HUGO (Victor). Autograph poetic manuscript. 34 verses on one p. 1/4 in-8, a few erasures and corrections; the second p. is mainly occupied by an autograph tally. Four passages from "Océan d'en haut", first part of his collection Dieu, in a version with variants from the final printed text: "Higher than Atlas, and more than the swift birds! Why be content with your religions? When in infinity we take refuge, Why not follow us, soul in the leaning coffin, And know all? Why, what the abyss sings, [next to "know" Hugo crossed out "take" which he would eventually choose] Not to decipher it? you only have to want it! If you can't hear it, you can at least see it, That hymn that shudders beneath the eternal veils. [above "cet hymne qui frémit" Hugo inscribed "The eternal vibrating hymn" he would ultimately choose] The constellations are scales of stars ; And the winds at times sing you shreds Of that unheard song that fills the tombs. ["De ce chant inouï" would become "Du chant prodigieux" in the printed version] Come, make an effort, greater spirit than eagle; Take your ladder, take your pen, take your ruler; All this music with its ineffable noise Is there on the frightful register of the night; Go, climb; all you have to do is draw staves Under the septentrions and under the lactées ways To read at this very moment, deep in the ruddy skies, The symphony written in notes of suns!" "But you're getting small; you're changing the argument, And there, you take up your complaint rightly; Man is a vast desire in a narrow embrace, A eunuch in love, a traveller who limps; Man is nothing, the earth lies to him every hour; Life is a reckoning instead of a payment". "What are you waiting for? Go to the bottom of God! Go quickly! Ah! breath of manure that perfume avoids, Man, shadow! vain runner of all lost steps! [under "coureur" Hugo crossed out "marcheur"] Merchant of betrayed Christs and sold Josephs! [next to "marchand" Hugo has crossed out "vendeur"] Go! you come out of the mire!" "Muskrats, huddled at the bottom of glassy lakes, Caught wintering under the ice and eating each other;" [the definitive version would be much reworked: "Les musquas rongeurs pris au fond des lacs vitreux Par la glace et l'hiver, se dévorant entre eux"] Also at the top, two verses whose various expressions would be scattered throughout several of the final printed verses: "You providential, and the rest fatal! Ah, you think you're divine! Ah giant! Ah colossus!" "L'OCEAN D'EN HAUT". From the spring of 1855 onwards, Victor Hugo envisaged a kind of conclusion to Contemplations, which he initially entitled "Solitudines cœli [solitudes du Ciel]". This initial nucleus soon grew and took on a life of its own in the writer's mind, under the successive titles "Ascension dans les ténèbres" and "Le Gouffre". It was on the advice of Auguste Vacquerie that he would turn it into a separate work under the immense title of Dieu, so immense that he would not complete it, and it would be published posthumously by Paul Meurice in 1891. It would then comprise two parts, "L'Océan d'en haut" and "Le Seuil du gouffre". Hugo himself explained that he had conceived a triptych in which "the single problem, Being in its triple face: Humanity, Evil, Infinity; the progressive, the relative, the absolute; in what might be called three songs: The Legend of the Centuries, The End of Satan, God". "JE FINIS PAR NE PLUS ÊTRE QU'UNE ESPECE DE TEMOIN DE DIEU". While Baudelaire, like many of his readers, still said of him: "M. Victor Hugo est un grand poète sculptural qui a l'œil fermé à la spiritualité" (Victor Hugo is a great sculptural poet with his eye closed to spirituality), Victor Hugo was turning his thoughts to the mysteries of the infinite and man's metaphysical condition. Thus, in April 1856, he wrote to Franz Stevens: "I live in splendid solitude, as if perched on the tip of a rock, with all the vast foam of the waves and all the great clouds of the sky beneath my window; I dwell in this immense dream of the ocean, I gradually become a somnambulist of the sea, and before all these prodigious spectacles and all this enormous living thought in which I immerse myself, I end up being no more than a kind of witness to God. It's from this eternal contemplation that I wake up from time to time to write. There is always on my stanza or my page a little of the cloud's shadow and the sea's saliva; my thought floats and comes and goes, co