Victor Hugo suffered, but not acutely, from this separation from his mother. He was already, at fifteen, in love with a neighbor's daughter, Adéle Foucher, and was planning a brilliant literary career so that he could marry her. An excellent student in literature and mathematics, in 1817 he received an honorable mention from the Académie Française for a poem entered in a competition, and in 1819 he won first place in another national poetry contest.
When his mother died in 1821, he refused to accept any financial support from his father and endured a year of acute poverty, but in 1822, his first volume of verse, Odes at Poésies diverses, won him a pension of 1,000 francs a year from Louis XVIII. On the strength of this he promptly married Adéle, and during the following years four children were born to the Hugos.
Already in 1824, Hugo was a member of the group of Romantic rebels who were attempting to overthrow the domination of classical literature, and in 1830, he became one of the leaders when his historical drama Hernani won the theater audience and broke the stranglehold of the classical format on the stage. It also made him rich, and during the next fifteen years, six plays, four volumes of verse, and the novel Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) established his position as the leading writer of France.
