Victor Hugo was a French playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, visual artist and human rights activist. He was influential in the Romantic Movement in France. Hugo is best known for his Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables. This autobiography begins, "This volume of memoirs has a double character--historical and intimate. The life of a period, the XIX Century, is bound up in the life of a man, Victor Hugo. As we follow the events set forth we get the impression they made upon the mind of the extraordinary man who recounts them; and of all the personages he brings before us he himself is assuredly not the least interesting. In portraits from the brushes of Rembrandts there are always two portraits, that of the model and that of the painter."