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chapter 5 Grave Friendship Hugo’s Miserable Waterloo In March 1811, shortly after his ninth birthday, Victor Hugo set out from Paris with his mother, Sophie, and brothers Abel and Eugène on a journey across France and Spain to join their father, General Léopold Hugo, in Frenchoccupied Madrid. For his service as an exemplary aide-de-camp to Joseph Bonaparte—who had been crowned King of Spain in 1808 by his younger brother Napoleon—General Hugo had been named Comte de Siguenza in 1809. But as with his colleague General Junot, who was named Duc d’Abrantès for his own service in Portugal and Spain, Hugo’s new title was a dubious honor. Also known as the Peninsular War, Napoleon’s Iberian Campaign (1807–14) was a bloody and protracted conflict, bogged down by crippling summer heat, fierce guerilla fighting, hostile civilian resistance, and the constant naval threat of the English. For Napoleon’s o≈cers, assignment to Spain was synonymous with imperial disfavor and exile, a fate from which not even Napoleon’s closest friends were exempt. All of those who served in Spain and Portugal faced the same grave dangers and frustrations, but for o≈cers like Lannes, Junot, and Hugo, the Iberian quagmire must have felt like imperial purgatory or a season in Napoleonic hell. In an e√ort to thwart the French occupation, Spanish guerillas ambushed, captured, and tortured French soldiers on deserted roads, in provincial villages, and along remote mountain passes. Gruesome accounts circulated of mutilated bodies, lopped-o√ limbs, and gouged-out eyes, as well as castrated and disemboweled soldiers left to choke on their own viscera or drown in their own blood.∞ These grisly acts of Spanish resistance were met by merciless French reprisals on the civilian population, which in turn fueled even greater violence between Spanish patriots and Napoleon’s occupying troops. As French soldiers slipped away at night and deserted Spain by the thousands , Sophie Hugo and her three young boys were on the road to Madrid, traveling in a heavily armed convoy of French reinforcements. In her intimate biography of her husband, Adèle Hugo reports that the young Victor and his brothers saw the perilous journey in 1811 as a great adventure, during which they played in the ruins of burned-out villages and dodged the bullets that occasionally reached their carriage. As their convoy inched closer to Madrid, however, they were confronted with the disconcerting sight of wounded French Hugo’s Miserable Waterloo 127 soldiers marching in the opposite direction, on their way out of the Iberian horror: The infantry was mixed with the cavalry: dismounted cavalrymen trotted on their own feet, while crippled infantrymen rode on mules or donkeys. In this regiment of cripples, there were samples of every kind of uniform and specimens of every kind of wound. Some had bandages over their eyes, others had their noses blown o√; here there was a wooden leg, there an arm in a sling . . . [A]ll of these soldiers had on their shoulders, in place of their epaulettes, a monkey or a parrot . . . This broken fragment of the army was coming from Portugal. They had gone there looking for glory, and had come back with monkeys and parrots. The convoy began to laugh at the sight of these cripples. The cripples laughed too, at themselves. The soldiers in the convoy laughed at the thought that soon they would be the same way. It was one great laugh.≤ Despite the general amusement, this unsettling laughter belies the horror of this troubling scene. The soldiers’ mismatched uniforms, ragged appearance, and companion donkeys, monkeys, and parrots all invite comparisons to a traveling circus or, as Adèle Hugo writes, a ‘‘burlesque fantasy.’’≥ But the juxtaposition of these comic elements with amputated limbs and disfiguring wounds transforms this carnivalesque scene into a grotesque and macabre nightmare. While the children find the monkeys and parrots entertaining, the retreating and invading soldiers are less amused. If, as Madame Hugo reports, these two groups of travelers laugh in unison, they seem to be laughing for very di√erent reasons. Instead of mocking their wounded comrades, the nervous laughter of the invading soldiers may be an attempt to hide their growing fear. Instead of laughing at themselves, the retreating soldiers may be laughing at the convoy’s ignorance of the grave dangers ahead. Having survived the Iberian bloodbath, these veterans must have found it absurd that anyone would voluntarily report for...

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