Hugo et Sainte-Beuve: Vie et mort d’une amitié littéraire (review)

Described by Graham Robb as the ‘most productive and mutually destructive friendship in French literature’, the closeness and subsequent falling out of Hugo and Sainte-Beuve is the most famous story of a literary friendship from nineteenth-century France. The dynamics between Hugo and Sainte-Beuve reflect the uncertainties and preoccupations of the literary scene, as did the dynamics between Diderot and Rousseau and, most recently, Sartre and Camus. In the case of Hugo and Sainte-Beuve, however, these dynamics have been submerged in a welter of speculation and fascination with the affair between Sainte-Beuve and Hugo’s wife, Adèle. Overall, history has been unkind to Sainte-Beuve; he has tended to be presented both as the person who perpetrated most wrongs within the relationship and as the needier, more craven man. There are many achievements in this lucidly written and thoughtful book, but to my mind the most significant is the way in which Brix has wrested the story of the friendship away from the soap-opera of Sainte-Beuve’s adultery and has situated the break-up so firmly within competing Romantic agenda. By shifting the focus of the crescendo of arguments between the two men, Brix has uncovered a whole web of tensions. Both parties exacerbated these by endlessly rehashing in print the details of their mutual disagreements, and one of the pleasures of this book is to provide details of how their contemporaries (Gautier, Virginie Ancelot, Edouard Turquety) viewed the dynamic between them. To a large extent Brix recounts the story from Sainte-Beuve’s point of view; this, in itself, is unusual as, to date, it has predominantly been drawn from biographies of Hugo. The picture of the way in which the friendship developed is quite radically altered from this perspective. Brix begins the book by settling the thorny issue of who had initiated the friendship. Both men had asserted that it was the other who had tried to establish the relationship; posterity had by and large accepted Hugo’s version presented in Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie, but Brix reveals the letter written by Hugo in 1827 seeking Sainte-Beuve’s address and confirming Sainte-Beuve’s version of events. Furthermore, Brix highlights the role played by Sainte-Beuve’s criticisms of Hugo in deepening any rifts between them, reminding us of Hugo’s frequent declaration that ‘Qui aime ma personne admire sans restriction mes œuvres et le proclame’. By and large Sainte-Beuve’s criticisms were rooted in his conviction that Hugo would be more palatable to his readers if he toned down his superhuman self-presentation, an observation that anticipates Gide’s famously weary response to the question of who is the greatest French writer: ‘Victor Hugo, hélas!’ Sainte-Beuve’s misgivings are shared not just by Gide, but by a significant number of contemporaries such as Balzac, Baudelaire and Goethe. Brix goes on to remind us of the respect earned by Sainte-Beuve from his contemporaries — Lamartine, Henry James, Chateaubriand and Vigny, among others. It should be clear by now that the book is heavily weighted in favour of Sainte-Beuve. Some might see this as a defect and might prefer a more even-handed approach. And yet the pace and impetus of Brix’s vivid account would have become greatly impeded by perfunctory nods at Hugo’s point of view, which has been presented numerous times. Brix’s book is as partisan as any of the Hugolian accounts, but provides the valuable counterbalance and corrective that has been missing to date.