In 1862, Victor Hugo, then living in exile on the island of Guernsey because of his political views, published to great acclaim his epic novel, Les Misérables, which decried social evils that degraded man.
Ironically, in the same year, Hugo's 32-year-old spinster daughter, Adèle, secretly planned her escape from the family home to Halifax, where her love, a British soldier, was stationed.
On June 18, 1863, Adèle recorded in her journal: " It is an incredible thing to do, for a young woman....to walk over the sea, to fly over the sea, to pass from the old world to the new world to rejoin her lover. This thing I will do." Her other resolve was to "have ...gold in both pockets" earned from her writings.
Yet, as her Canadian biographer, Leslie Smith Dow shows, Adèle Hugo was never to be the liberated female artist she aspired to be. Unlike her idol, George Sand, Adèle could not successfully battle the heavy discrimination against women in society at that time.
Dow is the author of Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond the King and I, and was named "the most promising writer under the age of 30" by the Canadian Authors' Association and Air Canada in 1992. Dow based La Misérable on extensive archival research. She also made use of Adèle's 2,000 page Journal of Exile which inspired the 1975 film by French director François Truffaut, L'Histoire d'Adèle H.
Adèle Hugo was born on July 28, 1830, in Paris, while shots rang out in the streets during the three-day revolution known as Les Trois Glorieuses. As a child, she was admired for her breathtaking beauty, demure disposition, and remarkable talents in music and writing.
When she was 13, tragedy struck the family as Léopoldine, her 19-year-old sister, drowned in a boating accident along with her newlywed husband. Adèle was never the same, eventually imagining she heard her sister's voice speaking to her.
Unlike Léopoldine, Adèle became rebellious, wanting a career in writing or music more than conventional marriage. Despite her father's disapproval, she fell in love with an Englishman, Albert Pinson, whom she met in 1854.
Pinson was a soldier, a handsome dandy and a gambler. His premature proposal of marriage was turned down by Adèle, who didn't want to lose her freedom yet. To her dismay Pinson immediately lost interest in her. Convinced by a dream that it was her fate to be his wife, Adèle began to pursue him shamelessly.
When Adèle appeared in Halifax, then a garrison town, Pinson ignored her (though he took her money). She vowed to stay and even wrote her distraught family that she was at last "Madame Pinson." Through her favorite brother, François-Victor, whom she corresponded with, she received a monthly allowance. Unbeknown to her, François-Victor also corresponded with the Saunders, the family she rented a room from. They kept him informed of her true situation, that she was not married, that she locked herself in her room to write all day, and that at night she would go out dressed in men's clothing, to spy on Pinson.
When Pinson was relocated to Barbados three years later, Adèle followed him there, dressed in ragged velours and furs, and with her numerous trunks of unpublished manuscripts. As in Halifax, she would be remembered for her tall, noble bearing and wild melancholy look. In 1869, Pinson left for England, and Adèle, destitute, was taken in by a former slave, Madame Baa. It was Madame Baa who returned with her to Paris in 1872.
Victor Hugo, at the behest of doctors, placed Adèle in a Paris insane asylum where he infrequently visited her. She died in 1915, having never recovered from what was most likely schizophrenia.
This biography is a gripping read: it brings to life the plight of Adèle Hugo, and women like her, who, unable to express their talents, become slaves to unhealthy passions. It is a story as powerful and relentless as the waves breaking against the rocks off the Nova Scotia coast, where Adèle so bravely had disembarked.
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