Nothing miserable about this stroll through history

Michael Hodges, ahead of a show opening at the Royal Academy, follows the path of celebrated writer Victor Hugo around Paris, from his first home to his final resting place

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Wander through Beaux-Arts architect Henri Labrouste’s 1868 reading room at Bibliotheque Nationale de France and you realise what an astonishing place it is. The garlanded cast-iron pillars hold the ceramic domes of the ceiling above thousands of books. However, as I stand goggle-eyed in this extravagant library on Paris’s Rue de Richelieu, partly housed in an excardinal’s palace, something extraordinary is happening.

A curator has brought out the annotated manuscript of Victor Hugo’s world-famous 1862 novel Les Misérables. The ink is still deeply black, as if Hugo had only recently put down his pen; whole paragraphs are scored through, individual words blotted out, the author’s ideas there to see almost as they occurred to him.

Such a treasured cultural artefact doesn’t often come out for viewing. However, on this occasion, an exception is being made for this visiting rosbif journalist because the great 19th-century French writer, politician, campaigner and poet is about to come to London – or, rather, his pictures are.

Born in 1802 at Besançon in Franche-Comté, the multi-talented Hugo was also an accomplished artist of the Romantic school and many of his fantastical ink-and-wash depictions of eerie seascapes and Gormenghast-like castles – hailed as “astonishing things” by Van Gogh – will be showing at the Royal Academy in London from 21 March.

The marks of Hugo’s life can be found across Paris. I only have one day to find them, so this is an abridged visit, involving the Metro and walking – always a pleasure in a city that seems designed for it. When Hugo died, aged 83 on 22 May 1885, his coffin was placed on a giant and highly ornate catafalque beneath the Arc de Triomphe, which was draped in black for the occasion.