Victor Hugo

Ninety-three: a Historical Novel Victor Hugo

Ninety-Three is a historical novel built upon "a sort of enigma," which was at that date (1793) laid before revolutionary France: "Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill the sheep?" This question meets with one answer after another during the course of the book. --- The interest of the novel centres about revolutionary France; just as the plot is an abstract judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force. And this has been done, not as it would have been before, by the cold and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward realism, dealing only with the objective materials of art, and dealing with them so masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come before us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men and maidens of customary romance. --- Ninety-Three is full of pregnant and splendid sayings. It is equal to anything that Victor Hugo has ever written. (Robert Louis Stevenson)