Did Victor Hugo and his wife, Adèle, have an open marriage? I know that Hugo had a longtime love affair with a woman named Juliette Drouet.
Victor and Adèle did not quite have an “open marriage” in today’s sense. But after Adèle learned about Victor’s relationship with Juliette Drouet, she stayed with him—just as Victor had earlier chosen to stay with Adèle after discovering that she and his best friend were having love trysts. Here’s the back story:
In 1830, the wife Victor had adored since adolescence barred him from her bed after the birth of their fifth child. With pregnancies every couple of years for a decade and four lively children, Adèle wanted no more. It’s hard to imagine that Victor was pleased with the only dependable form of birth control in those days. Still young and virile at twenty-eight, he was no longer the eighteen-year-old who had proudly written Adèle about how virtuously chaste he was for her. Despite the enforced abstinence, he at first remained faithful to Adèle, even after learning that she loved famed literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve.
Victor had been working night and day to support his family, intensely involved with producing his new play. Hernani—with its outsider hero, swashbuckling romance, and extravagant language—turned the Parisian theater world upside down, as old guard Classicists and young Romantics battled during performances. Victor helped orchestrate that artistic conflict, and Hernani made French Romanticism successful on stage.
During this period, Charles, who spent many evenings at the Hugos’, fell in love with Adele—and she found herself drawn to him. From her perspective, Charles may have been the perfect lover, as he was apparently physically incapable of sexual intercourse. Their affair might have been platonic, but their fond closeness must have been perceptible. They exchanged secret letters and had clandestine meetings. Victor, emerging from the Hernani whirlwind, wrote to Charles in summer 1831 about his fears. His uncharacteristically awkward style signals his emotional distress and probable confusion over what was happening:
I am convinced that it might be that what has all my love might have ceased to love me, and that it may have had a little bit to do with you. It’s no good going over everything you have said and telling myself the very idea is folly; it’s still a drop of poison sufficient to poison my entire life. Sure, go ahead, pity me: I am genuinely unhappy. I don’t know where I stand with the two beings I love most in the world. You are one of the two. (1)
Devastated over his sense that Adèle had withdrawn from him and grown nearer to Charles—but conflicted about his own suspicions—Victor waffled between asking Charles to stay away and welcoming him back. He threw himself more actively into theater, daily attending his play rehearsals. At one point, Victor offered Adèle her freedom to be with Charles, but she chose to remain with her husband.
So when Victor met the beautiful actress Juliette Drouet about eighteen months later, he was ripe for falling in love. Juliette, who had a small role in his play Lucrèce Borgia, was reputed to have the most beautiful shoulders in Paris. Orphaned at a young age, she had survived through modeling and acting, falling into affairs with her sculptor, James Pradier, and others. From the liaison with Pradier came her daughter, Claire, whom Victor essentially adopted and supported, along with Juliette. Victor and Juliette remained lovers and friends for fifty years, until her death in 1883.
It’s not clear when Adèle learned about Juliette, but her unhappiness about the affair is implicit in her efforts to separate the lovers, such as when she blocked Juliette’s acting career. As Juliette prepared for the lead role in Victor’s new play Ruy Blas at the Théâtre de la Renaissance—and while she and Victor were vacationing together incognito—Adèle wrote to the theater director. Having Mademoiselle Juliette star in Ruy Blas would harm its chances of success, she wrote, “insisting” that he find a way to cast someone else as the Queen. (2)
When Victor was forced into exile by the 1851 coup d’état, Juliette immediately followed him to Brussels with his trunk full of manuscripts. After Adèle complained that she and all “proper Parisians” regretted that Juliette was in Brussels with him, Hugo defended his lover: “She saved my life . . . Without her, I would have been captured and lost . . . . For twenty years she has shown me an absolute, complete devotion that has never failed.” (3)
Such fairly public love affairs were not rare in nineteenth-century French society, especially among artists. It doesn’t surprise me that Adèle chose to remain with the devoted father of their children, the leading French poet of the time and a highly successful playwright and novelist.
NOTES:
(1) July 7, 1831, letter to Sainte Beuve: “J’ai acquis la certitude qu’il était possible que ce qui a tout mon amour cessât de m’aimer, et que cela avait peut-être tenu à peu de chose avec vous. J’ai beau me redire tout ce que vous me dites et que cette pensée même est une folie, c’est toujours assez de cette goutte de poison pour empoisonner toute ma vie. Oui, allez, plaignez-moi, je suis vraiment malheureux. Je ne sais plus où j’en suis avec les deux êtres que j’aime le plus au monde. Vous êtes l’un des deux.” Victor Hugo: Oeuvres complètes, Club Français du Livre, IV, 1038.
(2) Adèle Hugo to Anténor Joly, August 19, 1838, cited in Gérard Pouchain & Robert Sabourin, Juliette Drouet ou la dépaysée (Paris: Fayard, 1992): 192-93.
(3) January 24, 1852, letter: “Elle m’a sauvé la vie . . . Sans elle j’étais pris et perdu . . . . C’est un dévouement absolu, complet, de vingt ans, qui ne s’est jamais démenti.“ Cited in Victor Hugo: Oeuvres complètes, Club Français du Livre, VIII, 1161 .