Another snippet from Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria : Spirit Visions, Metaphors, And Media Into The Twenty-First Century (2006):

“After the death of his much loved daughter Léopoldine in a drowning accident, Victor Hugo became very involved in table-turning, planchette or Ouija board experiments, and other means of contacting spirits. Léopoldine frequently spoke to him. But he also began receiving copious messages from all kinds of visitors, including Dante, Galileo, and Voltaire, and even ‘the Ocean’, who held forth to the company in an astonishing outpouring of rhetorical bombast scattered with furious expletives. Some of the communications passed straight into print. As someone observed at the time, ‘Victor Hugo was channelling Victor Hugo’.”