Déclaration manuscrite autographe à propos de la maison de Juliette Drouet à Guernesey

Autograph statement about Juliette Drouet's house in Guernsey
August 8, 1857, 14.5x11cm, one leaf.

Autograph statement by Victor Hugo, written on August 8, 1857. 13 lines in black ink on the back of an envelope inscribed with his Guernsey address, bearing two postmarks, one from Gramat dated June 23, 1857, and the other in English dated June 26. A few words crossed out by the author.
This is probably a draft for a notarial document relating to La Fallue, where Hugo had installed Juliette Drouet during his exile. Now a "French outlaw and English landlord", Hugo had moved with his family to Hauteville House the previous summer, and rented for Juliette a house a stone's throw from his own, from which she had an unobstructed view of her lover. For a year, Juliette had to make do with the first floor of her new home, while she waited for renovations to be completed on Hugo's instructions. It coincided with the writing of this somewhat cold and detached statement:



"In consideration of the renovations carried out for Madame Drouet in the house I have rented for her, I declare that Madame Drouet, at the end of her lease, may remove, without any objection on my part, everything she has placed there belonging to her, on the sole condition that she restore the apartments to the condition they were in when she arrived in the house.
August 8, 1857
Madame Drouet will not be required to put wallpaper the second bedroom, on the understanding that there was no wallpaper in this room when she took possession of the apartment".




By autumn, the renovations were completed: "you have made the temple of your divinity in which my soul adores you day and night", she writes to him. La Fallue became a meeting place for the two lovers and an occasional workplace for Hugo, who was busy writing La Légende de siècles at the end of 1857. Despite the joy she derived from being close to her beloved, Juliette's status as a single woman and her total dependence on Hugo - highlighted by this manuscript - weighed heavily on her: "It's not your generosity I'm complaining about, but the humiliating tutelage you've always kept me in, despite my persistent protests and even my attempts to rebel", she wrote to him the following year.
An exceptional document in Hugo's own hand, bearing witness to his wholly unusual extra-marital situation in Guernsey.