Hence, it is not improbable that Victor Hugo might have broken through the bonds of marital fidelity, even had Sainte-Beuve never written his abnormal poems; but certainly these poems hastened a result which may or may not have been otherwise inevitable.  Hugo no longer turned wholly to the dark-haired, dark-eyed Adele as summing up for him the whole of womanhood.  A veil was drawn, as it were, from before his eyes, and he looked on other women and found them beautiful.

It was in 1833, soon after Hugo’s play “Lucrece Borgia” had been accepted for production, that a lady called one morning at Hugo’s house in the Place Royale.  She was then between twenty and thirty years of age, slight of figure, winsome in her bearing, and one who knew the arts which appeal to men.  For she was no inexperienced ingenue.  The name upon her visiting-card was “Mme. Drouet”; and by this name she had been known in Paris as a clever and somewhat gifted actress.  Theophile Gautier, whose cult was the worship of physical beauty, wrote in almost lyric prose of her seductive charm.

At nineteen, after she had been cast upon the world, dowered with that terrible combination, poverty and beauty, she had lived openly with a sculptor named Pradier.  This has a certain importance in the history of French art.  Pradier had received a commission to execute a statue representing Strasburg—­the statue which stands to-day in the Place de la Concorde, and which patriotic Frenchmen and Frenchwomen drape in mourning and half bury in immortelles, in memory of that city of Alsace which so long was French, but which to-day is German—­one of Germany’s great prizes taken in the war of 1870.

Five years before her meeting with Hugo, Pradier had rather brutally severed his connection with her, and she had accepted the protection of a Russian nobleman.  At this time she was known by her real name—­Julienne Josephine Gauvin; but having gone upon the stage, she assumed the appellation by which she was thereafter known, that of Juliette Drouet.

Her visit to Hugo was for the purpose of asking him to secure for her a part in his forth-coming play.  The dramatist was willing, but unfortunately all the major characters had been provided for, and he was able to offer her only the minor one of the Princesse Negroni.  The charming deference with which she accepted the offered part attracted Hugo’s attention.  Such amiability is very rare in actresses who have had engagements at the best theaters.  He resolved to see her again; and he did so, time after time, until he was thoroughly captivated by her.

She knew her value, and as yet was by no means infatuated with him.  At first he was to her simply a means of getting on in her profession—­simply another influential acquaintance.  Yet she brought to bear upon him the arts at her command, her beauty and her sympathy, and, last of all, her passionate abandonment.