‘No music disposal along my lines’: Victor Hugo never actually
uttered this famous sentence, though it is attributed to him.
In any case musicians did not await his approval to draw
inspiration from his poetry. The level of refinement reached by
the French mélodie at the end of the nineteenth century was
probably due to the fact that music and poetry were closely
united to allow its flight. ‘My verses would flee, sweet and frail,/
To your garden so fair,/ If my verses had wings,/ Like a bird’: did
Hugo perhaps have a premonition of it, in this poem taken from
Contemplations and often set to music?