VICTOR HUGO—Matthew Josephson—Doubleday, Doran ($3.50).
With this book Matthew Josephson fills a gaping hole in U.S. biographical writing (hitherto there has been no good life of Victor Hugo) and adds another superb study to his series of great French literary figures (Zola and His Time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau). In the U.S. the great champions of democracy have always been practical politicians. In France they have usually been literati.
Between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Emile Zola, there were no writers so influential as Victor Hugo. The last half of his life (he lived to be 83) was a long battle of books for the ideals of justice and humanity that have come to be called democratic. In his youth, however, literature was his chief passion. At 28 Hugo started one of the most sensational episodes in French literary history.
Wild Men. One icy night in 1830, Parisians, passing the famed Comédie-Françise, were terrified to see “a band, wild and bizarre, bearded, hairy, dressed in all fashions save the current ones.” The strange creatures were yelling: “We are the Wild Men of art!” “We are the brigands of thought!”
Some of the brigands of thought were led by Poet Théophile Gautier, who wore a scarlet satin vest and green silk trousers. Others wore “red vests like Marat’s and collars like Robespierre’s.” Also present were Authors Balzac and Stendhal, Composer Hector Berlioz. Occasion for this intellectual incursion was the first night of Poet Victor Hugo’s romantic drama Hernani. His young supporters had come (lugging ham, sausage, garlic, wine) to shout for their youthful hero, to see him upset the classical traditions of the French theater and win Round One for the new Romantic Movement.
For the author of Hernani was the leader of the artistic radicals. He was no political radical.
Luckless Lover. Hugo’s father was one of Napoleon’s generals. Victor’s infancy was full of the clash of swords. But the infant Hugo was not impressed by Bonaparte. Under the influence of his strong-willed mother, who despised her warrior husband, Victor became a Royalist. Father Hugo raged. But Mother Hugo got even by letting the little Hugos romp with their “godfather,” her Royalist lover, General La Horie.
Mother Hugo regarded Waterloo as a personal triumph. So did Victor, but he was already engrossed in literary matters. At 14 he had translated much of Virgil, was composing “poems in every form, odes, satires, elegies.” At 15 he carried off one of the French Academy’s poetry prizes against the best poets of France. Secretary of the Academy Raynouard sent him “a few hexameters” of praise. King Louis XVIII gave him a purse of 500 francs. The great author and statesman Chateaubriand called him “the sublime child,” received young Hugo in his bath, read him “huge sections of a poetic tragedy.” (Victor thought it very dull.) At 18 Hugo was famous.
But Mother Hugo dominated Victor so strongly that when he fell in love with Adèle Foucher, his mother refused to allow them to be engaged. Through years of unofficial engagement, Victor poured out his inhibited heart to her in verse. Adele complained that she did not understand poetry. “Your soul understands poetry,” said Hugo. Soon after his mother died, Victor married Adèle. In seven years she bore him five children.
Lucky Lover. With The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo became French writer No. 1, but his home life took a bad turn. Worn out with childbearing, Adèle became languid. Hugo’s best friend, waspish Critic Sainte-Beuve, offered her his sympathy, spread the story that he was her lover. Hugo believed his wife innocent but began to get around a little himself. At the rehearsal of one of his plays he noticed that when Actress Juliette Drouet read the line, “Ah, what is it that fills the whole heart?” she turned “her large dark eyes” on him. Soon Victor called at her apartment.
Juliette’s life had been full of men, adventures, debts. Hugo decided to reform her. He succeeded so well that her black hair turned snow white in a few years. He made her sell her jewels, negligees, robes, put her in a cheap apartment, would not buy enough fuel to heat it. Juliette stayed in bed to keep warm. She said to Hugo: “If you seek warmth in this room you will have to seek it at the bottom of my heart!”
But Hugo adored his prisoner, who wrote, after five years of ruthless domination, “I would not exchange the role you have given me for any riches in the world.”
Passionate Republican. Soon the horrors of Bonapartism seemed about to be vived by the Bourbons: the court censor forbade one of Hugo’s plays. Hugo’s Royalism was replaced by passionate Republicanism. He wrote an ode to the revolutionaries who ousted Charles X (1830). After King Louis-Philippe abdicated (1848), Hugo, now an Academician and ily’s insanity. Bethel was judged insane, sent to a sanitarium for 20 years. At that point Sister Lerryn discovered that poor Bethel was not really a Treveryan after all—just “a child Mama had that had not been Papa’s.” For reasons “we shall never know” Mama had chosen to keep quiet, and to ruin her daughter’s happiness. But to bring up all this now would invalidate the insanity plea and Bethel would hang. So Lerryn kept quiet, went insane herself (“she remembers nothing but is quite happy in her little cell”). Some readers may find this book morbid.
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