After the long, slow journey through Paris in the sunshine, they reached the cemetery of Saint Mandé. Near the tomb of the poet’s friend, Armand Carel, a freshly dug grave yawned, gloomy and covetous. There was some singing, some blessing, the turmoil of a congested crowd; then they separated, but not without a renewal of Pradier’s promise.

Eight years later he died himself, without having discharged his “sacred debt.” One more resolve had fizzled out in empty words. Victor Hugo was then living precariously in exile, but as soon as he heard of the sculptor’s end, he wrote off and ordered a decent headstone for Claire, and directed that the grave should be sown with green grass. Upon the tomb were carved four of the lines he had erstwhile written for Juliette’s consolation, and he set about composing others. Thus it came about that, to the very last, Claire Pradier was protected by the father of Léopoldine against two of the fears that had most alarmed her youthful imagination, “a neglected grave in some distant cemetery, and a faded memory in the hearts of men.”

CHAPTER VI
“ON AN ISLAND”

I

Juliette relates that when she had occasion to admonish her maid, or find fault with a tradesman during her residence in Jersey and Guernsey, the answer she invariably received was: “It cannot be helped, Madame; we are on an island....”

The phrase tickled her fancy, and she adopted it and made use of it on many occasions.

The reader of the following chapters must likewise accept the axiom that, “on an island,” things are not quite the same as on the mainland; for, only by so doing, will he be enabled to peruse without undue astonishment the extraordinary narration of the life led in common by Victor Hugo, his wife, sons, friends, and mistress, between 1851 and 1872.

Its beginning dates from the poet’s sojourn in Belgium without Madame Victor Hugo, at the beginning of his exile[44]; that is to say, in the last weeks of the year 1851 and the first half of 1852. Not that his precarious circumstances and prudent, somewhat middle-class habits, permitted him to house Juliette under his own roof: indeed, their liaison was never more secret. But, at Brussels, the problem of the relations henceforth to exist between the sons of Victor Hugo and she whom they already called “our friend, Madame Drouet,” first came up for solution. It was at Brussels also, that Juliette set herself to simplify it, if not settle it, by her devotion, unselfishness, and unremitting attentions.

At his first arrival on December 14th the poet had taken rooms at the Hôtel de la Porte Verte in the narrow street of the same name. He remained there barely three weeks, and on January 5th, 1852, took a small room on the first floor of No. 27, Grand’ Place. It was “furnished with a black horsehair couch, convertible into a bed, a round table, which served indifferently for work and for relaxation, and an old mirror, over the chimney which contained the pipe of the stove.”[45]

Juliette never went there, but we learn from the poet’s complaints to her, that the couch was too short for a man, the mattresses hard, and offensive to the olfactory nerve, and that sleep was difficult to obtain, on account of the noises in the street. But with the first streak of dawn outside the lofty window, the “great façade of the Hôtel de Ville entered the tiny chamber and took superb possession of it”[46]; the atmosphere became impregnated with art and history. The poet’s fine imagination and ardour for work did the rest. Hence the tone of his letters to his wife, who had remained behind in France, was almost joyous. It was full of masculine courage. Hence, also, that air of “simple dignity and calm resignation,” which characterised his bearing in exile, “adding to his inherent nobility and charm,” and drawing from Juliette the enthusiastic exclamation: “Would that I were you, that I might praise you as you deserve!”[47]