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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.