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VICTOR HUGO never succeeded in making Juliette adopt his conception of love. He craved something calm, placid, regular as a time-table in its manifestations; but she was wont to object: “Such a love would soon cease to exist. A fire that no longer blazes is quickly smothered in ashes. Only a love that scorches and dazzles is worthy of the name. Mine is like that.”

And indeed it would not be easy to name an object that this woman did not cast into the crucible of her passion between the years 1834 and 1851. Everything was sacrificed—comfort, vanity, renown, talent, liberty. Then she turned to her poet. She adopted his tastes, his ambitions, his dreams for the future; she shared his joys and sorrows; she exaggerated his qualities, and sometimes even his faults. She lived only in him and for him.

We are about to witness a completeness of self-abnegation that raises Juliette Drouet almost to the level of the mystics of old; afterwards we shall scrutinise one by one the details of the cult she rendered to Victor Hugo.