[10] We heard it from Monsieur Benezit, who was often with Frédérick Lemaître about the year 1872.
[11] Théophile Gautier, Portraits contemporains.
[12] Lucrèce Borgia. First note to the original edition.
[13] She was forty-six and beginning to grow fat. According to Juliette, she told Victor Hugo that his mistress was deceitful, vain, lawless, and a flirt.
[14] V. H. Fleischmann, Une Maîtresse de Victor Hugo, chap. vii.
[15] Nothing remains of it now, save the name and the site. All the rest, park, garden, and dwelling, has been completely altered.
[16] In 1877 Madame Drouet, although seventy-one years old, insisted upon attending the funeral of Mlle. Louise Bertin. “I wish,” she wrote to Victor Hugo, “to show in this way that I have not forgotten the marks of sympathy she gave you on my account in the early days of our love” (Letter of April 28th, 1877).
[17] This inn still exists, and is not changed in any way. It is exceedingly modest.
[18] It belongs now to Madame Veuve Bigot. On the left exterior wall a Versailles society has thought fit to place an inscription recording that Victor Hugo once inhabited the house. Four lines of La Tristesse d’Olympio follow. It would have been more correct to bracket the name of Juliette Drouet with that of the poet, for after all it was not he who lived there, but she.
[19] Here occurs the only discrepancy between La Tristesse d’Olympio and the letters of Juliette. Victor Hugo writes in 1837: “They have paved this rough, badly-laid road”; whereas Juliette, as early as 1835, calls it the pavement.