The lyric work of these years would have been enough for the energy of another man, for the glory of another poet; it was but a part, it was (I had well nigh said) the lesser part, of its author's labours—if labour be not an improper term for the successive or simultaneous expressions or effusions of his indefatigable spirit. The year after Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Feuilles d'Automne appeared one of the great crowning tragedies of all time, Le Roi s'amuse. As the key-note of Marion de Lorme had been redemption by expiation, so the key-note of this play is expiation by retribution. The simplicity, originality, and straightforwardness of the terrible means through which this austere conception is worked out would give moral and dramatic value to a work less rich in the tenderest and sublimest poetry, less imbued with the purest fire of pathetic passion. After the magnificent pleading of the Marquis de Nangis in the preceding play, it must have seemed impossible that the poet should, without a touch of repetition or reiterance, be able again to confront a young king with an old servant, pour forth again the denunciation and appeal of a breaking heart, clothe again the haughtiness of honour, the loyalty of grief, the sanctity of indignation, in words that shine like lightning and verses that thunder like the sea. But the veteran interceding for a nephew's life is a less tragic figure than he who comes to ask account for a daughter's honour. Hugo never merely repeats himself; his miraculous fertility and force of utterance were not more indefatigable and inexhaustible
a charge of unbecoming presumption, I must and do here enter my most earnest and strenuous protest against the claim of an edition to be in any sense final and unalterable, which rejects from among the Châtiments the poem on the death of Saint-Arnaud and admits into the Légende des Siècles the poem on the reinterment of Napoleon.
