The good lady probably thought these verses had been composed in a moment of deep fervour, in honour of a respected spouse. She congratulated the poet, quoted some of the lines to him, questioned him minutely about his children—and, while he enlarged on these domestic topics, the real heroine of the beautiful poetry so dear to the Duchesse, sat waiting below in the cab ... dreaming of the future peer of France; she already saw him in imagination descending the great staircase of the Luxembourg, with a demeanour full of dignity. For her part, she was more than ever content to remain at the foot of the steps, in a posture of humility, among the crowd of watchers.... When the poet issued at last from the ducal apartments, she would tell him her dream, and he would complacently acquiesce.
The appointment of Victor Hugo to the Pairie appeared in the Moniteur of April 15th, 1845. It must be left to politicians to determine in what degree the presence of “Olympio” could profit the councils of the nation; but to Juliette’s biographer the entry of her lover into the Luxembourg seems a felicitous event. From that moment, in fact, the young woman ceased to be cloistered. Busier than ever, and perhaps less jealous, the poet permitted his mistress to accompany him to the Luxembourg and to return alone to the Marais. At first Juliette hardly knew how to take this unfamiliar freedom. With her lover absent, she had grown accustomed to semi-obscurity. The blatant sunshine seemed to mock her loneliness. She writes: “Nobody can feel sadder than I do, when I trudge through the streets alone. I have not done such a thing for twelve years, and I ask myself what it may portend. Is it a mark of your confidence or of your indifference? Perhaps both. In any case, I am far from content.”
Gradually, however, she fell into the new ways. She used to walk back from the Luxembourg by way of the Pont-Neuf and the Quais. She amused herself by trying to trace the footsteps of Victor Hugo and fit her own little shoes into them. When she reached home, she immersed herself deeper than ever in the preoccupations of her lover.
Occasionally, fortunately, she had a reaction. She read little: the letters of Madame de Sévigné, perhaps, or those of Mlle. de Lespinasse. She tended her flowers; for Victor Hugo had made her remove from No. 14 to No. 12 Rue St. Anastase, where her ground-floor rooms opened on to a garden.[33] There, in a space of sixty square feet, she had four bushes of crimson roses, and a few dozen prolific strawberry-plants, destined to furnish the poet’s favourite dessert, throughout the summer. She attended to all the most trivial details in person, making them all subservient to her love.
In this wise—with the exception of a few bouts of jealousy of which we shall have occasion to speak later, Juliette’s days flowed almost happily. She no longer brooded over her past; redemption through love seemed to her an accomplished fact. When she turned to the future, it was with ideas borrowed from Victor Hugo certainly, but none the less consoling, since they authorised her to hope for the eternal reunion of souls beyond the confines of this earth. On December 31st, 1842, the poet had dedicated some delicate verses to her, which she learned by heart. They were part of a creed by which Juliette hoped to fortify her soul against the arrows of fortune—hopes fallacious in the event. First death, then treachery, were about to rend her faithful heart as a child’s toy is smashed.
ABOUT the year 1844, when Victor Hugo visited his friend on Sundays and holidays, he used to find seated at his private table, in accordance with his own permission, a tall girl of eighteen, very fair, very pale, with very black eyes—two prunes, as he said, dropped in a saucer of milk. Often she did not hear him enter. Bending her willowy neck and undeveloped bust over her books, she was immersed in study, perhaps also in rêverie. Sometimes he kissed her affectionately, at other times bowed formally. The lowly assistant-mistress of a suburban school, marvelling at the great man’s condescension, would rise blushing, and submit her pale brow to his lips. She would then ask permission to return to her task: the examinations were near at hand, and, as she was going in for a diploma, she must work.
Sometimes Victor Hugo smilingly took up the books scattered on the table, weighed the value of each with a glance, then, pushing them all aside with the back of his hand, sat down, saying: “Now then, Claire, I will be your tutor to-day,” and the lesson began, vivid, enthusiastic, brilliant as a poem.
The reader would be justly disappointed if we failed to relate the story of the girl to whom this “magician of words” thus unveiled the beauties of the French language. Besides, a deeper acquaintance with the daughter may lead to a better understanding of the mother; therefore, we append a short sketch of Claire Pradier.
She was born in Paris in 1826. Her father, the sculptor, undertook the care of her early childhood, while her mother, as we have learnt, was in Germany and Belgium. He put her out to nurse at Vert, near Mantes, with a married couple named Dupuis, and sometimes combined a visit to her with a little sport, in the shooting season.
He brought her back to Paris on October 15th, 1828. From letters of his which have been preserved, we are justified in believing that he derived some satisfaction from his educational rôle. His pen is prolific in praise of the child with “the locks of pale gold,” “the roguish brown eyes,” “the apple-red cheeks,” whose “nose ends in a pretty tilt” which reminds him agreeably of Juliette’s.
He discovers in his daughter a fine nature, plenty of intelligence, and so much feeling, that he hesitates for a time whether he shall apply his efforts to checking its development, or to cultivating it—in the first case, he would turn Claire into a semi-idiot in order not to let her passions become too strong for her happiness, and in the second, he might make of her an artist capable of the most splendid impulses and the noblest fulfilment.
If Pradier is to be believed, the child herself decided in favour of the latter. At the age of three, guided by paternal suggestion in the studio of the Rue de l’Abbaye, she chose for her favourite plaything a stuffed swan. From her games with this handsomely fashioned bird she imbibed a taste for pure lines and fine pose. She also listened to music given at Pradier’s house by sculptors and painters who aped the art of Ingres. She derived so much delight from it that she could never afterwards meet any of these self-engrossed performers without begging for a kiss. Finally, by his studies of dress, his clever manipulation of draperies, which he always preferred to the higher parts of his profession, Pradier taught her to appreciate light and colour. She had a vivid appreciation of the latter, and, during her short life, a mere trifle such as the blue of the sky, or the tint of a rose, gave her the most exquisite pleasure.
Having thus cultivated the sensibilities of the flower committed to his charge, Pradier was rewarded by the prestige attached to his rôle of master and guide; the father reaped in tenderness what the artist had expended in intelligence and effort. From her earliest infancy Claire showed a marked preference for this man, so ardent, so gay, who taught her to breathe and live among works of art; all her life she felt for him an affection that neither his mistakes nor his carelessness, or even his injustice, could damp. Meanwhile, ever prolific in good intentions, always ready with vows and promises, the artist was forming high hopes and ambitions for his daughter.
“We must hope,” he wrote to Juliette on that October 15th, 1828, when he took the child away from her nurse, “that she will live to grow up, and that we shall make a distinguished personage of her.” A little later, on September 28th, 1829, he writes: “Dear friend, you are fortunate in the possession of a Claire who will be a great solace to you in your old age.” Again, on July 4th, 1832: “Who can love her better than I do, especially now that I see her rare intelligence developing so satisfactorily and encouragingly for our designs?”
He planned for his little daughter the most singular and unexpected gifts: once it was to be the proceeds of his bust of Chancellor Pasquier, a commission he owed to Juliette and her friendship with the subject; another time it was the price of a house he possessed at Ville d’Avray and wished to sell; again, he designed to settle upon Claire the sum of 2,000 frs. he had lent to a cousin—fine words, as empty as the hollow mouldings that decorated the studio of the man. The cousin never returned the loan, the house at Ville d’Avray was sold, by order of the court, at a moment when the mortgage upon it far surpassed its value, and the bust of Chancellor Pasquier, though ordered, was never even rough-cast by Pradier.
Juliette had determined to live with Victor Hugo in the conditions of poverty indicated in a former chapter. Her natural delicacy prompted her to make the future of her child secure, and at the same time to release the poet from all anxiety on that score. In the latter part of the year 1833, therefore, she wrote to Pradier asking him to acknowledge Claire. The answer of the sculptor was as follows:
“Dear Friend,
“Your letter did not displease me at all, as you seem to have feared that it would. Its motive was too praiseworthy to cause me any sentiment contrary to your own. The only thing that vexes me is that I should be unable to do at once what you desire, and what I fully intend to do eventually, though in a manner carefully calculated not to interfere with the future or tranquillity of any other person. It grieves me that you do not realise what I feel towards you and Claire! I believed that all your hopes were centred in me! I am so crushed with debt that I cannot think of executing my intentions at present. Good-bye, get well and hope only in me. You have not lost me, either of you—far from it! Good-bye, your very devoted friend, and much more,
“J. Pradier.”[34]
CLAIRE PRADIER AT FIFTEEN. From an unpublished drawing by Pradier.
CLAIRE PRADIER AT FIFTEEN.
From an unpublished drawing by Pradier.
It is easy to guess how annoyed Juliette was at the receipt of such a letter. She expressed her disgust to Victor Hugo in various notes in which she abuses her former lover: “Wretched driveller, stupid scoundrel, the vilest and most idiotic of men, a coward without faith"—such are the principal epithets she applies to him.
It has been said that the author of Lucrèce Borgia interfered and obtained from Pradier the acknowledgment of Claire.[35] This is absolutely incorrect. It is probable indeed that the poet made the attempt; it seems certain that with the assistance of Manière, the attorney, he extracted from the sculptor the promise of an allowance; but there was no official recognition, and soon we shall find the father of Claire more disposed to repudiate her than to allow her the protection of his name.
For the moment he merely agreed that Juliette should put the child to school at Saumur with a Madame Watteville, whose Paris representative was a certain Monsieur de Barthès. He would have liked Victor Hugo and his friend to undertake the sole responsibility of the arrangements, but they prudently declined to do so, though they lavished kindness, caressing letters, advice, and treats, upon the little exile.
On May 28th, 1835, Claire, having suffered some childish ailment, received from her mother a doll and the following letter:
“Good morning, my dear little Claire. I hope you will be quite well again by the time you read this letter. Now that you are convalescent I can discuss serious matters with you. This is what I wish to say: Foreseeing that you may be in need of recreation, I send you from Paris a charming little companion who is most amiably disposed to amuse you. But, as it would not be fair that the expenses of her maintenance should devolve upon you during the time of her stay with you, I also send you a big purse of money for her upkeep. Spend it wisely, in accordance with your needs.
“Monsieur Toto is no less anxious about her, than devoted to you. He therefore adds an enormous basket of provisions. I hope the little girl will not have eaten them all up on the way, and that there will still be something left for you.
“This is not all. I have also been thinking of your clothes, dear little one, and I send you a shawl for your walks, a white frock with drawers to match, a figured foulard frock, a striped frock without drawers, and a sleeved pinafore.
“Good-bye, dear good child. You must tell me if my selection is to your taste. Love me and enjoy yourself, so that I may find you tall and plump and pretty, when I come to see you again.
“J. Drouet.”
At other times, Victor Hugo himself wrote affectionately to his friend’s child. It is necessary to read these letters, so full of thoughtful tenderness, to gain a better knowledge of the warmth of the poet’s heart. Much should be forgiven him in consideration of it.
“We love you very much,” he wrote to Claire on May 23rd, 1833, “and you have a sweet mother who, though absent, thinks a great deal about you. You must get well quickly, and thank the good God in your prayers every night for giving you such a good little mother, as she on her part thanks Him for her charming little daughter.”[36]
And a few days after, in a postscript to a letter to Juliette: “Monsieur Toto sends love and kisses to his little friend, and wishes he could still have her to travel everywhere with him. But, above all, he would like to caress her and look after her as his own child.”[37]
As his own child—those words were indeed characteristic of Victor Hugo’s feeling concerning the little girl thus thrown across his path by chance, and unhesitatingly adopted by him. At first, Claire either did not realise, or was unwilling to return, his affection. She was jealous of the big gentleman who stole some of her mother’s attention from her. She was reserved and disagreeable. Juliette was indignant, but the poet did not relax his efforts to win her. With the authority of Pradier, who was only too pleased to delegate it to him,[38] he placed Claire, on April 15th, 1836, in a school at St. Mandé, 35, Avenue du Bel-Air, kept by a Madame Marre. From that moment, whether he paid her a surprise visit in the parlour on Thursday afternoons, with a Juliette beaming from the enjoyment of the trip, or whether she spent Sundays with her mother, Claire Pradier insensibly grew to connect Victor Hugo with Juliette in her affections, to give to them both equal respect, and to link them together in her prayers. Exceedingly sensitive by nature, more eager for love than for learning, she fell into habits of day-dreaming in school, or out in the meadows, and only seemed to recover the brightness of cheeks and eyes when the lovers fetched her, and toasted her little cold, contracted fingers in their warm ones. Then the apartment in the Rue St. Anastase resounded with her merry chatter, and she joined eagerly in the rites of which Victor Hugo was the god and Juliette the priestess.
In 1840, when she had attained her fifteenth year, Claire’s mother thought it right to confide to her the secret of her irregular birth. She told her also of Pradier’s neglect, and Victor Hugo’s goodness. She exhorted her to be simple in her ideas, and not to set her ambitions too high. Claire manifested much chagrin and vexation at first, but presently her natural piety awoke and Juliette was able to write: “Claire is for ever in church.” Victor Hugo took upon himself to open the girl’s eyes to the practical side of life, and to point out to her the necessity of preparing for a profession as early as possible.[39] In response to these appeals to her reason, Claire soon accepted her lot with a brave heart. It was settled that at the age of eighteen, that is to say in 1844, she should be engaged as an assistant mistress in Madame Marre’s school, in exchange for board and lodging, but without salary. She agreed also to study for a diploma, and she hoped, when once she had gained it, to find some honourable and paid employment, by Victor Hugo’s help.
Claire fell to work with an ardour, a good-humour, and an intelligence, that drew from Juliette the warmest commendation for her daughter and gratitude for Victor Hugo.
One cannot but wonder whether Claire Pradier was really happy at heart, or whether that eighteen-year-old brow, pure and fair as Juliette’s own, perchance concealed a spirit weighed down by melancholy. She was good-looking certainly, and knew it. In her chestnut locks, her eyes, whose hue wavered between soft black and the blue of ocean, her rounded cheeks, often hectic with fever, the distinction of a tall figure and stately walk, she united—
But beauty is no consolation to one who feels herself already touched by the icy finger of death, and who has, besides, no incentive to prolong the struggle for life. Claire felt thus.
Already, in earliest childhood, she had shown a delicate temperament, uncertain health, more nerves than muscle, more sensitiveness than vitality. During the whole of 1837, her cough never left her. In the years that followed, her figure scarcely showed any of the curves of youth. When her looks were praised, she smiled faintly, and her voice, which was lovely and caressing enough to recall to Victor Hugo the softest cadences of Les Feuillantines, scarce dared pronounce the word “to-morrow.” Hence proceeded low spirits, which she was never able to shake off, though she usually managed to conceal them from her mother. Presentiments also beset her. “I often dream of those I love,” she wrote to her mother, “and when I wake up, I long to sleep on for ever.”
Mobile as the chisel he manipulated so skilfully, volatile as the dust of the plaster which powdered him, Pradier gave Claire neither regular assistance nor moral support. He had married, and was the father of several legitimate children. Unfortunate as was the celebrity of his wife and far-reaching the scandals provoked by her, he yet desired to preserve before his natural daughter a primly respectable attitude, and a modesty quite Calvinistic. He was as careful to avoid the occasions of meeting her, as Claire herself was eager to provoke them. The more she overwhelmed him with little presents, worked by her own fingers, tender evidences of an unconquerable affection, the more indifferent and discourteous he showed himself, forgetting to pay her monthly allowance, forgetting to give her New Year’s presents, forgetting even to keep his appointments with her, leaving her to wait patiently in the cold studio of Rue de l’Abbaye while he played the gallant on the boulevard.
He had, nevertheless, permitted the girl to make the acquaintance of his legitimate children, and had gone so far as to put his youngest child, Charlotte Pradier, at the same school, when he sent his two sons to Auteuil to a boarding-school. In the month of May, 1845, Claire, with an impulse natural in a girl of nineteen, wished to give the two school-boys the pleasure of a sisterly letter; she got Charlotte to write also. The sculptor heard of it and this is how he treated her trivial indiscretion:
“My dear Big Claire,
“I have seen the headmaster of ... who has informed me that you and Charlotte have written to J....[41] Pray write as seldom as possible. I do not think young girls should use their pens to reveal their sentiments. Such a habit is too easily acquired; they should know how, yet not do it. Besides, the children see each other every fortnight, and that is enough. Please do not sign yourself Pradier to them any more. Such a thing becomes known and might cause gossip. You do not need the name, to be loved and respected. Be frank and fear nothing. Your good time will come some day. You must be prudent in all respects. The children must accustom themselves to your position as it is; they will take more interest in you later. Also, as I am on these subjects, pray use some other formulæ in your letters to me than ‘adored father,’ or ‘beloved.’ I am not accustomed to them. Such epithets are only appropriate to a god. Call me anything else that comes natural to you. It is unnecessary that I should prompt you; your feelings will be your best guide. Please write more legibly, for I receive your letters at night; and, above all, write only when you have something special to say. You must not become a scribbler about nothing—I mean for the mere pleasure of using your pen.”[42]
How such a letter must have wounded the heart which once beat so tenderly for Pradier! Neither the caresses of Juliette nor the soothing words of Victor Hugo were able to comfort Claire.[43] One month after her father had thus disowned her, she went up for her examination, and, partly through grief, partly through timidity, failed utterly. It was the last stroke.
Not that her constitution showed any immediate sign of the shock it had sustained, or broke down at once. Her physical appearance remained unchanged, but death entered her soul and lurked there henceforward, as sometimes it lies under the depths of waters which flow calmly to outward seeming. She made her will.
From that moment Claire Pradier lived like those resigned invalids who, raising their gaze to the heaven above them, no longer heed the passing of the hours, while they await the supreme summons. She waited. Her mother, seeing her still apparently healthy, failed to realise her condition, and took the beginning of this mute colloquy with death for a mere return of her daughter’s former depression. Nevertheless, an incident which happened in the month of February 1846 gave to Juliette also one of those presentiments which cannot deceive. Like Claire, she waited.
CLAIRE PRADIER ON HER DEATHBED. Drawing by Pradier (Victor Hugo Museum).
CLAIRE PRADIER ON HER DEATHBED.
Drawing by Pradier (Victor Hugo Museum).
It was not for long. On March 21st, 1846, having gone to St. Mandé to see the young assistant mistress, she took with her the design and material for a piece of work Victor Hugo had asked for. The idea was to embroider his family coat of arms on coarse canvas, in colours selected by himself. This complicated heraldic work was to adorn the backs of two Gothic arm-chairs in his rooms in the Place Royale.
Contrary to her usual habit, Claire showed very little interest in the poet’s plans; she listened absently and spoke very little. A dry cough shook her frame from time to time, her cheeks burned with fever. Juliette walked home by way of the Avenue de Bel-Air, the Barrière du Trône, and the Faubourg St. Antoine. Victor Hugo, who was always anxious about her, was to meet her half-way. He did so; she was walking slowly, with bent head, and when he asked for news of his embroidery, she burst into tears. The poet understood in an instant. By his instructions, Claire was removed to Rue St. Anastase the very next day; Triger, her mother’s doctor, was instructed to visit her daily. Not venturing to pronounce at once the dread name of consumption, he spoke of a chill and chlorosis. Claire scarcely heeded, and indicated by a feeble gesture that she was too spent to care. The head she tried to raise from the pillow, fell back as if too heavy for the frail neck. Her large dark eyes gazed through space at some melancholy vision. Her hands upon the white sheets hardly retained strength to clasp themselves in a caress or a prayer.
She begged that Pradier might be informed of her illness. He wrote first, and then came. He demonstrated his affection by theatrical gestures and well-chosen words. Then he placed a villa, which he said he possessed at Auteuil, at the disposal of the invalid and her mother. The so-called villa proved to be one floor in a tenement house, 57, Rue de La Fontaine. Claire was taken there in the early part of May. Her mother accompanied her. Victor Hugo visited them nearly every day, but neither the compliments of “Monsieur Toto” nor the roses he brought his ex-pupil, nor the exhortations of Doctor Louis, whom he brought with him one day, were successful in restoring colour to the countenance of one whose blood-spitting left her every day paler and more exhausted. Claire hardly dared raise herself in bed; icy sweats drenched her, and she moaned continuously, in a manner terribly painful to those who were forced to stand by, helpless.
On June 6th, she asked to see the Vicar of St. Mandé, her confessor. On the 16th, she received the Last Sacraments. On the 18th, delirium supervened, and she expired on the 21st. They buried the girl in the first place at Auteuil, but when her will was read, in which she had written, “I desire to be buried in the cemetery of Saint-Mandé. I also beg that Monsieur l’Abbé Chaussotte should celebrate my funeral Mass, and that green grass should be grown on my grave,” Victor Hugo and Pradier agreed to have the coffin exhumed. The ceremony took place on July 11th. Juliette, who was more dead than alive, was not present; but Victor Hugo and Pradier walked together behind the funeral car, leading the white procession of Claire’s young pupils and companions. The sculptor, always full of intentions, plans, and chatter, discoursed in a low voice of the magnificent tomb he would raise with his own hands to the memory of his daughter. It should be, he said, “a sacred debt; I shall execute it with so much love that my chisel will never before have fashioned anything so chaste or so beautiful.”
After the long, slow journey through Paris in the sunshine, they reached the cemetery of Saint Mandé. Near the tomb of the poet’s friend, Armand Carel, a freshly dug grave yawned, gloomy and covetous. There was some singing, some blessing, the turmoil of a congested crowd; then they separated, but not without a renewal of Pradier’s promise.
Eight years later he died himself, without having discharged his “sacred debt.” One more resolve had fizzled out in empty words. Victor Hugo was then living precariously in exile, but as soon as he heard of the sculptor’s end, he wrote off and ordered a decent headstone for Claire, and directed that the grave should be sown with green grass. Upon the tomb were carved four of the lines he had erstwhile written for Juliette’s consolation, and he set about composing others. Thus it came about that, to the very last, Claire Pradier was protected by the father of Léopoldine against two of the fears that had most alarmed her youthful imagination, “a neglected grave in some distant cemetery, and a faded memory in the hearts of men.”
Juliette relates that when she had occasion to admonish her maid, or find fault with a tradesman during her residence in Jersey and Guernsey, the answer she invariably received was: “It cannot be helped, Madame; we are on an island....”
The phrase tickled her fancy, and she adopted it and made use of it on many occasions.
The reader of the following chapters must likewise accept the axiom that, “on an island,” things are not quite the same as on the mainland; for, only by so doing, will he be enabled to peruse without undue astonishment the extraordinary narration of the life led in common by Victor Hugo, his wife, sons, friends, and mistress, between 1851 and 1872.
Its beginning dates from the poet’s sojourn in Belgium without Madame Victor Hugo, at the beginning of his exile[44]; that is to say, in the last weeks of the year 1851 and the first half of 1852. Not that his precarious circumstances and prudent, somewhat middle-class habits, permitted him to house Juliette under his own roof: indeed, their liaison was never more secret. But, at Brussels, the problem of the relations henceforth to exist between the sons of Victor Hugo and she whom they already called “our friend, Madame Drouet,” first came up for solution. It was at Brussels also, that Juliette set herself to simplify it, if not settle it, by her devotion, unselfishness, and unremitting attentions.
At his first arrival on December 14th the poet had taken rooms at the Hôtel de la Porte Verte in the narrow street of the same name. He remained there barely three weeks, and on January 5th, 1852, took a small room on the first floor of No. 27, Grand’ Place. It was “furnished with a black horsehair couch, convertible into a bed, a round table, which served indifferently for work and for relaxation, and an old mirror, over the chimney which contained the pipe of the stove.”[45]
Juliette never went there, but we learn from the poet’s complaints to her, that the couch was too short for a man, the mattresses hard, and offensive to the olfactory nerve, and that sleep was difficult to obtain, on account of the noises in the street. But with the first streak of dawn outside the lofty window, the “great façade of the Hôtel de Ville entered the tiny chamber and took superb possession of it”[46]; the atmosphere became impregnated with art and history. The poet’s fine imagination and ardour for work did the rest. Hence the tone of his letters to his wife, who had remained behind in France, was almost joyous. It was full of masculine courage. Hence, also, that air of “simple dignity and calm resignation,” which characterised his bearing in exile, “adding to his inherent nobility and charm,” and drawing from Juliette the enthusiastic exclamation: “Would that I were you, that I might praise you as you deserve!”[47]
Truth to tell, she merited a rich share of the praise herself. The little comfort Victor Hugo was able to enjoy, and the moral support he needed more than ever, came to him solely through her.
She lodged almost next door, at No. 10, Passage du Prince,[48] with Madame Luthereau, a friend of her youth, married to a political pamphlet writer. For the modest sum of 150 frs. a month, of which 25 were paid to her servant, Juliette obtained food, shelter, and sincere affection. But what she appreciated more than all these, was the liberty she enjoyed of superintending from afar the poet’s domestic arrangements, and preparing under the shadow of the galleries the dishes and sweetmeats he partook of in the publicity of the Grand’ Place. Every morning at eight o’clock her maid, Suzanne, conveyed to Victor Hugo a pot of chocolate made by Juliette, linen freshly ironed and mended, and sometimes even the modicum of coal the great man either forgot, or did not trouble, to order.
When Suzanne had swept and cleaned the room which Charras, Hetzel, Lamoricière, Émile Deschanel, Dr. Yvan, Schoelcher and sometimes Dumas père daily enlivened with their wit and littered with the ashes from their pipes, she returned at about two o’clock. She found her mistress busy preparing the master’s luncheon—a cutlet generally, which Juliette took the trouble to select herself, in order to make certain that the butcher cut it near the loin! Suzanne started off again bearing the cutlet, the bread, the plates and dishes, and even the cup of coffee! Obedient to her mistress’s injunction, she hurried through the street, for, at any cost, the luncheon must not be allowed to get cold.
When Charles Hugo joined his father in February 1852, it might be supposed that Juliette would relinquish her rôle of cordon bleu; but nothing was further from her intention. She merely proceeded to supplement the daily cutlet with a dish of scrambled eggs, in honour of the young man. Hugo having opened the necessary credit, she continued the task she had undertaken, and prepared two luncheons instead of one. Again, when on May 24th Madame Victor Hugo came for the second time to visit her husband in Brussels, it was Juliette who undertook to cook a little feast for her. In the agitation caused by such a high honour, she forgot to add an extra fork. She worried for the rest of the day over the omission, and apologised in successive letters to the poet, in the terms a dévote might employ to confess a mortal sin.[49]
But these occupations did not prevent the afternoons from hanging heavy on her hands. Victor Hugo spent them in writing Napoléon le Petit; or he organised expeditions to Malines, Louvain, Anvers, with friends; or he yielded to the material pleasures of Flemish life, and accepted invitations to dine at some of those culinary institutes on which Brussels so prides herself.
But none of these resources were open to Juliette. Confined within the four walls of her narrow chamber, her only view was of roofs, and a dull wall, pierced by a single dirty window; she spent whole hours watching a canary in its cage, through the thick panes. She likened her condition to that of the tiny captive. At other times, she allowed her thoughts to roam among past events, and brooded over the packet of letters so cruelly sent to her the year before[50]; she dwelt upon the grief she had endured for many months, the choice the poet had finally made in her favour, and their joint excursion to Fontainebleau to celebrate the reconciliation. Under the depressing influence of the grey Belgian sky, always partially obscured by thick smoke, she realised that her splendid vitality and her love for novelty had departed for ever. Then she allowed jealousy to resume its sway over her, more powerfully than ever.
In this mood, she once more resolved to set Victor Hugo free: “If you tell me to go,” she wrote on January 25th, 1852, “I will do so without even turning my head to look at you.” But again he bade her stay.
Gravely, then, without showing any symptom of her former coyness, she proposed to discontinue her letters.
JULIETTE DROUET IN JERSEY.
JULIETTE DROUET IN JERSEY.
Fortunately, at this very juncture, the unwelcome attentions of the Belgian police, who were nervous about the forthcoming publication of Napoléon le Petit, had decided Victor Hugo to leave Brussels and go to Jersey. Juliette was to go also, either in the steamer with him, or in one starting a few hours later. Naturally he urged her to go on writing, if only to bridge over the short separation. She admits that when she landed at St. Helier, on August 6th, 1852, hope had once more gained the ascendant within her breast. For the first time in her life, she was about to enjoy the society of her “dear little exile,” her “sublime outlaw,” all by herself, far from the madding crowd.
Victor Hugo resided at first in an hotel at St. Helier, called La Pomme d’Or. Later he settled on the sea-front at Marine Terrace, Georgetown, in an enormous house which, owing to its square shape and skylights, resembled a prison.
Juliette had intended to put up at the Auberge du Commerce, but for twenty years she had never sat at a table d’hôte without the protection of the poet. The proximity of tradespeople and farmers proved insupportable to her. On August 11th she began a search for a suitable boarding-house, and presently concluded a bargain with the proprietress of Nelson Hall, Hâvres-des-Pas, for lodging at eight shillings a week, and board at two shillings a day. This made a monthly expenditure of about a hundred and fifteen francs, to which was added twenty-five francs, the wages of Suzanne, her maid.
Like Marine Terrace, Nelson Hall’s chief claim to maritime advantages was its name. At Victor Hugo’s house there were no large windows overlooking the sea, and in Juliette’s ground-floor rooms, a high paling screened the topmost crest of the highest wave.
Our heroine tried to console herself by listening to the surge of the ocean, and copying the nearly completed manuscript of L’Histoire d’un crime, or the poems the poet intended to add to the volume of Les Châtiments. At the end of September she moved upstairs to a large room on the first floor of the house, whence a wide view could be had of the barren scenery of Hâvres-des-Pas, from the battery of Fort Regent on the right, to the rocks of St. Clément on the left; but Juliette’s peaceful contemplation was constantly disturbed by the violence of the proprietress, a drunkard, who was renowned all over the island for the vigour with which she beat her husband when in her cups.
A further removal was therefore decided upon in January 1853, and carried out on February 6th. Juliette went to live in furnished apartments next door, consisting, as in Paris, of a bedroom, drawing-room, dining-room, and kitchen, on the first floor. They overlooked a vast stretch of sand and shingle, rocks and seaweed.
At first Victor Hugo seldom went to his friend’s house, but met her each day at the outset of his walk and took her with him along roads where the magic of summer glorified every blade of grass. From end to end of the island, Dame Nature had transformed herself into a garden, where all was perfumed, gay, and smiling. Juliette, walking arm in arm with her lover, could feel the glad beating of his heart; her upraised eyes noted that his dear face seemed less worried. With the ingenuity of a twenty-year-old sweetheart, she entertained him of his own country, and invoked memories of the journeys they had made together in former days to the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees. The exile remembered, not the rain, nor the omnibuses, nor the thousand trifles recalled by Juliette, but France ... his own beautiful France.... Under the influence of that voice which had once made him free of the realm of love, his country was restored to him for a fleeting moment.
The lovers were unpleasantly surprised by the week of tempests which ushered in the equinox, and was followed without a pause by the setting in of winter. “Everything became sombre, grey, violent, terrible, stormy, severe.” Day and night rain fell, and “the drops chased each other down the window-panes like silver hairs.”[51] Amidst the uproar to which frenzied Nature suddenly delivered herself, the daily tramps were perforce discontinued. Fortunately for Juliette, Victor Hugo found Nelson House warmer than his house at Marine Terrace. His wife had recently joined him, but had brought with her neither comfort nor the serene atmosphere propitious for an author’s labours. As in the old days of the Rue St. Anastase, therefore, he set up a writing-table near the fire in Juliette’s sitting-room, with a few volumes of Michelet and Quinet, and a novel or two by Georges Sand; and every day, after lunching with his own family, the poet came to work in his friend’s room. Juliette determined to “find the way back to his heart through his appetite,”[52] as she wrote to him, so she insisted upon his dining with her. She appealed to his greediness as well as to his hospitable instincts, assuring him that nowhere else could he so successfully entertain his new companions, the exiles, as at her abode. Soon she gave two “exiles’ dinners” a week, then three, then four; finally, she had one every day.
With the assistance of his two sons, whom he had at length presented to Juliette, Victor Hugo presided at these feasts with an affability born in part of a desire for popularity. Juliette showed herself more reserved, more severe. Accustomed to treat the poet as a divinity, she could not tolerate the familiarity of these petty folk. “A brotherly cobbler is not to my taste,” she said harshly. “I cannot resign myself to this consorting of vulgar mediocrity with your genius.”
Her sweetness to the two sons of the poet was as marked as the haughtiness of her manner towards the victims of the Coup d’État. For twenty years she had longed to be friends with them. As far back as 1839, on the occasion of a distribution of prizes at which Charles and François Victor were to cover themselves with honours, she wrote: “What a pity I cannot witness their triumph! I love them with all my heart, and would give my life for them; but that is not enough. I will avenge myself by praying that they may remain always as they are at present: charming and good.”
Later we find her treasuring their portraits, anxious about their little childish ailments, pleading for them when they incurred punishment, and overwhelming them with little presents manufactured by her pen or needle, whenever she received the master’s sanction to do so.
What joy it must have given her to receive officially at her table these children grown to manhood! As soon as she became acquainted with them, she raised the young men to the level of Victor Hugo in the order of her preoccupations, and resolved to do nothing for the father, in the way of spoiling and cherishing, that she did not do also for the sons. If she copied Les Contemplations, she protested that she must also write out François Victor’s translation of Shakespeare. If she sent Suzanne to Marine Terrace with a herb soup for the master, she bade her carry six lilac shirts for Charles.
Even young Adèle and Madame Victor Hugo accepted her good offices without demur. For Adèle, Juliette picked the earliest strawberries and the first roses of the Nelson Hall garden; she embroidered handkerchiefs on which Charles had designed the monogram, and bound together the serial stories of Madame Sand, cut from magazines. For Madame Victor Hugo she prepared a certain soup made of goose, which, she said, was most succulent. She lent her Suzanne, her own servant, for the whole time Marine Terrace was without a cook, and meanwhile went without a servant herself, and did her own cooking. She spoilt her skin and wore down her nails, but she took a pride in her devotion and self-abnegation, and resolved to carry them even further. She dreamt of entering Victor Hugo’s household for good, to assume in all humility the position of an ex-mistress become housekeeper.
However numerous may have been the wrongs Victor Hugo inflicted upon this woman, whose jealousy he never ceased to excite, one must admit that he felt and appreciated the greatness of her love. Like a great many men, the artist in him recognised a moral worth that no longer satisfied his needs as a lover; he experienced generous revulsions, under the influence of which he paid her carefully studied attentions, which bore a semblance of impulse and spontaneity gratifying to her feelings.
The young queen, Victoria, having paid France, in the person of Napoleon III, the gracious compliment of a visit in August 1855, the exiles of Jersey dared address an insolent letter to her, which was published by their quaintly-named journal, L’Homme. True to his native chivalry, Victor Hugo declined to sign this manifesto[53]; but he was indignant when the authorities of Jersey marked their disapproval by expelling its three authors. He protested vigorously against their punishment, and was in his turn driven from the island on August 31st.
He went to Guernsey, a neighbouring island, bleaker and less temperate in climate. He settled at first at No. 20, Rue Hauteville, St. Pierre Port. On May 16th, 1856, he bought a roomy, substantial house built on the shore at some former period by an English pirate. It only required restoration, to make it a suitable residence. It was called Hauteville House.
Here again, Juliette lived successively at the inn, and at a boarding-house kept by a Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Leboutellier. But when she found that Victor Hugo could no longer content himself with a temporary house, and intended to send for the furniture and art-collection he had stored at the rooms in Paris,[54] she begged him to include her in his plans, and let her have her own things also. She was tired of so-called English comfort, with its hard beds, narrow sheets, straight-backed chairs, and tiny wardrobes.
Victor Hugo gave a generous assent to her request. He took a little house for her, called La Pallue, close to, and overlooking, Hauteville House. The faithful Suzanne was despatched to France to pack and send to Guernsey all the Hugo family’s and Juliette’s possessions. She returned on August 9th. The furniture and art-collection arrived on the 20th of the same month.
A busy time followed, for the lovers. They threw themselves feverishly into the excitements of removal, decoration, and treasure-hunting. Victor Hugo dropped spiritualism and photography, which had been his recreations in Jersey, to become architect, cabinet-maker, and joiner. He undertook the supervision of Juliette’s arrangements as well as his own, bought antique Norman furniture, which he turned to various uses, manufactured carpets and curtains out of Juliette’s old theatre frocks, designed panels and mantelpieces, and the many incongruous articles which now decorate the Musée Victor Hugo, and which his friend aptly called “a poetical pot-pourri of art.”
In this wise, the fitting up of the two houses lasted over a considerable period. We learn from Juliette that the poet was still busy with his dining-room on April 2nd, 1857, and on May 28th, 1858, he wrote to Georges Sand: “My house is still only a shell. The worthy Guernseyites have taken possession of it, and, assuming that I am a rich man, are making the most of the French gentleman, and spinning out the work.”
Juliette, whose dwelling was more modest, had the enjoyment of it sooner. She settled into La Pallue at the beginning of November 1856, and had the happiness henceforth of seeing her friend many times a day. He had constructed on the roof of Hauteville House a room that he somewhat pretentiously named his “crystal drawing-room,” and that we should call a belvedere; it was roofed and covered in with glass on all sides. His bedroom opened out of it.
Every morning he sat and worked there, at a flap-table affixed to the wall, when the cold did not drive him to some warmer part of the house. Beneath his gaze spread the low town, the port, the group of Anglo-Norman islands, and, in clear weather, the coast of Cotentin. At his back, and slightly higher up, Juliette, from her little house, kept watch and ward over him. From that moment it may be said that, though Juliette’s body was at La Pallue, her heart and mind inhabited Hauteville House.
Unfortunately, as winter progressed, the storms grew worse, and a darkness reigned that made reading and copying difficult. “Like a great lake turned upside down,” the sky hung lowering above the gloomy houses, and only allowed the pale rays of a leaden sun to pierce through it, at infrequent intervals. The rest of the time the atmosphere remained charged with rheumatic-dealing clamminess.
VICTOR HUGO IN JERSEY.
VICTOR HUGO IN JERSEY.
Juliette, just entering her fiftieth year, bore the rigours of the climate with difficulty. She would have died of it, she declared, had she not been upheld by the influence of love. She was a martyr to gout, and greatly dreaded being crippled by it. She brooded long and often upon death and the dead. Whether under the influence of a priest, or in response to some inward prompting we cannot tell, but she reverted for a time to her former religious practices.
In April 1863, when Juliette was slowly recovering from another attack of gout, Victor Hugo realised the extreme humidity of La Pallue. On the advice of his sons, who seem to have been of one mind with him on the subject, he decided that Juju, as he called her, should move as quickly as possible, and that he should for the second time assume the functions of architect, upholsterer, and decorator of her new dwelling.
Juliette offered a prolonged and strenuous resistance to the plan, for the house chosen for her possessed the grave inconvenience of being at some distance from Hauteville House. The idea that she would no longer be able to watch every movement of her lover, drew from our heroine lamentations and loving reproaches. But Victor Hugo was adamant, and on February 2nd, 1864, the anniversary of the first performance of Lucrèce Borgia, “Princesse Négroni” took up her abode in the new house, which she named Hauteville Féerie.
There again the poet had arranged everything himself. Remembering Juliette’s attachment for her rooms in Rue St. Anastase, he had endeavoured to reconstitute faithfully its curtain of crimson and gold, its peacocks embroidered on panels, its china, the porcelain dragons which adorned the dresser, and especially the numerous mirrors that reflected and multiplied the furniture, knick-knacks, and embroideries.
When Juliette was shown this “marvel,” she said she had no words to express her admiration and gratitude. Then, knowing how often Madame Victor Hugo was away on the Continent, and how uncomfortable the poet was at home, she offered to act in turn as hostess and housekeeper to him.
In 1863 we find her assuming Madame Victor Hugo’s duties during the short absence of the latter, and at the end of 1864, during a further one which lasted until February 1867, she divided her time equally between Hauteville House and Hauteville Féerie.
But there is a difference in her methods of ruling the two establishments. At Hauteville House she governs without obtruding herself, wisely, discreetly, somewhat mysteriously. She directs the servants, reproves them if necessary, superintends the accounts, and keeps down expenses. But she carries out her task from her place in the background. Officially, the poet lives alone with his sons and his sister-in-law, Madame Julie Chenay; when he entertains friends from Paris, Juliette’s name is not mentioned.
At Hauteville Féerie, on the contrary, our heroine is at home. It behoves her to comport herself as the mistress of the house, and expend her gifts of mind, as well as her talents as a manager. As she says, “she must be both lady and housekeeper.”
In this double rôle it might be supposed that she would be reluctant to receive the exiles presented to her by Victor Hugo, whose society is so distasteful to her. Not so. Once more Juliette accepts, through duty and devotion, that which she never would have tolerated on her own account.
The poet was bored, alas! Though he was composing splendid poetry, his long dialogue with Mother Nature was beginning to pall upon him. His somewhat theatrical genius demanded more than a fine stage; it required a public. Without it, the author of Les Châtiments was but the shadow of the poet of Ruy Blas. No doubt the bronzing of his skin by the salt breath of the sea, and the virulence of his spite against Napoleon III, lent him a fictitious appearance of spring and vigour; but there were times when he flagged sadly, and when despondency and fatigue expressed themselves in the droop of his lips, the sagging of his ill-shaved cheeks, the wrinkles on his brow, and, especially, the heavy pockets beneath his eyes. His attire betrayed his complete neglect of himself. When he walked through the Place de Hauteville in his Girondin hat all battered by the wind, his cashmere neckcloth carelessly knotted under an untidy collar, his open coat revealing a buttonless shirt in summer, and in winter, a faded scarlet waistcoat which Robespierre himself would have despised, the little children he so loved ran from him as if he were accursed.[55]
Juliette grasped these mute warnings, and, as soon as she was established in the vast frame of Hauteville Féerie, she attempted to reconstitute the society she had once presided over at Jersey. She even endeavoured to enlarge the circle and admit a few new-comers.
Juliette was able to maintain the simple dignity to which she attached so much importance, and from which she departed only in favour of her poet, in the most delicate circumstance of her life, namely, when Madame Victor Hugo offered her her friendship. She did not decline it, but, where many might have erred by an excess of satisfaction and familiarity, she showed a discreet reserve highly creditable to her. Since their exile, the relations of the two women had undergone a great change. On the one hand, Madame Victor Hugo’s perpetual pursuit of pleasure, her constant fatigue, her laziness, and her incapacity to manage a house, had gradually involved her in the network of attentions, civilities, and petting, Juliette lavished upon her and hers. The reports brought to her by her sons and servants of the doings at Hauteville Féerie, had given her a good opinion of our heroine; her natural kindliness did the rest, and she showed herself disposed to treat in neighbourly, and even friendly, fashion one whom she might justly have hated as a rival.
On the other hand, Juliette no longer felt that jealousy of the mistress against the legitimate wife, that she had experienced at the beginning of her love-story. But actual friendship between Madame Victor Hugo and Juliette was hindered for a long time, by the fear of English criticism, and of those Guernseyites of whom Victor Hugo wrote, that they made even the scenery of the island look prim. Juliette dreaded the unkind tittle-tattle the exiles would not fail to retail to her, if she accepted the advances from Hauteville House. Therefore, during the first ten years at Guernsey, she only set foot in her friend’s house once, in 1858, to inspect the treasures the master had collected in it. Madame Victor Hugo was absent that day.
At the end of 1864, the wife of the poet became more urgent in her invitations. She was about to depart to the Continent, to undergo treatment for her eyes; her absence might be, and indeed was, indefinitely prolonged. However careless she might be in housekeeping matters, she was probably loath to commit her husband to the tender mercies of her sister, Madame Julie Chenay, who boasted of possessing neither aptitude for business nor a head for figures. She saw the use that might be made of the poet’s friend, and opened negotiations by inviting her to dinner. But Juliette declined. This policy of self-effacement was continued by her even during the long absence of Madame Victor Hugo in 1865 and 1866. When Victor Hugo pressed her to dine with him, in secret if necessary, she wrote: “Permit me to refuse the honour you offer me, for the sake of the thirty years of discretion and respect I have observed towards your house.”
In the end, however, Madame Victor Hugo gained the day, and overcame this dignified reticence. On her return to Guernsey on January 15th, 1867, she declared her intention of paying Juliette a visit. The diplomatic abilities of the poet were taxed to the uttermost in the regulation of the details of this important event. The visit took place on January 22nd. It was impossible to avoid returning it. Juliette did so on the 24th, and thenceforth, no longer hesitated to cross the threshold of Hauteville House. She went there almost every day, to revise the manuscript and the copies of Les Misérables with the help of Madame Chenay; in 1868, she spent the whole month of May under its roof, while her faithful Suzanne was in France.
Similarly, she no longer minded being seen in public with Victor Hugo and his sons, and even his wife, during the journeys they made together. Whereas in 1861, for instance, on a journey to Waterloo and Mont St. Jean, we still find her dining apart, and seeming to ignore Charles Hugo, in 1867, she is constantly at the latter’s house in Brussels, attending the family dinners and enjoying the charm of what she calls “a delicate and discreet rehabilitation” by Madame Hugo and her daughter-in-law. She took her share in their joys as in their sorrows.
It was at Brussels that the three grandchildren of the poet were born, and there also that he lost successively, in April and August 1868, his eldest grandchild and his wife. He mourned the latter with the sorrow of a man from whom the memory of his early love has not faded. As for Juliette, her regret was thoroughly sincere. She did not venture to attend the funeral, in deference to outside gossip; but when, a few days later, she went to the house and saw the empty arm-chair Madame Victor Hugo’s indulgent personality had been wont to occupy, she could not restrain her tears.
Victor Hugo and his friend returned to Guernsey on October 6th, 1868. They continued to inhabit separate houses, but dined together at one or the other. They also resumed their sea-side walks, and their long talks, of which the chief topic was the second son of Charles Hugo, an infant who had been left behind at Brussels.
The infirmities of increasing age occasionally prevented our heroine from following her indefatigable companion. She would then remain at her chimney corner, reading the Lives of the Saints or some devotional book. She was more than ever prone to reflect upon death. She had been greatly shocked by the rapidity with which Madame Victor Hugo had succumbed, and she felt that her turn, and that of the poet, must soon come. She prayed ardently that she might be permitted to go first.
In August 1869 Victor Hugo took Juliette with him, first to Brussels, where Charles Hugo and Paul Meurice joined them, and then to the Rhine, which held so many sweet memories for both. On their return to Guernsey on November 6th, he proceeded to plan a journey to Italy for the following winter. He also made arrangements for the revival of Lucrèce Borgia at the Porte St. Martin. The journey to Italy was never carried out, but on February 2nd, 1870, on the anniversary of its first performance, Lucrèce had a brilliant success.
The old poet was enchanted.
Foreseeing the fall of the Empire, and guessing that the French were sick of a régime which, during the last eighteen years, had confused government with spying, and politics with police, he redoubled the activity of his propaganda, and indited letter after letter, manifesto after manifesto. The more Juliette confessed to the lassitude of age, the more he seemed to defy his years.
WHEN Victor Hugo grasped the full extent of the national disaster in August 1870, he started immediately for Belgium. On the proclamation of the Republic, he proceeded to the frontier, where a few official friends awaited him.
The scene that took place on his arrival was impressive, though somewhat theatrical. The “sublime outlaw” asked for the bread and wine of France. After he had eaten and drunk, he begged Juliette to preserve a fragment of the bread, and buried his face in his hands with the gesture of one who is dazzled by too much light. Juliette relates that big tears flowed through his clenched fingers. The bystanders stood in silence, awed by his emotion....
The poet and our heroine stayed with Paul Meurice at Avenue Frochot for a time, and then went to the Hôtel du Pavillon de Rohan. Finally they settled, he in a small furnished apartment at 66, Rue de la Rochefoucauld, and she close by, in a fairly spacious entresol rented at fourteen hundred francs, at 55, Rue Pigalle.
VICTOR HUGO, HIS FAMILY, AND JULIETTE DROUET AT HAUTEVILLE HOUSE.
VICTOR HUGO, HIS FAMILY, AND JULIETTE DROUET AT HAUTEVILLE HOUSE.
But hardly had they resumed the peaceful tenor of their ways when they were forced to uproot again. On February 8th, 1871, Victor Hugo was elected a member of the Assemblée Nationale, and, as he could not bear to be parted any longer from his grandchildren, he removed his whole household to Bordeaux, including his son Charles, his mistress Juliette, and the little heroes of L’Art d’être grandpère. They started on February 13th, and the poet took his seat on the 15th. On March 8th he felt it his duty to resign, on account of the refusal of his colleagues to allow Garibaldi to be naturalised a Frenchman. He was about to leave, when a fresh sorrow struck him down: this was the sudden death of Charles Hugo, on March 13th.
The body of the unfortunate and charming young man was taken back to Paris, and the funeral took place on the 18th, in the sinister scenario of the rising insurrection. On the 21st, Victor Hugo went to Belgium to make arrangements for his grandchildren’s future. Two months and a half later, he was expelled from Brussels, for rewarding its hospitality by throwing his house open as a refuge to the political miscreants who had just fired Paris and shed the blood of their compatriots. He was the object of a violently hostile demonstration on May 27th, 1871, and afterwards received the decree of expulsion. He went to Vianden, in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and returned definitely to Paris in September 1871. Juliette had accompanied him everywhere.
No sooner was the luggage unpacked, than she bravely undertook to amuse him, by forming a small circle of his friends and admirers, in her drawing-room at Rue Pigalle. But the undertaking was beyond her powers. Her long sojourn in a solitary island and her complete absorption in one sole object, had resulted in the loss of what might be termed her social talent. In France, and especially in Paris, everything was new to her, everything caused her agitation.
The state of her health was not such as to restore her equanimity. She suffered from gout and heart-disease, was growing stout, walked with difficulty, slept badly, and was terribly weary: “I am so tired,” she writes, “that I feel as if even eternity would fail to rest me.”
Victor Hugo, therefore, gave up the entertainments at Rue Pigalle; the boxes were repacked, and on August 14th, 1872, the party returned to that island where everything spoke to the exile of former joys, from the anemones he loved, to the cherry-tree he had planted himself.
In the mornings, at half-past eleven, Victor Hugo used to make his joyous appearance at Hauteville Féerie, and escort his friend to Hauteville House, where the luncheon-table was proudly attended by Georges and Jeanne. In the afternoon, a family drive was organised. The largest carriage on the island was hardly big enough to contain the dear beings by whom he loved to be surrounded. The hours drifted peacefully towards dusk.
While our heroine lived on future hopes and past memories, Victor Hugo enjoyed the present more than ever. Every one knows of his gallantry, and the bold front he offered to advancing age. Amongst other comforting illusions, he chose to believe that women prefer old men, and he gloried in proving his theory. With more sense than she has been credited with, Juliette sometimes managed to close her eyes and ears; at other times she gently rallied him, congratulating him on the success of his most recent exploit. But more often it must be admitted that her temper was not equal to the nobility of her nature. To jealousy was presently added the pain of humiliation and offended dignity, caused by a vulgar intrigue, conducted under her very eyes, at her own fireside.
At last, at the end of the visit to Guernsey, which had turned out so differently from her expectations, Juliette came to a grave decision. She resolved to abandon the field to the frail beauties whom chance, desire, or self-interest, gathered around her poet, and to retire to live at Brest with her sister, or at Brussels with her friends the Luthereau.
Having borrowed 200 frs. from some one, Juliette actually started on September 23rd, 1873, without leaving the smallest note of farewell for Victor Hugo. But he lost no time in despatching a letter of recall, and he couched it in terms so eloquent, and so pathetic, that once more the poor woman was fain to overlook the past. She returned to Rue Pigalle on September 27th. She subsequently wrote to the kind hosts with whom she had taken refuge: “I have been very foolish, very cruel, very stupid; but I am rewarded. If one could hope for a second resurrection like this, one might be almost tempted to go through it all again.”
Shortly after Juliette’s act of defiance, her friend imposed the fatigue of a new removal upon her. The author of L’Art d’être grandpère had just lost his son, François Victor. More than ever he turned to his little grandchildren for consolation, and at the end of 1873, he decided to join households with them and their mother. For a rental of 6,000 frs. a year, he took two apartments, one above the other, at 21, Rue de Clichy. On April 28th, 1874, Juliette took possession of the third floor with her maid, while Madame Charles Hugo, her children, and the poet, settled in the fourth.
The receptions and dinners began again almost at once. At first they were weekly, then bi-weekly, and finally daily. The table was large and well attended. In addition to the five people forming the family party, including Juliette, there were rarely fewer than seven guests. Our heroine, in her capacity of chief steward, usually provided for twelve. She liked the fare to be simple and substantial: sole Normande, côtelettes Soubise, and poulets au cresson were the chief items of the repast.
Housekeeping on this scale demanded a staff of competent servants. Juliette had five, for whom she was responsible. She superintended their expenditure, their purchases, and the use to which they put the provisions; she commended good work and reproved faults, and in fact fulfilled the functions of a majordomo in a situation where the daily expenditure exceeded £4 for food, and approximated £2 for wines and spirits. She also had to supervise the department of the invitations, draw up lists, and sort the guests of each day, so as to temper the solemnity of a Schœlcher or a Renan, with the wit and froth of a Flaubert or a Monselet. Juliette assumed this charge, submitted the names to Victor Hugo, wrote the letters, opened the answers, and classified them. If anybody failed at the last moment, she telegraphed to some one on the “subsidiary list,” as she called it, and only ceased her efforts when she was assured of being able to offer to the gratified master a full table and a numerous and docile court.
She was now at the head of that court, but it must not be supposed that it was by her own desire. On the contrary, she practised the most severe self-effacement. Clad in black, wearing as her only jewel a cameo set in gold, representing Madame Victor Hugo, and bequeathed to her in the latter’s will, she usually sat at the chimney-corner in a large arm-chair. Fatigued by her laborious preparations, it frequently happened that she fell asleep in the drawing-room, as Madame Victor Hugo had been wont to do. This lapse of manners so covered her with confusion, that she made a vow either to bring her health up to the level of her devotion or else to disappear from view. She did, in fact, redouble her activities, to an extent astonishing in a septuagenarian. She undertook to follow the aged poet whenever he mingled with crowds. At Quinet’s and Frédéric Lemaître’s funerals, she was present in the throng, an infirm old woman, watching from a distance, over a Victor Hugo, upright as a dart, and full of vitality. Did he wish to make an ascent in a balloon, she was there; when he conducted a rehearsal, or read one of his early dramas to his modern interpreters, it was she who led the applause, declared that the voice of Olympio had retained all its strength and beauty, and that he had never read better.
In the period between 1874 and 1878 it must be conceded that Victor Hugo did his best to secure to his friend a greater degree of mental tranquillity than she had ever enjoyed before. He was careful to conceal his infidelities from her, and often succeeded in averting scenes and reproaches; or, if denial seemed impossible, he tried to palliate his fault and gain indulgence by addressing to her one of those poetical odes in which he excelled, and from which she derived such pride and joy.
But these were only passing revivals of youthful emotions, in the poet as well as in his friend. They resemble those bonfires of dead leaves, lighted by labourers in autumn on the summit of bare hills—their flame can ill withstand the slightest puff of wind. Such a puff blew upon the old couple in the course of the year 1878.
Juliette was greatly troubled about the state of her health. She wrote to the poet, on January 8th: “I feel that everything is going from me and crumbling in my grasp: my sight, my memory, my strength, my courage.”
On June 28th of the same year, at one of those copious banquets to which he still did full justice, and in the midst of an argument with Louis Blanc concerning Voltaire and Rousseau, Victor Hugo had a cerebral attack which alarmed his friends exceedingly. His speech faltered, he gesticulated feebly. Two doctors summoned in haste failed to give reassurance, and prescribed absolute rest in the country. On July 4th, the poet was escorted to Guernsey by a large retinue consisting of his grandchildren, the Meurice family, Juliette, Monsieur and Madame Lockroy, Richard Lesclide, and another friend, Pelleport. But no sooner had they reached the island, than Victor Hugo began to show symptoms of agitation. It could not be on account of his illness, for he was living quietly and comfortably, rejoicing at the amusement the season afforded his friends, and taking his own share of it. But, according to the testimony of one who has published a book concerning the master as witty as it is frank,[56] the reason was that he had left behind him in Paris the heroines of several intrigues; amongst others, the young person whose behaviour had occasioned Juliette’s fit of anger and departure for Brest,[57] and he was fearful lest the post should convey to Guernsey the forlorn cooings of the deserted doves, and that some echo of them should reach Juliette.