In Willa Cather Remembered, George Seibel says of his and Cather's translating French works: "We plunged into vats of color like Theophile Gautier's Une Nuit de Cleopatre, and scaled towers of alexandrines in Victor Hugo's Hernani. Verlaine and Baudelaire were among the poets we discovered, Bourget and Huysmans among the novelists."
In an 1895 Journal article, Cather writes: "The traditions of our stage are distinctly unliterary....We cannot understand why lines 220 and 381 of Hugo's Hernani at the first representation drove all conservative classics out of the house and almost ruined the play."