by David Bellos
But it wasn’t just a matter of having to tolerate papists in St Helier. The refugees were mostly penniless and they brought nothing to the island’s trade. Some of them wore beards, others had long hair, and some were probably atheists as well. A few of them had been seen eyeing up boats they probably planned to steal for an amateur invasion of France. As in many situations of this kind today, ordinary residents viewed the migrants as an alien and untrustworthy lot. There were spies among them, that was for sure. But were their paymasters in London, in Paris, or further afield?
The breach between the host and migrant communities was exacerbated by the outbreak of a distant war. In a disastrous attempt to defend Turkey’s hold on Crimea against a Russian advance, Britain became an ally of the new emperor of France. Napoleon III was given a lavish welcome when he made a state visit to London, and it seems that he took the opportunity to ask the British government to deal with the nuisance on Jersey. Westminster could only meet the French request in a roundabout way because it had no direct power over the internal affairs of the island. Parallel orders also came from Paris to the French Consul in St Helier to find a way of getting Hugo and his consorts thrown out. French agents pressured exiles to spy on their comrades and rivals, British agents kept close watch on the French while pulling their own strings among the island’s elite to increase tension between the community and the refugees. By 1855 the imbroglio in this otherwise quiet and orderly place reached a level of complication worthy of a novel by Le Carré.
The trigger for the showdown was an open letter to Queen Victoria asking her not to flatter Napoleon III by making a return visit to Paris. Written by a French exile in London, it was published in L’Homme, the journal of the French exile community. It was taken to be offensive to the queen, to whom the islanders were intensely loyal. It took the lid off the resentments that foreign agents had been stoking as best they could, and all of a sudden the townsfolk of St Helier wanted the French exiles to leave. Victor Hugo had had almost nothing to do with the letter itself, but he made a show of standing shoulder to shoulder with his comrades, provoking a flicker of a riot that nearly turned into a lynching party. To preserve public order, the authorities ordered the great man and his sons to leave. The name of the document that was handed to him only made sense to Victor Hugo when he’d repeated the main word in it to himself with the diction appropriate to the ‘great language of the human race’: Expieulcheune.
Where could he go now? With his family, and his manuscript trunk?
5.
Hauteville House
Jersey and Guernsey had much in common but had always led separate lives, with different legislatures, customs and coinage. There was even a degree of animosity between them, and it was this quirk in the history of the Anglo-Norman Islands that gave Hugo his new place of abode. It stood to reason that a victim of Jersey’s expieulcheune would be welcome on Guernsey’s shore. It was a stroke of luck that heralded many more. The steamer that took the thrice-exiled group from St Helier to St Peter Port on 31 October 1855 was certainly buffeted by high seas, but the winds of Hugo’s fortune had begun to turn.
In 1855, Guernsey was not the holiday resort and tax haven of today. Its population of about 40,000 worked in three small industries (a quarry, a shipbuilding yard, and the knitting of ‘garnseys’ with imported wool) or in farming and fishing, with a bit of smuggling on the side. Smaller than Jersey and even more blessed by the Gulf Stream, it has an exceptionally mild climate that allows geraniums and tomatoes to grow year round out of doors. For a nature-lover like Victor Hugo, it was close to paradise. Wild flowers bloom on gentle slopes and dramatic cliffs, seabirds of every kind wheel in the sky, and from almost every high point there are views of the sparkling, raging, magnificent sea.
Hugo arrived there with a work almost completed on Jersey. Not Les Misérables, but a substantial body of lyrical verse that he organized into a kind of poetic biography of himself. He completed it in early 1856 and had it published in Brussels by his old friend and fellow exile Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Les Contemplations came out in 1856 and was immediately recognized as a milestone achievement. It contains many of the best-known and most-loved lyrics written in French. By the time Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) appeared the following year, the delicate, enchanting, eerie and memorable poetry of Les Contemplations was in everybody’s ears.
Unlike Napoléon le Petit and Les Châtiments, Les Contemplations was not a clandestine publication. Its sale was permitted in France, and Hugo was able to receive payment for it. The book made Hetzel a rich man and replenished Hugo’s coffers too. After three years drawing down and nearly exhausting his reserves, he could now return to living within his means, and living quite well.
Soon after coming ashore at St Peter Port, Hugo found a vacant large house to rent. It hadn’t been lived in for some time because of fears it had been visited by one of the island’s undead. Hugo learned of this after he moved in when the cook told his wife that the only tenant in the last four years had had to move out because of the knocking that could be heard at night. The servants were sure they could hear the ghost moving about, and Hugo himself was woken up by ‘something like the noise that dwarves running up and down a wooden staircase would make’.14
Hugo didn’t think of moving out when he learned that Hauteville was a haunted house. Perhaps he’d grown sceptical of his own pursuit of the undead, or perhaps he liked the idea of having a visitor. As he already had an advance for Les Contemplations and was confident that more was on its way, he approached the owner and bought the place outright. Like most French people in that period Hugo was not accustomed to owning his own home, and Hauteville remained the only property that ever would be his. However, he had a special reason for using his cash in that way. Owning a house made him a taxpayer, and on Guernsey, taxpayers had an inalienable right of abode. After four years of moving ever on, Hugo now had a permanent home.
Hauteville was large enough to house the whole clan: the writer, his wife Adèle, his elder son Charles and his younger son François-Victor (both bachelors still) and his equally unmarried daughter, Adèle II. Her suitor, Auguste Vacquerie, who was a fervent disciple of Victor Hugo, also needed a room. A household of that kind required live-in servants – a cook, Marie Sixty, and two maids, who rotated quite often. Hugo organized the house and its inhabitants from bottom to top. The ground floor supplied the public rooms (dining room, billiard room and the guest suite, initially reserved for Vacquerie). The first floor was for the two Adèles, each with her own bedroom, and two large reception rooms facing on to the garden and the sea. The second floor was allocated to the young men, Charles and François-Victor, with a bedroom each and a shared bathroom, and a similarly imposing salon with views to the sea. Only the top floor, by far the least grand, was Hugo’s own retreat. His bedroom was small and gave on to a junk room and to an antechamber where the maids slept (Hugo insisted they sleep nearby). The space he set aside for writing was hardly luxurious and must have been difficult to heat, as it gave directly on to a roof terrace through glazed doors. He called it his ‘Look-Out’, variously spelled by Juliette and others as loocout, loukot and so on. Juliette herself was part of the ménage, but had to be housed elsewhere. The agreement with Adèle rested on strict territorial respect, and the ‘other woman’ was never allowed into the house. For his lifelong lover Hugo rented La Fallue, just a few steps away, across a garden and over a wall. Juliette could see Hugo when he stepped out on the roof terrace every morning to take an open-air bath in a tin tub. He insisted that ‘hydrotherapy’ did him good, and she fussed about him catching cold in the morning air. They loved each other a lot.
Hugo set about making his home unique. He had gas lighting put in and then redecorated the place from bottom to top. The dining room was done in blue-and-white tiles with Latin mottoes and logos incorporating the letters ‘V. H’. The first-floor lounges were lavishly decorated with red and blue fabrics and all kind
s of exotic objects found in sales. The second-floor salon was the most bizarre: panelled from floor to ceiling in dark oak with carvings of medieval inspiration, its main exhibit was a huge wooden bed on which Hugo said he would spend his last hours. Throughout this exercise in gothic interior design Hugo installed objets d’art and pieces of furniture he thought up himself and had made by a local craftsman, Tom Mauger. This Victorian wonderland has been left more or less as it was and can be visited in the summer months. The conception and installation of this richly detailed and self-obsessed interior decor was Hugo’s consuming passion from 1856 to 1859. He even got to the point of wondering whether he had chosen the wrong career. Maybe he should have devoted his energies not to literature and politics, he mused, but to decorating homes. Thank goodness it was only a thought.
The remodelling of Hauteville was not the principal reason why Les Misères stayed in the manuscript trunk for so long. Jersey and the sight of the sea had sparked off an intense burst of creation in poetry that had not yet run its course, and when he got to Guernsey Hugo continued to produce large amounts of narrative and increasingly philosophical verse. He had always been an occasional painter, and on Guernsey he also put more time into watercolours, pen-and-ink sketches and unclassifiable visual works in other media. It’s as if he was giving himself a protracted holiday from prose before settling down to what he had known for many years would be an immensely challenging task.
On 25 April 1860, Hugo finally went to his manuscript trunk in the Oak Room of Hauteville House and took out the work he’d broken off in February 1848. He looked at a few pages of Les Misères and took them with him to read aloud that evening when he went over the road to have dinner with Juliette at La Fallue. Next morning, as every morning, Juliette’s first thought was to write a letter to her lover in the big house over the way.
Did you sleep well, my dear great man? Did your little Cosette not make too much of a noise in your head last night?… My mind is still quivering with affection and joy as if I were expecting the return of a real daughter of our own we’d been parted from for twelve years.15
The campaign to turn a draft into the greatest novel of the nineteenth century was about to get underway.
6.
The Beliefs of Victor Hugo
Les Misérables expresses the beliefs that Hugo held, which were quite particular to him. He was never reluctant to say that he believed in God, but he did not subscribe to any established tradition or cult. Contrary to the impression that Les Misérables may make on some readers, Hugo was not a Catholic. Unlike most French people of his age he had never been baptized or confirmed and had never taken communion; he never attended religious services and never went into church to pray.16 But pray he did. And he was adamant that Les Misérables was ‘a religious book’.
At the start of the story, in October 1815, a fierce-looking ex-convict that no innkeeper will house is offered a meal and a bed by a priest. Valjean wakes up in the small hours, puts the silverware he’s seen at dinner in his kitbag, climbs over the garden wall and runs off. Local gendarmes arrest him and bring him back to the bishop’s palace. Myriel stuns the policemen and the ex-convict by saying (untruthfully) that he had made a gift of the silverware to the outcast, who had overlooked the two silver candlesticks that he’d meant to give him as well. This exceptionally charitable act strikes to the heart of the rough customer just out of jail. He resolves to turn himself into a different man and to be as good to others as Monseigneur Myriel has been to him.
Hugo’s elder son Charles, a rationalist and a republican through and through, did not approve of this portrait of a saintly priest. One evening at Marine Terrace, fulfilling his half-official role as the winder-up of his father’s after-dinner talk,17 he declared that the uplifting ‘candlestick story’ at the start of Les Misères was a dreadful way to begin. Adèle II’s record of the ensuing flare-up is almost fit for the stage:
CHARLES: Priests, especially Catholic ones, are the enemies of democracy. To make a Catholic priest a model of perfection or understanding is to do a favour to the Catholic church, it’s like saying that Catholicism and the ideal of the good can be one and the same thing.
He finished up by saying his father should use, in place of a priest, another kind of man, a modest professional like a doctor, for instance.
VICTOR HUGO: First, in general, there will always be religions and priests. There are different ways of being a priest. Whoever teaches about the invisible world is a priest. All thinkers are priests.
CHARLES: Well, take a thinker then, a priest of times to come, not a priest of times past, the enemy of the future.
VICTOR HUGO: You can’t put the future in the past. My novel is set in 1815.
Charles Hugo used as a secondary argument in the conversation the bad impression that the glorification of a priest would make on republicans, who would not understand the book’s aim.
VICTOR HUGO (loud): You call Myriel a Catholic priest? I would say that the portrait of a pure, great and real priest in my book is the most savage satire imaginable of real living priests today.
Charles Hugo then raised the objection that it would nonetheless irritate a number of blinkered and obstinate republicans.
VICTOR HUGO (louder): I don’t care about the opinions of crazy or blinkered republicans! What I care about is doing my duty. At my time of life, having scaled every peak, having been a member of the Académie and the Chambre des pairs, having served in two parliaments [… and] having even turned down a ministerial post, here I am, in exile. Here I am no longer a man, I am an apostle and a priest. I am a priest. Mankind needs religion. People need God. I’m not afraid to proclaim that every night I pray.18
Hugo’s after-dinner outburst about religion and prayer wasn’t directed just at the audience round the table. Behind Charles’s bid to steer Les Misérables away from favourable representation of a member of the Catholic church lay the wider community of unbelieving socialists and republicans in exile on Jersey and elsewhere, who hoped that the most famous proscrit among them would pin his flag to their mast. Many of them went so far as to think that Hugo’s attachment to religion was unhinged. Kessler, a loyal hanger-on who followed Hugo from Jersey to Guernsey, called the great man a cretin to his face for believing in God. Pierre Leroux, the utopian philosopher who lived next to the Hugos at Marine Terrace, made a sport of poking fun at Hugo’s beliefs during their long walks together on the beach. (Hugo privately dubbed that notorious scrounger a philousophe,19 blending the words for ‘crook’ and ‘philosopher’; in Les Misérables, he goes so far as to transfer the insult to Thénardier).20 An adulating scribe, Martin-Dupont, felt it proper to say that Hugo’s beliefs were childish and could be summed up as diluted Catholicism. ‘Either you believe or you don’t, and that’s that,’ was Hugo’s conventional conversational riposte.21 But the fact is that in 1845, at the start of the work, in 1854, in argument with his son, in 1862, in the final version of the novel, and at all other times in his life, Hugo was respectful of all those who had faith but had no interest in what faith that was.
Bishop Myriel (whose character is based on the historical Bishop Miollis of Digne) is certainly not an average ecclesiastical dignitary of the era. He lies without a qualm, and to the police; he sells stolen property recovered from a bandit; his beliefs do not appear to include the divinity of Christ or the Virgin Birth. His refusal of pomp and his charity towards the poor and the oppressed are silent reproaches to the regular behaviour of the Catholic hierarchy. That’s why Catholic readers of the first edition of Les Misérables in 1862 were outraged more by the character of Myriel than by almost anything else in the book. The nephew of the real Miollis protested in a letter to the press: Hugo had no right to refer so transparently to his uncle, he said, and especially not to add ‘details entirely contrary to the truth and of a libellous nature’, namely the ‘odious, absurd, fantastical and abominable’ scene where Bishop Myriel kneels at the feet of the political outcast G.22
Charles was the first in a long line of readers who have tried to bend Les Misérables to fit political agendas and ideas alien to Victor Hugo. Because he put in his oar before the book was finished – while it was still the incomplete draft suspended on 21 February 1848, with only its new title in place – he was more effective than anyone else in making the novel even more firmly what it is. In the work Hugo did later on to complete and expand his draft, he paid special attention to broadening and deepening his image of the godly man of the church. Partly to show Charles who was in charge, and partly to make sure he would be completely understood.
Myriel gives away 90 per cent of his stipend, leaving himself only 1,500 francs a year to live on. That certainly justifies calling him un saint homme, which means a little less than ‘a holy man’ and rather more than ‘a good guy’. However, it is not the saintliness but the fairness of Myriel that Hugo foregrounds in the title he chose for the first book of Les Misérables, ‘Un Juste’. Meaning something more than ‘good’, the word juste points more specifically to righteousness. (The ‘Righteous Among Nations’ honoured by the State of Israel at Yad Vashem are called Les Justes Parmi les Nations in French.) Myriel is an example not of what a priest might be, but of how a just man – a fair and righteous man – can mitigate the injustices visited on others by the social practices of nineteenth-century France.