The apartment on the Place des Vosges, which was re-let after the Hugo family’s departure, and later converted into classrooms, has undergone many changes. The layout of the rooms has been altered, and most of the furniture was sold off in separate lots in 1852 as the family departed into exile. There are hardly any pictures showing the layout of the rooms in Victor Hugo’s time. However, we can build up an image of the residence from archives, museum documents and visitors' accounts.
Victor Hugo's guests - see the information panel insets - have left us descriptions of the apartment on the Place Royale, now Place des Vosges. These accounts describe the décor, merely to set the scene for their author’s meeting with the master of the house. They describe mainly the reception rooms, and remain quite vague and inaccurate. While we are able to piece them together, they are sometimes contradictory.
Despite some uncertainties, a number documents have allowed us to restore the layout and purpose of the rooms, which also changed over time. The key source is the records of the polisher, Guignon, which have been conserved by the museum. He maintained the parquet flooring, carpets, furniture and tapestries, and hung paintings, etc. The museum's archives hold many invoices that also provide an insight into the domestic life of the Hugo family, and also give us an impression of the commercial activity in the neighbourhood at that time.
Some of the details (such as the fireplace in the dining room, the “Gothic” furniture, Hugo’s liking for tapestries, and combinations of fabric and copper studs) already anticipate the décor of Hauteville House.
VISIT THE APARTMENT WITH HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, 1833 AND 1843
The Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen visited Victor Hugo twice, in 1833 and 1843. Both times he wrote a short account of the visit, in a letter and in his diary.
He looks like the portrait you have, only thinner and younger. In the antechamber, there was a picture of Notre Dame Cathedral, and a little Bohemian child was running around the floor, probably from our Victor. We sat together and talked about Danish literature, but he didn't even know Öehlenschlaeger. I think we would get along, there was something about him I liked! During the conversation I often thought of you and wished that you were here with your favourite author. Victor was in his dressing gown and slippers. I would have asked him to write a verse in my album, but being a stranger, I modestly asked him to write his name (so that you could see it) and he scratched it among my other trophies. He said he understood me very well, but that must be because he has a good head.
Hans Christian Andersen, letter to Henriette Wulff, 23 August 1833
When I arrived at Victor Hugo's house, he was out. His wife told me to wait, as she wanted to write a reply to Marmier. I entered a small sitting room, entirely furnished in a rococo style, with Gobelin tapestries of Amours [cherub-like children], queens, and ladies! A sort of sofa, or rather a high-backed antique pew, stood against the wall. V. Hugo's daughter, a beautiful, dark 11- or 12-year-old, was sitting having lunch while reading a play. She put the parrot back in its cage. Madame Hugo is beautiful and Spanish-looking. She was very kind.
Hans Christian Andersen, Diary, 15 March 1843
The staircase of the Hotel de Rohan-Guéménée has been altered. In Victor Hugo's time, the entrance hall reached the middle of the current antechamber. To the left, it led straight into a kitchen looking onto an inner courtyard, which no longer exists.
Antechamber (now Room 1 of the Museum, “Antechamber”)
As soon as you step into the antechamber, Victor Hugo's taste is evident, in the two large chests, plaster casts, copper medallions, paintings, engravings, etc. The polisher, Guignon, listed as many as 80 items in December 1840, when a mahogany sideboard was installed between the doors to the kitchen and sitting room, to display the silverware.
VASSILY PETROVICH BOTKIN AT VICTOR HUGO'S HOUSE IN 1835
This description seems inaccurate. He mentions the study, which he apparently sees from the sitting room through the open door. Yet the study is at the other end of the apartment. However, he is interested in the furnishings and mentions a number of them.
Hugo went out and the sitting room door closed behind him, so I was able to have a look around the famous writer's abode at my leisure. There were signs of a passion for medieval architecture everywhere. On the wall hung beautiful drawings of Antwerp Cathedral, a distant view of Strasbourg’s bell tower, a partial view of Paris with the Gothic Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie Tower, and a portrait of a General in uniform from the time of the Revolution, probably a portrait of his father. Along the wall there was a superb, wooden divan with carvings from the 16th or 17th century; to the left, a canopied sofa in raspberry damask, from the time of Louis XIII or Louis XIV, and in front of it, a piano. It is a very high room, all hung with raspberry drapes. The door to the study was open: it is not large. Many pictures hang on the walls. There are lots of books and papers on the table in the centre. I could see the study from a distance*, and judged it improper to enter.
Vassili Pétrovitch Botkine, 27 July 1835
* According to most accounts of the time, the study was located at the rear of the apartment and so could not be seen from the main drawing room.
Leather Room and Dining Room (now Room 2 of the Museum, the “Red Room”)
From here, you could access the Leather Room which overlooks the square. It is decorated in patent leather, except for one wall, which is covered from floor to ceiling with a medieval tapestry. Between the windows stands a stove and a large, carved medieval sideboard. Opposite, there is a bench with a backrest in the same style, as well as a shelf between the two doors of the corridor and the large drawing room. The furniture is covered with vases and porcelain, and an array of ancient weapons hangs here.
Red damask doors and the ceiling in the same fabric, installed in 1837, complete the décor. In November 1840, this room was converted into a dining room (when Madame Hugo moved her bedroom into the previous dining room). The marble floor was then covered with an old Persian carpet.
A passageway separated this first sitting room from the dining room on the courtyard side. This dining room contains a fireplace with patterned ceramic tiles. Victor Hugo created the same type of fireplace for the dining room of Hauteville House. Madame Hugo installed her bedroom here in 1840. These two rooms and the passageway occupied the space taken up by the present Red Drawing Room.
Gustave Masson, a future writer and literary critic, was 20 years old when he visited Victor Hugo.
Eight days after receiving Mr. Victor Hugo's reply, I went to his house. It was a Sunday. You must understand how I trembled as I put my hand on the bell. A little maid opened the door. “Who is calling?” she asked. I gave her my card. A minute later, “Please do come in!” Here is a description of the drawing room. A very beautiful, large room, with two windows and a balcony overlooking the Place Royale. In the centre, a chandelier, Renaissance furniture. A very attractive bust of Mr. Hugo on a sideboard. A carved wooden dresser covered with ornaments. Between the two windows, another sideboard on which stood two statuettes representing Ruy Blas and the Queen of Spain. Old tapestries served as hangings. When I entered, Mr. Hugo's youngest son was seated at a table next to an open window, finishing a translation for his homework while eating prunes. His father was pointing out turns of phrase along with a young man with a black moustache, a friend of the house it seems, who was leafing through the dictionary. Madame Hugo was sitting on a sofa. On her knee, she held a charming little girl of 8 or 9, while another, perhaps 13 or 14 years old, accounted for everyone in the room. I would guess Victor Hugo’s age to be 45. He is short in stature, with very long, slicked back hair.
Gustave Masson, 1 July 1839
The Large Drawing Room (now Room 3 of the Museum, “Chinese Room”)
Following the wall where a long balcony used to run (the balcony no longer exists), you come to the large drawing room, which connects, through a door at the rear, with the passageway serving the bedrooms. It is the large drawing room, especially, that conjures the visitors, including members of the Romantic set (artists, writers, politicians and famous people) who used to throng here. Dating from 1847, it is also the only room represented in the Museum whose designer has not been identified.
The floor is covered with a huge rug and the walls are hung with the familiar red damask that dominates the house. On the wall opposite the entrance, the fireplace is engulfed in a tapestry adorned with gilded studs and surrounded by cupboards with doors hidden under precious silk drapes, with a red background on the right and a blue background on the left. The furniture consists of gilded wooden tables and a carved wooden divan crowned with a velvet canopy. A vicious rumour suggested that this canopied sofa was Victor Hugo's “throne”, from where he reigned over the Romantic scholars who flocked to this room. Théophile Gautier's famous pun on the “Dey's dais” led to confusion, as the Ottoman banner from the capture of Algiers, given to the poet by Lieutenant Eblé, actually hung on the opposite wall, as you can see in the drawing.
Ceremonial portraits decorate this drawing room. The marble bust of David d'Angers sits on its pedestal, draped in red silk and adorned with gilded studs. Also featured are paintings of Madame Hugo by Louis Boulanger; the master of the house with his son François-Victor by Auguste de Châtillon, and a full-length portrait of General Hugo, and Léopoldine by Dubufe. In July 1837, the painting by Saint-Evre, Inez de Castro, was hung here. It was a gift from the Duke and Duchess of Orleans to Victor Hugo It was probably in front of the door to the rear of this room that Auguste de Châtillon painted the portrait of Victor Hugo with his son [François-]Victor. And it is also likely that in the portrait of Léopoldine with the Book of Hours, the young girl is sitting on a chair in this very room.
VISIT THE APARTMENT WITH JACQUES-ÉDOUARD LEBEY DE BONNEVILLE, 1844
The journalist Jacques-Édouard Lebey published a long article on the writer in Le Moniteur des feuilletons. His description of the apartment – a rite of passage in the newspaper’s literary column – is one of the fullest and most detailed ever written.
Let us now enter inside the poet’s current home, the sanctuary where his heart is divided between the shrines of family and of poetry. His apartment is located on the second floor of a house in the Place Royale. First impressions are more of luxury and splendour than of comfort and good taste. The antechamber is furnished with two superb antique dressers filled with Saxony porcelain, terracotta antiques and a few modern plaster casts featuring themes from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Lots of bronze and plaster medallions, lithographs and drawings are crowded onto the panels, including caricatures of several famous people, such as Alexandre Dumas.
The dining room, the usual meeting place of the family, is simple, and almost bourgeois. Only the colour red dominates in the hangings and curtains, as it does throughout Mr. Hugo's apartment. This taste for red and for brightness reminds me of a little-known saying attributed to one of our wittiest and most whimsical poets.
“Mr. Hugo,” he said, “Is a cactus, the brightest and most beautiful of flowers. It attracts and absorbs the eye, but it says nothing to the soul; it has no perfume.”
The first half of this comparison seems to me much more accurate than the second half. In any case, Mr. Hugo is particularly fond of red, and seems to confirm the ingenious analogy of Fourier, who claims that this colour represents ambition and hyperbole.
To write adequately and completely about the drawing room and all the contrasts in taste, colour and styles that it holds would require the meticulousness of Mr. de Balzac or the official accuracy of an auctioneer. I will content myself with mentioning the two main objects that first strike the eye. Firstly, there is a sort of throne topped with a red velvet canopy, on which it is said Mr. Hugo likes to sit when he gathers together his clean-shaven, fervent followers. Secondly, there is a very beautiful painting depicting the coronation of Inès de Castro after her death. This painting was given to the poet by the Duke of Orleans in rather touching circumstances, which deserve to be recounted here. When a poor family solicited the poet's intervention to obtain some help, he referred the matter to the prince, who immediately accepted his recommendation and came to the aid of the unfortunate people in whom he took an interest. Mr. Hugo, wanting to pay his protégés’ debt of gratitude, celebrated the Duke of Orlean’s charity in a very beautiful piece of verse, entitled “The Poor Family”, and dedicated it to the royal prince. The poem was printed in Voix Intérieures [Inner Voices]. To thank the poet for this tribute, the august benefactor gave him this painting. In this room, there are also some beautiful family portraits painted by Mr. Louis Boulanger, some old paintings, and medieval sculptures that are more valuable for the originality and the strangeness of their composition than for their artistic merit.
Two hallways lead from the drawing room to the study. One is straight and rarely used. The other passageway is dark and winding; at each angel, at each angle, at each bend, we have to pass successive large, green curtains, like the three mysterious doors that Rudolph must open to reach the wife of Angelo. On entering the study, the first thing that catches the eye is the painting that adorns the ceiling of a life-size, almost naked woman. On all four walls, there are bronze and plaster medallions of nearly all the illustrious contemporaries whom Mr. Hugo generously calls his friends. There are pen drawings, watercolours and pochades, representing scenes and characters from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mary Tudor, Lucrece Borgia and Ruy-Blas. There are views of Gothic monuments and sketches of ghouls and all those strange and hideous monsters with which the architects of the 13th and 14th centuries loved to adorn their churches. The writer’s desk appears in the middle of all this, laden with jumbled piles of books, papers, journals, pamphlets, and manuscripts. Although common to a great many artists, it is not exactly the “effect of art” that Boileau suggests. It was here, surrounded by the blond heads of his four children, whom he loved to see playing around him, that Mr. Hugo wrote his most adorable and nobly inspired pages, those which have remained in all our memories, and which we will happily find again in our old age, like a distant echo of our earliest, most delightful and most emotional impressions.
Next to the study, there is a dressing room, almost as pretty as a woman's.
There is no need to mention the poet's lively and expressive features. His portraits have made us sufficiently familiar with that high forehead, which painters have taken pleasure in exaggerating, his small brilliant eyes, that aristocratic and almost disdainful mouth, those fleshy, rounded cheeks whose curve resembles the face of a child. His stature is on the short side. He is beginning to round out and gain a belly, like all men of learning who spend a large part of their lives in an armchair.
His domestic habits are those of a good bourgeois from Le Marais. He lunches between 10 and 11 o'clock, dines willingly at 5pm, and has a weakness for good food. He rather likes having one or two friends around his table, and treats them well. He has a few favourite dishes, which he prepares in a very distinguished manner, with a particular liking for fried veal. He is also very fond of sweet desserts. Madame Hugo anticipates all her husband's culinary whims and fancies, in a timely manner, and with charming delicacy.
Lebey de Bonneville, Le Moniteur des feuilletons, 1 September 1844
At the back of the house, in the wing set at right angles, there was a passageway along the wall, on the opposite side to the current corridor. Lit by a small window (like those that can still be seen on the other floors), it gave access to the rooms that looked out onto the courtyard.
Madame Hugo and the Girls’ Bedrooms (now Room 4 of the Museum, “Dining Room’)
The current Room 4 of the museum was divided in two, between the windows, with fireplaces on either side of the dividing wall. The first of the rooms, closer to the drawing room, was Madame Hugo's bedroom until 1840, when she moved into the former dining room. Although there are different versions, it is likely that the girls shared the next room but that Léopoldine was given a separate room when she became an adult.
Eugène Woestyn was only 14 years old when he came to read his poems to Victor Hugo. Ten years later, he appeared to be a regular when he described the Place Royale apartment for Le Journal du dimanche. He went on to enjoy a career as a playwright, poet and journalist.
Isidore, the poet's valet, opened the door and ushered us into the drawing room, which was for the moment deserted. As we passed through the antechamber, whose walls are lined with medallions, and the dining room, where a superb Gothic dresser stands, my companion slowed his pace, casting a curious glance to right and left. His insatiable interest would not have been satisfied until we had passed by every enamel, so I told him, “We’ll never be done if you itemise all the riches here, one by one. Come on, the drawing room will sufficiently compensate you for the rest. [...] Alfred was no longer listening to me. He was entranced by the drawing room. His gaze went from the old tapestry adorning the ceiling, to the wide doors framed with lampas silk; from the paintings by the masters, fraternal mementos from great artists to great poets, to the statuettes and chinoiseries capriciously crammed onto the sideboards and credenzas. Every single thing was subject to this rapid examination: the watercolours by Dauzats, Louis Boulanger, Chassériau, and Delacroix; the Venetian mirrors, whose bevels are half hidden under the fine scrolls of the frame sculptures; the squat potiche vases, which Bernard de Palissy, from the Celestial Empire, had enamelled in shining colours, the gilt bronze Amours [child statues] showing off their adorable chubbiness on the high mantelpiece, and the Boulle clock, richly inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver. Then the young man's eyes fixed upon the magnificent, white, marble bust of Victor Hugo, carved by David d'Angers [...] Come over here! Before any else arrives, I want to show you another portrait. And, drawing him over to the fireplace, I pointed out a pastel by Edouard Dubufe, under the Rocaille style clock. “Who is this young girl?” asked Alfred, turning to me. “This is the daughter that the poet has lost. This is sweet, charming Leopoldine, who was taken up heaven while her bridal bouquet was still fresh and in full bloom.
Eugène Woestyn, Journal du dimanche, 4 October 1846
Boys’ Bedroom? (now Room 5 of the Museum, “Small Study”)
There is little documented evidence of the adjacent room as a dressing room, or more likely as the bedroom of the boys, Charles and François-Victor. There are no sources suggesting that it was anything else.
In 1847, Charles Dickens recounts his visit to Victor Hugo, in a letter to Lady Blessington. He casts an ironic, amused eye over what he sees. For his part, Victor Hugo seems to have paid no attention to this writer, with whom he would often be compared in later years.
They are playing Victor Hugo’s Lucreece Borgia again, at the Porte St. Martin; but it is poorly performed, and hangs fire drearily, though a very remarkable and striking play. We were at his house last Sunday. A most extraordinary place, looking like an old curiosity shop, or the Property Room of some gloomy vast old Theatre. I was much struck by Hugo himself, who looks like a Genius, as he certainly is very interesting from head to foot. His wife is a handsome woman with flashing black eyes, who looks as if she might poison his breakfast any morning when the humour seized her. There is also a ditto daughter of fifteen or sixteen, with ditto eyes, and hardly any drapery above the waist, whom I should suspect of carrying a sharp poignard in her stays but for her not appearing to wear any. Sitting among old armour, and old tapestry, and old coffers, and grim old chairs and tables, and old Canopies of state from old places, and old golden lions going to play at skittles with ponderous old golden balls, they made a most romantic show, and looked like a chapter out of one of his own books...”
Charles Dickens, Letter to Lady Blessington, 27 January 1847
Victor Hugo's Study and Bedroom (now Rooms 6 and 7 of the Museum)
It is possible that these last two rooms are laid out and partitioned differently from what they were in Victor Hugo’s time. The first is Victor Hugo's bedroom, which had a single window (whereas there are currently two windows), and the second is the study, according to Victor Hugo's own description (“At the end of the apartment was the study belonging to the master of the house, with an exit to the backstairs”). It would also be more logical for this important room to be the largest. Hugo himself referred to his work space in a poem in his Voix intérieures [Inner Voices] collection, called A des oiseaux envolés [To the Flown Birds]. The floor of the study has brown tiles and parquet flooring covered with rugs. Green and gold curtains frame the stained glass windows that filter the light. A carved wooden mirror surmounts a green damask couch, and on the table is a compass, known as Christopher Columbus' compass, bearing the date 1489 and the inscription “La Pinta”. The bedroom walls and door are hung with red damask, and a tapestry serves as an alcove. In 1837, a painting was attached to the ceiling, according to tradition. Le Moine rouge [The Red Monk] by Auguste de Châtillon depicts a religious man in a flamboyant red robe reading a Bible, alongside a naked woman who serves as his lectern.
Victor Hugo – [1848] 1876
The Last Visitors to the Place Royale
Almost thirty years later, Victor Hugo remembers his Place Royale apartment in “Paris and Rome” (Section IV), introduction to Part 3 of “Words and Deeds - Since Exile”. His moving account of the “visit” paid by rioters in June 1848 was published in 1876.
One of the tenants in number 6 was actually a former Peer of France and, at that time, a member of the Constituent Assembly. He and his family were not at home. His apartment was quite large and occupied the whole of the second floor. At one end was an entrance to the main staircase, and at the other end, an exit via a back stairway.
At that very moment, this former Peer of France was one of the 60 representatives sent by the Constituent Assembly to suppress the riot, direct the columns of attack, and maintain the Assembly's authority over the generals. On the day that these events took place, he was dealing with riots in one of the neighbouring streets, assisted by his colleague and friend, the great Republican sculptor, David d'Angers.
“Let's go up to his apartment!" shouted the rioters.
And all hell broke loose in the house.
They went up to the second floor. They filled the main stairway and the courtyard. An old woman was looking after the house while the masters were out. Completely distraught, she opened the door to the rioters. They piled in after their leader. The deserted apartment had the serious air of a place of work and reflection.
As they crossed the threshold, the leader, Gobert, removed his hat and ordered,
“Hats off!
Everyone took off their hats.
A voice cried,
“We need weapons”.
Another replied,
“If there are any here, we'll take them.”
“For sure,” said the leader.
The antechamber was a large, austere room, lit by a long, narrow window in one corner. It was furnished with wooden chests along the walls in the old Spanish fashion.
They entered.
“Fall in!” ordered the leader.
They lined up in threes, with all sorts of confused murmuring.
“Let us be silent!” commanded the leader.
Everyone fell silent.
The leader added,
“If there are weapons, we will take them.”
The old woman led on, trembling. From the antechamber, they entered the dining room.
“There they are!” one of them shouted.
“What?” asked the leader.
“There are the weapons.”
On the wall of the dining room, they were indeed rewarded with an arsenal of sorts. The man who had spoken continued,
“Here’s a rifle.”
And he pointed to a rare, old wheel-lock musket.
“It’s a piece of art,” replied the leader.
Another rioter, with grey hair, spoke up.
“In 1830, we took some of these rifles from the Artillery Museum.”
The leader replied,
“The Artillery Museum belonged to the people.”
They left the rifle where it was.
Next to the wheel-lock musket hung a long, Turkish yatagan sword. Its blade was made of Damascus steel; the roughly-carved handle and scabbard were of solid silver.
“Oh, look!” exclaimed a rioter, “Here’s a good weapon. I'll take it.” “It’s a sword.
Made of silver!” shouted the crowd.
These words were enough. No-one touched it.
There were lots of ragpickers from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in this crowd, poor men who were really destitute.
The drawing room came after the dining room. They entered.
A notice was lying on a table, with the initials of the master of the house in the corners.
“Oh no, look!” said one of the rioters, “He’s fighting against us!”
“He's doing his duty,” replied the leader.
The rioter continued,
“Then what are we doing?”
The leader answered,
“We are doing our duty too.”
He added,
“We are defending our families; he is defending the fatherland.”
There are witnesses, still alive today, who heard these great words, calmly spoken.
The invasion continued, if you can call the slow procession of a silent crowd an invasion. They visited every room, one after the other. Not a single piece of furniture was moved, except for a cradle. The mistress of the house had the maternal superstition of keeping her youngest child's cradle beside her bed. One of the fiercest-looking in this ragged army came up and gently pushed the cradle, which seemed for a few moments to be rocking a sleeping child.
And the mob stopped to watch the rocking cradle with a smile.
At the far end of the apartment was the master's study, with an exit via the back stairs. They went from room to room until they reached it.
The leader ordered his men to open this exit, for behind the first arrivals, the “Légion les Combattants, Maitres de la Place” filled the whole apartment, and it was impossible to retrace their steps.
The study looked as though the writer had just popped out for a moment, and was about to return. Everything was scattered about with the deliberate messiness of work in progress. No one but the master of the house ever entered this room; hence the complete trust. There were two tables, both covered with the writer's instruments. Everything was jumbled together: papers and books, unopened letters, verses and prose, loose sheets and rough manuscripts. On one of the tables were some precious objects, including Christopher Columbus’ compass, bearing the date 1489 and the inscription “La Pinta”.
The leader, Gobert, approached. He picked up the compass and examined it curiously, then put it back on the table, saying,
“This is unique. This compass discovered America.”
Next to this compass, there were several gems: luxury seals, one of rock crystal, two silver, and one gold. This last jewel had been chased by the great artist, Froment-Meurice.
The other table was high, as the master of the house was in the habit of writing standing up.
On this table were the most recent pages of his interrupted work, [note: Les Misérables] and a large, unfolded sheet of paper covered with signatures had been tossed on top of these pages. This sheet was a petition from the sailors of Le Havre, asking for sanctions to be reviewed, and explaining that the insubordination of crews was due to the cruelty and unfairness of the Maritime Code. In the margin of the petition, the French Peer and Representative of the People, had written, “Support this petition. If we came to the aid of those who suffer, if we met their legitimate claims, if we gave back to the people what is due to the people, in a word, if we were just, we would be avoid the painful duty of repressing riots.”
This procession lasted nearly an hour. All these destitute, angry people passed by in silence. They entered through one door and left through the other. Cannon fire could be heard in the distance.
.
They all returned to battle.
