Here again, Juliette lived successively at the inn, and at a boarding-house kept by a Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Leboutellier. But when she found that Victor Hugo could no longer content himself with a temporary house, and intended to send for the furniture and art-collection he had stored at the rooms in Paris,[54] she begged him to include her in his plans, and let her have her own things also. She was tired of so-called English comfort, with its hard beds, narrow sheets, straight-backed chairs, and tiny wardrobes.
Victor Hugo gave a generous assent to her request. He took a little house for her, called La Pallue, close to, and overlooking, Hauteville House. The faithful Suzanne was despatched to France to pack and send to Guernsey all the Hugo family’s and Juliette’s possessions. She returned on August 9th. The furniture and art-collection arrived on the 20th of the same month.
A busy time followed, for the lovers. They threw themselves feverishly into the excitements of removal, decoration, and treasure-hunting. Victor Hugo dropped spiritualism and photography, which had been his recreations in Jersey, to become architect, cabinet-maker, and joiner. He undertook the supervision of Juliette’s arrangements as well as his own, bought antique Norman furniture, which he turned to various uses, manufactured carpets and curtains out of Juliette’s old theatre frocks, designed panels and mantelpieces, and the many incongruous articles which now decorate the Musée Victor Hugo, and which his friend aptly called “a poetical pot-pourri of art.”
In this wise, the fitting up of the two houses lasted over a considerable period. We learn from Juliette that the poet was still busy with his dining-room on April 2nd, 1857, and on May 28th, 1858, he wrote to Georges Sand: “My house is still only a shell. The worthy Guernseyites have taken possession of it, and, assuming that I am a rich man, are making the most of the French gentleman, and spinning out the work.”
Juliette, whose dwelling was more modest, had the enjoyment of it sooner. She settled into La Pallue at the beginning of November 1856, and had the happiness henceforth of seeing her friend many times a day. He had constructed on the roof of Hauteville House a room that he somewhat pretentiously named his “crystal drawing-room,” and that we should call a belvedere; it was roofed and covered in with glass on all sides. His bedroom opened out of it.
Every morning he sat and worked there, at a flap-table affixed to the wall, when the cold did not drive him to some warmer part of the house. Beneath his gaze spread the low town, the port, the group of Anglo-Norman islands, and, in clear weather, the coast of Cotentin. At his back, and slightly higher up, Juliette, from her little house, kept watch and ward over him. From that moment it may be said that, though Juliette’s body was at La Pallue, her heart and mind inhabited Hauteville House.
Unfortunately, as winter progressed, the storms grew worse, and a darkness reigned that made reading and copying difficult. “Like a great lake turned upside down,” the sky hung lowering above the gloomy houses, and only allowed the pale rays of a leaden sun to pierce through it, at infrequent intervals. The rest of the time the atmosphere remained charged with rheumatic-dealing clamminess.
