fit for a sweetheart worthy of the name, when the lover is absent or delayed. On February 18th, 1833, Victor Hugo had left her early in the morning. She had rushed to the window to follow him with her eyes as long as he was in sight. At the corner of the Rue St. Denis, as he was about to turn into the Rue St. Martin, he looked back; they exchanged a volley of kisses. Then she found herself lonely indeed, oblivious of her surroundings, like a somnambulist who walks and speaks and acts in a dream. Around her was an immense void, in her heart one sole desire: to see the poet again, and never to part from him. It was to fill that void and beguile that desire that she took up the habit of writing to him.

JULIETTE DROUET IN THE RÔLE OF LA PRINCESSE NÉGRONI.

He, on his part, repaid letters and messages as much as possible with his own presence. Any time he could snatch from his children and work and visits to publishers or theatre-managers, he gave to Juliette. As Lucrèce Borgia continued to reap a signal success—the greatest, from the financial point of view, that the Porte St. Martin had ever experienced—Harel asked the author for a new play. Victor Hugo wrote Marie Tudor in very few days, and the principal parts had just been allotted: to Mademoiselle Georges the Queen, to Juliette, Jane. Under pretext of rehearsing, we find our lovers lunching together almost every day. If there was really a rehearsal, they met again afterwards on the stage, and tasted the rare pleasure of sharing their work, as they shared their pleasure. When they did not rehearse, they hurried out of town. Furtively yet boldly, timidly but merrily, they started on one of those strolls, partly Parisian, and partly suburban, which, according to Juliette, were the chief enchantment of their liaison.

Paris was not then the dusty conglomeration of eight-story-high houses it now is. Instead of spreading over the surrounding country, it allowed the country to encroach upon itself. At the foot of Montmartre (which Juliette always calls a mountain), real windmills waved their long arms; along the Butte aux Cailles a genuine brook purled among the lilacs and syringa; on the summit of Montparnasse, when there was dancing, artists and poets, dandies and grisettes, trod actual grass, to the sound of fiddles! Juliette had always in her a strain of bohemianism. We may therefore picture her in short, striped, pleated skirt, tight at the waist but flowing out wide at the bottom over white stockings, a little silken cape covering her queenly young bosom, without concealing its fine lines, her head surmounted by a rose-trimmed bonnet with black ribbons, clasping the arm of her “friend” with sparkling eyes and cheeks as rosy as her headdress. Happiness, as she used to say in after-days, is so light to carry, that her feet hardly touched the ground. Her pride in her companion was such that her glance defied Heaven. “When I hold your arm,” she wrote to him, “I am as proud as if I had made you myself.”

She did remake him, to a certain extent, for it was she who insisted upon his becoming younger and smarter in appearance. He now trained his chestnut locks over his Olympian brow, in careful but unromantic fashion; his black eyes, with their blue depths, resumed their upward glance, when they were not plunged in those of his mistress; his complexion, which had been so pale, now gained colour, and soon, when Auguste de Châtillon paints the poet’s miniature for Juliette’s pleasure, he will be able to endow him with lips less eloquent than caressing, without straying from the truth. “The dear little fashionable,” as his companion called him, compressed his sturdy figure into a really handsome blue coat opening over a shot waistcoat. His immaculate linen, and the scarlet ribbon of the order Charles X had bestowed upon him in his youth, stood out in pleasant contrast to the sombre hue of his coat. His tiny feet, and hands as delicate as Juliette’s own, completed this somewhat incongruous exterior.

And the two made expeditions together, wherever they knew of, or hoped to find, moss and trees, and an attractive shelter. They went to Montmartre and Montrouge, to Maison Blanche and St. James, to Bicêtre and Meudon, Fontainebleau, Gisors, St. Germain-en-Laye, and Versailles. Sometimes the poet pondered his work as he walked. Silence was then the order of the day; so Juliette was silent. But more often they talked, made plans for the future, babbled merry nonsense, and exchanged kisses. Or else they discussed their past: Victor told of his studious childhood spent poring over books, of his early works, laborious and chaste. Juliette recalled her bare-footed school-girl pranks. Both gloried in the radiant memories of their youth.

But in the midst of those halcyon days of simple pleasures, Fate began to show herself unkind. First came the failure of Marie Tudor, then Juliette’s disappointment at the Comédie Française, and, in addition, the persecution of her creditors and the consequent quarrels with Victor Hugo, with their subsequent scenes of tender reconciliation.