Victor-Marie, comte Hugo

Victor-Marie, comte Hugo (1910) is one of Péguy's central prose works — a sprawling, personal essay that begins with Victor Hugo and opens onto Corneille and Racine, and onto Péguy's own quarrel with his generation over what greatness in French letters is and how it is handed down.

This is the first English translation, by Wilson Pruitt, with Péguy's preface. Like all his mature prose it moves by return and insistence rather than by outline; the translation keeps that movement.