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When Hugo sets off on a string of imagery, the associations never seem to stop: they grow and replicate, spawning variations--a fractal imagination with no final term. The components keep interfusing. Thus, although Hugo never seems to have drawn a nude, he could invest even typography with sex, as in the strange drawing known as Marine Terrace with Initials, 1855. Marine Terrace was the house on the Channel Island of Jersey where Hugo lived with his family during some of his period of political exile (1851-70). He disliked the place--"brick-laid Methodism," he called its white square architecture, so unlike the dirty, suggestive, intricate Gothic he was crazy about. Here it shines with cold pallor under a gray sky, but over it flies a clawed, gnarled, vinelike object that on close inspection turns out to be a monogram, the interlaced initials of Victor Hugo and his mistress Juliette Drouet, the stems and serifs furiously grappling in the sky above the house of virtue. In Hugo's world, nothing--least of all himself and his desires--was safe from apotheosis.