Description of the attraction
The Victor Hugo House Museum is located on the Place des Vosges. In one of the most beautiful Parisian squares (then called the Royal), Hugo in 1832 rented an apartment in the Rogan-Gemines mansion. A large family is located on 280 square meters: the writer with his wife Adele and four children.
Hugo was then thirty years old, and he had already tasted fame after the publication of the novel "Notre Dame de Paris". He spent sixteen years in an apartment overlooking the square and experienced many happy and bitter moments. Here he met with friends - Mérimée, Balzac, Liszt, Rossini, Gaultier, Dumas came to visit him. By the way, as a friendly joke, Dumas settled the heroine of The Three Musketeers - my lady - in this house on the Royal Square. Here Hugo wrote Lucrezia Borgia, Mary Tudor, Ruy Blaza, Songs of Twilight, Inner Voices, Rays and Shadows, chapters from Les Miserables. Here he rejoiced in public recognition when he became a member of the French Academy, and then was elected to the National Assembly. But here, in this apartment, he experienced the death of his nineteen-year-old daughter Leopoldina, who drowned in the Seine with her husband.
In 1902, on the centenary of the birth of Victor Hugo, his longtime and devoted friend and executor, playwright Paul Meris, proposed to create a museum of the writer in the same apartment. He donated money to buy a house and donated to the museum a collection of Hugo's drawings, his manuscripts, books, furniture. On June 30, 1903, Victor Hugo's house-museum opened.
The visitor enters the luxurious staircase, takes a wide wooden staircase to the second floor and through the hallway goes into the Chinese living room (Hugo loved Chinese art), then into the medieval-style dining room and into the bedroom where Hugo's bed is on which he died. The interiors of the rooms perfectly convey the atmosphere of the 19th century. The museum's exposition also includes more than four hundred watercolors and pen sketches made by Hugo, his manuscripts, copies of the first editions of his works, illustrations for novels made by the writer's contemporaries, and sculptures and paintings dedicated to him.
