For a time, Hugo devoted all his energies to work.  The record of his steady upward progress is a part of the history of literature, and need not be repeated here.  The poet and his wife were soon able to leave the latter’s family abode, and to set up their own household god in a home which was their own.  Around them there were gathered, in a sort of salon, all the best-known writers of the day—­dramatists, critics, poets, and romancers.  The Hugos knew everybody.

Unfortunately, one of their visitors cast into their new life a drop of corroding bitterness.  This intruder was Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a man two years younger than Victor Hugo, and one who blended learning, imagination, and a gift of critical analysis.  Sainte-Beuve is to-day best remembered as a critic, and he was perhaps the greatest critic ever known in France.  But in 1830 he was a slender, insinuating youth who cultivated a gift for sensuous and somewhat morbid poetry.

He had won Victor Hugo’s friendship by writing an enthusiastic notice of Hugo’s dramatic works.  Hugo, in turn, styled Sainte-Beuve “an eagle,” “a blazing star,” and paid him other compliments no less gorgeous and Hugoesque.  But in truth, if Sainte-Beuve frequented the Hugo salon, it was less because of his admiration for the poet than from his desire to win the love of the poet’s wife.

It is quite impossible to say how far he attracted the serious attention of Adele Hugo.  Sainte-Beuve represents a curious type, which is far more common in France and Italy than in the countries of the north.  Human nature is not very different in cultivated circles anywhere.  Man loves, and seeks to win the object of his love; or, as the old English proverb has it: 

    It’s a man’s part to try,
    And a woman’s to deny.

But only in the Latin countries do men who have tried make their attempts public, and seek to produce an impression that they have been successful, and that the woman has not denied.  This sort of man, in English-speaking lands, is set down simply as a cad, and is excluded from people’s houses; but in some other countries the thing is regarded with a certain amount of toleration.  We see it in the two books written respectively by Alfred de Musset and George Sand.  We have seen it still later in our own times, in that strange and half-repulsive story in which the Italian novelist and poet, Gabriele d’Annunzio, under a very thin disguise, revealed his relations with the famous actress, Eleanora Duse.  Anglo-Saxons thrust such books aside with a feeling of disgust for the man who could so betray a sacred confidence and perhaps exaggerate a simple indiscretion into actual guilt.  But it is not so in France and Italy.  And this is precisely what Sainte-Beuve attempted.

Dr. George McLean Harper, in his lately published study of Sainte-Beuve, has summed the matter up admirably, in speaking of The Book of Love: