The appointment of Victor Hugo to the Pairie appeared in the Moniteur of April 15th, 1845. It must be left to politicians to determine in what degree the presence of “Olympio” could profit the councils of the nation; but to Juliette’s biographer the entry of her lover into the Luxembourg seems a felicitous event. From that moment, in fact, the young woman ceased to be cloistered. Busier than ever, and perhaps less jealous, the poet permitted his mistress to accompany him to the Luxembourg and to return alone to the Marais. At first Juliette hardly knew how to take this unfamiliar freedom. With her lover absent, she had grown accustomed to semi-obscurity. The blatant sunshine seemed to mock her loneliness. She writes: “Nobody can feel sadder than I do, when I trudge through the streets alone. I have not done such a thing for twelve years, and I ask myself what it may portend. Is it a mark of your confidence or of your indifference? Perhaps both. In any case, I am far from content.”
Gradually, however, she fell into the new ways. She used to walk back from the Luxembourg by way of the Pont-Neuf and the Quais. She amused herself by trying to trace the footsteps of Victor Hugo and fit her own little shoes into them. When she reached home, she immersed herself deeper than ever in the preoccupations of her lover.
Occasionally, fortunately, she had a reaction. She read little: the letters of Madame de Sévigné, perhaps, or those of Mlle. de Lespinasse. She tended her flowers; for Victor Hugo had made her remove from No. 14 to No. 12 Rue St. Anastase, where her ground-floor rooms opened on to a garden.[33] There, in a space of sixty square feet, she had four bushes of crimson roses, and a few dozen prolific strawberry-plants, destined to furnish the poet’s favourite dessert, throughout the summer. She attended to all the most trivial details in person, making them all subservient to her love.
In this wise—with the exception of a few bouts of jealousy of which we shall have occasion to speak later, Juliette’s days flowed almost happily. She no longer brooded over her past; redemption through love seemed to her an accomplished fact. When she turned to the future, it was with ideas borrowed from Victor Hugo certainly, but none the less consoling, since they authorised her to hope for the eternal reunion of souls beyond the confines of this earth. On December 31st, 1842, the poet had dedicated some delicate verses to her, which she learned by heart. They were part of a creed by which Juliette hoped to fortify her soul against the arrows of fortune—hopes fallacious in the event. First death, then treachery, were about to rend her faithful heart as a child’s toy is smashed.
CHAPTER V
CLAIRE PRADIER
ABOUT the year 1844, when Victor Hugo visited his friend on Sundays and holidays, he used to find seated at his private table, in accordance with his own permission, a tall girl of eighteen, very fair, very pale, with very black eyes—two prunes, as he said, dropped in a saucer of milk. Often she did not hear him enter. Bending her willowy neck and undeveloped bust over her books, she was immersed in study, perhaps also in rêverie. Sometimes he kissed her affectionately, at other times bowed formally. The lowly assistant-mistress of a suburban school, marvelling at the great man’s condescension, would rise blushing, and submit her pale brow to his lips. She would then ask permission to return to her task: the examinations were near at hand, and, as she was going in for a diploma, she must work.
Sometimes Victor Hugo smilingly took up the books scattered on the table, weighed the value of each with a glance, then, pushing them all aside with the back of his hand, sat down, saying: “Now then, Claire, I will be your tutor to-day,” and the lesson began, vivid, enthusiastic, brilliant as a poem.
The reader would be justly disappointed if we failed to relate the story of the girl to whom this “magician of words” thus unveiled the beauties of the French language. Besides, a deeper acquaintance with the daughter may lead to a better understanding of the mother; therefore, we append a short sketch of Claire Pradier.
I
She was born in Paris in 1826. Her father, the sculptor, undertook the care of her early childhood, while her mother, as we have learnt, was in Germany and Belgium. He put her out to nurse at Vert, near Mantes, with a married couple named Dupuis, and sometimes combined a visit to her with a little sport, in the shooting season.