My Beloved Toto: Letters from Juliette Drouet to Victor Hugo 1833-1882 by Juliette Drouet (review)

1 58 Women in French Studies Drouet, Juliette. My Beloved Toto: Letters from Juliette Drouet to Victor Hugo 1833-1882. Evelyn Blewer, ed. Victoria Tietze Larson, trans. Albany: SUNY, 2005. Pp [l]-xvi; 245. ISBN 0-7914-6571-3. $60.00. "My virtue is to love you . . . Beyond my love, I am nothing, I understand nothing, I want nothing" (172). These words illustrate how Juliette Drouet, some thirty years into herrelationship withVictorHugo, persists in her beliefthat loving Hugo is her vocation and meaning for existence. By the time Drouet, orphan, courtesan, actress, lover and faithful correspondent to Hugo for fifty years, died at age seventy-seven, she had penned over twenty thousand letters to Hugo, writing him twice a day. "Drouet saw her role as lover as a kind ofcounterpart to Hugo's role as artist. Her letters were thus the artistic expression of her love," states Victoria Tietze Larson in her well-written introduction to Drouet's letters (26). For Hugo's part, Larson claims that he demanded that Drouet write him, "jokingly describing them as . . . 'restitus,' a neologism apparently based on 'resituter,' 'to pay back.'" (30). Larson has skillfully translated and emended Evelyn Blewer's collection of Drouet's 186 Lettres à Victor Hugo, 1833-1882, published in 1985 and augmented in 2001 as acompanion edition to Jean Gaudon's 2001 Lettres à Juliette Drouet. Drouet met Hugo in January of 1833 when he went to the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Martin to read his Lucrèce Borgia. On Mardi Gras night, Juliette gave herselfto Hugo "completely" and thus began a fifty-year affair. According to Larson, the affair endured because the two needed each other, for Drouet offered Hugo adulation and devotion in exchange for the redemption offered by Hugo's love. Drouet ultimately played Mary Magdalene to Hugo's Christ, thoroughly adhering to his tough terms which required on her part "total monogamy and stringent economy" (14). Their "mystic marriage" took place in 1839; Drouet agreed to abandon the theater after Hugo swore to support both her and her daughter. Despite his promise, Hugo had an affair with Léonie Biard that upset their union after Biard sent Drouet all the love letters she had received from Hugo. The 1851 coup d'état, however, salvaged their relationship, for Drouet saved Hugo's life by helping him to escape to Brussels. She spent several happy years in exile with him on Guernsey, and had fifteen more years with Hugo after his wife died in 1868. Over time, however, she grew increasingly suspicious of Hugo's infidelities and was humiliated repeatedly by the letters she read from young female admirers awed by his political and literary fame. She even fled to Belgium in an attempt to leave Hugo, who was philandering well into his eighties. It is almost incomprehensible Drouet would continuously play the martyr and fatalistically accept Hugo's constant betrayals. In the preface he wrote for this work, Jean Gaudon declares that the stereotype of the passive Drouet who lived to worship her lover is an inaccurate one, for Drouet at times proves to be quite the contrary. In fact, her letters are so intriguing because they represent such a wide range of tones reflecting the many facets ofthis intelligent woman writer. Certainly, some letters display self-pity and are even self-effacing, yet others are feisty, especially the one in which Drouet, chiding Hugo for reminding her ofthe past he promised not to evoke, declares: "I am not a tart" (62). In Book Reviews159 other letters, she adopts a "naughty" tone with overt references to Hugo's "dickybird" and requests more sex with him (62). Nonetheless, she attacks Hugo more than once, in one retaliatory letter calling him a "monster" and a "rascal" (104). Finally, Drouet can be very compassionate, an admirable trait best illustrated in letters that try to comfort Hugo over the loss ofhis children. Larson has skillfully translated the text and has meticulously pointed out in her notes the difficulties oftranslating certain insidejokes and puns, not to mention slang that has all but disappeared or has changed in usage since Drouet first wrote the letters. In addition to the excellent overview of...