The French writer Victor Hugo has become very fashionable in China rather suddenly.

That’s because of what Hugo had to say about the sacking of the Summer Palace at the end of the Second Opium War. At that time in 1860, French and British troops spent days looting, burning and ransacking the Summer Palace, which is in Beijing’s northwest corner.

The Summer Palace is in the news these days because Christie’s auction house last week put under the hammer two bronze animal heads taken from a water clock fountain in the gardens.

The bronze heads together fetched $40 million – until a surprising turn of events a few hours ago in which the mystery buyer identified himself as a Chinese and said he wouldn’t fork over the money. He just wanted to throw a wrench into the auction. What will happen next is anybody’s guess.

In any case, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is all over the internet. His name even came up at a press conference this afternoon when Zhao Qizheng, a spokesman for the CPPCC, a Chinese rubber-stamp consultative body, was asked about the auctioning of the looted animal heads.

“The literary giant Victor Hugo once said that two bandits had entered the Old Summer Palace of China. One is Great Britain and the other is France,” Zhao said. “He said that he hoped one day France would . . . cleanse herself and return the looted goods back to China.”

Perhaps it’s fitting that the Chinese should refer to Victor Hugo because what he had to say about the pillaging of the Old Summer Palace is extraordinarily elegant, even in translation from the French. He made his comments in a letter to a French captain, first describing the beauty of the Old Summer Palace and later detailing what a wretched deed it was to leave it in smoking ruins.

Here are some excerpts:

 “You ask my opinion, Sir, about the China expedition. You consider this expedition to be honorable and glorious, and you have the kindness to attach some consideration to my feelings; according to you, the China expedition, carried out jointly under the flags of Queen Victoria and the Emperor Napoleon, is a glory to be shared between France and England, and you wish to know how much approval I feel I can give to this English and French victory.

Since you wish to know my opinion, here it is:
There was, in a corner of the world, a wonder of the world; this wonder was called the Summer Palace. Art has two principles, the Idea, which produces European art, and the Chimera, which produces oriental art. The Summer Palace was to chimerical art what the Parthenon is to ideal art. All that can be begotten of the imagination of an almost extra-human people was there. It was not a single, unique work like the Parthenon. It was a kind of enormous model of the chimera, if the chimera can have a model. Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a lunar building, and you will have the Summer Palace. Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it, enamel it, gild it, paint it, have architects who are poets build the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, basins, gushing water and foam, swans, ibis, peacocks, suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such was this building. The slow work of generations had been necessary to create it. This edifice, as enormous as a city, had been built by the centuries, for whom? For the peoples. For the work of time belongs to man. Artists, poets and philosophers knew the Summer Palace; Voltaire talks of it. People spoke of the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, the Coliseum in Rome, Notre-Dame in Paris, the Summer Palace in the Orient. If people did not see it they imagined it. It was a kind of tremendous unknown masterpiece, glimpsed from the distance in a kind of twilight, like a silhouette of the civilization of Asia on the horizon of the civilization of Europe.

This wonder has disappeared.
One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned. Victory can be a thieving woman, or so it seems. The devastation of the Summer Palace was accomplished by the two victors acting jointly. Mixed up in all this is the name of Elgin, which inevitably calls to mind the Parthenon. What was done to the Parthenon was done to the Summer Palace, more thoroughly and better, so that nothing of it should be left. All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewelry. What a great exploit, what a windfall! One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits.

We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.

Before history, one of the two bandits will be called France; the other will be called England. But I protest, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity! the crimes of those who lead are not the fault of those who are led; Governments are sometimes bandits, peoples never.

The French empire has pocketed half of this victory, and today with a kind of proprietorial naivety it displays the splendid bric-a-brac of the Summer Palace. I hope that a day will come when France, delivered and cleansed, will return this booty to despoiled China.

Meanwhile, there is a theft and two thieves.
I take note.
This, Sir, is how much approval I give to the China expedition.”

Signed,
Victor Hugo