Creators (22 page)

At age twenty he married a childhood friend, Adèle Foucher, in a spirit of Catholic sacramentalism. Both were virgins, and he insisted that she preserve the strictest modesty, rebuking her for lifting her dress when she crossed a muddy street and so exposing her ankle. The same year as his marriage (1822), he published his first volume of poetry, receiving a donation from the king, Louis XVIII, of 500 francs from the privy purse. The next year Hugo’s first novel,
Han d’Islande
, was again rewarded with a royal bounty, a regular pension; it also got Hugo invited to the gatherings that Charles Nodier, the protoromantic novelist, held at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, where he was librarian—the first
cénacle
(coterie) of the romantic movement. Within two years, however, Hugo set up a
cénacle
of his own, taking most of the young writers with him. Then followed a cunning period of backing both sides. Still a royalist, and a sufficiently vocal one to be invited to the coronation of Charles X—and to write a poem about the royal birth describing the baby as a “royal like Jésu” and “a sublime infant” (another!)—he was also working up a band of his own followers to assist him to the center of events. His play
Cromwell
(1827) struck an ominous note for the Bourbons, for it was ambivalent about the choice between monarchy and republic. The preface he wrote to this drama is a kind of political manifesto, but about what? That is hard to say. It has the air of a mystery or a vacuity. Charles X offered to increase his pension. Hugo let it be known he had turned the offer down. But he kept the original pension, an early example of what became a habit—having it both ways. By 1830 he had a sufficiently large and fanatical band of followers to arrange a bellicose demonstration in his favor at the opening night of his play
Hernani
at the Comèdie Française. This was the official, historic triumph of the
romantics, led by Hugo, over the classicists. His 300 warriors were dispersed strategically throughout the theater and carefully trained and rehearsed. In the riot that ensued, several classicists were badly beaten up and the rest fled, leaving romanticism triumphant. It was a characteristic operation by Hugo, well planned and carried through with brio—he was not a general’s son for nothing—but the fruit of cunning, not intelligence, let alone idealism.

The first night of
Hernani
is usually presented as the dramatic prelude to the overthrow of the Bourbons later in the year. This overthrow, though foreseeable—the winter was exceptionally bad, and there were many hungry—came as a surprise to Hugo, who after a week of bewildered hesitation dropped all his links with the Bourbons and proclaimed himself a republican. The triumph of the duc d’Orléans—who was elected not “king of France” but “king of the French,” dropped the fleur-de-lis and took up the republican tricolor, with an Orléanist coat of arms on it (another example of having it both ways)—likewise surprised Hugo, though he was quick to endorse the new “popular monarchy.” In return, King Louis-Philippe made him a “peer of France,” with all the special privileges attached to the title, including a seat in the upper house of parliament. This proved convenient, as we shall see. Hugo’s relations with the kindhearted pear-shaped monarch were good, and on one occasion a tête-à-tête conversation they had at the Tuileries Palace prolonged itself so late into the night that the servants, thinking everyone was in bed, extinguished the lights, and the king had to find and light a candle, then unlock the street door and let Hugo out.

Hugo always supported the state, and its grandeur, when it was advantageous to himself. Having originally upheld the strictest rules of French prosody and vocabulary, insisting that literary discipline was of the essence of French culture, he then broke them at will, especially in his verse. He invented new rhythms. He manipulated the alexandrine in the most audacious way. He used cunning, hitherto forbidden
enjambements
, carrying one line on to another. His placing of the caesura was idiosyncratic, and his use of the French silent
e
arbitrary. But all these devices were adopted or exploited by young poets, and Hugo’s poetic revolution quickly
became orthodox or standard. In prose he used “natural” speech and plebeian words, and described situations and events hitherto beneath the notice of literature. He also bared his soul and made huge use of
moi
and
moi-même.
Coleridge and Wordsworth had done much the same a generation before (
Lyrical Ballads
had been published in 1798), in England, and Wordsworth had made a literary virtue of self-centeredness. But these things were new in France, and seemed fresh and exciting. Together with his literary antinomianism, they made Hugo a hero to educated youth.

At the same time, to counter charges that he was assaulting the temple of French culture, and importing destructive foreign practices, Hugo always took care to beat the patriotic drum and sound the French cultural trumpet at the charge. In 1840, on the tenth anniversary of the revolution of 1830, the choirs from the Paris opera sang a poem by Hugo during the celebrations in the Place de la Bastille:

And much else in the same vein.

Two years later Hugo published his travel book
Le Rhin
, whose theme was: “Give back to France what God gave her”—the Rhine frontier. The book presents France and Germany as the essence of Europe: “Germany is the heart, France the head.” If the two powers act together, with France doing the directing, they can beat Britain and Russia out of Europe. But the “Rhine frontier” was the essential preliminary to this alliance of head and heart. Hugo said it would be democratic, too: the Rhinelanders, although German-speaking, wanted to live under “the finest, the most noble, the most popular flag in the world, the
Tricouleur.”
They would soon adopt French, the true language of culture, the speaking mind—a theme he reiterated throughout his career. Thus: “How does one recognize intelligence in a nation? By its ability to speak French.”
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Hugo always, and often, presented France as a nation that had the destiny of ruling others. It was
une nation conquérante
.
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In a poem written in 1830 he presents Paris as the “mother city of Europe,” a “spider in whose huge web entire nations are caught.”
⁷
He presented
French nationalism, of the strident kind Napoleon Bonaparte had personified, as an unmixed boon to the world.
⁸
What he did not see was that nationalism inevitably spread to other countries, such as Italy and Germany, and as such worked to France’s disadvantage. In the nineteenth century, the populations of both a united Germany and a united Italy each grew by 250 percent, whereas France grew by a mere 45 percent. But even in 1871, when the disastrous consequences of France’s ignition of the nationalist bonfire were apparent, and France’s own relative weakness was fully revealed, Hugo continued to pour forth nationalist froth. He told the National Assembly, of which he was a member, when it debated the peace terms laid down by the victorious Bismarck, that the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine would “soon be recaptured,” adding, in a loud voice: “Is that all? No. France will again seize Trèves, Mainz, Coblenz, Cologne—the entire left bank of the Rhine!” This empty bombast was received in embarrassed silence.
⁹
Hugo’s views on politics and international affairs appear here and there in his writings, often at considerable length. But it is impossible to point to any passages that show unusual knowledge, genuine insight, or even routine intelligence. All are vacuous expressions of popular platitudes—the republic, the people, France, destiny, and so forth. There is no evidence that Hugo ever thought deeply about these issues.

Indeed, had he thought deeply, he would have become uncomfortably aware of the logical insecurity of his own position. He was both the beneficiary and the victim of his own double standard. In youth a legitimist, he became a republican in 1830, briefly, then an Orléanist; but when Napoleon’s ashes were returned to France, all the veterans of the wars turned out in the streets of Paris, and Hugo wrote, in
Retour des Cendres,
“It was as if the whole of Paris formed to one side of the city, like liquid in a vase that was being tilted.” He became so excited that he found himself, without any rational process of thought, a Bonapartist, before reverting to Orléanism, which suited his personal convenience. With the revolution of 1848, which took him completely by surprise, he found himself a republican again. He wrote in exultation: “Paris is the present capital of the civilized world…. It is the thinkers of Paris who prepare the way for great things,
and for the workers of Paris who carry them out.” Three days later, on 23 June 1848, those same workers sacked and burned Hugo’s house in what is now the Place des Vosges, understandably placing him in the ranks of the existing regime, since he was a member of the House of Peers in the parliament.
¹⁰

This confusion on the part of the revolutionaries was the inevitable result of Hugo’s trying to have things both ways, to be both a man of the people and a peer of the Orléanist realm. This led to a ludicrous incident in 1845, which in various respects was characteristic of Hugo’s entire life, public and private. From being puritanical as a young man, he had graduated to promiscuous bohemianism by 1830. He had a regular mistress—Juliette Druet, an actress—and was involved in many other affairs, usually casual, with chambermaids and their kind. In 1844 he began an affair with Léonie Biard, the discontented wife of a mediocre painter, Auguste Biard, who was her senior by twenty years. She was in the process of obtaining a legal separation when she met Hugo. Léonie was only four years older than Hugo’s daughter Léopoldine. When she became his mistress, he began to write her frequent love letters. She loved them. What she did not know was that many of the most ardent passages in them were copied from love letters Hugo had written to Juliette, and from Juliette to him (he also used bits in his novels).
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He also wrote for Madame Biard eleven poems about sexual love, again much cannibalized from other poems. It is worth noting that Hugo’s love letters, whether original or derivative (and many hundreds survive), always follow a pattern, as Verlaine sharply noted. “I like you. You yield to me. I love you. You resist me. Push off.” They were, said Verlaine, “the joy of the cock and then its full-throated cry.”
¹²
Hugo found a love nest for his meetings with Léonie in the discreet Passage Saint-Roch, off the Rue Saint-Honoré. What he did not know was that Léonie’s husband was having her followed. On 4 July 1845, Hugo (under the name of “Monsieur Apollo”) and Léonie, both naked, were wakened up in bed by two police detectives. For a married woman to engage in “criminal conversation” was a serious offense, and Léonie, caught in the act, was hauled off immediately to the women’s prison at Saint-Lazare, where prostitutes and adulteresses were incarcerated. She
served six months. Hugo, on the other hand, produced a gold medal, which he wore on a chain around his neck at all times, certifying that he was a peer of France, immune to arrest on such matters except by command of the House of Peers. He was accordingly released and returned at four in the morning to his house, where he woke up his wife and confessed. She, interestingly enough, was not disturbed to find that Juliette, whom she hated, had a rival. On the contrary she took Léonie under her wing, visited her in prison, gave her refuge when she was released, allowed Hugo to resume his affair with her, and took good care to let Juliette know all about it. Hugo, meanwhile, outraged at this display of French justice, of which he felt himself to be the victim (he was not much concerned about Léonie’s sufferings), began work on
Les Misérables
, his great fictional epic about the workings of the law. Hugo did not get away with this episode completely, however. Though the scandal was not reported in the censored Parisian press, word of it got around. It brought the system of aristocratic privilege into disrepute, and the king was very angry. The husband, who might have gone public about his wife and Hugo, was bought off by being given a commission to do some wall painting at Versailles. The king also authorized Léonie’s transfer from prison to the Convent of Dames de Sainte-Michèle, fearing that she, too, might publicly complain about the inequality of treatment. At the convent, Léonie helped the nuns to make a selection of Victor Hugo’s poems for the edification of teenage schoolgirls, before moving into Hugo’s home under Adèle’s supervision. It was Hugo who eventually threw her out, complaining to Adèle: “Must you always boss me about? Cannot you even allow me to choose my own mistress?” The episode cast Hugo in a comic and disreputable light, and he never quite got over it. Balzac, in his
Cousine Bette
, written the next year (1846), made fun of Hugo’s arrest and the circumstances, and other writers continued to make covert allusions to it. Mallarmé claimed to have been born in the house where Hugo was arrested.

All the same, Hugo’s embarrassment did not last long, even if it may have played a part in the sacking of his house. He continued to have affairs, to seduce servants whenever possible, and to frequent prostitutes for the rest of his long life. His diaries con
tain a symbol for copulation, which appears eight times in the spring of 1885. The final one is on 5 April, thirty-eight days after his eighty-third birthday, and six weeks before his death on 22 May 1885. When I was a young man living in Paris in the early 1950s, I was given an unforgettable picture of the elderly Hugo’s sexuality by an old society gentleman who, as a small boy, had been a visitor at a château, along with Hugo, in 1884. In those days, children and women servants had rooms on the attic floor, which was uncarpeted and spartan (the male servants slept in the basement). He said he got up very early one summer morning, being bored, and went out into the corridor, the unvarnished boards under his feet, the strong sunlight slanting through the windows at a low angle, picking out the motes of dust. He was, perhaps, four. Suddenly an old man hove into sight, striding purposefully along, white-bearded, eyes penetrating and fierce, wearing a nightshirt. The boy did not know at the time, but surmised later, thinking of the episode, that Victor Hugo had risen early too, having noted a pretty serving girl handing plates at dinner the night before; had, possibly, made an assignation with her; and anyway was now in search of her bedroom. The old man, whom the boy thought was possibly God, paused in his stride, seized the boy’s hand, and, lifting his nightshirt, placed the hand on his large, rampant member and said: “Tiens, mon petit. Il parait que c’est très rare à mon age. Alors, en temps d’avenir tu auras le droit à dire à tes petits-enfants, que tu a tenu en ton p’tit main,
le machin de Victor Hugo, poète
!” Then he lowered his nightshirt and strode off down the corridor, in search of his prey.
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