William Shakespeare

First edition of William Shakespeare, published in 1864 by A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Cie.

Contemporary half aubergine calf, smooth spine decorated with gilt and blind fillets, gilt ornamental bands at head and foot, marbled paper boards, marbled endpapers and pastedowns. A few small areas of foxing.

A highly significant copy, with a signed autograph presentation inscription from Victor Hugo to Camille Berru, added on a leaf of blue paper:

“To my brave and dear companion in adversity, C. Berru, Victor Hugo.”

The volume is further enriched with a photographic portrait of Victor Hugo by Maes & Michaux, signed in ink by the author and mounted as a frontispiece on a card printed “Souvenir du 16 Septembre 1862” (“Souvenir of 16 September 1862”).

Hugo's words to Berru refer directly to the repression that followed the coup d'état of 2 December 1851. Born in 1817, Camille Berru had served as editor-in-chief of L'Événement, the newspaper founded within Victor Hugo's circle and directed in particular by his sons Charles and François-Victor, together with Auguste Vacquerie and Paul Meurice. Condemned to deportation to Cayenne, Berru managed to escape to Brussels, where part of Hugo's political and personal network was reconstituted among the exiles. It is this shared experience that gives particular weight to Hugo's phrase “companion in adversity”.

In Brussels, Berru joined L'Indépendance belge, where he held an important position alongside Léon Bérardi. His ties with the Hugo family remained close: surviving correspondence between Berru, Victor Hugo, and François-Victor documents their continuing relationship, which extended far beyond political solidarity. When Adèle Foucher stayed in Brussels in 1868, she was received at Berru's home and died there on 27 August.

The portrait bound into the volume returns to one of the defining Brussels moments of Hugo's exile. On 16 September 1862, Lacroix and Verboeckhoven gave a banquet in his honour to celebrate the success of Les Misérables. Bringing together French and Belgian figures from literature, journalism, and politics, the occasion marked one of the most conspicuous expressions of the European recognition Hugo had achieved while still in exile. The Maes & Michaux portrait, dated to that very day and signed by Hugo, preserves a direct souvenir of the event.

William Shakespeare itself grew out of the intellectual and family world of exile. Victor Hugo had originally intended to write a preface to François-Victor's translation of Shakespeare; the project gradually expanded into an independent work on genius, the sovereignty of art, and the responsibility of the writer towards his age. Its title therefore only partly describes its true subject: Hugo develops a wide-ranging aesthetic and moral credo, shaped by the experience of proscription and by his conviction that literature must participate in human progress.

In a copy presented to Berru, this meditation acquires a particularly personal dimension. The recipient was not merely a member of Hugo's literary circle, but one of the men with whom he had directly shared political defeat, proscription, and the Brussels years of exile.

The inscription and portrait thus bring together two aspects of the same history: the fellowship forged in the persecution of 1851 and, eleven years later, the Brussels celebration of Les Misérables. Presented to the man Hugo called his “companion in adversity”, William Shakespeare here preserves the record of a friendship shaped as much by exile as by literature.