ad declared themselves, and he
accepted the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe only as a step
towards a republic, for which he considered France was not yet ripe. In
1845 the king made him a peer of France, but this did not prevent
him from throwing himself with all the ardour of his nature into the
revolution of 1848. Divining the ambition of Louis Napoleon, he resisted
his growing power, and when the Second Empire was established the poet
was among the first who were exiled from France. He took refuge first in
Jersey, and afterwards in Guernsey, where he lived in a house near the
coast, from the upper balcony of which the cliffs of Normandy could
sometimes be discerned. Thence he launched against the usurper a bitter
prose satire, _Napoleon le Petit_, and a still bitterer satire in verse,
_Les Chatiments_, and there he wrote two of his greatest novels, _Les
Travailleurs de la Mer_ and _Les Miserables_, two of his finest volumes
of poetry, _Les Contemplations_, the greater part of the first series of
_La Legende des Siecles_, and the two remarkable religious poems, _Dieu_
and _La Fin de Satan_. He returned to France on the fall of Napoleon in
1870, to be for fifteen years the idol of the people, who regarded him
as the incarnation of the spirit of liberty. Several volumes of poetry
were issued during those fifteen years, notably _L'Annee Terrible_,
_Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit_, and a second series of _La Legende des
Siecles_, none perhaps equal as a whole to the best of his earlier
volumes, but all, especially the second-named, abounding in beautiful
and striking poetry. He died in 1885, and was buried in a manner
befitting one who had filled Europe with his fame, and had been for so
many years the 'stormy voice of France.'

PREFACE
DE LA PREMIERE SERIE

_Hauteville-House, Septembre 1857,_

Les personnes qui voudront bien jeter un coup d'oeil sur ce livre ne
s'en feraient pas une idee precise, si elles y voyaient autre chose
qu'un commencement.

Ce livre est-il donc un fragment? Non. Il existe a part. Il a, comme on
le verra, son exposition, son milieu et sa fin.

Mais, en meme temps, il est, pour ainsi dire, la premiere page d'un
autre livre.

Un commencement peut-il etre un tout? Sans doute. Un peristyle est un
edifice.

L'arbre, commencement de la foret, est un tout. Il appartient a la vie
isolee, par la racine, et a la vie en commun, par la seve. A lui seul,
il