Victor Hugo might have been the consummate womanizer. While married (to Adele Foucher), he cheated on his mistress (Julienne Gauvain, stage name Juliette Drouet) with another mistress (Leonie Biard). For seven years straight. And tried to cheat on Biard, who was married, with another actress named Alice Ozy.

Who, er, at the time was sleeping with Hugo's son. Right then.

So it will come as no big shocker, I'm sure, that Hugo's involvement with the ladies did not stop at his multiyear or even adulthood-long, deeply forged and felt relationships. However, the story about the Parisian brothels closed for Hugo's funeral is probably a myth.

The usual source cited is the journal of Edmond de Goncourt, a contemporary author and no big fan of Hugo. Goncourt has a few things to say about what he considers the ridiculous and undeserved pomp of Hugo's funeral. First, that the adulation is all political and not actually related to the literary merits of Hugo's work. Second, and hilariously, he derides the public enthusiasm for Hugo as "l'hugolatrie"--Hugo-idolatry, parodying the recent coinage "Bardolatry" to describe quasi-worship of Shakespeare.

And Goncourt wasn't wrong about at least the extent of the festivities--one to two million people are said to have lined the streets of the public procession. Compare that to the population of Paris, which in 1885 was probably around 2.3 million. Accounting for contemporary exaggeration, the point is, that's a lot of people.

Goncourt does give one additional detail, and it does pertain to prostitutes. However, they're not mourning in the, well, classical sense. According to Goncourt:

Concerning these funeral festivities--a curious detail given by the police--in these nights of priapees [rampant sexual activities, presumably], all the prostitutes worked on the lawns of the Champs-Elysees [famous Paris street], their private parts surrounded by scarves of black crepe-cloth.

This is the rumor that Goncourt chooses to report: prostitutes mourning, but not quite like that. If the Paris brothels were "shuttered," well, they were shuttered because their sex workers--along with legendarily a good chunk of the Paris population--were taking their business outside. I suppose it is up to you how seriously to take Goncourt and his claimed source.

Yes.