Writing while naked

A nice example of how we cannot leave a good story alone and of epistemological evolution. What we know is often what we want to know. From The Victor Hugo working naked story: myth or fact? by Druss.

I ran into a Neatorama article the other day which listed authors who like(d) to work naked. One of them was apparently Victor Hugo:

When Victor Hugo, the famous author of great tomes such as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, ran into a writer's block, he concocted a unique scheme to force himself to write: he had his servant take all of his clothes away for the day and leave his own nude self with only pen and paper, so he'd have nothing to do but sit down and write.

That's a cute story. But how true is it?

He does some research and eventually turns up the truth.

So, in this version, Hugo was not writing while naked. He was just stuck in his pyjamas and had no formal clothes to leave his study. This sounds a lot more plausible. We also learn that the source of this anecdote is his wife (Adèle Foucher). McNally cites a J. Sturrock in his article who turns out to be a John Sturrock, a translator of Hugo's works. The "introduction", I find out is Sturrock's introduction to The Hunchback of Notre-Dame:

'He bought himself a bottle of ink and a huge grey knitted shawl, which swathed him from head to foot, locked his formal clothes away so that he would not be tempted to go out and entered his novel as if it were a prison. He was very sad.' This engagingly domestic report on Victor Hugo sitting down in the autumn of 1830 to write Notre-Dame of Paris is by his wife, Adèle, who in the 1860s published a quaintly tinted memoir (dictated, some have hinted, by its subject himself): Victor Hugo Recounted by a Witness of His Life.

Read the whole thing to get a sense of how a story of Victor Hugo exercising self-control ended up as a story of Victor Hugo writing while naked.