[HUGO Victor (1802-1885)].

PANAT Dominique-Samuel-Joseph, viscount of (1787-1860). L.A. (minute), Toulouse December 18, 1822, to Monseigneur; 3 pages in-4. The perpetual secretary of the Académie des Jeux Floraux asks that the young Victor Hugo be exempted from military service. Recalling the precedents of Chênedollé, Millevoie and Soumet, "The Academy of the Floral Games dares, Monseigneur, to recommend to your benevolence one of its members whose talent (which it does not have to compare with that of the men of letters already mentioned) has undoubtedly shown itself to be earlier. It is Mr. Victor-Marie Hugo, [...] a young poet as well known for the literary merit of his works as for the purity of the feelings which inspired them. Born at the beginning of 1802, Mr. Hugo won, in the competition of 1819, two prizes of Ode, one on the restoration of the statue of Henri IV, subject proposed by the academy, the other on the revolutionary catastrophe of the young girls of Verdun. The annals of our ancient society did not offer, before him, the example of such a beginning; it is perhaps unique in the splendors of Literature. The year after, the same poet obtained another price of ode; & using the privilege attached to his triple triumph, he claimed the right to sit among his judges, & took rank, aged only eighteen years, in the list of the Masters-èsjeux- floraux, list always little, but which was never without glory". The members of the Academy thus request that the young Hugo benefits from the exemption of the military service envisaged by the law of March 10, 1818, to encourage thus "the songs of a young favorite of the Muses which seems born Royalist as it is born poet"...