The Contemplations are above all a collection of nostalgia and in particular of the memory of LÔeopoldine , the poet's daughter, who drowned in the Seine with her husband theSeptember 4, 1843, whose death Hugo learns by chance in the press on September 9, 1843 in Rochefort, when he returned from a trip to Spain with Juliette Drouet. The death of her daughter indeed conditions the structure of the book and its separation into two parts. Hugo chooses the verses to tell the story of his grief, they allow to shape this painful experience and to overcome it. Poetic constraint is a way of channeling affect by sinking the informal as in a mold of pre-existing forms; the sonnet or rhythmic structures.