No rhyming can withstand such reasoning. If the ballads really had any effect in fostering an admiration of abnormally small waists, both science and a truer conception of beauty should by this time have counteracted their influence. Women cannot much longer, with decency, plead ignorance of the results of a practice which would be ridiculous were it less pernicious.
On the steep heights of the Rue de Clichy, at the corner of a street, we find the number 21. How many heads crowned either with a laurel or a diadem have passed beneath the arch of this doorway since Victor Hugo left the Rue Pigalle to take up his abode here! The apartment inhabited by the poet can hardly be considered either spacious or elegant. Its dining-room is of cramped dimensions, and the famous red drawing-room, though handsomely furnished, lacks the air of individuality that one would naturally expect to find in it. Probably this arises from the wandering life that Victor Hugo has led for so many years. After the _coup d'état_ the furniture of his house in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne was sold at auction. Contrary to custom, and probably through the interference of some member of the imperial party, no police were at hand to protect or watch over the articles exposed for sale. Consequently, the depredations were frightful. Small objects were carried off bodily, tapestries were cut to pieces and the furniture and statues were mercilessly mutilated. One well-dressed man walked off with Columbus's compass--that which the insurrectionists had a few months before examined so respectfully, their leader remarking, "That compass discovered America." Many of the poet's household treasures remain at Hauteville House, in the island of Guernsey.
But the curiosity of the abode is the study. From floor to ceiling it is one mass of books, letters, newspapers and manuscripts: the chairs, the mantelpiece, the table have disappeared beneath their burdens. A narrow path, shaped in the midst of these accumulations, permits the poet to pass from the door to the window, Victor Hugo's correspondence is enormous, and is continually increasing. He receives letters from all sorts of people on all sorts of subjects--letters of homage and letters of abuse, requests for autographs and demands for money, verses sent by youthful poets with prayers for his advice, and the wails of the oppressed who look to him as their sworn champion. Very seldom does Victor Hugo refuse to answer, though his responses are necessarily brief. Among these accumulated papers must be cited the vast mass of Victor Hugo's unpublished works. He never fails to devote a certain portion of the day to literary work, his brain being as clear, his imagination as fertile, his pen as ready, as they were twenty-five years ago. "Nulla dies sine linea" is the motto of his daily life. Yet with all his industry he has been heard to lament that he will not live long enough to transfer to paper all the conceptions that crowd his busy brain. In January, 1876, he remarked to a friend, "Were I to begin giving to the world my unpublished and completed works, I could issue a new volume monthly for a year." Among these treasures for posterity are to be found the tragedies of _Torquemada_ and the _Twins_ (the Iron Mask); the comedies of the _Grandmother_, _The Sword_, and perchance _The Brother of Gavroche_; a fairy piece wherein the flowers and trees play speaking parts; volumes of poems entitled _The Four Winds of the Mind_, _All the Lyre_, _Just Indignation_, _The Sinister Years_ (a connecting link between _Les Châtiments_ and a _Terrible Year_); and even a scientific work on the effects of the sphere. He once said, "I have more to do than I have yet done. It seems to me that as I advance in years my horizon grows larger, so I shall depart and leave my work unfinished. It would take several more lifetimes to write down all that fills my brain. I shall never complete my task, but I am resigned: I see in my future more than I behold in my past."