Victor-Marie Hugo was born in Besançon, France, on 26 February 1802. The son of Count Joseph Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo, Napoleon's general, and Sophie Trébucher, he spent most of his childhood outside France, in constant travels, which were part of his father's life. In addition to being a great novelist, poet, playwright and draughtsman, he was a man deeply interested in Spiritism. Following the loss of his daughter, he undertook the task of communicating with her beyond death. 

In 1843, Victor Hugo's eldest daughter married Charles Vacquerie, a wealthy, good-looking young man with certain literary interests that he euphorically shared with his father-in-law. On a warm, blue September 4, 1843, barely ten months after the wedding - she was already pregnant - Léopoldine and Charles boarded a boat at Villequier on the Seine. A few hours later, the boat capsized in the meandering river. Léopoldine sank and Charles searched for her without success. He was able to save himself, but probably in despair, he let himself be swept away. 

Victor Hugo was at the time travelling in northern Spain, accompanied by his mistress, Juliette Drouet. Following their walk, the poet and his lover arrived at the village of Soubise and went to dine in a local restaurant. A Parisian newspaper, the Charivari, was forgotten on the next table. In what Victor Hugo called "the most terrifying moment of my life", he read the headline: "Victor Hugo's daughter drowned in the Seine". That night, he wrote a single sentence in his diary: "My God, what have I done to you?" After successive efforts to adapt to the tyrannical regime of Napoleon III and under real threat of arrest, he decided that he and his family could no longer remain in Paris and in 1851 they escaped to Brussels and 2 years later, settled on the island of Jersey. 

Only a few months after they had settled in, Delphine de Girardin, a friend of the family for many years, who had recently shown herself to be an accomplished medium for summoning the spirits of the dead, came to visit them. Victor Hugo was initially sceptical, but listened attentively to Delphine's procedure. Delphine asked to see the table they considered appropriate. It was a small square table with four legs. Delphine burst out laughing: "No spirit could manifest itself in it, no matter how heavy it might be".. Unfortunately, the house had not been furnished by a specialist in the occult. So, in order not to risk a bad experience, Delphine went to Saint-Hélier that same afternoon and tirelessly scoured the furniture shops until she found a very small round table with three legs. And that same evening they tried the first session, with no success. 

The next day the same thing happened. For four days, the group - to which Hugo's children had been added - insisted for hours on end without receiving the slightest response from the "other" world. Victor Hugo became bored and kept getting up from the table. Finally, on Sunday 11 September 1853 (ten years after Léopoldine's death), the little table began to emit words through the tapping on the floor. Present, in addition to Delphine, were Victor Hugo, his wife, his children, and General Auguste Vacquerie, the uncle of Léopoldine's husband. 

At first, the messages were brief, scattered, fragmentary, almost incoherent. Suddenly Auguste Vacquerie asked the table: Guess what word I am thinking of. The table knocked: "sufferings". That was not the word, Vacquerie said. He had thought of "love". But over the next few minutes the table's movements became more abrupt.  

Then followed more questions from Victor Hugo and answers from his daughter in spirit. 

After that first session with the spirit of Léopoldine – who returned with very similar messages - Victor Hugo had occasion to converse with Shakespeare, Molière, Mozart, Dante, Aeschylus, Plato, Galileo, Napoleon (the great), Joshua, Luther, and other personalities. Some of these conversations are admirable and others fall into the tedious. But this Victor Hugo seemed to take on board as part of the supernatural phenomenon and it did not seem to sap his enthusiasm. Thus, for example, when he asked Luther about his doubts about the veracity and appropriateness of the séances and the characters who appeared in them, he replied: "Don't be afraid to doubt. Doubt everything even more. Avoid certainties. Shakespeare doubted and created Hamlet. Cervantes doubted and created Don Quixote. Dante doubted and created Inferno. Aeschylus doubted and created Prometheus. I doubted and created a religion". 

He would spend hours and hours – sometimes even whole nights, until it was "daylight" – transcribing, in a great euphoria, the dialogues of the sessions. 

As expected, the family doctor advised them to abandon the spiritist practices. Madame Hugo decreed one fine day to discontinue them.