Sourceberg can mainly work as an interface for easily linking from Wikipedia to a Project Gutenberg file, and as an interface for people to easily submit new work to PG. Wed want to complement Project Gutenberg--how, exactly, and Jimmy Wales adding like Larry, Im interested that we think it over to see what we can add to Project Gutenberg. It seems unlikely that primary sources should in general be editable by anyone -- I mean, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, unlike our commentary on his work, the project began its activity at ps. wikipedia. org. The contributors understood the PS subdomain to mean either primary sources or Project Sourceberg, however, this resulted in Project Sourceberg occupying the subdomain of the Pashto Wikipedia. A vote on the name changed it to Wikisource on December 6,2003. Despite the change in name, the project did not move to its permanent URL until July 23,2004, since Wikisource was initially called Project Sourceberg, its first logo was a picture of an iceberg
5.
Poetry
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Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotles Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on such as repetition, verse form and rhyme. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a creative act employing language. Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly figures of such as metaphor, simile and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm. Some poetry types are specific to cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing, among other things, in todays increasingly globalized world, poets often adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages. Some scholars believe that the art of poetry may predate literacy, others, however, suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing. The oldest surviving poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer. An example of Egyptian epic poetry is The Story of Sinuhe, other forms of poetry developed directly from folk songs. The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in poetics—the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as Chinas through her Shijing, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance, Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Later aestheticians identified three major genres, epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry, Aristotles work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic Negative Capability and this romantic approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract and distinct from the underlying notional logic
6.
Modernism
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Among the factors that shaped modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by reactions of horror to World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected religious belief, the poet Ezra Pounds 1934 injunction to Make it new. Was the touchstone of the approach towards what it saw as the now obsolete culture of the past. In this spirit, its innovations, like the novel, atonal and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting and abstract art. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and makes use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, others focus on modernism as an aesthetic introspection. While J. M. W. Art critic Clement Greenberg describes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as proto-Modernists, There the proto-Modernists were, of all people, the Pre-Raphaelites actually foreshadowed Manet, with whom Modernist painting most definitely begins. They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, rationalism has also had opponents in the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and later Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom had significant influence on existentialism. A major 19th-century engineering achievement was The Crystal Palace, the huge cast-iron, Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental style in the construction of major railway terminals in London, such as Paddington Station and Kings Cross Station. These technological advances led to the building of structures like the Brooklyn Bridge. The latter broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be and these engineering marvels radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and the daily lives of people. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but that Society was antithetical to Progress, the philosopher Schopenhauer called into question the previous optimism, and his ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Nietzsche. Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness, in particular, the notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as lower animals proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Karl Marx argued that there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system, historians, and writers in different disciplines, have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. Everdell also thinks modernism in painting began in 1885–86 with Seurats Divisionism, the poet Baudelaires Les Fleurs du mal, and Flauberts novel Madame Bovary were both published in 1857. In the arts and letters, two important approaches developed separately in France, the first was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors. Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, the school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners, and became increasingly influential. A significant event of 1863 was the Salon des Refusés, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention
7.
Satan
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Satan is a figure appearing in the texts of the Abrahamic religions who brings evil and temptation, and is known as the deceiver who leads humanity astray. In the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Satan is primarily an accuser and adversary, a malevolent entity, also called the devil. Although Satan is generally viewed as having negative characteristics, some groups have different beliefs. In Theistic Satanism, Satan is considered a deity who is either worshipped or revered, in LaVeyan Satanism, Satan is a symbol of virtuous characteristics and liberty. The original Hebrew term satan is a noun from a verb meaning primarily to obstruct, oppose, as it is found in Numbers 22,22,1 Samuel 29,4, ha-Satan is traditionally translated as the accuser or the adversary. The definite article ha- is used to show that this is a title bestowed on a being, thus, this being would be referred to as the satan. Ha-Satan with the definite article occurs 13 times in the Masoretic Text, in two books of the Hebrew Bible, Job ch. 1–2 and Zechariah 3, 1–2. 32 behold, I went out to thee,1 Samuel 29,4 The Philistines say, lest he be an adversary against us 2 Samuel 19,22 David says. 1 Kings 5,4 Solomon writes to Hiram, there is neither adversary nor evil occurrent, when the angels present themselves to God, Satan comes as well. God informs Satan about Jobs blameless, morally upright character, God therefore gives Satan permission to test Job. In the end, Job remains faithful and righteous, and there is the implication that Satan is shamed in his defeat, some scholars see contact with religious dualism in Babylon, and early Zoroastrianism in particular, as influencing Second Temple Judaism, and consequently early Christianity. Subsequent development of Satan as a deceiver has parallels with the spirit in Zoroastrianism, known as the Lie. In the Septuagint, the Hebrew ha-Satan in Job and Zechariah is translated by the Greek word diabolos, the Book of Enoch contains references to Satariel, thought also to be Sataniel and Satanel. The similar spellings mirror that of his angelic brethren Michael, Raphael, Uriel, the Second Book of Enoch, also called the Slavonic Book of Enoch, contains references to a Watcher called Satanael. It is a text of an uncertain date and unknown authorship. The text describes Satanael as being the prince of the Grigori who was cast out of heaven, a similar story is found in the book of 1 Enoch, however, in that book, the leader of the Grigori is called Semjâzâ. In the Book of Wisdom, the devil is represented as the being who brought death into the world, in the Book of Jubilees, Mastema induces God to test Abraham through the sacrifice of Isaac. He is identical to Satan in both name and nature, in Judaism, the term satan used since its earliest biblical contexts to refer to a human opponent
8.
Haussmann's renovation of Paris
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Haussmanns renovation of Paris was a vast public works program commissioned by Emperor Napoléon III and directed by his prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, between 1853 and 1870. Haussmanns work met with opposition, and he was finally dismissed by Napoleon III in 1870. The street plan and distinctive appearance of the center of Paris today is largely the result of Haussmanns renovation, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the center of Paris was overcrowded, dark, dangerous, and unhealthy. Paris is a place where plants shrivel and perish. The street plan on the Île de la Cité and in the called the quartier des Arcis. In 1840, a doctor described one building in the Île de la Cité where a single room five meters square on the floor was occupied by twenty-three people. In these conditions, disease spread very quickly, cholera epidemics ravaged the city in 1832 and 1848. In the epidemic of 1848, five percent of the inhabitants of two neighborhoods died. Traffic circulation was another major problem, the widest streets in these two neighborhoods were only five meters wide, the narrowest were only one or two meters wide. Wagons, carriages and carts could barely move through the streets, the residents of these neighborhoods had taken up paving stones and blocked the narrow streets with barricades, and had to be dislodged by the army. He wrote that the facade of the Louvre was admirable, but it was hidden behind buildings worthy of the Goths and he protested that the government invested in futilities rather than investing in public works. Moreau, the architect in chief of Paris, suggested paving and developing the embankments of the Seine, building monumental squares, clearing the space around landmarks, Napoleon Bonaparte also had ambitious plans for rebuilding the city. He began work on a canal to bring water to the city and began work on the Rue de Rivoli, beginning at the Place de la Concorde. The medieval core and plan of Paris changed little during the restoration of the monarchy through the reign of King Louis-Philippe and it was the Paris of the narrow and winding streets and foul sewers described in the novels of Balzac and Victor Hugo. In 1833, the new prefect of the Seine under Louis-Philippe, Claude-Philibert Barthelot, comte de Rambuteau and he constructed new sewers, though they still emptied directly into the Seine, and a better water supply system. He constructed 180 kilometres of sidewalks, a new street, rue Lobau, a new bridge over the Seine, the pont Louis-Philippe, and cleared an open space around the Hôtel de Ville. He built a new street the length of the Île de la Cité, to access the central market at Les Halles, he built a wide new street, and began work on the Boulevard Malesherbes. On the Left Bank, he built a new street, rue Soufflot, which cleared space around the Panthéon, Rambuteau wanted to do more, but his budget and powers were limited
9.
Franc
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The franc is the name of several currency units. The French franc was the currency of France until the euro was adopted in 1999. The Swiss franc is a world currency today due to the prominence of Swiss financial institutions. The name is said to derive from the Latin inscription francorum rex used on early French coins and until the 18th century, or from the French franc, the countries that use francs include Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and most of Francophone Africa. Before the introduction of the euro, francs were used in France, Belgium and Luxembourg, while Andorra. The franc was used within the French Empires colonies, including Algeria and Cambodia. The franc is sometimes italianised or hispanicised as the franco, for instance in Luccan franco, one franc is typically divided into 100 centimes. It was equivalent to one livre tournois, the French franc was the name of a gold coin issued in France from 1360 until 1380, then a silver coin issued between 1575 and 1641. The franc finally became the currency from 1795 until 1999. Though abolished as a coin by Louis XIII in 1641 in favor of the gold louis and silver écu. The franc was also minted for many of the former French colonies, such as Morocco, Algeria, French West Africa, today, after independence, many of these countries continue to use the franc as their standard denomination. The value of the French franc was locked to the euro at 1 euro =6, fourteen African countries use the franc CFA, originally worth 1.7 French francs and then from 1948,2 francs but after January 1994 worth only 0.01 French franc. Therefore, from January 1999,1 CFA franc is equivalent to €0.00152449, a separate circulates in Frances Pacific territories, worth €0.0084. In 1981, The Comoros established an arrangement with the French government similar to that of the CFA franc, originally,50 Comorian francs were worth 1 French franc. In January 1994, the rate was changed to 75 Comorian francs to the French franc, since 1999, the currency has been pegged to the euro. The conquest of most of western Europe by Revolutionary and Napoleonic France led to the wide circulation. Newly unified Italy adopted the lira on a basis in 1862. In the 1870s the gold value was made the fixed standard, the 1921 monetary union of Belgium and Luxembourg survived, however, forming the basis for full economic union in 1932
10.
Lesbos
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Lesbos, sometimes referred to as Mytilini after its capital, is a Greek island located in the northeastern Aegean Sea. It has an area of 1,632.819 square kilometres with 320 kilometres of coastline and it is separated from Turkey by the narrow Mytilini Strait and in late Palaeolithic/Mesolithic times was joined to the Anatolian mainland before the end of the last glacial period. Lesbos is a regional unit of the North Aegean region. The others are Chios, Ikaria, Lemnos, and Samos, the total number of islands governed by the North Aegean are nine, Lesbos, Chios, Psara, Oinousses, Ikaria, Fournoi Korseon, Lemnos, Agios Efstratios and Samos. The capital of the North Aegean Region is Mytilene, the population of Lesbos is approximately 86,000, a third of whom live in its capital, Mytilene, in the southeastern part of the island. The remaining population is distributed in small towns and villages, the largest are Plomari, Kalloni, the Gera Villages, Agiassos, Eresos, and Molyvos. In fact the archaeological and linguistic record may indicate a late Iron Age arrival of Greek settlers although references in Late Bronze Age Hittite archives indicate a likely Greek presence then, the name Mytilene itself seems to be of Hittite origin. According to Homers Iliad, however, Lesbos was part of the kingdom of Priam in what is now Turkey, much work remains to be done to determine just what was happening and when. In the Middle Ages, it was under Byzantine and then Genoese rule, Lesbos was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1462. The Ottomans then ruled the island until the First Balkan War in 1912, according to Classical Greek mythology, Lesbos was the patron god of the island. Macar was reputedly the first king whose many daughters bequeathed their names to some of the present larger towns, in Classical myth his sister, Canace, was killed to have him made king. The place names with female origins are likely to be much earlier settlements named after local goddesses, homer refers to the island as Macaros edos, the seat of Macar. The abundant grey pottery ware found on the island and the worship of Cybele, the island was governed by an oligarchy in archaic times, followed by quasi-democracy in classical times. For a short period it was a member of the Athenian confederacy, its apostasy from which is recounted by Thucydides in the Mytilenian Debate, in Hellenistic times, the island belonged to various Successor kingdoms until 79 BC when it passed into Roman hands. During the Middle Ages it belonged to the Byzantine Empire, in 802, the Byzantine Empress Irene was exiled to Lesbos after her deposition, and died there. The island served as a base for the fleet of the rebel Thomas the Slav in the early 820s. In the 10th century, it was part of the theme of the Aegean Sea, in the 1090s, the island was briefly occupied by the Turkish emir Tzachas, but he was unable to capture Methymna, which resisted throughout. In the 12th century, the became a frequent target for plundering raids by the Republic of Venice
11.
Victor Hugo
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Victor Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best-known French writers, outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables,1862, and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,1831. In France, Hugo is known primarily for his collections, such as Les Contemplations. He produced more than 4,000 drawings and also campaigned for causes such as the abolition of capital punishment. He is buried in the Panthéon in Paris and his legacy has been honoured in many ways, including his portrait being placed on French currency. Victor Hugo was the son of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie Trébuchet, his brothers were Abel Joseph Hugo. He was born in 1802 in Besançon in the region of Franche-Comté. Hugos childhood was a period of political turmoil. Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor of the French two years after Hugos birth, and the Bourbon Monarchy was restored before his 13th birthday, since Hugos father was an officer, the family moved frequently and Hugo learned much from these travels. On a childhood trip to Naples, Hugo saw the vast Alpine passes and the snowy peaks, the magnificently blue Mediterranean. Though he was five years old at the time, he remembered the six-month-long trip vividly. They stayed in Naples for a few months and then headed back to Paris, at the beginning of her marriage, Hugos mother Sophie followed her husband to posts in Italy and Spain. Thereafter she dominated Hugos education and upbringing, as a result, Hugos early work in poetry and fiction reflect her passionate devotion to both King and Faith. It was only later, during the leading up to Frances 1848 Revolution. Young Victor fell in love and, against his mothers wishes, because of his close relationship with his mother, Hugo waited until after her death to marry Adèle in 1822. Adèle and Victor Hugo had their first child, Léopold, in 1823, on 28 August 1824, the couples second child, Léopoldine was born, followed by Charles on 4 November 1826, François-Victor on 28 October 1828, and Adèle on 24 August 1830. Hugos eldest and favourite daughter, Léopoldine, died aged 19 in 1843, on 4 September, she drowned in the Seine at Villequier, pulled down by her heavy skirts when a boat overturned. Her young husband also died trying to save her, the death left her father devastated, Hugo was travelling with his mistress at the time in the south of France, and first learned about Léopoldines death from a newspaper he read in a café
The Flowers of Evil public domain audiobook at LibriVox
