5 h 44 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
How does a father carry his grief from a daughter's grave toward the edge of the infinite?
In The Contemplations, Volume 2: Today, Victor Hugo turns the loss of his daughter Léopoldine into poetry. She drowns in the Seine at Villequier only months after her wedding. This second half of his collection follows the life that continues after her death, giving private mourning room to speak.
From exile on Guernsey, Hugo moves beyond personal sorrow toward struggle, faith and doubt. The journey unfolds through A Few for My Own, On the March, and On the Edge of the Infinite. Together, they carry the reader from a father's loss toward his searching vision of God, souls and the universe.
What you’ll discover
- A father's mourning Meet Léopoldine through poems that hold her memory and face the grief of losing her.
- The world beyond sorrow Follow Hugo as private mourning opens outward into exile, struggle and the wider world.
- Faith beside doubt Explore poems that bring loss into conversation with questions about God and the soul.
- At the infinite's edge Enter the volume's strangest, most ambitious book, where Hugo looks toward souls and the universe.
- Poetry to read slowly Read aloud and let the poems' sounds give you time to stay with their feelings.
Who will love it
For readers who love poetry about grief, faith and doubt, and anyone drawn to French Romantic writing or to Hugo beyond his novels.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A grieving father builds a monument
- Book Four mourns Léopoldine directly
- Exile turns grief into struggle
- Book Six looks into the infinite
- Images, forms and sounds that return
- How to read these poems and what they say
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Le contemplazioni, Volume 2: Oggi
by Victor Hugo · 1856
A grieving father walks at dawn to a grave, seeking words for loss and the hope that sits beside it.
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1 of 6
A grieving father builds a monument
The Contemplations was written over twenty-five years, but Hugo shaped it as a single book with a hinge in the middle. The first three books belong to Formerly. The last three belong to Today. Between them he places the date of Léopoldine's death as a dividing line. He writes that a gulf lies between the two halves, and the reader is meant to feel it.
Hugo was already the most celebrated writer in France when she died. He was travelling in the southwest when he learned the news from a newspaper. He had not known that her boat had capsized, and her husband Charles Vacquerie had died trying to save her. Hugo was devastated, and for a long time he wrote almost no poetry at all.
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What is The Contemplations Volume 2 Today about?
It is the second half of Hugo's poetry collection. It covers his grief after his daughter Léopoldine drowned in 1843, his years of exile after 1851, and his spiritual poems about God, death and the soul.
Why is the second volume called Today?
Hugo split the collection into Formerly and Today, dividing it at the date of his daughter's death in 1843. Today holds the poems written under the weight of that loss and of exile.
Who is Léopoldine in The Contemplations?
Léopoldine was Victor Hugo's eldest daughter. She drowned in the Seine at Villequier in 1843, shortly after her marriage. Many poems in Book Four are addressed to her or are about her.
The author
Victor Hugo
1802–1885 · French novelist, poet and playwright
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a French novelist, poet, dramatist and politician. He was born in Besançon and died in Paris. He wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), Les Misérables (1862) and The Contemplations (1856). He lived in exile in Jersey and Guernsey between 1852 and 1870.
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