"I love you against all odds": Juliette Drouet and Victor Hugo
Autograph letter signed ("Juliette").
8vo. 4 pp. on bifolium.
€ 9,500.00
Charming letter from Drouet's important correspondence with Victor Hugo. Written on a rainy afternoon, Drouet expresses her inner conflict of having "resisted the desire to accompany" Hugo, who apparently had left just moments before she wrote the letter, due to a stomach ache. Although she knows that she did the right thing "from the point of view of prudence" and hopes to recover after a good night of sleep, Drouet appeals to Hugo's conscience as she states that she could easily endure her "little discomfort with patience" if he was there "to mother" her. As it happened, she could only follow Hugo with her eyes until his umbrella disappeared from her sight, musing about the possibility of following him if she had wings. In a particularly charming and curious final passage, Drouet announces that she won't give in to her belly and "borborygmi" like that again, both of which she then apostrophizes, scolds, and compares to Hugo's: "I am almost angry now for having sacrificed my heart to my belly. Another time I won't make such stupid concessions and he'll get away with it, and so will those borborygmi. What do they want from me? When I tell you that there are no more little guts. Here are mine that want to make as much noise as yours, how ambitious. Will you shut up right now, I don't like such noisy evils. Shut up, they tell you at the end. Voime, voime [!]. Be quiet because I don't like gossip wherever it comes from. My beloved Toto, my lovely little man, I am not ill, I love you too much, that's all. The rest is pure imitation and to do it like the big guts. I love you against all odds." - Published in the online edition of Drouet's letters to Hugo by the University of Rouen.
Minimally dusted and creased to the lower margin.
Édition des Lettres de Juliette Drouet à Victor Hugo, 22 mai 1851.