Part 10

While plodding along with that great work, Hugo put forth from this study much verse and his last plays. Here, in 1838, he wrote his final dramatic success, "Ruy Blas," and his final dramatic failure, "Les Burgraves," which ended his stage career. From here he went to his _fauteuil_ in the Academy in 1841, the step to the seat of Peer of France, accorded him by the King within a few years. Meanwhile, his larger rooms hardly held the swelling host of his friends, and, it must be said, his flatterers. Not Marion Delorme had more, nor listened to them with a more open ear. Their poison became his food. Indeed, the men who formed "_le Cénacle_," in these and other _salons_, seemed to find their breath only in an atmosphere of mutual admiration. Each called the other "_Cher Maître_," and all would listen, in wistful reverence, to every utterance of the others and to the deliverance of his latest bringing-forth, vouchsafed by each in turn. While Lamartine, standing before the fireplace, turned on the pensive tune of his latest little thing in verse, Hugo gazed intent on him as on an oracle. Then Hugo would pour forth his sonorous rhymes, his voice most impressive in its grave monotone. The smaller singers next took up the song. No vulgar applause followed any recitation, but the elect, moved beyond speech, would clutch the reciter's hand, their eyes upturned to the cornice. Those not entirely voiceless with ecstasy might be heard to murmur the freshest phrases of sacramental adoration: "_Cathédrale_," or "_Pyramide d'Égypte_!"

There were certain minor chartered _poseurs_ in the circle. There was Alfred de Vigny, "before his transfiguration," to whom might be applied Camille Desmoulins's gibe at Saint-Just: "He carries his head as if it were a sacrament." To which Saint-Just replied by the promise, that he kept, to make Camille carry _his_ head after the fashion of Saint-Denis. There was Alfred de Musset, who had been brought first to the cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs by Paul Foucher, his schoolmate and Hugo's brother-in-law. Like his Fantasio, de Musset then "had the May upon his cheeks," and was young and gay and given to laughter; now, old at thirty, he posed as the bored and _blasé_ prey and poet of passion.

[Illustration: Alfred de Musset. (From the sketch by Louis-Eugène Lami.)]

Yet there were others, by way of contrast: Dumas, fresh from his romance-factory, full-blooded, stalwart, sane; Gautier, dropping in from his rooms near by, at No. 8 in the square, ship-shape inside his skull for all its mane of curling locks, and for all his eccentric costume; Barye, coming from his simple old house at No. 4 Quai des Célestins, sitting isolated and silent, dreaming of the superb curves of his bronze creatures; Nodier, escaping from his Librarian's desk in the Arsenal, the _flâneur_ of genius, with no convictions about anything, and with generous friendships for everybody; Delacroix, impetuous chief of the insurgents in painting, most mild-mannered of men, his personal suavity disarming those who were going gunning for him, because of his insurrectionary brush; Mérimée, frock-coated, high-collared, buttoned-up, self-contained, cold and correct, of formal English cut.

Among the guests were occasional irreverent onlookers, not deemed worthy of admission to the inner circle, who sat outside, getting much fun out of its antics. Such a one was Madame Ancelot, whose graphic pen is pointed with her jealousy as a rival lion-hunter, who had outlived her vogue of the early Restoration. Daudet's sketch of her blue-stockinged _salon_, a faded survival of its splendors under Louis XVIII., is as daintily malicious as is her sketch of Hugo's evenings. Through those evenings, Madame Ancelot says, Madame Hugo reclined on a couch, as if over-wearied by the load of glory she was helping to carry. That lady had one relief in this new home, its doors being shut against the ugly face of Sainte-Beuve, at the urging of the indignant young wife. This happened in 1834, and within a few years Sainte-Beuve gave to the world his "Book of Love," a book of hatred toward Hugo, with its base suggestion of the wife's complaisance for the writer. Him it hurt more than it hurt Hugo. _He_ had taken, and he still keeps, his unassailable place in the affection, as in the admiration, of his countrymen. There can be no need to summon them as witnesses, yet it may be well to quote the words of two foreign fellow-craftsmen.

The Englishman, Swinburne, in his wild and untamed enthusiasm, acclaims Hugo as a healer and a comforter, a redeemer and a prophet; burning with wrath and scorn unquenchable; deriving his light and his heat from love, while terror and pity and eternal fate are his keynotes. No great poet, adds Swinburne, was ever so good, no good man was ever so great. Heine, German by birth, scoffs at Hugo, claiming that his greatest gift was a lack of good taste, a condition so rare in Frenchmen that his compatriots mistook it for genius. He sees merely a studied passion and an artificial flame in Hugo's specious divine fire; and the product is nothing but "fried ice." And Heine sums him up: "Hugo was more than an egoist, he was a Hugoist."

Charles Dickens describes Madame Hugo as "a little, sallow lady, with dark, flashing eyes." Making the round of Paris with John Forster, in the winter of 1846-47, they came to this "noble corner house in the Place Royale." They were struck by its painted ceilings and wonderful carvings, the old-gold furniture and superb tapestries; and, more than all, by a canopy of state out of some palace of the Middle Ages. It is worthy of note here that Hugo was almost the first man of his period--a deplorable period for taste in all lands--to value and collect antiques of all sorts. They were a fit setting for these rooms, and for the youth and loveliness that crowded them, up to the open windows on the old square. The young smokers among the men were driven forth to stroll under its arcades, recalling the strollers of Corneille's and Molière's time, albeit these were painfully ignorant of tobacco bliss, so loud were the papal thunders against its temptations then.

Dickens and Forster found Hugo the best thing in that house, and the latter records the sober grace and self-possessed, quiet gravity of the man, recently ennobled by Louis-Philippe, but whose nature was already written noble. "Rather under the middle size, of compact, close buttoned-up figure, with ample dark hair falling loosely over his close-shaven face. I never saw upon any features, so keenly intellectual, such a soft and sweet gentility, and certainly never heard the French language spoken with the picturesque distinctness given it by Victor Hugo."

Within the portal of the Church of Saint-Paul and Saint-Louis, in Rue Saint-Antoine, on either side, is a lovely shell holding holy-water, given by Hugo in commemoration of the first communion of his eldest child, Léopoldine. In this church she and young Charles Vacquerie were married in February, 1842. Both were drowned in August of that year. And this is the church selected by Monsieur Gillenormand for the marriage of Marius and Cosette, because the old gentleman considered it "more coquettish" than the church of his parish. For he lived much farther north in the Marais, at No. 6 Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, where a new block of buildings has taken the place of his eighteenth-century dwelling. For this marriage, after playing the obdurate and irascible godfather so long, he was suddenly transformed into a fairy godmother.

Toward the end of 1848, after the escape of Louis-Philippe, Hugo moved to Rue d'Isly, No. 5, for a short period, and then to No. 37, now No. 41 Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne, where he remained until 1851. In the Paris _Bottin_ during these years he is entitled--considering it, strangely to us, his especial distinction--"_Représentant du Peuple_." The youthful Royalist poet, the friend of Charles X., the friend later of Louis-Philippe, had become an oracle of Democracy. He added nothing to his honestly earned fame by his long-winded bombast in the _Tribune_; and however genuine his attitude may have been, it appealed almost entirely to the groundlings.

They came in crowds about this house, with flaming torches and blaring bands, howling their windy homage. They are remembered, with mute disapproval, by the old _concierge_ of the house, Lagoutte Armand. With real pleasure does he recall "Monsieur Hugo," and prattle memories of his friends like Béranger, and of his family. There were two sons, Charles and François-Victor, the former known as "Toto," a "_très gentil garçon_." In his _loge_, pointed out with pride by the _concierge_, to whom it was given by Hugo, is a rare engraving of the poet, which makes him serious, almost stern, of aspect, his mouth showing its strength in the beardless face, his hair plastered down about the superb brow. His head was carried always well bent forward, and he went gravely, the old man tells us. The house is unaltered, but the street has grown commonplace since the days when its half-countryfied cut attracted Hugo and Béranger and Alphonse Karr. This witty editor of "Les Guêpes," something of a _poseur_ with his pen, had a genuine love of flowers and of women, on whom he lavished his pet camelias and tulips. He cultivated them in the garden of the house, now numbered 15, which he occupied in this street from 1839 to 1842. The sculptor Carrier-Belleuse is now in possession of Karr's old rooms, and his studio covers the one-time garden. Béranger came, in 1832, to No. 31, then a small cottage behind a garden, where he lived for three years. The bare walls of the communal school, numbered 35, now cover the site of his home, and there are no more cottages nor gardens in the street.

From 1851, when the _coup-d'état_ of December drove him first into hiding and then into exile, through all the years of the empire, we find in each year's _Bottin_: "_Hugo, Victor, Vicomte de, de l'Institut_, . . . . ." These dots represent a home unknown to the Paris directory; no home indeed, for there can be none for a Frenchman beyond his country's borders. Of Hugo's dwellings during these years nothing need be said here, save that his long residence in Guernsey gave him his characters and colors for "Les Travailleurs de la Mer," and such slight acquaintance with seafaring and ships as is shown in "Quatre-Vingt-Treize." Where he got the fantastic English details of "L'Homme-qui-rit," no man shall ever know.

Here, too, he finished "Les Misérables," writing it, he said, with all Paris lying before him in his mind's eye; or, as he puts it, with the exile's longing, "_on regarde la mer, et on voit Paris_." His topographical memory was none too accurate, and errors of slight or of real importance may be detected in "Les Misérables." It is really in his poetry that he has done for his "maternal city" what Balzac did for her in prose; singing in all tones the splendor and the squalor of "_la ville lumière_," to use his swelling phrase. Despite some errors, and despite the pulling-about of Paris since Valjean's day, we may still trace his flight through nearly all that thrilling night, when Javert and his men hunted him about the southern side of the town, and across the river from the Gorbeau tenement. This tenement, so striking a set in many scenes of the drama, was an historic mansion run to seed, standing just where Hugo places it--on the site of Nos. 50 and 52 Boulevard de l'Hôpital, almost directly opposite Rue de la Barrière-des-Gobelins. Facing that street--renamed Rue Fagon in 1867--on the northern side of Boulevard de l'Hôpital, the little market of the Gobelins replaces the squalid old shanty which gave perilous shelter to Valjean and Cosette, and later to Marius.

From here, driven by a nameless terror after his recognition of Javert in the beggar's disguise, the old convict started, leading Cosette by the hand. He took a winding way to the Seine, through the deserted region between the Jardin des Plantes and Val-de-Grâce, turning strategically on his track in streets through which we can follow him as easily as did Javert. He was not certain that he was followed, until, turning in a dark corner, he caught full sight of the three men under the light before the police-station. Hugo places this station in Rue de Pontoise, and this is a mistake; it was then and is still in the next parallel street, Rue de Poissy, at No. 31.

Now, Valjean turns away from the river, carrying the tired child in his arms, and makes a long circuit around by the Collége Rollin--long since removed to the northern boulevards--and by the lower streets skirting the Jardin des Plantes--no longer the Jardin du Roi--and so along the quay. He is bent, as Javert guessed, on putting the river between himself and his pursuers. He crosses Pont d'Austerlitz, and plunges into the maze of roads and lanes, lined with woodyards and walls, on the northern side of the river. There Javert loses the trail; while for us, that trail is hidden under new streets laid out along those lanes, and under railway tracks laid down on those roads. We come in sight of the fugitive again, as he climbs the convent wall, drawing up Cosette by the rope taken from the street lantern. Here is that high gray wall, stretching along the eastern side of old Rue de Picpus, and the southern side of the new wide Avenue Saint-Mandé. This wall--of stone, covered with crumbling plaster--is as old as the garden of "_Les Religieuses de Picpus_," which it surrounds, and as the buildings within, which it hides from the street. We may enter the enclosure by the old gate at No. 35 Rue de Picpus, the very gate through which Cosette was carried out in a basket, and Valjean borne alive in the nun's coffin to his mock burial. About the court within, the red-tiled low roofs of the ancient foundation peep out among more modern buildings. Behind all these and beyond the court stretches the garden, a portion still set aside for vegetables, and we look about for Fauchelevent's protecting glasses for his cherished melons. What we do find is the very outhouse, in an angle of the wall, on which Valjean dropped; it is a shanty nearly gone to ruin, but serving still to store the garden tools of Fauchelevent's successor.

[Illustration: The Cemetery of Picpus.]

"Near the old village of Picpus, now a part of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, under the walls of the garden which belonged to the Canoness of Saint-Augustin, in a bit of ground not more than thirty feet in length, repose thirteen hundred and six victims beheaded at Barrière du Trône, between _26 Prairial_ and _9 Thermidor_, in the second year of the republic." This extract, from the "Mémorial Européen" of April 24, 1809, is a fitting introduction to the small cemetery, hid away at the very end of this convent garden. In this snug resting-spot sleep many illustrious dead. On the wall, alongside the iron-railed gate, under a laurel-wreath, is a tablet inscribed with the name of "André de Chénier, son of Greece and of France," who "_servit les Muses, aima la sagesse, mourut pour la verité_." He and his headless comrades were carted here and thrown into trenches, when the guillotine was busy at the Barrière du Trône, now Place de la Nation, only a step away, in the early summer of 1794, up to the day of Robespierre's arrest. Their mothers, widows, children, dared not visit this great grave nor, indeed, ask where it was. In that time of terror, grief was a crime and tears were no longer innocent. It was only in after years that this bit of ground was bought, and walled in, and cared for, by unforgetting survivors. Some few among them, of high descent or of ancient family, planned for their own graves and those of their line to come and to go, within touch of this great common grave that held the clay of those dear to them. They bought, in perpetuity, this bit of the convent garden on the hither side of the gate, through which we have been looking, and it is dotted with many a cross and many a slab. And this tiny burial-ground draws the American pilgrim as to a shrine, for in it lies the body of Lafayette.

The sisters of the Séminaire de Picpus, who inherited the duties, along with the domain of "_Les Religieuses_" of the eighteenth century, devote themselves to the instruction and the training of their young _pensionnaires_. The story of the establishment is told in "Les Misérables," in detail that allows no retelling.

Fauchelevent had planned to carry off his tippling crony of the Vaugirard Cemetery to the tap-room, "_Au bon Coing_," and so get Valjean out of his coffin. To his horror, he found the drunkard replaced by a new grave-digger, who refused to drink, and Valjean was nearly buried alive. We will, if it please you, visit the "Good Quince," no longer in its old quarters, for it quitted them when the historic Cemetery of Vaugirard was closed forever. On its ground, at the corner of Rue de Vaugirard and Boulevard Pasteur, has been built the Lycée Buffon. To be near the then newly opened burial-ground of Mont-Parnasse, "_Au bon Coing_" put up its sign on the front of a two-storied shanty, at the corner of Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and Rue de la Gaieté, a street strangely misguided in title in this joyless neighborhood. About the bar on this corner crowd the grave-diggers and workmen from the near-at-hand graves, and at the tables sit mourners from poor funerals, all intent on washing the smell of fresh mould from out their nostrils. This den is the _assommoir_ of this quarter, swarming, noisy, noisome.

On those summer days, when Hugo used to stroll from his cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs out to the southern slopes, he discovered the Champ de l'Alouette--a fair field bordering the limpid Bièvre, just beyond the factory of the Gobelins. It had borne that name from immemorial time, and was the field, as the man told Marius, where Ulbach had killed the shepherdess of Ivry. Marius came to this green spot that he might dream about "The Lark," after he had heard, from his peep-hole in the wall of the Gorbeau tenement, the Thénardiers so name his unknown lady. We, too, may walk in the Field of the Lark, its ancient spaciousness somewhat shrunken, as with all those erstwhile fields hereabout, of which we get glimpses along Boulevard Saint-Jacques and other distant southern boulevards. There is a wide gateway in the high wall that runs along stony Rue du Champ-de-l'Alouette, and we pass through it and the court within to the bright little garden beyond, where children are playing, guileless as Cosette. This is her field, now shut in by great tanneries, its air redolent of leather, its Bièvre sullied by the stains and the scum of the dye-works above. Yet, hid away in this dreary quarter--where the broad and cheerless streets are sultry in summer, bleak in winter, and gritty to the feet all the year round--it is still, as Hugo aptly says, the only spot about here where Ruysdael would have been tempted to stop, and sit, and sketch.

Among the countless American feet that tread Rue du Bac and Rue de Babylone, on their way to the shop that is a shrine at the junction of those two streets, there may be some few that turn into Rue Oudinot. It is well worth the turning, if only because it has contrived to keep that village aspect given by gardens behind walls, and cottages within those gardens. It still bore its old name, Plumet, when General Hugo came to live in it, that he might be near his son in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and here he died suddenly in January, 1828. In this house, well known to Hugo, he installed Valjean and the girl Cosette. From this house, by its back door and by the lane between high parallel walls, Valjean slips out unseen into Rue de Babylone. In its front garden, under a stone on her bench, Cosette finds her wonderful love-letter; and here is the scene of that exquisite love-making, when Marius appears in the moonlight.