3
" He was over ninety years of age, his walk was erect, he talked loudly, saw clearly, drank neat, ate, slept, and snored. He had all thirty-two of his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous disposition, but declared that, for the last ten years, he had wholly and decidedly renounced women. He could no longer please, he said; he did not add: "I am too old," but: "I am too poor." He said: "If I were not ruined--Heee!" All he had left, in fact, was an income of about fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come into an inheritance and to have a hundred thousand livres income for mistresses. He did not belong, as the reader will perceive, to that puny variety of octogenaries who, like M. de Voltaire, have been dying all their life; his was no longevity of a cracked pot; this jovial old man had always had good health. "
― Victor Hugo , Victor Hugo: Oeuvres complètes - 122 titres (Annotés et illustrés) - Arvensa Editions
5
" Quelle était la situation de la presse à l’époque de la terreur ?... (Interruption.) Il faut bien que je vous rappelle des analogies non dans les époques, mais dans la situation de la presse, la presse alors était, comme aujourd’hui, libre de droit, esclave de fait. Alors, pour faire taire la presse, on menaçait de mort les journalistes, aujourd’hui on menace de mort les journaux. (Mouvement.) Le moyen est moins terrible, mais il n’en est pas moins efficace. Qu’est-ce que c’est que cette situation ? c’est la censure. (Agitation.) C’est la censure, c’est la pire, c’est la plus misérable de toutes les censures ; c’est celle qui attaque l’écrivain dans ce qu’il a de plus précieux au monde, dans sa dignité même ; "
― Victor Hugo , Victor Hugo: Oeuvres complètes - 122 titres (Annotés et illustrés) - Arvensa Editions
7
" While in any other great city the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean. "
― Victor Hugo , Victor Hugo: Oeuvres complètes - 122 titres (Annotés et illustrés) - Arvensa Editions
