I. A Sentence Revised
On the last day of August 1881 a man of seventy-nine sat down to settle his estate and could not stop composing. The document he produced was practical enough in its dispositions: an allowance for his sick daughter, everything else to his two grandchildren, a life annuity raised to twelve thousand francs for their mother Alice, and another for a woman described not by name but by service rendered — the courageous woman who at the time of the coup d’état had saved his life at the risk of her own and afterward saved the trunk containing his manuscripts. To the poor he left forty thousand francs. He asked to be carried to the cemetery in the paupers’ hearse.
Two years later he revised. On 2 August 1883 he handed Auguste Vacquerie an unsealed envelope containing five short sentences intended for publication the day after his death. He gave fifty thousand francs to the poor; he wished to be carried to the cemetery in their hearse; he refused the prayers of all churches and asked for a prayer from every soul; he believed in God.
Look at what the rewriting does. The sum rises by a quarter. “The paupers’ hearse” becomes “their hearse” — the possessive stripped of its noun, a pronoun with no antecedent anywhere in the document, which means the antecedent has to be supplied by the reader out of sixty years of published work. It is the syntax of a man who assumes that everyone already knows who they are because he taught them. And the woman who saved the manuscripts, Juliette Drouet, had died on 11 May 1883, twelve weeks before the envelope was sealed. The final text contains no woman at all. It contains the poor, the churches, the souls, and God: four collectives and a deity, with the author standing among them in a borrowed vehicle.
Then the Republic overruled him. The government of Jules Grévy decreed a national funeral within a day of his death. The pauper’s hearse was kept — it would have been suicidal to discard it — but it was kept the way a relic is kept, carried through a ceremony of a scale no Bourbon had received, preceded by a night in which the coffin lay beneath the Arc de Triomphe on a catafalque designed by the architect of the Opéra, under crape and silver stars, guarded by cavalry with torches. The next morning, 1 June 1885, something close to two million people moved with the cortège from the Étoile to the Panthéon. The plain black cart drawn through that was not a refusal of pomp. It was the most expensive prop in the history of French mourning, and everyone who saw it understood exactly what it was saying, which was: he was one of you, and look what has become of him.
This is the difficulty with Victor Hugo, and it is not a difficulty that goes away if one is patient with it. He performed his sincerity so well that the performance is often mistaken for insincerity, and the sincerity is genuinely there. He asked for the poor man’s cart because he had spent forty years arguing, in verse, in fiction, in speeches, in private letters to condemned men in other countries, that the state’s treatment of the poor was the measure of its legitimacy. He also knew precisely how the image would look in the engravings. Both facts are true at once, and no honest account of him can spend one to pay for the other.
What follows takes the will as a working model of the man. Hugo’s central faculty — the thing he possessed in a quantity nobody else in the century approached — was conversion. He could turn one order of reality into another. A cathedral became a book; a book became an argument about printing; a drowned daughter became a liturgical calendar with an annual pilgrimage in it; a political defeat became a moral office held in perpetuity from a rented house on an island of nine thousand people; a grudge against a nephew of Bonaparte became a European vocabulary for describing usurpation. He converted the abject into the sublime so reliably that he made a theory of it before he was twenty-six and then spent the rest of his life proving the theory with his own life as the raw material.
Conversion of that kind has a yield and it has a cost, and both are payable by other people as well as by him. The yield included a change in how Europe talked about the guillotine, the workhouse, the prostitute, the foundling, and the political refugee. The cost was borne, to a degree that his admirers have often preferred not to calculate, by a wife who published his early life as though she were a witness rather than a wife, by a mistress who wrote him something on the order of twenty thousand letters and was given a house with rules, by a daughter whose collapse he handled with a mixture of tenderness and bureaucracy, and by the great many women whose initials and prices appear in his notebooks in a private shorthand that scholars have been decoding, uncomfortably, for a hundred years.
He was born in a garrison town, in a family split down the middle by the largest political quarrel in French history, and ...
