Not that Adèle Foucher remained the central female figure in Hugo's life during all the years when he was singing of his home. Feuilles d'Automne is the last collection of his poems in which he could truthfully write of the happiness he found there. In 1833, during the rehearsals of his Lucrèce Borgia, he became intimate with the young and beautiful, though talentless, actress, Juliette Drouet (her real name was Julienne Gauvain), whom he had chosen to play the very small part of the Princess Negroni. This lady's contemporaries write with enthusiasm of her beauty, which is said to have combined the purity of outline of the Greek statue with the poetic expression which we attribute to Shakespeare's heroines. In Hugo's tragedy she had only two words to say, merely walked across the stage; yet Théophile Gautier, after describing her lovely dress, writes thus of her performance: "She resembled a lizard that had erected itself on its tail, so wavy, supple, and serpentlike was her carriage. And with all her charm, how skilfully she managed to insinuate something poisonous into her words! With what mocking and perturbing agility did she avoid the attentions of the handsome Venetian noblemen!"
Juliette Drouet's profile was antique, and she had a profusion of beautiful hair. Pradier, the sculptor, has immortalised her in the statue of the city of Lille in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.
When Hugo made her acquaintance he was thirty-one and she twenty-seven; and their connection lasted until her death, that is, for nearly fifty years. After 1833 she accompanied him on his travels, and both during and after his exile "Madame Juliette Drouet" lived in his house.
His wife, between whom and Sainte-Beuve there was soon a liaison which the latter's literary indiscretions made unnecessarily public, seems as long as she lived to have borne patiently with Hugo's inconstancy; and Hugo's letters show that he, in his turn, showed both dignity and great delicacy of feeling in the way in which he received Sainte-Beuve's intimation of his passion for Madame Hugo.
In his poetry, at least, Hugo remained united by the tenderest of ties to his home.
It is in the Chants du Crépuscule which were published in 1835, consequently long after he and Juliette Drouet had become closely connected, that (in the poem "Date lilia!") he writes of his wife as the being to whom he says: Toujours! and who answers: Partout!
And it is in this same poem that we have the perfectly charming picture of the young mother followed by her four children, the youngest of whom still walks with tottering steps:
"Oh! si vous rencontrez quelque part sous les cieux
Une femme au front pur, au pas grave, aux doux yeux,
Que suivent quatre enfants dont le dernier chancelle,
Les surveillant bien tous, et, s'il passe auprès d'elle
Quelque aveugle indigent que l'âge appesantit,
Mettant une humble aumône aux mains du plus petit;
Si, quand la diatribe autour d'un nom s'élance,
Vous voyez une femme écouter en silence,
Et douter, puis vous dire: Attendons pour juger.
Quel est celui de nous qu'on ne pourrait charger?
On est prompt à ternir les choses les plus belles.
La louange est sans pieds et le blâme a des ailes.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Si, loin des feux, des voix, des bruits et des splendeurs,
Dans un repli perdu parmi les profondeurs,
Sur quatre jeunes fronts groupés près du mur sombre,
Vous voyez se pencher un regard voilé d'ombre
Où se mêle, plus doux encor que solennel,
Le rayon virginal au rayon maternel;
Oh! qui que vous soyez, bénissez-la. C'est elle!
La sœur, visible aux yeux, de mon âme immortelle!
Mon orgueuil, mon espoir, mon abri, mon recours!
Toit de mes jeunes ans qu'espèrent mes vieux jours!"
And through all these poems there is a twitter and a hum, a sound as of the play of little children and their bird-like cries. The child rushes into the room, and the darkest brow, nay, even the guilty countenance, brightens; it interrupts the most serious converse with its questions, and the talk ends in a smile; it opens its young soul to every impression, and offers a kiss to strangers and to friends.
"Let the children stay! do not drive them from the poet's study; let them laugh and sing and mingle their childish clamour with the chorus of spirit voices whilst he writes and dreams at his desk. Their breath will not disperse the gay bubbles of his dream. Do you think that I fear, when these bright heads pass before my eyes in the midst of my visions of blood and fire, that my verses will take flight like a flock of birds startled by playing children? No, indeed! No image is destroyed by them. The painted, chased flowers of the gay Orientale expand more freely when they are near, the ballad grows more spirited, the winged lines of the ode mount with more ardent aspiration towards heaven."