Читать книгу Juliette Drouet's Love-Letters to Victor Hugo - Louis Guimbaud - Страница 11

After selling the bulk of her furniture and quitting the luxurious apartment she occupied at 35, Rue de l’Échiquier, Juliette, it will be remembered, had settled down in a tiny lodging costing 400 frs. a year, at 4, Rue de Paradis au Marais. She and Victor Hugo determined to live there together, poor in purse, but rich in love and poetry.[24] The said love and poetry must indeed have filled their horizon, for they have left no account whatsoever of that first nesting-place.

On March 8th, 1836, Juliette removed again to a somewhat more commodious apartment: 14, Rue St. Anastase, at 800 frs. a year. It comprised a drawing-room, dining-room, one bedroom, a kitchen, and an attic in which her servant slept. This district has fallen into decay, and is now dull and dreary. In those days it was chiefly occupied by the convent of the Hospitaliers St. Anastase, whence the street took its name, and a few houses more or less enclosed by gardens. The convent and gardens endowed it with a provincial tranquillity and an impenetrable silence which occasionally weighed upon Juliette’s spirits.

Her mode of life was not calculated to enliven her. A degree of poverty bordering on squalor simplified its details. Little or no fire: Juliette sometimes even lacks the logs she is by way of providing for herself. Then she spends the morning in bed, reading, planning, day-dreaming. She keeps careful accounts of her receipts and expenditure—accounts which Victor Hugo afterwards audits most minutely. When she rises, the cold does not prevent her from writing cheerfully, “If you seek warmth in this room you will have to seek it at the bottom of my heart.”

All luxuries in the way of food were reserved, as in duty bound, for the suppers the master honoured with his presence after the theatre. The rest of the time Juliette ate frugally, breakfasting on eggs and milk, dining on bread and cheese and an apple. When her daughter visited her she treated her to an orange cut into slices and sprinkled with a pennyworth of sugar and a pennyworth of brandy. The same simplicity reigned on high-days and holidays.

Juliette also denied herself useless fripperies and reduced to the strictest limits the expenses of her wardrobe. Everything she was able to make or mend, she made and mended, and it gratified her to compute the money she saved thus in dressmakers. The rest she bought very cheaply or did without. In the month of August 1838, when she was about to start on a journey with Victor Hugo, she found herself in need of shoes, a dress, and a country hat. She bought the shoes, manufactured the dress, and had intended to borrow the hat from Madame Kraft; but this lady, who held some minor post at the Comédie Française, only wore feathered hats, so Juliette curses the extravagance that places her in an awkward predicament. A little later, on May 7th, 1839, she wanted to furbish up her mantle with ribbon velvet at 5d. a yard; but she found that she could not do with less than eight yards and a half. She bemoans her extravagance, saying, “Why, oh, why have I let myself in for this!”

In studying Juliette’s financial position one wonders that so much privation should be necessary, for, from the very beginning, Victor Hugo allowed her 600 or 700 frs. a month. He afterwards increased this sum to 800, and finally to 1,000 frs. in 1838, when he began to get better terms from publishers and theatre-managers. Surely such a sum should provide ordinary comforts—there should be no suggestion of squalid poverty?

The fact is that, in 1834, Victor Hugo had only paid off the most pressing of Juliette’s debts; but the result of his doing so was to rouse the energies of the rest of the creditors, and Juliette was overwhelmed by them. Sometimes she managed to pacify them by quaint expedients. For instance, to Zoé, her former maid, she offered, in place of wages, a box for Angélo; to Monsieur Manière, her legal adviser, she promised that, if he would extend her credit, “Monsieur Victor Hugo should read with interest” a certain plan of political organisation of which the said Manière was the author, but which alas, does not yet figure in the archives of the French constitution! But more often she was forced to pay, and she had to save off food or dress. Then it was that money was skimped from the butcher and grocer to satisfy the former milliner or livery-stable keeper. In the month of May 1835, out of 700 frs. received, the creditors obtained 316; in June they got another 347; in July 278. Another cause for pecuniary embarrassment was the irregularity of Pradier’s contribution to the maintenance of his and Juliette’s child. Very often, but for Victor Hugo’s assistance, this item would have been added to the sum-total of her debts. But Juliette bore everything with the blitheness of a bird. She, who had hated accounts and arithmetic, now devoted her attention to them every day, sometimes more than once a day; she, who loathed poverty, encountered the most sordid privations with a smile; she, who once throve upon debts and promises to pay, now exclaimed: “I would do anything rather than fall into debt. How hideous and degrading such a thing is, and how splendid and noble of you, my adored one, to love me in spite of my past!”[25]

VICTOR HUGO ABOUT 1836. From a picture by Louis Boulanger (Victor Hugo Museum).

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that she began to seek in work, especially theatrical work, an addition to her private resources. She took her career as an artist very seriously, and it was a great disappointment to her that her lover failed to desire her as an interpreter of his parts. He certainly did not. He allowed his jealousy full play, and wished to keep Juliette for himself alone. His tactics seem to have been to dangle promises ever before her, but to give her nothing; to procure dramatic engagements for her, and prevent her from fulfilling them.

In February 1834 he introduced Juliette to the Comédie Française, but a year later he declined to give her the smallest part in Angélo, which was produced there. In the course of 1836, 1837, 1838, he allowed Marie Dorval to monopolise all the important rôles in his former plays, and never once attempted to put Juliette’s name at the head, or even in the middle, of the bill. Yet he gave her fine promises in plenty, encouraged her to learn long passages from Marion and Dona Sol, and vowed he would some day write a play for her alone.

Thus kept in the background, Juliette passed through exhausting alternations of despair and confidence, gratitude and jealousy. For, as may easily be imagined, she was terribly jealous, and her suspicious mind exercised itself chiefly concerning actresses, whose lively manners and easy morals she knew, by professional experience. There was Mlle. Georges, already growing stout, no doubt, but ever ready to raise her banner and exercise her accustomed sovereignty. There was Mlle. Mars, who, though her looks were a thing of the past, still endeavoured to attract attention. Above all, there was Marie Dorval.

Ah, how Juliette envied Dorval! How she studied her in order to arm herself against her fancied rivalry! How often she took her moral measure! She knew that she was of the people, that she tingled with vitality from head to foot, that, though her primary impulses were virtuous, nature was yet strong within her.... She was well acquainted with “the voice that quivered with tears and made its insinuating appeal to the heart.”[26]

Could Juliette fail to dread such a woman, one so versed by the practice of her profession in the wiles that attract men? Could she refrain from warning her lover against her, day after day, like one draws attention to a danger, a scourge, or a tempest? Far from it—she threatened to return to the theatre, to act in her lover’s plays, to be present at every rehearsal, to vie with her rival in beauty and talent and ardour. She learnt parts, and whole scenes, and filled her solitude with the pleasing phantoms her lover had once created, and that she dreamed of restoring to life on the stage.

Months passed; delicate circumstances obliged her to relinquish her plan of appearing at the Théâtre Français.[27] She was on the verge of despair when, one evening in the spring of 1838, her lover brought her a new play he wished to read to her, according to his invariable custom. It was Ruy Blas. She at once claimed the part of Marie de Neubourg, and fell in love with the melancholy little queen who was hampered and hemmed in by the trammels of étiquette, as she herself was imprisoned within the limits of her icy apartment in the Rue St. Anastase. Victor Hugo asked for nothing better. He intended Ruy Blas for the Théâtre de la Renaissance, which was under the management of his friend, Anténor Joly. He requested the worthy fellow to engage Juliette, and the agreement was signed early in May.

We can picture the delight with which Juliette set about copying the play; nevertheless, she was assailed by melancholy fears: “I shall never play the queen,” she wrote; “I am too unlucky. The thing I desire most on earth is not destined to be realised.” And it is a fact that the part was taken from her almost as soon as it was given.

After 1839 her longing to go back to the stage calmed down gradually. At the end of that year it had completely faded. Her love’s tranquillity was greatly increased thereby, while she was driven to immerse herself still more completely in her amorous solitude and the disadvantages pertaining thereto.

For, in the same degree that he deprecated her being seen on the stage, Victor Hugo detested the thought of her going out alone, and he had managed to extract a promise from her that she would never make one step outside the house without him. She was, therefore, practically as much a prisoner as any châtelaine of the Middle Ages, or heroine of some of the sombre dramas she had formerly played. She had not even permission to go and see her daughter at school at St. Mandé, and, rather than trust her by herself, the poet would escort her to the dressmaker and milliner, or on her visits to the uncle whose name she bore, and who lay dying at the Invalides, to the money-lender’s, and curiosity-shop, and even the ironmonger’s!

When Victor Hugo thus lent himself to her needs, all went well, and Juliette, proud and happy, arm in arm with her “dear little man,” chattered away blithely. But a time came when the lover, monopolised by other cares, perhaps by other intrigues, was no longer so assiduous. Then the mistress protested and rebelled, with the fierce rage of a prisoned beast of the forest, bruising itself against the bars of its cage, in its agony for freedom.

Victor Hugo met her remonstrances with gentle reasoning and persuasive exhortations. However far Juliette went in her transports of anger, he was always able to pacify her. On September 27th, 1836, at the end of a long period during which the poet had not been able to give his friend even what she called the “joies du préau"—that is to say, a walk round the Boulevards—Juliette threatens to break out. For several weeks she has been attributing the sickness and headaches she constantly suffers from, to her sedentary life. Losing all patience, she addresses an ultimatum to him, proposing an assignation in a cab on the Boulevard du Temple. He does not appear. For three hours she waits inside the vehicle, then, in the certainty that he has failed her, she writes a letter in pencil, dated from the cab, No. 556, stating her intention to fetch her daughter and go off somewhere, anywhere, alone with her. “Thus,” she writes, “I shall free myself for ever from a slavery which satisfies neither my heart nor my mind, and does not secure the repose of either of us.”

However, the next day she did not start. She did not go out at all. She had resumed her chains and her prison garb. Her anger always evaporated thus, and turned to melancholy and resigned gentleness. In the end she came to feel that nothing existed for her, save a lover who sometimes came and sometimes stayed away. If he was present, she was alive; if absent, her mainspring was broken.

But Victor Hugo continued to lead an ordinary life, while his mistress spent her days in the confinement of a cloister. It was probably about this time that Juliette resolved to set up in that cloister an altar for the cult of her lover. Finding herself impotent to attract and keep him by the sole charm of passion, she endeavoured to win him over by devotion, minute attentions, tender interest in everything he undertook, and by unbridled adoration of his person and work.