"Mon exil est comme voisin de son tombeau, et je vois distinctement sa grande âme hors de ce monde"

Autograph letter signed by Victor Hugo dated 13 May 1856 following an unpublished letter from Madame Victor Hugo to Madame David d'Angers dated 11 May. 4 pages on a folded sheet with watermark "Barbet Smith Street Guernesey".
Published in Correspondance de Victor Hugo, Paris, year 1856, p. 246
In this letter imbued with the apparitions and specters that haunt the recently published Contemplations, Victor Hugo addresses the widow of his great friend the sculptor David d'Angers, fervent republican and artist particularly admired by the Romantics. In the midst of a mystical crisis, Hugo speaks to the shadow of the sculptor to whom he dedicated sublime poems in Les feuilles d'automne as well as Les rayons et les ombres and requests from his widow his favorite portrait, a marble bust once sculpted by David d'Angers.

After the expulsion of the exiles from the island of Jersey, Victor Hugo purchased Hauteville House thanks to the success of Contemplations and sadly learned of the death of a dear friend. He writes to the sculptor's widow on the same sheet as his wife Adèle, also connected with the family of David d'Angers, creator of a medallion in her likeness: "You are the widow of our great David d'Angers, and you are his worthy widow as you were his worthy wife".
The renowned sculptor had already formed bonds at Nodier's first romantic salon at the Arsenal and visited Hugo almost daily in the late 1820s in the Bonapartist and good-natured atmosphere of rue Notre-Dame des Champs, in the company of the Devéria brothers, Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, Nanteuil and Delacroix. In 1828, the writer had happily posed in David d'Angers' studio on rue de Fleurus, for a medallion then a bust which had been followed by two sublime poems celebrating the sculptor's talent in Les Feuilles d'Automne and Les rayons et les ombres. Of all his numerous portraits, he cherished above all others his marble bust signed David d'Angers and does not hesitate to request it from his widow: "Before long, perhaps, madame, my family will ask you to return this bust which is my figure, which is little, but which is a masterpiece by David, which is everything. It is him even more than me, and that is why we want to have it among us".
From these posing sessions with the sculptor arose fruitful aesthetic and political conversations where their common aversion to the death penalty was affirmed. They witnessed the chaining of galley slaves who were joining Toulon from Paris, described by Hugo in two chapters of Dernier jour d'un condamné. A victim of exile like Hugo, David d'Angers had returned to Paris before joining the world of the dead: "My exile is like neighbor to his tomb, and I see distinctly his great soul outside this world, as I see his great life in the stern history of our time". The "great life" of David d'Angers was devoted to shaping the effigies of illustrious men, through a subtle balance of resemblance and idealization. The sculptor finally takes his place in Victor Hugo's personal pantheon, he who had adorned the pediment of the true Pantheon of great men where the writer rests today: "David is today a figure of memory, a renown of marble, an inhabitant of the pedestal after having been its craftsman. Today, death has consecrated the man and the sculptor is statue. The shadow he casts upon you, madame, gives your life the form of glory".
It was indeed in the shadow of great men that Hugo lived his exile in Jersey, far from the tumult of the capital and in the silence punctuated by sea spray striking the windowpanes. Hugo had plunged into the occult and spoke to the departed: "David is one of the shadows to whom I speak most often, shadow myself", he declares, recalling the final poem of Contemplations, "Ce que dit la bouche d'ombre", dictated to the poet through the spiritualist process of "turning tables". Then at the height of their popularity, the tables were practiced in all the salons of Paris, even at the emperor's at the Tuileries and at Compiègne. Three years earlier, he had been moved to be able to converse with his departed daughter, Léopoldine, and had erected a poetic monument to her, the Contemplations, whose triumph the Hugos were enjoying: "I am happy that the book of Contemplations was read by you. You found there our dear memories and our common aspirations. Exile has this good thing, that it sets the seal on man and preserves the soul as it is". His nocturnal conversations soon extended to a cohort of illustrious figures, who communicated with the Hugo family through the creaking of a pedestal table. During almost daily séances, Hugo had invoked the soul of Chateaubriand, Dante, Racine, Hannibal, André Chénier, Shakespeare, Molière, Aristotle, Lord Byron, Louis XVI, Napoleon I, and even Jesus Christ: "it is only toward the shadows that I turn, for there lies glory, pride, greatness of souls, light; and there is now more life in the dead than in the living" he confides to the sculptor's widow. David d'Angers had achieved the eternity to which they both aspired through words and matter, remaining forever present in his memories and the marble portraits he sculpted for him.

Through the lines, reveals itself the poet of the Contemplations, the bereaved man still wounded by the disappearance of his daughter Léopoldine and his dear friend. Hugo here delivers himself to a magnificent movement of epistolary lyricism, the Angevin sculptor having left to posterity the most beautiful portraits of the writer. Many years later, Victor Hugo himself was placed with great pomp in the Pantheon of great men, whose pediment his friend David d'Angers had adorned.


"Guernesey, 13 mai