Now commences the most singular period of the life of Juliette, one which has been aptly entitled an “amorous redemption after the romantic manner.”[14] For nearly two years Victor Hugo, taking his mistress as the subject of his experiment, put into practice the theories, in part religious, and in part philosophical, which he professed concerning courtesans, namely: the expiation of faults by faithful, passionate, disinterested love; love itself being considered as a species of sesame, capable of opening wide the doors of science, and throwing light upon all hidden things.

The first condition of redemption was poverty, voluntarily, almost joyously, accepted. The furniture of the Rue de l’Échiquier must be sold and the beautiful rooms given up. A tiny apartment consisting of two rooms and a kitchen was taken for Juliette at No. 4, Rue du Paradis au Marais, at a yearly rental of 400 fr. There she shivered through the winter, and spent part of her days in bed to economise her fuel; but at least she proved that she loved truly and was deserving of love.

When he had completed this splendid programme, of which almost every part, as we shall presently see, was carried out to the letter, the poet experienced an overpowering need to find himself alone somewhere with the woman he had finally subjugated. His mind was still quite Virgilian. He had not yet arrived at confusing duty with politics and happiness with popularity. His greatest enjoyment, next to love, was in rural pursuits, and for the indulgence of these he flattered himself he had discovered in Juliette a companion worthy of himself. The lovers had barely settled in the Rue du Paradis au Marais before they went off to the valley of Bièvres. Half mystics, half pagans, worshipping equally at the shrines of the forest divinities and those of the village churches, they entered upon the consummation of what they themselves called their “marriage of escaped birds.”

JULIETTE DROUET IN THE RÔLE OF LA PRINCESSE NÉGRONI.
JULIETTE DROUET IN THE RÔLE OF LA PRINCESSE NÉGRONI.

HOUSE IN THE VILLAGE OF LES METZ, IN THE PARISH OF JOUY-EN-JOSAS, SEINE-ET-OISE, In which Juliette Drouet lived while Victor Hugo was staying at Les Roches. This is the house referred to in La Tristesse d’Olympio.
HOUSE IN THE VILLAGE OF LES METZ, IN THE PARISH OF JOUY-EN-JOSAS, SEINE-ET-OISE,
In which Juliette Drouet lived while Victor Hugo was staying at Les Roches. This is the house referred to in La Tristesse d’Olympio.

CHAPTER III

“LA TRISTESSE D’OLYMPIO”

They used to arrive in the summer, some for a couple of days, others for weeks together, to stay with Monsieur Bertin, editor of the Journal des Débâts and owner of Les Roches,[15] a property situated midway between the villages of Bièvres and Jouy-en-Josas. Genial and lively, as Ingres represents him in his celebrated portrait, Monsieur Bertin loved to divine, promote, and, where needful, encourage their vocations and plans. His housekeeping was on a modest scale, but his hospitality delightful—a mixture of go-as-you-please and kindly despotism; perfect freedom outwardly, but, in reality, careful ministrations skilfully disguised. Louise Bertin, the eldest daughter of the old man, and one of the muses of the period, willingly divided her time between the kitchen and the drawing-room, cookery-books and poems. As an ardent musician, tolerably familiar with the best literature, her mind was full of quaintness, while her heart was instinct with kindliness. When, perchance, she had surfeited her guests with sonatas and song, she would be seized with fear lest she should be interfering with their habits or inclinations, and would hastily substitute anarchy, by commanding each one to choose his own occupation, and pursue his meditation, walk, or game unhindered.

Of them all, Victor Hugo seems to have been the girl’s favourite, and the one who made the largest use of this generous welcome and charming liberty. As soon as the periwinkles blossomed, he settled his wife and children at Les Roches, while he himself came and went between Paris and Bièvres. Gradually he grew to associate the valley with his joys and sorrows; it became one of those familiar haunts to which one instinctively turns, with the comforting assurance of finding there the outward conditions suitable to one’s moods. As a young father, he made it the fitting frame for family joys; when his love was flung back in his face and his friendship betrayed, he returned to seek, if not consolation, at least faith and hope for the future. A year later, again under the shelter of Les Roches, he thought he had found solace. The valley meant something more than an invitation to dawdle: it filled him with sensuous suggestion; he longed to place his ideal of an unquenchable love at the feet of a woman, and to pronounce the word “Forever.”

With the connivance of Madame Victor Hugo, who shut her eyes, and that of Mademoiselle Louise Bertin, who smiled her toleration,[16] this happiness came to him at length; not indeed in the first year of his passion for Juliette, but in the early part of the second. He brought his mistress to Bièvres and to Jouy on July 4th, 1834, a little before the tragic crisis that so nearly separated the lovers, as we have related in the foregoing chapter.

Juliette immediately fell in love with the scenes the poet had so often and so eloquently described to her. Of their joint visit to the Écu de France, the little inn at Jouy-en-Josas,[17] she drew up, in fun, one of those mock official reports in which she excelled. They decided to return and lunch, no matter where, or how, provided it was neither too near nor too far from Les Roches. Then they set out in quest of rooms, which they eventually found in the hamlet of Metz, on the summit of the hill above Jouy on the northern side. They returned to Paris after paying over to the proprietor, Sieur Labussière, the sum of 92 frs. for a year’s rent. Thither they came in September for a sojourn of six weeks, after the troubled interval described above.

The little house does not seem to have been altered at all.[18] It was originally built for the game-keeper of the neighbouring château, which belonged to Cambacérès. It still spreads its white frontage, pierced with green-shuttered windows, against the background of woods. It consists only of a ground-floor and an attic; a rambling vine covers its walls; around it are scattered a barn, some outhouses, and an orchard, whose steep sides slope downwards to a gate opening on to the Jouy road.

With the assistance of the landlady, Mère Labussière, as she calls her, Juliette undertook to perform the lighter tasks of housekeeping in the mornings, and it was understood that Victor Hugo should visit her every afternoon unless some grave impediment prevented him.

But the walk from Les Roches to Les Metz was long: not much under two miles, by rough roads. The lovers agreed therefore to meet half-way, by a path settled beforehand, and to abandon the Labussière roof-tree for some leafy bower. Thus began, as Juliette writes, their “bird-life in the woods.”

Victor Hugo had a choice of three ways when he went to meet his lady. One led across the valley of Bièvres; another, along the pavement,[19] as the high road from Bièvres to Versailles was called; and lastly there was the woodland path, which they both preferred. Victor Hugo started by the Vauboyau road, plunged into the woods skirting the boundary of the Château of Les Roches, then, turning to the left, walked straight on as far as the four cross-roads at l’Homme Mort, and bore to the right towards the Cour Roland. There, in the hollow of a hundred-year-old chestnut-tree, all bent and twisted, his lady-love would be awaiting him.

Clad in a dress of white jaconet striped with pink, such as she usually affected, her head covered with an Italian straw hat, left over from the days of her former affluence, with swelling bosom, rosy cheeks, and smiling mouth, she resembled a flower springing from the rude calyx formed by the aged tree. A wide-awake flower, indeed, for, from the first sign of the approach of Victor Hugo, she would fly to him, and afford him one more opportunity of admiring the far-famed aerial gait, that fairy footstep, so light that it had been compared to the sound of a lyre.

Then followed kisses, caresses, a flood of soft words, more kisses, and a rapid rush into the cool green depths whither the twitter of birds invited them. When they issued forth again, silent now, Juliette walked first, making it a point of honour to push aside the branches and thorns before her poet; and he was content, gazing upon the tiny traces left upon the moss or sand by the feet that looked almost absurd by reason of their minuteness.

At the far end of a clearing a fountain burbled. Juliette made a hollow of her little hands and collected a delicious draught for their burning lips. Drops dribbled from between her fingers, and, seeing them, her lover knew that here was a fairy able to “transmute water into diamonds.”[20]

We must not imagine, however, that the treasure of their love expended itself entirely in this sportive fashion. If it be true that passion is the stronger for an admixture of intellect, it follows that only persons of distinguished parts are capable of extracting the full measure of delight from sentimental intercourse. Victor Hugo was far too wise to neglect the training of the sensibilities of his young mistress. Like some block of rare marble, she submitted herself to this able sculptor in the charming simplicity of a nature somewhat uncultivated and rugged, as she herself owns, and he perceived in the formless material the growing suggestion of the finished statue he was soon to evolve. The forest was the studio whither he came every afternoon to cultivate, through novel sensations and delights, his own poetry and eloquence. The forest gave him colour for colour, music for music....

At other times Victor Hugo encouraged in Juliette an inclination for prayer and tearful repentance. He retained, and she had always possessed, strong Catholic sensibilities. The mere satisfaction of sensuality without the hallowing influence of absorbing love spelt defilement, from their point of view. Hence followed painful remorse for a past which the lover liked to hear his mistress bewail, and which she despaired of ever redeeming. Her rôle was the abasement of Magdalen; his, the somewhat strained attitude of an apostle or saviour.

As soon as dawn broke she was up again. She jumped out of bed, ran to the window, opened the shutters, and interrogated the heavens—not that she feared rain, any more than she minded “blisters on her feet or scratches on her hands"—but she had only two dresses, a woollen and a linen, and the condition of the weather controlled her choice of the two. Her toilet was rapid, her breakfast simple. She spent the remaining time copying the manuscripts confided to her by Victor Hugo. Then, lightly running, as she says, like a hare across the plain, she started for the rendezvous. As becomes a loving woman, she was always first at the trysting-tree. She scrutinised the intertwined initials she herself had carved upon its bark, or conned again from memory the verses she had found the day before in its hollow trunk. She “sings them in her heart,” presses them to her bosom, and kisses the letters she has brought in answer.

CHURCH OF BIÈVRES, SEINE-ET-OISE.
CHURCH OF BIÈVRES, SEINE-ET-OISE.

For the chestnut-tree served them as a letter-box as well as a shelter. According to an arrangement between them, the first thing they did on arrival was to deposit within its friendly shade everything they had written in the course of the preceding day for, or about, one another. On Juliette’s part, especially, the letters became more and more numerous: two, four, sometimes six per day. She no longer wrote, as at first, to expatiate upon her passion or assure the poet that she loved him with real love, or to relieve boredom and make the hours of her solitude pass more quickly. She wrote because Victor Hugo, who had formerly been indifferent to her “scribbles,” now exacted them as a daily tribute, and reproached her if they were too brief or not numerous enough. This jealous lover had discovered the advantages of a pretty woman’s mania for writing. When thus occupied, he reflected, she is contented. He also found that her letters were full of enthusiasm, humour, feeling, fun, and poetry, and he therefore desired that they should be preserved; one day, when Juliette had thrown a packet of them into the fire in a fit of temper, he made her write them all over again. Juliette might protest prettily, entrench herself behind her ignorance, and allege her want of intelligence; but the more she pleaded that she knew not how to write, the more her lover insisted upon her doing so. No one has ever carried to greater lengths that form of affectation which consists in vilifying oneself in order to gain praise. Having thus placed herself, as far as her style is concerned, in the kneeling position she prefers, Juliette remains there. It is at Les Metz that her letters commenced to be a hymn of praise in honour of her divinity. Adoration and excessive adulation are their basis; for form and imagery, Juliette does not hesitate to borrow from the sacred writings she had studied at the Convent of Petit-Picpus. Sooth to say, this mixture of religiosity and passion presents an aspect both disproportionate and pathetic. When love raises itself—or degrades itself—to this almost mystical adoration, one cannot be surprised if it ends by believing in its own virtue. Having adopted the forms of religion, it insensibly acquires its importance and dignity; it ennobles itself.

We do not possess Victor Hugo’s answers, but partly from the note-books in which his lady-love punctiliously copied and dated the poems addressed to her, and partly from the dates inscribed at the bottom of each page in the collected works of the poet, we know which of his verses were composed during his sojourn at Les Metz. It is not too much to say that the author of Feuilles d’Automne was never more happily inspired. Nowhere did he more closely approach the classical model he had chosen at that time, the gentle Virgil.

In 1845, the pilgrimage was hers; she planned it and begged for it, writing on August 19th: “I have an inexpressible longing to see Les Metz again. We absolutely must go there.”[21]

They did. Early in the month of September Juliette arranged the little journey. Which dress should she wear? The striped organdy one, or the blue tarlatan shot with white, she had worn a few months previously, at the reception of St. Marc Girardin at the Académie Française? She chose the former because her lover preferred it; the same reason determined her to wear a straw hat “trimmed with geraniums above and below the brim.” Thus decked, with cheeks rosier than usual, and eyes glowing, Juliette climbed with her poet into the omnibus from Paris to Sceaux.

Victor Hugo disliked omnibuses, and especially that one. He remembered his many drives in it with his friend Sainte-Beuve, at the time the latter was most assiduous in his visits to Les Roches, and in spite of himself he seemed to see the ghost of Joseph Delorme in the back seat, with his ecclesiastical appearance, and his mania for nestling cosily between two fat people. Silently the poet dwelt upon these memories, while Juliette volubly recalled others. She wondered whether they would find the beggar at the foot of the Bièvres hill, into whose hands she had often emptied her purse, in order that alms should bring them luck, and whether the baker in the Square still made those little tarts her lover used to be so fond of. At last the omnibus deposited them at Bièvres in front of the Chariot d’Or. The striped organdy dress created a great sensation among the village children. Juliette rushed off to the little church; nothing was changed—the same simplicity, the same silence, the same brooding peace as in the old days. The young woman fell on her knees, then, together, the lovers returned to the Chariot d’Or, breakfasted, and started to walk to Les Roches. There again, in Juliette’s opinion, everything was unchanged. To the left, behind tall grasses, the river flowed unseen and unheard. In deference to the needs of man and those of the valley, its course had been diverted, and it now spread itself through meadows and orchards. Its presence could be divined from the abundance of flowers and reeds born of its moisture. When they reached Les Roches, Juliette insisted upon abandoning the valley for the forest. They ascended through Vauboyau to the wood of l’Homme Mort. She walked straight to a chestnut-tree which she said she recognised; then she found a mountain-ash upon whose bark she had once carved their interlaced initials; after that the spring, and the paths. She wished to revisit what she called “the chapels of their love,” to pay at each one a tribute of devotion.[22]

At length they reached Les Metz and the house of the Labussière. Delirious enchantment! Everything was just as she remembered it: the gate, the bell, the kitchen-garden, the mile-stone upon which she used to sit to watch for her lover when the rendezvous was at the cottage; the bed, with its curtains of printed cotton, the rustic wardrobe, the oak table.... “Heaven,” she cried, “has put a seal upon all the treasures of love we buried here! It has preserved them for us,” and she longed to take possession of them all and carry them away with her.[23]

How charming Juliette is at this moment, and how superior to Olympio! How preferable is her enthusiasm, with its power of bringing back to life the dead past, to the melancholy which disparages and kills! One sole interest animates her. Her instinct is creative, for where the poet sees death she perceives life. The roses he thought faded and scattered, she admires in full bloom; she can still breathe their perfume. From the dust and ashes he has tasted and bewailed, she draws the savour of honey. In this instance, surely, her love does not merely aspire to sit on the heights with the poet’s genius, as she claimed—it soars far beyond it.

CHAPTER IV

THE SHACKLES OF LOVE

After selling the bulk of her furniture and quitting the luxurious apartment she occupied at 35, Rue de l’Échiquier, Juliette, it will be remembered, had settled down in a tiny lodging costing 400 frs. a year, at 4, Rue de Paradis au Marais. She and Victor Hugo determined to live there together, poor in purse, but rich in love and poetry.[24] The said love and poetry must indeed have filled their horizon, for they have left no account whatsoever of that first nesting-place.

On March 8th, 1836, Juliette removed again to a somewhat more commodious apartment: 14, Rue St. Anastase, at 800 frs. a year. It comprised a drawing-room, dining-room, one bedroom, a kitchen, and an attic in which her servant slept. This district has fallen into decay, and is now dull and dreary. In those days it was chiefly occupied by the convent of the Hospitaliers St. Anastase, whence the street took its name, and a few houses more or less enclosed by gardens. The convent and gardens endowed it with a provincial tranquillity and an impenetrable silence which occasionally weighed upon Juliette’s spirits.

Her mode of life was not calculated to enliven her. A degree of poverty bordering on squalor simplified its details. Little or no fire: Juliette sometimes even lacks the logs she is by way of providing for herself. Then she spends the morning in bed, reading, planning, day-dreaming. She keeps careful accounts of her receipts and expenditure—accounts which Victor Hugo afterwards audits most minutely. When she rises, the cold does not prevent her from writing cheerfully, “If you seek warmth in this room you will have to seek it at the bottom of my heart.”

All luxuries in the way of food were reserved, as in duty bound, for the suppers the master honoured with his presence after the theatre. The rest of the time Juliette ate frugally, breakfasting on eggs and milk, dining on bread and cheese and an apple. When her daughter visited her she treated her to an orange cut into slices and sprinkled with a pennyworth of sugar and a pennyworth of brandy. The same simplicity reigned on high-days and holidays.

In studying Juliette’s financial position one wonders that so much privation should be necessary, for, from the very beginning, Victor Hugo allowed her 600 or 700 frs. a month. He afterwards increased this sum to 800, and finally to 1,000 frs. in 1838, when he began to get better terms from publishers and theatre-managers. Surely such a sum should provide ordinary comforts—there should be no suggestion of squalid poverty?

The fact is that, in 1834, Victor Hugo had only paid off the most pressing of Juliette’s debts; but the result of his doing so was to rouse the energies of the rest of the creditors, and Juliette was overwhelmed by them. Sometimes she managed to pacify them by quaint expedients. For instance, to Zoé, her former maid, she offered, in place of wages, a box for Angélo; to Monsieur Manière, her legal adviser, she promised that, if he would extend her credit, “Monsieur Victor Hugo should read with interest” a certain plan of political organisation of which the said Manière was the author, but which alas, does not yet figure in the archives of the French constitution! But more often she was forced to pay, and she had to save off food or dress. Then it was that money was skimped from the butcher and grocer to satisfy the former milliner or livery-stable keeper. In the month of May 1835, out of 700 frs. received, the creditors obtained 316; in June they got another 347; in July 278. Another cause for pecuniary embarrassment was the irregularity of Pradier’s contribution to the maintenance of his and Juliette’s child. Very often, but for Victor Hugo’s assistance, this item would have been added to the sum-total of her debts. But Juliette bore everything with the blitheness of a bird. She, who had hated accounts and arithmetic, now devoted her attention to them every day, sometimes more than once a day; she, who loathed poverty, encountered the most sordid privations with a smile; she, who once throve upon debts and promises to pay, now exclaimed: “I would do anything rather than fall into debt. How hideous and degrading such a thing is, and how splendid and noble of you, my adored one, to love me in spite of my past!”[25]

VICTOR HUGO ABOUT 1836. From a picture by Louis Boulanger (Victor Hugo Museum).
VICTOR HUGO ABOUT 1836.
From a picture by Louis Boulanger (Victor Hugo Museum).

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that she began to seek in work, especially theatrical work, an addition to her private resources. She took her career as an artist very seriously, and it was a great disappointment to her that her lover failed to desire her as an interpreter of his parts. He certainly did not. He allowed his jealousy full play, and wished to keep Juliette for himself alone. His tactics seem to have been to dangle promises ever before her, but to give her nothing; to procure dramatic engagements for her, and prevent her from fulfilling them.

In February 1834 he introduced Juliette to the Comédie Française, but a year later he declined to give her the smallest part in Angélo, which was produced there. In the course of 1836, 1837, 1838, he allowed Marie Dorval to monopolise all the important rôles in his former plays, and never once attempted to put Juliette’s name at the head, or even in the middle, of the bill. Yet he gave her fine promises in plenty, encouraged her to learn long passages from Marion and Dona Sol, and vowed he would some day write a play for her alone.

Thus kept in the background, Juliette passed through exhausting alternations of despair and confidence, gratitude and jealousy. For, as may easily be imagined, she was terribly jealous, and her suspicious mind exercised itself chiefly concerning actresses, whose lively manners and easy morals she knew, by professional experience. There was Mlle. Georges, already growing stout, no doubt, but ever ready to raise her banner and exercise her accustomed sovereignty. There was Mlle. Mars, who, though her looks were a thing of the past, still endeavoured to attract attention. Above all, there was Marie Dorval.

Ah, how Juliette envied Dorval! How she studied her in order to arm herself against her fancied rivalry! How often she took her moral measure! She knew that she was of the people, that she tingled with vitality from head to foot, that, though her primary impulses were virtuous, nature was yet strong within her.... She was well acquainted with “the voice that quivered with tears and made its insinuating appeal to the heart.”[26]

Could Juliette fail to dread such a woman, one so versed by the practice of her profession in the wiles that attract men? Could she refrain from warning her lover against her, day after day, like one draws attention to a danger, a scourge, or a tempest? Far from it—she threatened to return to the theatre, to act in her lover’s plays, to be present at every rehearsal, to vie with her rival in beauty and talent and ardour. She learnt parts, and whole scenes, and filled her solitude with the pleasing phantoms her lover had once created, and that she dreamed of restoring to life on the stage.

Months passed; delicate circumstances obliged her to relinquish her plan of appearing at the Théâtre Français.[27] She was on the verge of despair when, one evening in the spring of 1838, her lover brought her a new play he wished to read to her, according to his invariable custom. It was Ruy Blas. She at once claimed the part of Marie de Neubourg, and fell in love with the melancholy little queen who was hampered and hemmed in by the trammels of étiquette, as she herself was imprisoned within the limits of her icy apartment in the Rue St. Anastase. Victor Hugo asked for nothing better. He intended Ruy Blas for the Théâtre de la Renaissance, which was under the management of his friend, Anténor Joly. He requested the worthy fellow to engage Juliette, and the agreement was signed early in May.

For, in the same degree that he deprecated her being seen on the stage, Victor Hugo detested the thought of her going out alone, and he had managed to extract a promise from her that she would never make one step outside the house without him. She was, therefore, practically as much a prisoner as any châtelaine of the Middle Ages, or heroine of some of the sombre dramas she had formerly played. She had not even permission to go and see her daughter at school at St. Mandé, and, rather than trust her by herself, the poet would escort her to the dressmaker and milliner, or on her visits to the uncle whose name she bore, and who lay dying at the Invalides, to the money-lender’s, and curiosity-shop, and even the ironmonger’s!

Victor Hugo met her remonstrances with gentle reasoning and persuasive exhortations. However far Juliette went in her transports of anger, he was always able to pacify her. On September 27th, 1836, at the end of a long period during which the poet had not been able to give his friend even what she called the “joies du préau"—that is to say, a walk round the Boulevards—Juliette threatens to break out. For several weeks she has been attributing the sickness and headaches she constantly suffers from, to her sedentary life. Losing all patience, she addresses an ultimatum to him, proposing an assignation in a cab on the Boulevard du Temple. He does not appear. For three hours she waits inside the vehicle, then, in the certainty that he has failed her, she writes a letter in pencil, dated from the cab, No. 556, stating her intention to fetch her daughter and go off somewhere, anywhere, alone with her. “Thus,” she writes, “I shall free myself for ever from a slavery which satisfies neither my heart nor my mind, and does not secure the repose of either of us.”

According to Juliette, who secured several stolen meetings in the poet’s own house,[28] Victor Hugo suffered from a complete absence of the most ordinary comfort at home. His lamps smoked, as did his chimney on the rare occasions when a fire was lighted; he worked in a “horrible little ice-house,” with insufficient light and a half-empty inkstand; his bed was wretched, the mattress stuffed with what he termed nail-heads; when he dressed he found his shirts button-less and his coats unbrushed—as for his shoes, Juliette was ashamed of their condition. We learn from Théophile Gautier that the author of Hernani was a hearty eater, but that his meals were served up in confusion: cutlets with beans in oil, beef and tomato sauce with an omelette, ham with coffee, vinegar, mustard, and a piece of cheese. He made short work of this extraordinary mixture, and no doubt was often reminded of a line his mistress had once written to him on the subject: “When I think of what you are and what you do, and of the discomfort in which you live, I am filled with admiring pity.”

With the instinct of a loving woman and the resource of a clever one, Juliette was quick to take advantage of the human side of her god, and to supply him with the personal care he needed. She trained herself to be a cordon bleu and a sick nurse, a tailor and a cobbler. If Victor Hugo went to the theatre he found on his return to the Rue St. Anastase, a dainty repast of chicken, salad, and the milky puddings he liked, and all the year round a dessert of grapes, a fruit he had always been fond of. Juliette served him “kneeling"—so at least she affirms. She took umbrage if he did not allow her to select for him the biggest asparagus and the thickest cream. He was happy, so was she. If he had an attack of that “cursed internal inflammation which sometimes affected his head and sometimes his eyes,” his mistress would prepare liniments, tisanes, herb soups, which the romanticist meekly swallowed. She assumed a maternal manner, kissed him, coaxed him with soft words, tried to feed him with her own hands, and regretted that she could not give him her own health and take his indisposition upon herself. If he complained of the paucity and untidiness of his wardrobe, Juliette mended his socks and linen, ironed his white waistcoats, removed grease-stains from his coat, made him a smoking-jacket out of an old theatre-cloak, and manufactured “a capital greatcoat lined with velvet, with collar and cuffs of the best silk velvet, out of another.” Thus she managed by degrees to collect nearly all the poet’s clothes in her own room; his ordinary suits, as well as those he wore on great occasions, such as a reception at the Académie, or a sitting of the House. On one occasion she writes, in gentle self-mockery: “I was sorry, after you went, that I had not made you put on your cashmere waistcoat to-night; it was mended and quite ready for you. This morning I have been tidying all your things. Your coat occupies the place of honour in my wardrobe; your waistcoat and tie hang above my mantle, your little shoes and silk socks below. In default of yourself I cling to your duds, look after them, and clean them with delight.”

But Juliette’s great achievement, her triumph, was to create in her tiny apartment the right atmosphere for her poet to work in. His custom was to collect his thoughts during the day, and work them out at night. Juliette made him a cosy corner in her bedroom, close to her bed. She fitted it up with a table, an arm-chair, a lamp, and an ink-pot. Above the chair she hung portraits of his children, to make him feel at home. On the table, sheets of paper and freshly cut pens attested the presence and care of a devotee of genius. Whenever he came in the evening the poet settled down in what he himself called his work-room. His methodical habits and strong will enabled him to abstract himself from his environment and devote himself strictly to his labours as an author. Besides, he was under the impression that Juliette was fast asleep; but in that he did her less than justice. Sleep while he worked! Juliette could never have brought herself to do so. She watched him, and admired him. Sometimes she seized a pencil to scribble on any scrap of paper the expression of her veneration, and when the poet had finished he would find little notes such as the following: “I love to watch even your shadow on the page while you write.”[29]

That a poet should allow his person to be thus worshipped is nothing new; that he should desire to be admired in his works is still more natural. Juliette guessed this, and acquired the habit of applauding the slightest achievement of the master with loving enthusiasm. Part of the day she spent in copying his manuscripts, classifying them, making them as like as possible to printers’ proofs; and it may easily be imagined that she occupied much time reading them over and over again. Everything he wrote was equally sublime in her eyes. If she permitted herself to show preference for this or that work, it was only on condition that she should not be supposed to be depreciating some other. In 1846, Victor Hugo having arranged to make a speech in the House on the “consolidation and defence of the frontier,” Juliette read it no less than three times: once in La Presse, again in Le Messager, and a third time in La Presse again. She made extracts from it and put it away among his archives; she then wrote gravely to the author, that he had never been more pathetic or more eloquent. In the same manner she hoarded all his most trivial sketches and poorest caricatures, and pasted them into albums which she carefully hid. She was envious of Léopoldine, the poet’s daughter, who was doing the same thing, and naturally had more opportunities than herself of adding to the collection.

She was more greedy still of his theatrical output, for there her jealousy came into play. It is safe to affirm that for more than fifteen years, namely from 1834 to 1851, she interested herself in every single representation of the dramas of Victor Hugo. She was present at the Théâtre Français on the first night of Angélo on April 28th, 1835, and wished to go again on all the following nights, in spite of the bitter disappointment the play had caused her, through the frustration of her ambition to take part in it. She was there on February 20th, 1838, for the revival of Hernani; and on March 8th following, it was she who applauded Marie Dorval loudest, at the revival of Marion Delorme. While Les Burgraves was being written she demanded to know all about it from its earliest conception, and achieved her wish. When Victor Hugo read the play to her, she was very much moved and said: “I hardly know how to descend to earth again from the sublime altitude of your conception.” She took part in the distribution of the rôles, and intrigued against Mlle. Maxime and Madame FitzJames, whom she did not want for Guanhumara.[30] She championed Madame Melingue, who, in consequence, obtained the part. At last the first night arrived. There was a cabal, a violent, aggressive cabal, a sign of the reaction of the new practical school against the romantic school. Who sat in a prominent box and opposed the firmest front to the hissing crowd? Juliette! Who ventured to accuse Beauvallet of murdering the part of the Duke Job? Juliette again! “To applaud thus your beautiful verses,” she wrote on March 13th, “and hurl myself into the fray in their defence is only another way of making love. Ah, I wish I could be a man on the nights the play is given![31] I promise you the subscribers of the Nationale and the Constitutionel would see strange things!”

The afternoons hung heavy in the lonely apartment of the Rue St. Anastase. Sometimes the poet looked in for a moment to bathe his eyes, or claim some other domestic attention; but, as a rule, his visits were made in the evening, after the parties and the theatre. His mistress, therefore, begged, and obtained, permission to receive a few of her friends. They were insignificant, but warm-hearted folk: Madame Lanvin, the wife of one of Pradier’s employés, who acted as intermediary, partly honorary and partly paid, between the sculptor and the mother of Claire Pradier; Madame Kraft, an employée of the Comédie Française who affected literary culture; Madame Pierceau, a worthy matron, and, lastly, Madame Bezancenot, a tried ally.

As a rule, Victor Hugo tolerated the presence of this little company; but, democratic though he might be in principle, it palled upon him before long, and he made some remonstrance. Then Juliette revealed to him that her need to talk about him had driven her to institute a regular course of “Hugolatry” among the good ladies. They made a practice of reading his poems, declaiming his plays, and showering praise on the independence of his character and the dignity of his life. In the face of such delicate proofs of the affection she bore him, it is not surprising that the poet should have entrusted to Juliette his most sacred hopes and ambitions. She was one of those in whom a lover may always confide, in the certainty of being ever sustained, encouraged, and approved. Thus it came about that she was cognisant of every effort Victor Hugo made, every step he took, and even of the intrigues by which he climbed gradually to the Académie Française, then to the Tuileries and the little court of Neuilly, and finally to the Chambre des Pairs.

For Victor Hugo was, above all, an unfortunate candidate, at any rate of the Académie. In February 1836 he was refused Lainé’s fauteuil, and it was given to a vaudevilliste of the period, called Dupaty. At the end of November of the same year, Mignet was preferred before him, for Raynouard’s vacancy. In December 1839, rather than select Hugo, nobody was appointed in the place of Michaud. In February 1840, precedence over him was given to the permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences, Monsieur Flourens. It was not until January 7th, 1841, that he was elected to Lemercier’s fauteuil by seventeen votes, against fifteen given to a dramatist called Ancelot, whose name an ungrateful posterity no longer remembers.

The visits were begun between Christmas and the New Year, in cold, dry, sunny weather. Clad in black according to prescribed custom, Victor Hugo fetched his friend every day from the Rue St. Anastase, got into a cab with her, and showed her the plan for the afternoon: at such and such a time they must lay siege to Monsieur de Lacretelle; after that, to Monsieur Royer-Collard; then to Monsieur Campenon. Monsieur de Lacretelle was too diplomatic not to give plenty of promises and assurances; Monsieur Royer-Collard too good a Jansenist to fail in a blunt refusal to the author of Hernani. As for Monsieur Campenon, he had the reputation of being an honest man and an excellent amateur gardener. His conversation bristled with graftings and buddings. How should he humour him about his favourite pursuit, Victor Hugo asked his friend. Should he select roses or pears, myrtle or cypress? As the good creature was getting on in years, and counted more summers than literary successes, Victor Hugo unkindly inclined towards the last.

It is the privilege of the Académie Française to be most courted by those who have oftenest sneered at it. No institution has ever been the cause of so much recantation. Juliette herself was to eat her words. On Thursday, January 7th, 1841, when Victor Hugo had at last triumphed over his brother candidate, it was no longer a mistress who wrote to him, but a general addressing a panegyric of victory to a hero: “With your seventeen friendly votes, and in spite of the fifteen groans of your adversaries, you are an Academician! What happiness! You ought to bring your beautiful face to me to be kissed.”

Although the speech was only to be delivered in June, Victor Hugo had it ready by April 10th; he read it to his admiring friend the same night. The white tarlatan dress, alas, was longer on the way. Several reasons conspired against its completion. First of all, Juliette declared that she would concede to nobody the honour of presenting the new member with his lace ruffles: this involved an expenditure of about 23 frs., a heavy toll on the exchequer of the lovers. Secondly, Victor Hugo’s reception was to fall upon nearly the same date as the first communion of Juliette’s daughter, Claire Pradier, which was yet another cause of expense. The young woman bravely sacrificed her frock, and, having consoled herself by making a fair copy of the master’s splendid speech, she awaited the great day. But at the very moment she hoped to see it dawn without further disappointment, malicious fate brought her, and consequently Victor Hugo and the Académie, face to face with a fresh dilemma of the gravest importance, namely, the question of the pulpit for the momentous occasion.

Such was the farcical object Victor Hugo had to interpose between himself and Juliette, on the day of the great ceremonial. She lost her sleep over it; for a time, even the lace ruffles, and the speech, and the white tarlatan dress and rose-coloured scarf, retired into the background: “I am in a state of inexpressible agitation and worry over this wretched pulpit,” she wrote. “I shall be just at the back of it. I am in perfect despair! Truly, since this apprehension has taken possession of me, I have become the most wretched of women. I think if I cannot see your handsome, radiant face that day, nothing will keep me from bursting into sobs of rage and misery. The very thought fills my eyes with tears.”[32]

In spite of himself, Victor Hugo shared one characteristic with Jean Racine: he could not bear to see a pretty woman cry. He therefore took decisive measures, and managed to assuage his friend’s grief. Juliette was assured that, whatever happened, she should contemplate her “dear little orator” at her ease—that is to say, from head to foot. Unfortunately, it was ordained that calmness should not inhabit this passionate soul for long together. The night preceding the reception, Juliette felt frightfully nervous, and, while Victor Hugo sat up correcting the proofs of his discourse at the Imprimerie Royale, she retired, saying irritably: “I am like the savages who take to their beds when their wives give birth to children.” At 4.30 a.m. she was already up, wrote several letters to her lover, dressed, and hurried to the Palais Nazarin, where she took up a position in the front row, before even the platoon of infantry detailed for guard had arrived.

According to the testimony of Victor Hugo’s enemies as well as of his friends, the reception surpassed in dignity and brilliancy anything the cupola had previously witnessed. The Court was represented by the Duc and Duchesse d’Orléans, the Duchesse de Nemours, and the Princesse Clémentine, in a tribune. Fashionable society and the world of letters jostled each other on the benches. There were women everywhere, even beside the most ancient and prim of Academicians. Old Monsieur Jay was partially concealed under billows of laces, gauzes, silks, and satins, worn by his neighbours, Madame Louise Colet and Mlle. Doze. Monsieur Étienne waggled his head between two monstrous hats so beflowered that, with one movement, he disturbed the fleurs du Pérou of Madame Thiers, and with the next, he ruffled the bunches of roses on Madame Anais Segalas’ head.

“LE CITOYEN VICTOR HUGO JOUANT AU CONGRÈS DE LA PAIX.” Political caricature, 1849.
“LE CITOYEN VICTOR HUGO JOUANT AU CONGRÈS DE LA PAIX.”
Political caricature, 1849.

Juliette saw nothing of all this; neither did she heed the irrelevant babble of her neighbour on the right, Monsieur Desmousseaux of the Comédie Française, or of her guest on the left, Madame Pierceau. She was in a state of painful, yet delicious turmoil, and when Victor Hugo made his entry, she nearly fainted. Fortunately, the poet gave her a smiling look before beginning his speech, which restored her to life; and she settled down to listen to his eloquent words, as if she had not already written them out until she knew them by heart. To-day they seemed invested with fresh beauties, and she gave herself up to the enjoyment of the moment. The magnificent imagery which decked Victor Hugo’s first address at the Académie, concealed calculation of the most worldly wise description. Victor Hugo aspired to the Chambre des Pairs as a stepping-stone to a power which would assist him to develop the moral and social mission he deemed to be the true function of a poet. To achieve this aim it was necessary that he should first belong to one of the societies from among which alone the King could legally select the members of that Assembly. The Académie was one of these, hence the successive candidatures of the poet, and the special tone of his discourse, in which all the political parties were blandished and caressed alike; hence, finally, the visits to Court, which increased in frequency after 1841.

Just as Juliette had practically burned in effigy almost all the Academicians of her time before she had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with them and finding them charming, so she began by criticising and censuring Louis Philippe and his children with the greatest severity. Were not these people going to wrest her poet from her? And for what? For the sake of empty honours and useless occupations! Therefore we find Juliette preaching to her lover the contempt of earthly greatness. She was fiercely jealous of the citizen-king.