Early in their residence here, Victor was honored by a summons to visit Châteaubriand, long the literary idol of the schoolboy, who had written in his diary, when only fourteen: "I will be Châteaubriand or nothing!" For he had begun to rhyme already at the Cordier school, and in his seventeenth year he had established, in collaboration with his eldest brother, Abel, "Le Conservateur Littéraire," a bi-monthly of poetry, criticism, politics, most of it written by Victor. It lived from December, 1819, to March, 1821, and its scarce copies are prized by collectors. Now the precocious boy's ode "On the death of the Duke of Berry"—assassinated by Louvel in February, 1820, in Rue Rameau, on the southern side of Square Louvois, then the site of the opera-house—had fallen under the eye of Châteaubriand, who was reported to have dubbed him "The Sublime Child." Châteaubriand denied this utterance, in later years, but agreed to let it stand, since the phrase had become "consecrated." It was at the door of No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique, then the residence of the elder author, that the young poet knocked in those early days of his fame; and here, a little later, he was invited by the diplomat to join his Embassy to Berlin. Madame Hugo's health prevented the acceptance of this flattering offer.
While still at this home in Rue des Mézières, Victor received another honor in a call from Lamartine, the lately and loudly acclaimed author of "Les Méditations," who was then about thirty-one years of age. In a letter, written many years after, Lamartine described this first meeting: "Youth is the time for forming friendships. I love Hugo because I knew and loved him at a period of life when the heart is still expanding within the breast.... I found myself on the ground floor of an obscure house at the end of a court. There a grave, melancholy mother was industriously instructing some boys of various ages—her sons. She showed me into a low room a little apart, at the farther end of which, either reading or writing, sat a studious youth with a fine massive head, intelligent and thoughtful. This was Victor Hugo, the man whose pen can now charm or terrify the world."
The grave, melancholy mother died in the early summer of 1821, and her bereaved sons carried her body across the Place, to the Church, of Saint-Sulpice and then to the Cemetery of Mont-Parnasse. On the evening of that day of the burial, Victor returned to the cemetery, and there, overcome with grief and choked by sobs, the boy of only nineteen wandered alone for hours, recalling his mother's image and repeating her name. Seeking blindly for some comforting presence, he found his way, that same night, to the Hôtel de Toulouse, for a glimpse of Adèle Foucher. Unseen himself, he saw her dancing, all unconscious of his mother's death and his heart-breaking loss.
After weeks of wretched loneliness, young Hugo went to live, with a country cousin just come to town, on the top floor of No. 30 Rue du Dragon. This street is connected with the court of the same name by a narrow passage under the houses at the western end of the court. No. 30 is still standing, a high, shabby old building, that yet suggests its better days. In the belvedere high above the attic windows, Hugo lived the life of his Marius, keeping body and soul together on a slender income of 700 francs a year. Luckier than Marius, who could only follow Cosette and the old convict in the Luxembourg Gardens, Hugo was allowed little walks there with his adored lady, her mother always accompanying them. This chaperonage did not prevent the secret slipping of letters between the lovers' hands, and many of these have been preserved for future publication.
It was at this time that the Post-office officials held up, in their cabinet-noir, a letter from Hugo, offering the shelter of his one room, "au cinquième," to a young fellow implicated in the conspiracy of Saumur, and hiding from the royal police. Hugo makes this offer, his letter explains, in pure sympathy for a misguided young man in peril of arrest and death; his own allegiance to the throne being so established as to permit him to give this aid with no danger to himself and no discredit to his loyalty. The letter was copied, resealed, sent on its way; the copy was carried to Louis XVIII., and so moved him—not in the direction meant by his officials—that he made inquiry about its writer, and presently gave him a pension. This incident was not known to Hugo until many years after.
Among the men who visited him in this garret was Alfred de Vigny, then a captain in the Royal Guard, and dreaming only, as yet, of his "Cinq-Mars." Hugo was dreaming many dreams, too, over his work, and his brightest dream became a reality in October, 1822, when, in Saint-Sulpice's Chapel of the Virgin—the chapel from which his mother had been buried eighteen months earlier—was performed the Church part of his marriage with Adèle Foucher. The wedding banquet was given at the Hôtel de Toulouse by her father, who had been won over to this immediate marriage, despite the delay he had urged because of the youth of the bride and the poverty of the bridegroom.
The young couple, whose combined ages barely reached thirty-five, found modest quarters for awhile in Rue du Cherche-Midi, near her and his former homes, and then removed to No. 90 Rue de Vaugirard. Their abode, cut away by the piercing of that end of Rue Saint-Placide, is replaced by the new building still numbered 90 Rue de Vaugirard, near the corner of Rue de l'Abbé-Grégoire.
In this first real home of his married life, Hugo produced his "Hans d'Islande" and his "Bug Jargal"—the latter rewritten from a crude early work—by which, poor things though they were, he earned money, as well as by his poems, poured forth in ungrudging flood. In the ranks of the Classicists at first, he soon fell into line with the Romanticists, and by 1827 he was the acknowledged leader of "La Jeune France." On his marriage, he had been allotted the pension, already alluded to, of 1,500 francs yearly, by Louis XVIII., in recognition of his Royalist rhymings, and this sum was doubled in 1823.
With their growing fortune, the young couple allowed themselves more commodious quarters. These they found, early in 1828, in a house behind No. 11 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a street somewhat curtailed in its length by the cutting of Rue de Rennes, and the old No. 11 is now No. 27. A long alley, once a rural lane between bordering trees, leads to the modest house hidden away from the street. Quiet enough to-day, it was quieter then, when it was really in the Fields of Our Lady, in that quarter of the town endeared to Hugo by his several boyhood-homes.
The long, low cottage, since divided and numbered 27 and 29, still faces the street, just as when he first passed under its northern end into the lane, with his young wife. She writes, in her entrancing "Life of Victor Hugo, by a Witness": "The avenue was continued by a garden, whose laburnums touched the windows of his rooms. A lawn extended to a rustic bridge, the branches of which grew green in summer." The rustic bridge, the lawn, and the laburnums are no longer to be found, but the house is untouched, save by time and the elements. Behind those windows of the second floor, where was their apartment, was written "Marion Delorme," his strongest dramatic work, in the short time between the 1st and the 24th of June, 1829; and there he read it to invited friends, among whom sat Balzac, just then finishing, in his own painstaking way, "Les Chouans." In October of this year "Hernani" was written and put on the boards of the Comédie Française, long before reluctant censors allowed "Marion Delorme" to be played.