Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote abundantly in an exceptional variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, and letters public and private, as well as dramas in verse and prose.

BOOK 9: SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN: It is a terrible thing to be happy! How content one is! How all-sufficient one finds it! How, being in possession of the false object of life, happiness, one forgets the true object, duty! Let us say, however, that the reader would do wrong were he to blame Marius.