VICTOR HUGO never succeeded in making Juliette adopt his conception of love. He craved something calm, placid, regular as a time-table in its manifestations; but she was wont to object: “Such a love would soon cease to exist. A fire that no longer blazes is quickly smothered in ashes. Only a love that scorches and dazzles is worthy of the name. Mine is like that.”
And indeed it would not be easy to name an object that this woman did not cast into the crucible of her passion between the years 1834 and 1851. Everything was sacrificed—comfort, vanity, renown, talent, liberty. Then she turned to her poet. She adopted his tastes, his ambitions, his dreams for the future; she shared his joys and sorrows; she exaggerated his qualities, and sometimes even his faults. She lived only in him and for him.
We are about to witness a completeness of self-abnegation that raises Juliette Drouet almost to the level of the mystics of old; afterwards we shall scrutinise one by one the details of the cult she rendered to Victor Hugo.
I
After selling the bulk of her furniture and quitting the luxurious apartment she occupied at 35, Rue de l’Échiquier, Juliette, it will be remembered, had settled down in a tiny lodging costing 400 frs. a year, at 4, Rue de Paradis au Marais. She and Victor Hugo determined to live there together, poor in purse, but rich in love and poetry.[24] The said love and poetry must indeed have filled their horizon, for they have left no account whatsoever of that first nesting-place.
On March 8th, 1836, Juliette removed again to a somewhat more commodious apartment: 14, Rue St. Anastase, at 800 frs. a year. It comprised a drawing-room, dining-room, one bedroom, a kitchen, and an attic in which her servant slept. This district has fallen into decay, and is now dull and dreary. In those days it was chiefly occupied by the convent of the Hospitaliers St. Anastase, whence the street took its name, and a few houses more or less enclosed by gardens. The convent and gardens endowed it with a provincial tranquillity and an impenetrable silence which occasionally weighed upon Juliette’s spirits.
Her mode of life was not calculated to enliven her. A degree of poverty bordering on squalor simplified its details. Little or no fire: Juliette sometimes even lacks the logs she is by way of providing for herself. Then she spends the morning in bed, reading, planning, day-dreaming. She keeps careful accounts of her receipts and expenditure—accounts which Victor Hugo afterwards audits most minutely. When she rises, the cold does not prevent her from writing cheerfully, “If you seek warmth in this room you will have to seek it at the bottom of my heart.”
All luxuries in the way of food were reserved, as in duty bound, for the suppers the master honoured with his presence after the theatre. The rest of the time Juliette ate frugally, breakfasting on eggs and milk, dining on bread and cheese and an apple. When her daughter visited her she treated her to an orange cut into slices and sprinkled with a pennyworth of sugar and a pennyworth of brandy. The same simplicity reigned on high-days and holidays.
Juliette also denied herself useless fripperies and reduced to the strictest limits the expenses of her wardrobe. Everything she was able to make or mend, she made and mended, and it gratified her to compute the money she saved thus in dressmakers. The rest she bought very cheaply or did without. In the month of August 1838, when she was about to start on a journey with Victor Hugo, she found herself in need of shoes, a dress, and a country hat. She bought the shoes, manufactured the dress, and had intended to borrow the hat from Madame Kraft; but this lady, who held some minor post at the Comédie Française, only wore feathered hats, so Juliette curses the extravagance that places her in an awkward predicament. A little later, on May 7th, 1839, she wanted to furbish up her mantle with ribbon velvet at 5d. a yard; but she found that she could not do with less than eight yards and a half. She bemoans her extravagance, saying, “Why, oh, why have I let myself in for this!”
In studying Juliette’s financial position one wonders that so much privation should be necessary, for, from the very beginning, Victor Hugo allowed her 600 or 700 frs. a month. He afterwards increased this sum to 800, and finally to 1,000 frs. in 1838, when he began to get better terms from publishers and theatre-managers. Surely such a sum should provide ordinary comforts—there should be no suggestion of squalid poverty?