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The English lieutenant’s Frenchwoman: the tragic story of Adèle Hugo

Mark Bostridge’s obsession with Victor Hugo’s beautiful daughter almost rivals her own infatuation with Albert Pinson, the naval officer she pursued around the world

8 June 2024

9:00 AM

8 June 2024

9:00 AM

In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter Mark Bostridge

Bloomsbury, pp.288, 20

In 1882, a sneaky reporter from the Figaro managed to track down Victor Hugo’s only surviving, long-forgotten child to an expensive mental asylum on the edge of Paris. He stalked her as she was being taken for a walk in the local park. She had the ‘profile of a duchess’, ‘staring black eyes’, a perilous hopping gait and odd compulsions.

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