Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith

Chapter 1: First Communion

28  Chapter 1 First Communion The Most Beautiful Day in the Lives and Deaths of Little Girls In August 1835, Léopoldine Hugo, eldest child of the writer Victor Hugo and his wife Adèle, sat for her father’s friend, the painter Auguste de Châtillon, to have her portrait made. Léopoldine was eleven and preparing for her first communion; the portrait shows a serious young girl looking up from her study of a medieval book of hours. Her dark hair, smoothed back from a central part, contrasts with her red dress, which looks like a pinafore, worn over a white blouse with full sleeves and a lace collar. She is the studious child of a bourgeois family, ensconced in a comfortably upholstered armchair and intent on her book until interrupted by the artist. However, the bright red flower that holds back her hair and the earring dangling against her neck both suggest that Léopoldine is on the verge of womanhood, and she appears distinctly older than in drawings her mother made during the same period. Her book opens to an image of the Dormition of the Virgin, a reminder that as a catechumen, Léopoldine was learning the appropriate models of Christian life, especially the Virgin. A few months later Châtillon produced an accompanying portrait of her mother, which featured Adèle Hugo in a similar pose with her dark hair also highlighted by a flower.1 The two portraits together display what should 1. Léopoldine’s portrait is at the Musée Victor Hugo, Paris, and Adèle’s is at the Musée Victor Hugo in Villequier and is reproduced in Elisabeth Chirol, Le Musée Victor Hugo de Villequier FIRST COMMUNION 29 (Villequier,Fr.,1982). Pierre Georgel,Léopoldine Hugo,une jeune fille romantique,2nd ed. (Paris,1968), pl. XV, 112–14, 118. For Adèle Hugo’s contemporary drawing of Léopoldine, see pl. XI. Figure 1.1. Auguste de Châtillon, Léopoldine au livre d’heures (1835), Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris. Photographer: Roger-Viollet. The Image Works. Reproduced with permission. have been Léopoldine’s future; poised on the edge of womanhood, she looks toward her mother and the Virgin, exemplars of marriage, maternity, and a peaceful death, all in the arms of the church. In fact, Léopoldine Hugo died young, drowned in a boating accident in September 1843, just a few months after her marriage. Her grieving mother 30 CHAPTER 1 2. The picture, with the scrap of fabric and a line from Victor Hugo’s Contemplations, is in the collection of the Musée Victor Hugo, Paris. 3. See Laura Kreyder, La Passion des petites filles: Histoire de l’enfance féminine de la Terreur à Lolita (Arras, Fr., 2003) on the nineteenth-century fascination with dead and dying girls. saved a scrap from the red dress Léopoldine wore for her portrait and framed it with her own drawing of Léopldine at twelve, made during the summer when her daughter received her first communion.2 Léopoldine joined a line of tragic girls who died young and whose first communion ceremony became the focus of the cult of memory that surrounded them. The little girl in her communion dress, kneeling to receive the sacrament, was an intensely charged symbol of the role of the sacred in daily life; waiting to enter into womanhood, the child in her white gown might never leave the innocence of youth.3 First communion remained a relevant ceremony throughout the nineteenth century, with most children receiving it even as observance of other sacraments declined. As the century progressed, however, representations of first communion increasingly featured girls rather than boys. A little girl, hesitating at a fork in the road that might lead her either to Christian womanhood or to a saintly and early death, resonated with Catholic audiences. The Eucharist reminded girls of the limits of their existence, particularly of the need to prepare for their deaths. Entering adulthood, girls accepted the heavy responsibility for their own souls and for the souls of their loved ones, especially of their future families;receiving Christ in the Eucharist,they also prepared themselves to stand before God after death. To assume responsibility for the state of one’s soul and to minister to others was not necessarily restrictive, however, because it might be the prelude to an active Christian...