While plodding along with that great work, Hugo put forth from this study much verse and his last plays. Here, in 1838, he wrote his final dramatic success, "Ruy Blas," and his final dramatic failure, "Les Burgraves," which ended his stage career. From here he went to his fauteuil in the Academy in 1841, the step to the seat of Peer of France, accorded him by the King within a few years. Meanwhile, his larger rooms hardly held the swelling host of his friends, and, it must be said, his flatterers. Not Marion Delorme had more, nor listened to them with a more open ear. Their poison became his food. Indeed, the men who formed "le Cénacle," in these and other salons, seemed to find their breath only in an atmosphere of mutual admiration. Each called the other "Cher Maître," and all would listen, in wistful reverence, to every utterance of the others and to the deliverance of his latest bringing-forth, vouchsafed by each in turn. While Lamartine, standing before the fireplace, turned on the pensive tune of his latest little thing in verse, Hugo gazed intent on him as on an oracle. Then Hugo would pour forth his sonorous rhymes, his voice most impressive in its grave monotone. The smaller singers next took up the song. No vulgar applause followed any recitation, but the elect, moved beyond speech, would clutch the reciter's hand, their eyes upturned to the cornice. Those not entirely voiceless with ecstasy might be heard to murmur the freshest phrases of sacramental adoration: "Cathédrale," or "Pyramide d'Égypte!"
There were certain minor chartered poseurs in the circle. There was Alfred de Vigny, "before his transfiguration," to whom might be applied Camille Desmoulins's gibe at Saint-Just: "He carries his head as if it were a sacrament." To which Saint-Just replied by the promise, that he kept, to make Camille carry his head after the fashion of Saint-Denis. There was Alfred de Musset, who had been brought first to the cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs by Paul Foucher, his schoolmate and Hugo's brother-in-law. Like his Fantasio, de Musset then "had the May upon his cheeks," and was young and gay and given to laughter; now, old at thirty, he posed as the bored and blasé prey and poet of passion.
Alfred de Musset.
(From the sketch by Louis-Eugène Lami.)
Yet there were others, by way of contrast: Dumas, fresh from his romance-factory, full-blooded, stalwart, sane; Gautier, dropping in from his rooms near by, at No. 8 in the square, ship-shape inside his skull for all its mane of curling locks, and for all his eccentric costume; Barye, coming from his simple old house at No. 4 Quai des Célestins, sitting isolated and silent, dreaming of the superb curves of his bronze creatures; Nodier, escaping from his Librarian's desk in the Arsenal, the flâneur of genius, with no convictions about anything, and with generous friendships for everybody; Delacroix, impetuous chief of the insurgents in painting, most mild-mannered of men, his personal suavity disarming those who were going gunning for him, because of his insurrectionary brush; Mérimée, frock-coated, high-collared, buttoned-up, self-contained, cold and correct, of formal English cut.
Among the guests were occasional irreverent onlookers, not deemed worthy of admission to the inner circle, who sat outside, getting much fun out of its antics. Such a one was Madame Ancelot, whose graphic pen is pointed with her jealousy as a rival lion-hunter, who had outlived her vogue of the early Restoration. Daudet's sketch of her blue-stockinged salon, a faded survival of its splendors under Louis XVIII., is as daintily malicious as is her sketch of Hugo's evenings. Through those evenings, Madame Ancelot says, Madame Hugo reclined on a couch, as if over-wearied by the load of glory she was helping to carry. That lady had one relief in this new home, its doors being shut against the ugly face of Sainte-Beuve, at the urging of the indignant young wife. This happened in 1834, and within a few years Sainte-Beuve gave to the world his "Book of Love," a book of hatred toward Hugo, with its base suggestion of the wife's complaisance for the writer. Him it hurt more than it hurt Hugo. He had taken, and he still keeps, his unassailable place in the affection, as in the admiration, of his countrymen. There can be no need to summon them as witnesses, yet it may be well to quote the words of two foreign fellow-craftsmen.
The Englishman, Swinburne, in his wild and untamed enthusiasm, acclaims Hugo as a healer and a comforter, a redeemer and a prophet; burning with wrath and scorn unquenchable; deriving his light and his heat from love, while terror and pity and eternal fate are his keynotes. No great poet, adds Swinburne, was ever so good, no good man was ever so great. Heine, German by birth, scoffs at Hugo, claiming that his greatest gift was a lack of good taste, a condition so rare in Frenchmen that his compatriots mistook it for genius. He sees merely a studied passion and an artificial flame in Hugo's specious divine fire; and the product is nothing but "fried ice." And Heine sums him up: "Hugo was more than an egoist, he was a Hugoist."
Charles Dickens describes Madame Hugo as "a little, sallow lady, with dark, flashing eyes." Making the round of Paris with John Forster, in the winter of 1846-47, they came to this "noble corner house in the Place Royale." They were struck by its painted ceilings and wonderful carvings, the old-gold furniture and superb tapestries; and, more than all, by a canopy of state out of some palace of the Middle Ages. It is worthy of note here that Hugo was almost the first man of his period—a deplorable period for taste in all lands—to value and collect antiques of all sorts. They were a fit setting for these rooms, and for the youth and loveliness that crowded them, up to the open windows on the old square. The young smokers among the men were driven forth to stroll under its arcades, recalling the strollers of Corneille's and Molière's time, albeit these were painfully ignorant of tobacco bliss, so loud were the papal thunders against its temptations then.
Dickens and Forster found Hugo the best thing in that house, and the latter records the sober grace and self-possessed, quiet gravity of the man, recently ennobled by Louis-Philippe, but whose nature was already written noble. "Rather under the middle size, of compact, close buttoned-up figure, with ample dark hair falling loosely over his close-shaven face. I never saw upon any features, so keenly intellectual, such a soft and sweet gentility, and certainly never heard the French language spoken with the picturesque distinctness given it by Victor Hugo."