2. Eighty years after their original publication as newspaper columns, these Letters from Paris were eventually collected in a volume, excellently edited and presented by Leon Edel. (Henry James: Letters from Paris, New York University Press, 1957.)
3. It would be inaccurate to ascribe these Hugolian flourishes to the onset of senility: thirty-five years earlier, he had already made similar pronouncements: “Vienna, Berlin, Saint Petersburg and London are only cities; Paris is a brain… At the present time, the French spirit comes to replace the old soul of every nation. The greatest intelligences of today, representing for the whole universe politics, literature, science and art, all belong to France, and France offers them to civilisation.” (Oeuvres complètes, Le Rhin, p. 425.) Or again: “French literature is not only the best, but the only literature there is.” (Quoted in Robb, p. 228.) But didn’t Hugo himself warn us? “All men of genius, however great, are inhabited by a beast which parodies their intelligence.” (Ibid, p. 137.)
4. Time, 27 April 1998.
5. If one day one were to compile an anthology of all the great books that were never written, this one should certainly enjoy pride of place. We only know how Baudelaire intended to conclude it: “In my novel, which will show a scoundrel, a genuine scoundrel, assassin, thief, incendiary and pirate, the story will end with this sentence: ‘Under the trees which I planted myself, surrounded by my family which worships me, by my children who cherish me, by my wife who adores me, I am now enjoying in peace the recompense of my crimes.’” (Recorded by Baudelaire’s first biographer, Charles Asselineau, and quoted in Henri Troyat, Baudelaire, Paris: Flammarion, 1994, p. 324.)
6. Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 87.
7. Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Journaclass="underline" Mémoires de la vie littéraire (Paris: Bouquins/Laffont, 1989), Vol. 2, pp. 1, 162.
Edmond de Goncourt, who, in his notorious diary, turned himself into the peeping concierge of the French literary world, was always salivating on the latest piece of scabrous gossip. Hugo, with his ravenous sexual appetite (far from decreasing with old age, his carnal cravings developed into a compulsive mania that never relented, virtually until his death at age eighty-three), provided a constant aliment for Goncourt’s prurient notes. With his wife Adèle, his permanent mistress, Juliette Drouet, and his numerous casual mistresses (actresses, bas-bleus, fashionable beauties, revolutionary heroines), Hugo was never short of female company; nevertheless, he also experienced a quasi-pathological need for furtive sexual encounters with all the successive maidservants of his own household, countless prostitutes and other humble and anonymous partners — volunteer or professional. He kept a personal record of these activities, usually including mention of the modest expenses they entailed (he was notoriously thrifty) and a brief description each time of the type of transaction involved; all this was written in a coded language (a macaronic mixture of Latin, broken Spanish and private hieroglyphs) in order to ward off the prying eyes of his principal mistress, who was fiercely jealous. Even in times of crisis and personal tragedy, his sexual urge seems to have escaped his control. When his beloved daughter Adèle became mentally unbalanced and eloped to the West Indies, she was eventually brought back to Europe under the care of a black nurse called Madame Baa. Adèle was incoherent (she never recovered her sanity) and could not recognise the members of her family. Hugo’s distress showed in his diary: “I saw Adèle. My heart is broken… Another door closed, darker than that of the tomb.” But a few days after this dramatic reunion, he could not resist the exotic curiosity which Madame Baa had aroused in him, and he was soon able to record in the same diary the success of this new experiment: “The first Negress in my life.”
8. Paul Valéry, Degas, danse, dessin, in Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade-Gallimard, 1993), Vol. 2, p. 1208.
9. Volkov, op. cit., p. 218. A fortuitous circumstance (fortuitous? Past a certain age, nothing we read can be fortuitous!) made me read simultaneously Brodsky’s Conversations and Robb’s Hugo. I found this totally unplanned rapprochement most inspiring. On the subject of “the linguistic impulse” in which Brodsky had a quasi-mystical faith (according to Volkov, he felt it was not only possible but inevitable that any crucial life decision would be reached first in a poem dictated by the inner demands of language), I find Brodsky’s testimony of particular value, for, in his case, these views could certainly not be lightly dismissed as some sort of formalistic cant: he had vouched for them with his freedom and his life.
10. For Hugo, words had a physiognomy, a physical reality, akin to what ideographs represent for the Chinese: “Words have each their own figure. Bossuet wrote ‘thrône’ [Note: the regular French spelling is “trône’] in accordance with the splendid seventeenth-century spelling, which was so stupidly mutilated, simplified and castrated in the eighteenth century. If you take the ‘h’ out of ‘thrône,’ you take the seat away. Capital ‘H’ is the chair seen from the front, small ‘h’ is the chair seen in profile.” (Océan, p.153.) Paul Claudel (who did not like Hugo very much, yet shared essential traits with him — both were poets with a cosmic inspiration, who wrote their best work in prose) has made similar observations on the ideographic nature of alphabet writing. (But Claudel had a relatively long and deep experience of China.)
11. Quoted in Robb, p. 337.
12. It is not sufficiently recognised yet that Hugo is one of the greatest writers of the sea in any language — in my anthology La Mer dans la littérature française, he occupies 300 pages, which I hope may begin to set the record straight in this respect. (And, by the way, he exerted a direct influence upon the double vocation — nautical and literary — of Joseph Conrad, who mentioned in A Personal Record the works of Victor Hugo as among the most memorable readings of his childhood; note that Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, had translated Les Travailleurs de la mer into Polish, as well as other works by Hugo — novels and dramas.)
13. He adopted “Ego Hugo” as his crest. “Hu(e)! Go!” is a Frenglish pun he coined after his expulsion from Jersey, where his political activities had upset the local authorities (he subsequently settled in nearby Guernsey, where he was to spend the remaining — and longer — part of his exile):
J’entends en tous lieux sur la terre
Un bon tutoiement compagnon,
Et du Hu de la France au Go de l’Angleterre,
Les deux syllables de mon nom.
(Everywhere on earth / I hear a familiar address / Calling with a French Hu [Hue = “Gee up,” to a horse] and an English Go / The two syllables of my name.)
His own name was an inspiring leitmotif for Hugo not only in his writings but, more especially, in his paintings.
14. “I consider Baudelaire as the greatest poet of the nineteenth century… But I do not mean that, if one had to choose the most beautiful poem of the nineteenth century, one should look for it in Baudelaire. I do not believe that among all the Fleurs du mal… one could find one poem that equals ‘Booz endormi.’” He follows with two pages of subtle and perceptive analysis of the poem. See “À Propos de Baudelaire,” in Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, Pastiches et mélanges, essais et articles (Paris: Pléiade/Gallimard, 1971), pp. 618–20.