A rare and touching inscription signed by Victor Hugo, aged twenty, in his first poetry collection: "To my dear and esteemed Monsieur de la Rivière. A tribute of profound and grateful attachment. Victor."

The poet would remember throughout his life with tenderness and reverence this "old priest" (Les Rayons et les Ombres), to whom he had already dedicated his very first success at the age of only fifteen, the poem on the Bonheur que procure l’étude (1817), which earned him a distinction in the Académie française competition. A decisive and benevolent presence during the early years of the "sublime child", M. de la Rivière greatly contributed to the blossoming of his precocious talent, and introduced him to the joys of Ancient poetry – and indeed to poetry in general, for he was known to compose verse in his spare time.

Victor Hugo would remain with his dear teacher for nearly six years, from February-April 1809 to February 1815. During the interruption caused by the Hugo family's journey to Spain, between 1811-1812, he carefully preserved the Tacitus he had been reading with him, now kept in his house on the Place des Vosges. Young Victor had inscribed La Rivière's name in it. At his mother's insistence, a staunch advocate of independent education,

"[Hugo] entered at the age of seven his school on the rue Saint-Jacques where a good man and a good woman taught the sons of workmen reading, writing and a little arithmetic. Father and Mother Larivière, as the schoolboys called them, merited this appellation by the paternal and maternal quality of their teaching [...] This Larivière, moreover, was an educated man who could have been more than a schoolmaster. He knew very well how to teach the two brothers Latin and Greek when the time came. He was a former priest of the Oratory. The Revolution had terrified him, and he saw himself guillotined if he did not marry; he preferred to give his hand rather than his head. In his haste, he did not go far to seek his wife; he took the first woman he found near him, his servant" (Victor Hugo raconté par un Témoin de sa Vie, vol. I, pp. 51-52.)

Teaching far from official institutions, Father Larivière or M. de la Rivière, or even Abbé La Rivière as Hugo would call him in Actes et Paroles, remains a little-known figure. It has even been suggested that this man was entirely invented by Hugo. After welcoming Victor-Marie and his brother Eugène to his school on the rue Saint-Jacques, he taught them directly at their mother's home at the Feuillantines. These years remained forever for Hugo an idyllic period, which he would sum up in this charming and celebrated portrait:

"I had in my blond childhood – alas, all too fleeting! Three teachers: a garden, an old priest and my mother."

After the cocoon of the Feuillantines, the Hugo brothers were taken from their mother on 13 February 1815, victims of the marital discord between the general and his wife. Sent to the Cordier-Decotte boarding school to prepare for the École Polytechnique, Hugo would retain a wretched memory of it:

"Neither Cordier nor Decotte, but even less the latter, would gain the confidence and sympathy of young Victor, and they would not be intellectual intercessors as the modest Father Larivière had known how to be." (Mireille Armisen-Marchetti)

Having become a friend to his former pupil, the old schoolmaster had not even claimed all that was owed to him for the lessons given to the Hugo brothers. He would finally approach Hugo three years after the publication of this collection, driven by necessity. To repay his debt, the young poet barely out of adolescence would sacrifice a gold watch he had wished to acquire: "The little we know, the little we are worth, we owe in large part to this venerable man" he would write to his father, urging him to settle the remainder (18 July 1825). The memory of his former master would never leave him, as Raymond Escholier recalls: "Forty-three years later, at the hour of supreme peril, when, hunted like his godfather, he had to flee Paris under an assumed name, he chose for a time the name of his old master, Father La Rivière."

A rare poetic tribute from the young Hugo at the age of twenty, to his first master who introduced him to poetry:  "The worthy priest and tutor was called Abbé de la Rivière. Let his name be spoken here with respect." (Actes et Paroles).

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* Translation of the cited poem by the Victor Hugo in Guernsey Society