Victor Hugo

The Spanish Dancer Victor Hugo

A gypsy girl who fascinated a king (old Philip IV) and swayed a crown - such is Maritana, the street singer of old Spain. But of course she was only a gypsy dancer, and his Queen thought it wise to study the vivacious young person that she might learn from her what so charmed her royal spouse. The king¿s own spies reported that he himself was being spied upon. Meanwhile the gypsy dancing girl had fallen in love with Don Caesar de Bazan, a dissolute nobleman. After she had danced in his gardens, she was completely captivated by this royal vagabond, and was willing to make any sacrifices that his life might be spared when he had incurred the royal displeasure and so she... The Spanish Dancer was a Paramount movie starring Pola Negri. Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a novelist, poet, and dramatist, and the most important of French Romantic writers. In his preface to his historical play Cromwell (1827) Hugo wrote that romanticism is the liberalism of literature. Hugo developed his own version of the historical novel, combining concrete, historical details with vivid, melodramatic, even feverish imagination. Among his best-known works are The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. Victor Hugo was one of the greatest personalities of French literature. Though not without the faults and eccentricities which frequently characterize great geniuses, he never entered any field of literature without excelling in it. The novel, the lyric, the drama, criticism, all fell from his facile pen without apparent effort. Hugo died in Paris on May 22, 1885. He was given at his death a national funeral. It was attended by two million people. Victor Hugo is buried in the Panthéon.