lesmiserableslove:

bobavader:

today i found out that victor hugo has had more sex than possibly almost any other human that has lived on this planet. 

he had so much sex his biographers straight up gave up trying to document all of his sexual partners. he was reported to fuck up to 3-9 times a day. He had a secret sex diary written in code. He had “official” and “unofficial” mistresses. One estimate was that he had ~200 sexual partners in two years. 

Icon. 

don’t forget that on the day of his funeral all the brothels in Paris were closed because every single prostitute in the whole goddamn city was busy mourning him

The thing about brothels seems to be true (even though I did not find any French mentions of that) but to be fair, everyone in Paris was “busy mourning him”… His funerals are one of the most important events in Paris that have ever happened! 

Here is my main source, an INA video
http://www.ina.fr/video/R15138199

Apparently there was a sort or party atmosphere around the ceremony… At one point the guy narrating says that “Victor Hugo would have liked these “devotion” acts” (meaning everyone lowkey-fucking on benches haha). But all in all, the “obsèques nationales” themselves were pretty solemn and politically important. 

This video is pretty neat because of the paintings/pictures of the funerals – the coffin went through some of the most emblematic Paris streets (les Champs-Elysées, le Boulevard Saint Michel, etc) and saw impressive monuments (l’Arc de Triomphe, and of course the Panthéon, where Hugo is buried – interestingly enough, I went to see his family grave in the Père-Lachaise and it’s deceptively simple, just a tiny white stone obelisk), so even if you don’t understand French, you can take a look at it!