Juliette
Drouet, until March 4,
2007 at the House of Victor Hugo. 6, place of the Vosges. 75004 Paris.
Tel.: 01 42 72 71 52.
Engravings, tables, letters, memories…
it is a small jewel of delicacy and sensitivity which the House of
Victor Hugo proposes to us to illustrate the passion of the two lovers.
They were in love during one half-century, him, the public figure,
genius of all arts, deputy, her, actress without much talent, pretty
and fresh like an apple. It had seen it, on February 2, 1833, in a
third role of Lucrèce Borgia to the Theatre of the Saint
Martin's day Door, had re-examined it a few weeks later. One night of
love had been enough so that is born a passion which lasted until their
death, at two years from interval. Three fairies are leaning on this
first exhibition devoted to Juliette Drouet, the most famous “mistress”
of the world of arts and letters: Gerard Pouchain, who knows perfectly
Juliette Drouet, Danièle Molinari, director of the House of
Victor Hugo, and Jerome Godeau, “romantic police chief flying”, as it
is defined himself, who made a success of a work of goldsmith in his
setting in scene, putting in correspondence engravings of time, letters
- Juliette wrote some more than 20 000 in her “Totor” - personal
memories, tables, creating by bulk-headings, curtains of pearls, plays
of lighting, an intimacy never commonplace, with the image of their
relation. Sometimes showing the Juliette, woman of the shade, which
agreed to live hidden in the Marsh, not to leave nor to even read its
mail without the downstream of his/her tyrannical lover, sometimes
Juliette, woman of light, at the time of their ritual holidays in
Normandy, in Spain or on the edges of the Rhine.
“If my name is alive, your name will live”, had written one day Victor
Hugo, visionary to him. It survived, indeed, only through the man who
it passionately liked at the point to enter in love like one enters in
religion. The portrait of “Holy Thérèse” of the baron
Gerard, all in extase extreme and sensual, exposed in the second room,
is not a sacrilege, but an audacity of a great accuracy. Juliette
Drouet closed herself in the world not to live that in distressed
waiting of the only being which counted for it, with her daughter, the
poor Louise, whom it had had with the Pradier sculptor and who died
phthisical in 20 years. A mourning similar to the pain which Hugo felt
when it lost his Léopoldine and which still brought them closer.
Refined gouaches which show it in its minor parts of “third in love”,
the violine dress of taffeta and gold which it wore on scene the day
when it live it for the first time, a delicious lithography of
Alphonse-Leon Christmas where it appears in all its grace, at the same
time voluptuous and modest, of the watercolours of Alphonse
Devéria, which brush the middle-class and fashionable company of
the XIX E century, bronzes of Pradier, of the sights of Étretat
by Isabey, other watercolours of Jongkind, and, of course, washings
with brown ink, of Victor Hugo, of these ghostly floating cities, “as
their love which floated above the world and his contingencies”, Jerome
Godeau notices,… each selected object reflects the disturbed time which
they crossed together, days of 1848, the difficult years which followed
until the fall of the Second Empire, the exile in Jersey, then in
Guernesey to have dared to write “Napoleon the small one”. There too,
it followed it, placed in a house close to his. With considering and
with known of Adele, the legitimate wife, who hardly hid her connection
with Sainte-Beuve and that Hugo also liked, with her manner, that a
being out of the commun run, living a life except standard in the most
normative company that the history knew.
Two portraits of Juliette, one at 25 years, signed Champmartin, fresh,
sensual, generous, available, the other of Bastien-Lepage, showing a
pretty old woman rams worthy, worn, and, paradoxically, happy, mark the
beginning and the end of the exhibition and a also insane love, also
except standard which Romanticism that it illustrates.
