Between Victor Hugo and Juliette Drouet, passion, influence and loyalty

Between Victor Hugo, whose

appeared , and this lifelong lover, to whom a new biography is dedicated, love was tinged with passion, but also with influence and loyalty.

,” writes Hugo in one of these notebooks, which he leaves each evening for the young woman to read when he has returned to the marital home.

For Florence Naugrette, biographer of Juliette Drouet,

.

On Wednesday, the historian published

with Flammarion editions .

Read alsoThese young people who still write handwritten letters

We discover an author in her own right, whose work is contained in 22,000 letters addressed to her

14,000 of them are transcribed on a website that bears his name.

It is one a day on average, an

with few equivalents in literary history.

“This diary is exceptionally rich: Juliette entrusts all her emotions to it.

I didn't invent any”

, explains the biographer.

They are sometimes strong, notes Victor Hugo.

April 8, 1833:

Juliette Drouet will be of unfailing dedication.

Him, not at all: he is cheating on her.

And she reacts.

Once she burns the writer's letters.

Another time she leaves without leaving an address.

He tracks her down in Brussels and begs her to come back.

Each era has its own vision of this relationship.

While the lovers were alive, morality condemned her, even if she was known to all of Paris.

Hadn't the wife, Adèle, herself had an affair with another writer, Sainte-Beuve?

One of the missing notebooks

Nowadays, we are struck by the morbid jealousy of Victor Hugo, who does everything to keep Juliette Drouet all to himself, even to have her watched.

, writes the biographer.

The writer thus asks her to put an end to her acting career, in exchange for the promise of ensuring her subsistence for the rest of her life.

She follows him into exile.

They will not live together until 1873, five years after the death of Adèle Hugo.

The text of Victor Hugo's three notebooks, belonging to collectors and reproduced in facsimile, was disseminated in old or confidential editions.

As the editor puts it, they are

.

The last, where Juliette Drouet copied writings, is unpublished in this complete form.

There is a fourth who is missing.

Purchased when the politician Louis Barthou's library was dispersed in 1935, it is in the hands of another collector who, perhaps one day, will come forward to have it published.

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