Hugo Victor – Victor Hugo in Switzerland

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Hugo Victor – Victor Hugo in Switzerland: In 1825, Victor Hugo had the idea with Charles Nodier to publish the relationship of his trip to Mont Blanc with his family. The journey was made, but the publisher having had difficulties, these relations were published only in pieces, in various magazines. Later, Victor Hugo made other trips …

In this journey in Switzerland from 1839 – descending from Germany to Nice with a more mild climate – and some stages have remained in the state of notes – Victor Hugo writes: “I want to see everything, and I look so much the edge from the path as the edge of the sky. And then, these are domestic scenes where the local originality is revealed. […] rather curious than archaeologist, rather strollers of highways than traveler, I am a great viewer of all things, nothing more, but I think I’m right; everything contains a thought; I try to extract the thought of the thing. It’s a chemistry like any other. All this amuses me and delights me. […] In Freiburg, I forgot for a long time the immense landscape that I had in front of me for the square of grass in which I was sitting. It was on a small wild bump of the hill. There too, there was a world. […] In short, this universe is as big as the other. […] In Rheinfelden, the exuberant inn signs have occupied me like cathedrals; and I have the spirit thus, that at certain moments a village pond, as clear as a mirror of steel, surrounded by thatched cottages and crossed by a flotilla of ducks, regales me as much as the lake of Geneva.

What does not prevent him from remaining dazzled in front of the falls of the Rhine: “The waterfall makes a tiger roar, frightening noise, terrible rapidity. Dust of water, all at once smoke and rain. Or, from the Rigi: “At that moment the abyss was magnificent. The sun was setting behind the crest of Pilate. It lit up only the extreme summits of all the mountains, and its horizontal rays landed on these monstrous pyramids like golden architraves. […] It’s not just a segment of the globe that’s in front of you, it’s also a segment of history. Thus, in Lausanne: “I was on the esplanade of the church, in front of the gate, and so to speak on the head of the city. I saw the lake above the rooftops, the mountains above the lake, the clouds above the mountains, and the stars above the clouds. It was like a staircase where my thoughts went from step to step and grew in every degree. Or in Berne: “In a city, there is a darkness and radiation at night, lights that show you things, and shadows that hide them from where they result I do not know. what an exaggerated and chimerical aspect which has its charm.

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