Autograph manuscript signed of Victor Hugo’s “Ballade du fou,” sung by the jester Elespuru in his play Cromwell (IV, 1). Two pages on a folded leaf backed with green glazed paper.

Exceptional autograph manuscript of Victor Hugo’s most celebrated poetic song, performed by the jester Elespuru in his resounding drama Cromwell.

Both grotesque and exalted, this piece embodies the freedom of Romantic drama championed by Hugo in the play’s famous preface: as noted by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this song “is the only passage in the play as equally famous as its preface”.

The fine, elegant script places this manuscript in the early years of Hugo's career, either immediately or only a few years after the poem’s composition. This was in fact the very first excerpt of Cromwell ever to appear in print, a year before the play’s publication. Hugo chose to place the poem as the epigraph to his tenth ballad, “A un passant,” published in Odes et ballades (1826). Notably, this epigraph does not appear in the manuscript of Odes et Ballades preserved at the BnF. Alongside our manuscript, therefore, only one other autograph example of the Chanson d’Elespuru survives in public institutions: within the full manuscript of Cromwell also at the BnF.

This spellbinding song inspired countless poems and elicited much praise from his fellow writers: for Barbey d’Aurevilly, Hugo is above all “the balladeer of the delightful Chanson du Fou […] those trembling drops of dew, dusky red, enough to drown an entire human head in an infinity of reverie!” (Les oeuvres et les hommes). Steeped in Hugo’s verses, Alfred de Musset perfectly replicated the song's structure in La Nuit, one of his earliest poems. As Hovasse remarks, “A lot of poets would have damned themselves to write it" quoting the poem in full in his Hugo biography. Alfred de Vigny called himself “a fool for the song like the fool [jester] himself” (letter to Hugo, 19 November 1826) and applauded Cromwell, that “immortal book" which “casts all modern tragedies into wrinkled old age”.

This seemingly effortless refrain is above all a dazzling demonstration of Hugo’s genius, equally at home in every literary form. By combining pentasyllabic lines with two-syllable verses, Hugo revives the lai, a poetic composition used in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Its short, lilting rhythm from distant centuries is nonetheless resolutely modern: a Verlaine poem before Verlaine, who adopted this metrical play in “Colombine” from Fêtes galantes and “Chanson d’automne” (Poèmes saturniens).

The jester Elespuru who gives voice to this poem is moreover the very first character created by Hugo at only nine years old. Before viewing himself a novelist, playwright, or poet, Hugo wrote “Elespourou Elespuru” in his copy of Tacitus (now preserved in his house on the Place des Vosges) during a very unhappy year at the colegio des nobles in Madrid. The name belonged to his schoolmate Don Francisco Elespuro,

“a shocking great fellow, with crispy hair, sprawling hands, ill-shapen, uncombed, unwashed, incurably lazy, using his inkstand no more than his washbowl, surly, and ridiculous, whose name was Elespuru." he would later recall to his wife in Victor Hugo, by a Witness of His Life.

He took his revenge in his own fashion, depicting him as one of the least appealing figures in one of his dramas yet granting him immortality. Elespuru, the grotesque jester par excellence, sings the sublime in this poem, “one of those adorable little pieces where the giant Hugo showed that he could be as delicate as he was powerful, and as mysterious as he was radiant” (Gregh). Hugo used the stage as the theatre of his vendettas: Elespuru, then Gubetta (the executioner in his Lucrèce Borgia) inspired by the violent Count Frasco de Belverana, who injured Hugo’s brother Eugène. His novels and poems revive gentler memories of the Madrid college: Quasimodo was inspired by a hunchback who woke him each morning at the monastery; his beloved classmate, the eldest son of the Duke of Benavente, was given a poem in Odes et ballades.

Hugo regretted never seeing Elespuru come to life on stage to sing his ballad “to a monotonous air,” as indicated in the stage direction. Cromwell is a sprawling play requiring nearly seven hours of performance. Nobody dared to create it for the stage during Hugo's lifetime. Maurois points out this sadly missed opportunity in his biography of Hugo: “The Shakespearean high spirits of the four fools made Cromwell a great and original play that would have deserved to be performed.”

For lack of a theatrical creation, the poem enjoyed a vast musical posterity. This chanson du fou had a prominent place in the artistic salons of the nineteenth century. Leading composers set it to music, notably Georges Bizet, Léon Kreutzer, Louis Lacombe, Hippolyte Monpou, Charles-Marie Widor, among others. In his catalogue of musical settings of Hugo’s texts, Arnaud Laster lists no fewer than twenty-six adaptations. Hugo himself seems to have sung and composed a melody: at Hauteville House is preserved a score of the Chanson d’Elespuru, “written and transcribed after Hugo's song, Guernesey, march 1856,” transcribed by Augustine Allix, a close friend of the Hugo family during their exile.

Exceedingly rare manuscript, to our knowledge one of only two autograph copies of this immortal literary song, “the earliest of those vaporous melodies, those ‘guitars,’ as Victor Hugo sometimes called them, where his mighty breath tapers off into a delicious sigh” (Fernand Gregh).

Transcription & Translation (by George Burnham Ives, 1909)