For the chestnut-tree served them as a letter-box as well as a shelter. According to an arrangement between them, the first thing they did on arrival was to deposit within its friendly shade everything they had written in the course of the preceding day for, or about, one another. On Juliette’s part, especially, the letters became more and more numerous: two, four, sometimes six per day. She no longer wrote, as at first, to expatiate upon her passion or assure the poet that she loved him with real love, or to relieve boredom and make the hours of her solitude pass more quickly. She wrote because Victor Hugo, who had formerly been indifferent to her “scribbles,” now exacted them as a daily tribute, and reproached her if they were too brief or not numerous enough. This jealous lover had discovered the advantages of a pretty woman’s mania for writing. When thus occupied, he reflected, she is contented. He also found that her letters were full of enthusiasm, humour, feeling, fun, and poetry, and he therefore desired that they should be preserved; one day, when Juliette had thrown a packet of them into the fire in a fit of temper, he made her write them all over again. Juliette might protest prettily, entrench herself behind her ignorance, and allege her want of intelligence; but the more she pleaded that she knew not how to write, the more her lover insisted upon her doing so. No one has ever carried to greater lengths that form of affectation which consists in vilifying oneself in order to gain praise. Having thus placed herself, as far as her style is concerned, in the kneeling position she prefers, Juliette remains there. It is at Les Metz that her letters commenced to be a hymn of praise in honour of her divinity. Adoration and excessive adulation are their basis; for form and imagery, Juliette does not hesitate to borrow from the sacred writings she had studied at the Convent of Petit-Picpus. Sooth to say, this mixture of religiosity and passion presents an aspect both disproportionate and pathetic. When love raises itself—or degrades itself—to this almost mystical adoration, one cannot be surprised if it ends by believing in its own virtue. Having adopted the forms of religion, it insensibly acquires its importance and dignity; it ennobles itself.
We do not possess Victor Hugo’s answers, but partly from the note-books in which his lady-love punctiliously copied and dated the poems addressed to her, and partly from the dates inscribed at the bottom of each page in the collected works of the poet, we know which of his verses were composed during his sojourn at Les Metz. It is not too much to say that the author of Feuilles d’Automne was never more happily inspired. Nowhere did he more closely approach the classical model he had chosen at that time, the gentle Virgil.
The lovers returned to Les Metz twice: once in October 1837 for a few days, and again, for a day, on September 26th, 1845. In 1837 it was Victor Hugo who directed the expedition and took the lead. He sought one by one the traces of their amours; his eccentric genius admired nature’s grand indifference, which had failed to preserve them intact for his honour and pleasure, and, deploring this ingratitude concerning outward things, he composed that masterpiece, La Tristesse d’Olympio. He laid it at the feet of Juliette, who accepted it, read and reread it, and learnt it by heart, without criticising it.
In 1845, the pilgrimage was hers; she planned it and begged for it, writing on August 19th: “I have an inexpressible longing to see Les Metz again. We absolutely must go there.”[21]
They did. Early in the month of September Juliette arranged the little journey. Which dress should she wear? The striped organdy one, or the blue tarlatan shot with white, she had worn a few months previously, at the reception of St. Marc Girardin at the Académie Française? She chose the former because her lover preferred it; the same reason determined her to wear a straw hat “trimmed with geraniums above and below the brim.” Thus decked, with cheeks rosier than usual, and eyes glowing, Juliette climbed with her poet into the omnibus from Paris to Sceaux.
Victor Hugo disliked omnibuses, and especially that one. He remembered his many drives in it with his friend Sainte-Beuve, at the time the latter was most assiduous in his visits to Les Roches, and in spite of himself he seemed to see the ghost of Joseph Delorme in the back seat, with his ecclesiastical appearance, and his mania for nestling cosily between two fat people. Silently the poet dwelt upon these memories, while Juliette volubly recalled others. She wondered whether they would find the beggar at the foot of the Bièvres hill, into whose hands she had often emptied her purse, in order that alms should bring them luck, and whether the baker in the Square still made those little tarts her lover used to be so fond of. At last the omnibus deposited them at Bièvres in front of the Chariot d’Or. The striped organdy dress created a great sensation among the village children. Juliette rushed off to the little church; nothing was changed—the same simplicity, the same silence, the same brooding peace as in the old days. The young woman fell on her knees, then, together, the lovers returned to the Chariot d’Or, breakfasted, and started to walk to Les Roches. There again, in Juliette’s opinion, everything was unchanged. To the left, behind tall grasses, the river flowed unseen and unheard. In deference to the needs of man and those of the valley, its course had been diverted, and it now spread itself through meadows and orchards. Its presence could be divined from the abundance of flowers and reeds born of its moisture. When they reached Les Roches, Juliette insisted upon abandoning the valley for the forest. They ascended through Vauboyau to the wood of l’Homme Mort. She walked straight to a chestnut-tree which she said she recognised; then she found a mountain-ash upon whose bark she had once carved their interlaced initials; after that the spring, and the paths. She wished to revisit what she called “the chapels of their love,” to pay at each one a tribute of devotion.[22]
At length they reached Les Metz and the house of the Labussière. Delirious enchantment! Everything was just as she remembered it: the gate, the bell, the kitchen-garden, the mile-stone upon which she used to sit to watch for her lover when the rendezvous was at the cottage; the bed, with its curtains of printed cotton, the rustic wardrobe, the oak table.... “Heaven,” she cried, “has put a seal upon all the treasures of love we buried here! It has preserved them for us,” and she longed to take possession of them all and carry them away with her.[23]
How charming Juliette is at this moment, and how superior to Olympio! How preferable is her enthusiasm, with its power of bringing back to life the dead past, to the melancholy which disparages and kills! One sole interest animates her. Her instinct is creative, for where the poet sees death she perceives life. The roses he thought faded and scattered, she admires in full bloom; she can still breathe their perfume. From the dust and ashes he has tasted and bewailed, she draws the savour of honey. In this instance, surely, her love does not merely aspire to sit on the heights with the poet’s genius, as she claimed—it soars far beyond it.