VICTOR HUGO Everything in my youth seemed calculated to keep me far removed from romanticism.

Those about me talked only of the great classics and I saw them welcome Ponsard's _Lucrece_ as a sort of Minerva whose lance was to route Victor Hugo and his foul crew, of whom they never spoke save with detestation.
Who was it, I wonder, who had the happy idea of giving me, elegantly bound, the first volumes of Victor Hugo's poems?
I have forgotten who it was, but I remember what joy the vibrations of his lyre gave me.

Until that time poetry had seemed to me something cold, respectable and far-away, and it was much later that the living beauty of our classics was revealed to me.

I found myself at once stirred to the depths, and, as my temperament is essentially musical in everything, I began to sing them.
People have told me _ad nauseam_ (and they still tell me so) that beautiful verse is inimical to music, or rather that music is inimical to good verse; that music demands ordinary verse, rhymed prose, rather than verse, which is malleable and reducible as the composer wishes.
This generalization is assuredly true, if the music is written first and then adapted to the words, but that is not the ideal harmony between two arts which are made to supplement each other.

Do not the rhythmic and sonorous passages of verse naturally call for song to set them off, since singing is but a better method of declaiming them?
I made some attempts at this and some of those which have been preserved are: _Puisque ici bas toute ame_, _Le Pas d'armes du roi Jean_, and _La Cloche_.