She was the first daughter of great French writer Victor Hugo, and the one who served as his poetic inspiration for Contemplations and the legendary poem Tomorrow, at Dawn. She died young, drowning at age 19. Until now, this is all posterity knew of the innocent and tragic figure of Léopoldine. Celebrated biographer Henri Gourdin is the first to tell the story of the short but intense life of the girl behind the muse. With the Hugo family letters included among his extensive sources, the author recounts Léopoldine’s birth and childhood, her privileged relationship with her father, and the trauma her wedding to Charles Vacquerie caused to their closeness, six months before she died. Gourdin exposes the Hugo family’s innermost world to the light of a sociological analysis of family behavior in the 19th century, making Léopoldine at once the biography of one of the most enigmatic destinies in French literature and a portrait of the quintessential French family of the time—and suspensefully interspersed throughout, is Gourdin’s piecing together of the circumstances that led to a drama still unexplained: was the sinking of the unfit vessel on the Seine that September 4, 1843, really an accident?