Well, when I got to Opéra (today I took the bus—faster than the métro, and totally direct), I started walking towards Richelieu, but something stopped me. I saw a "Passage." What's a "Passage," you ask? Good question! The "Passages parisiens" are these awesome little covered walkways that go between streets. Think the Burlington Arcade in London, but not horribly expensive, not as famous, and lots and lots of them! They're kind of like a classier version of the "traboules" in Lyon. So, to use a Lyonnais expression (translated into English): "I trabouled a little bit before heading to work" (j'ai traboulé un peu avant d'aller au travail). There are restaurants in some of the passages, so I ate at one of the faster food options—I got a smoothie (yes, that is a French word now), some chicken curry/rice, and a "fondant au chocolat" (a melted chocolate cake). Yummy! And all for under 10 euros!
The danger with the passages is that when you exit, you have no idea where you are. It's an instant disorientation, and it's actually quite fun. They aren't on my map of Paris that I have on my iPhone (not that I really use the map at all), so suddenly you're on a different street with traffic all around you, and infinitely more pedestrians. The passages are great, but you can't just walk through one! No, you see another and have to go through that too! And then another, and another. Suddenly, you have no idea where you are, where Richelieu is, or even if you're close to where you started. So, I figured that I wasn't obligated in any way to do work, and it therefore didn't matter if I got lost for a bit. The second I thought that, I happened to be almost directly in front of the library. Yeah yeah yeah, I got the message—work time.
Studying manuscripts is a much different kind of work than what I'm used to. Since I mainly work with 20th century literature, manuscripts aren't particularly important, and often don't really exist. Authors nowadays write books on typewriters or computers, so drafts aren't in their own handwriting. And if there are drafts, often they're just sort of lost or thrown out. Really modern stuff written on computers is even worse—people make changes and there is absolutely no record of the genesis of the texts! I mean, it's not horribly important if you're not into genetic criticism, but it helps sometimes. My authors of choice in the 20th century do have drafts: for Calvino, they are all in the possession of his daughter, who I've heard won't let anyone see them; for Perec, certain drafts have actually been assembled and published by my old adviser from Johns Hopkins (Jacques Neefs) as an indication of all the added constraints he used to write his masterpiece, La vie mode d'emploi (Life a user's manual, translated by David Bellos!).
But working on Victor Hugo is different. He was writing in the 19th century (born in 1802 and died in 1885—the only two important years of the 19th century according to him), and everything was different back then. They wrote by hand before things were printed. They also reused paper and didn't just throw it away. Apparently, Balzac sold his manuscripts during his lifetime because he was bankrupt, and an enthusiastic fan/collector found them years later wrapped around fish! Victor Hugo was very particular about his writing as well—upon his death, everything he ever wrote on was donated to the library of France, which he assumed would be the library of the world one day. Yes, he was very proud of his country. That's why I can look at his "reliquat des Misérables," the name given to the collection of drafts and preparatory documents that surround his most famous novel.
In this "reliquat" are several pages written by other people. These include letters from fans, from his publisher, from various people. The ones I'm interested in were penned by his two mistresses: Juliette Drouet and Léonie d'Aunet (otherwise known as Mme Biard). It's a fantastic story. The first mistress, Drouet, was a mediocre actress with whom Hugo was totally and completely in love. Their relationship lasted for 50 years, and when she died in 1883, Hugo put down his pen and never wrote another word. Beautiful, no? Mme Biard, as you can tell from her name, was married. So was Hugo, but it was different for men, and certainly different for Hugo. She hated her husband, cheated on him with Hugo, and soon, the two adulterers were interrupted by the police, who found them in "unlawful conversation" (they were committing adultery) and in "uncrumpled attire" (they weren't wearing any clothes). Funny, right? I read that in Hugo's biography! When the police asked for their identification, they discovered that Hugo was a "pair de France," a political title given to him by the king (a family friend), and that he was therefore immune from all laws. The result: they arrested Biard and sent her to prison. Yup...the 19th century in France would have made a really good sitcom!
I could go on for days about stories about Hugo and his mistresses, but I'll just say this: they were extremely helpful to him in the writing of the chapters of Les Misérables that take place in an imaginary convent for the very simple reason that Hugo, being a man, could not enter into a convent to do his own research. Fortunately, both Juliette and Léonie were raised in convents, and were more than happy to write down their memoirs about their respective childhoods.
Looking at these drafts adds an entirely new dimension to the novel. Anyone who has ever read Les Misérables knows that it feels like an almost religious experience. It's a religious book, no doubt about that, but reading a book that is so long, so comprehensive, and so engaging is really just indescribable. Looking through Hugo's drafts is a reminder of how much work went into it, how much research he did, and how much research he didn't have to do (he had a very big head with a lot of stuff in it, clearly). Imagine how long it must have taken him to write, physically with a pen on paper (and not a ball point pen, but one of those fountain pens with ink that needs to be dipped and blotted), legibly enough for his publisher to read it, then write him notes and comments and suggestions, then send them to him on Guernsey (the island in the English Channel where Hugo was in exile while he was writing this behemoth of a novel), then for Hugo to mark those up and send back. It just goes on and on. Oh, and did I mention Hugo did all his writing standing up? Yes, the man was not real. He was an enigma. He was a titan. He was a god! Actually, he is apparently a deity or a prophet or something in a Vietnamese religion. Here is a page that I illegally photographed in the library:
This is a first draft of the "avertissement," the page-long introduction that begins the book and makes a claim for its utility. This version says: "As long as man believes he has the right to introduce the irreparable into habits and the irreparable into laws, then books of this nature cannot be useless." The final version reads: "As long as there is misery and injustice in this world, books of this nature cannot be useless." (I'm paraphrasing and translating—I didn't bring Les Misérables with me to Paris).
But, I wasn't focusing on that. I was reading the letters about the convent, and not really Drouet's, but rather Biard's. Someone actually typed up Drouet's pages a long time ago (I think in the 70's). She's been the more popular of the two mistresses forever, especially recently. They've published all of her letters to and from Hugo, and they also turned them all into a play that was performed last year for Les Misérables' 150th anniversary (released in 1862). The play was called Victor Hugo, mon amour, and consisted entirely of lines taken from their letters (over 23,000 in total).
Unfortunately for Mme Biard, no one seems to care about her. I do, though. Drouet's memoirs of convent life didn't really make it into Les Misérables in any substantial way. She had a little anecdote about a flute player, which Hugo did steal (and modify greatly), but it seems he got most of his information from the woman he landed in prison. There was an article about the convent that appeared in the 20's (no one seems to care about this passage as much as I do...that is one of the few pieces of work that has ever been done on it), that reproduced bits and pieces of the Biard pages, but without giving her any credit. The author says something to the extent of: "Oh, I assumed they were written by Juliette Drouet, but they don't seem to be her handwriting. I know she was raised in convents, but the years don't seem to be right. She wrote a lot of letters to Hugo, but I don't really feel like reading them. She wasn't a very good writer." I am not being funny—that is essentially what he writes in the article. He basically shrugs off his lack of research by saying that it doesn't matter—all that matters is what Hugo took from the letters, and not who wrote them, especially if they are poorly written. A bit reductive, don't you think?
So, what my self-assigned job for the next few weeks is: type up word for word what Mme Biard wrote about her memories of the convent. That way, I'll be able to tweak the bits of the paper I wrote on the subject given that I will have actually read the documents, and I might also see if we can get these published in the same way Juliette Drouet's were. It would certainly facilitate future studies on the convent, but I'm not particularly hopeful that there are indeed people who want to work on the convent. I don't know why, but I find the passages fascinating. There are chapters about how nuns don't brush their teeth, because that's the first step on the ladder to losing your soul! Pages and pages on sexual repression! And a flute player! What more could you want from a Hugolian digression?
This is a page from Mme Biard's pages on convent life. At the top, you see she's drawn a map of the convent. It is almost the same layout as what Hugo describes in the book. Underneath, she describes that layout, and then the convent rules. It is extremely precise, but also filled with personal anecdotes that I'm enjoying so far. For instance, she says that you weren't allowed to hug your parents when you saw them, which wasn't very often. Once, she got to see her aunt, who was actually in a different part of the convent, and she cried and begged to hug her aunt. The aunt pleaded for them to let the little girl just put her hands through the grill in the wall so she could hug her a little, and they refused even that simple request!
So, that's the positive part of reading manuscripts. The negatives far outweigh them. First off, I'm not actually reading the manuscripts, but I'm reading photographs of them, printed onto film and then projected onto a white screen in front of me. The whole apparatus is called microfilm, and it is ridiculous. Why they can't just print it out and let me take it home is beyond me! Also, Hugo clearly did not pick his mistresses for their penmanship! They ignore punctuation, grammar, spelling. Drouet is worse than Biard, but still. It's very hard to read. I'm basically going back and forth between the documents themselves, my typed version of them, and the article that claims to cite them, but has clearly taken great liberties. I think there is definitely a need for an authoritative edition of it, if only because there isn't one already. I certainly wouldn't want everyone who wants to study the convent to have to go to the BnF and struggle with microfilm the way I'm doing now. But hey, there clearly isn't a demand for this, otherwise it would already have been done. There is a bright side though: the library closes at 6:00pm, so I can't sit there and struggle with it all day like I would most likely be able to in Princeton. Nope, when they tell me to leave, I leave and still have several hours of daylight left to enjoy! Today, I did that in the Latin Quarter, across the river from Notre-Dame. I relaxed in the medieval garden by Cluny (where the Musée du Moyen Age is, aka the Middle Ages museum), got my new favorite Lebanese sandwich for dinner (it's called Halloumi, by the way), and helped some tourists get back to their hotel before heading back myself. Oh, I also found Sihem Souid's book, Omerta dans la police. I decided to buy it because used, it was under 4 euros. Aka, that is less than I typically spend on ice cream per day, so I figured why not? Even if it isn't that great a book, it is still an excellent story!
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