Style is the reflection of the man and it is therefore not surprising that a writer of Hugo's enormous vitality should abandon classical restraint. Hugo revels in language. Ideas are stated and restated. Places are exhaustively described. Characters do not speak; they harangue, lament, eulogize. No doubt, Hugo's exuberance is excessive. His antitheses occasionally grow tiresome. His discourse can degenerate into verbiage. His pronouncements sometimes sound hollow, or worse, false. But the defect is minor, for Hugo suffers only from an overabundance of riches. His style is a mighty organ.
He is at home in every idiom from the argot of the underworld to the intellectual tone of student discussion. He captures the slangy sarcasm of the gamin, the eloquence of the idealist, the lyricism of the lover. His expository prose, fed by an insatiable curiosity, deals with a range of subjects rarely encountered in a novel. Hugo writes with an absolute command of the mot juste, about history, logistics, philosophy, religion, and political morality.
He remains, of course, the greatest word painter in the French language. In Les Misérables no less than in his poetry, he justifies his claim of being "the sonorous echo of the universe." Countless vignettes and a few bravura pieces such as the description of the Battle of Waterloo invest his novels with a heightened sense of reality. Few writers can rival the vividness and eloquence of Hugo's style.
