Life & Wisdom Quote by Victor Hugo

Calling puns "droppings" is Hugo at his most imperious: a grand Romantic novelist pausing mid-soar to swat away a small, grubby pleasure. The image is deliberately degrading. Wit, in Hugo's framing, is a bird of prey or an eagle - something that gains stature through altitude, distance, and dominion. A pun is what falls off that flight: accidental, crude, and embarrassingly physical. It turns a supposedly elevated faculty (intellect) into digestion. The joke is that the line itself is a kind of verbal stunt, a barbed bon mot that performs the very wit it polices.

The intent is less to banish humor than to enforce hierarchy. Hugo is drawing a border between "serious" verbal power and parlor-room wordplay. In 19th-century French literary culture, language was a battleground of class, taste, and authority; punning could signal the boulevard, the satirical press, the stage - spaces where the high style of the novel and the prestige of "literature" risked being heckled into equality. By calling puns waste, Hugo implies they are byproducts, not achievements: evidence you had wit, perhaps, but squandered it on a cheap mechanism.

The subtext is anxiety about control. Puns make meaning slippery; they expose how arbitrary and reusable words are. For an author invested in moral gravity and rhetorical majesty, that slipperiness is threatening. The line works because it flatters "soaring" genius while sneaking in a bodily insult, collapsing the high/low divide in a single, memorable plunge.