Victor Hugo's Framework

In exile on Guernsey, where he wrote Les Misérables, Hugo built a glass lookout on the roof of his house, and wrote there each morning standing at a small desk in front of a mirror. He rose at dawn to the gun from a nearby fort, took coffee and the morning letter from his mistress Juliette Drouet, swallowed two raw eggs, and wrote until eleven. Then he stepped onto the roof and washed from a tub of water left out overnight, pouring the icy water over himself and scrubbing with a horsehair glove. At noon he came down to lunch with guests, eating little himself, then took a two-hour walk or did strenuous exercises on the beach, visited the barber, drove out with Juliette and wrote letters. Evenings were a noisy dinner and cards at Juliette's, or a gloomy one at home. The framework is a dawn start, four and a half hours of creative work, two hours of hard exercise after lunch and an evening block the chart assigns to a second sitting. Both are the chart's estimates.