Months passed; delicate circumstances obliged her to relinquish her plan of appearing at the Théâtre Français.[27] She was on the verge of despair when, one evening in the spring of 1838, her lover brought her a new play he wished to read to her, according to his invariable custom. It was Ruy Blas. She at once claimed the part of Marie de Neubourg, and fell in love with the melancholy little queen who was hampered and hemmed in by the trammels of étiquette, as she herself was imprisoned within the limits of her icy apartment in the Rue St. Anastase. Victor Hugo asked for nothing better. He intended Ruy Blas for the Théâtre de la Renaissance, which was under the management of his friend, Anténor Joly. He requested the worthy fellow to engage Juliette, and the agreement was signed early in May.
We can picture the delight with which Juliette set about copying the play; nevertheless, she was assailed by melancholy fears: “I shall never play the queen,” she wrote; “I am too unlucky. The thing I desire most on earth is not destined to be realised.” And it is a fact that the part was taken from her almost as soon as it was given.
After 1839 her longing to go back to the stage calmed down gradually. At the end of that year it had completely faded. Her love’s tranquillity was greatly increased thereby, while she was driven to immerse herself still more completely in her amorous solitude and the disadvantages pertaining thereto.
For, in the same degree that he deprecated her being seen on the stage, Victor Hugo detested the thought of her going out alone, and he had managed to extract a promise from her that she would never make one step outside the house without him. She was, therefore, practically as much a prisoner as any châtelaine of the Middle Ages, or heroine of some of the sombre dramas she had formerly played. She had not even permission to go and see her daughter at school at St. Mandé, and, rather than trust her by herself, the poet would escort her to the dressmaker and milliner, or on her visits to the uncle whose name she bore, and who lay dying at the Invalides, to the money-lender’s, and curiosity-shop, and even the ironmonger’s!
When Victor Hugo thus lent himself to her needs, all went well, and Juliette, proud and happy, arm in arm with her “dear little man,” chattered away blithely. But a time came when the lover, monopolised by other cares, perhaps by other intrigues, was no longer so assiduous. Then the mistress protested and rebelled, with the fierce rage of a prisoned beast of the forest, bruising itself against the bars of its cage, in its agony for freedom.
Victor Hugo met her remonstrances with gentle reasoning and persuasive exhortations. However far Juliette went in her transports of anger, he was always able to pacify her. On September 27th, 1836, at the end of a long period during which the poet had not been able to give his friend even what she called the “joies du préau"—that is to say, a walk round the Boulevards—Juliette threatens to break out. For several weeks she has been attributing the sickness and headaches she constantly suffers from, to her sedentary life. Losing all patience, she addresses an ultimatum to him, proposing an assignation in a cab on the Boulevard du Temple. He does not appear. For three hours she waits inside the vehicle, then, in the certainty that he has failed her, she writes a letter in pencil, dated from the cab, No. 556, stating her intention to fetch her daughter and go off somewhere, anywhere, alone with her. “Thus,” she writes, “I shall free myself for ever from a slavery which satisfies neither my heart nor my mind, and does not secure the repose of either of us.”
However, the next day she did not start. She did not go out at all. She had resumed her chains and her prison garb. Her anger always evaporated thus, and turned to melancholy and resigned gentleness. In the end she came to feel that nothing existed for her, save a lover who sometimes came and sometimes stayed away. If he was present, she was alive; if absent, her mainspring was broken.
But Victor Hugo continued to lead an ordinary life, while his mistress spent her days in the confinement of a cloister. It was probably about this time that Juliette resolved to set up in that cloister an altar for the cult of her lover. Finding herself impotent to attract and keep him by the sole charm of passion, she endeavoured to win him over by devotion, minute attentions, tender interest in everything he undertook, and by unbridled adoration of his person and work.
II
According to Juliette, who secured several stolen meetings in the poet’s own house,[28] Victor Hugo suffered from a complete absence of the most ordinary comfort at home. His lamps smoked, as did his chimney on the rare occasions when a fire was lighted; he worked in a “horrible little ice-house,” with insufficient light and a half-empty inkstand; his bed was wretched, the mattress stuffed with what he termed nail-heads; when he dressed he found his shirts button-less and his coats unbrushed—as for his shoes, Juliette was ashamed of their condition. We learn from Théophile Gautier that the author of Hernani was a hearty eater, but that his meals were served up in confusion: cutlets with beans in oil, beef and tomato sauce with an omelette, ham with coffee, vinegar, mustard, and a piece of cheese. He made short work of this extraordinary mixture, and no doubt was often reminded of a line his mistress had once written to him on the subject: “When I think of what you are and what you do, and of the discomfort in which you live, I am filled with admiring pity.”