How Victor Hugo’s daughter stalked an unlucky British soldier across the Atlantic
In writing biographies of Florence Nightingale and the campaigning pacifist Vera Brittain, Mark Bostridge focused on two women of exceptional wilfulness and strong character. His new book runs “in pursuit” of someone totally different – the pathetic and elusive figure of Victor Hugo’s younger daughter Adèle, whose life was dominated first by her egomaniacal father and then by her neurotically obsessive infatuation with a British army officer.
Her story, suppressed by her family until her journal was published in 1968, was memorably dramatised seven years later in L’Histoire de Adèle H, a film directed by Fran?ois Truffaut with Isabella Adjani in the title-role; but Bostridge has dug deeper into the evidence than they did, weaving episodes of his own emotional life into hers and producing something of haunting beauty and stylistic grace.
Brought up in the shadow of her father’s enormous fame and his grieving over the drowning of her sister Leopoldine, Adèle was never happy. In photographs, she often has a melancholy expression; in character she was pallid and withdrawn, even sullen. Her one modest talent was for genteel musical composition and playing the piano remained her lifelong consolation. Otherwise she was confined to the family circle, where she was assigned the dreary task of recording her father’s incessant and verbose table talk.
When Hugo was exiled from France to the Channel Islands in the wake of his opposition to the authoritarian régime of Louis Napoleon, she dutifully followed, and it was in St Helier that in 1852 she encountered the unremarkable Albert Pinson, something of a dandy and “lover of the turf”. Their relationship, such as it was, blossomed when he pressed his leg against hers round the table at which Hugo held séances; Pinson kissed her, maybe more – we just don’t know – and he might well have initially felt warmly towards her. Adèle was certainly considered attractive; she was described by Balzac as the greatest beauty he had ever seen. But Pinson soon began a long process of slithering away from her clutches, joining the army as a volunteer as she turned into his relentless stalker.
At one point in 1861, he seems to have been on the verge of surrender – Bostridge finds a licence issued for a marriage that never took place. Adèle pretended that it did. Presenting herself as “Madame Pinson”, she abandoned her family and secretly followed her prey across the Atlantic to his garrison in Nova Scotia, shadowing his every move, always dressed in black, the victim of a compulsion chillingly described by Bostridge as “similar to the grip of paralysis, as if one were literally dragging heavy chains along the street”.
Hugo sent her an allowance and seemed resigned to losing her. “She alone can save herself and she does not want to,” he shrugged, more concerned about avoiding scandal than her well-being. From Nova Scotia, she pursued Pinson to Barbados. In 1869 he returned to Britain and married someone else, leaving Adèle physically and mentally broken. A kindly Caribbean nurse accompanied her back to Paris when Hugo returned to France following the fall of Louis Napoleon. Her story effectively ends there: at the age of 42, she was sectioned. Hugo called her a “naufrage”, a shipwreck. She died in 1915, at the age of 85, hugely wealthy through her father’s royalties, not downright mad but very fragile, having lived over half her life in sanatoria.
Following a model made fashionable by Richard Holmes in Footsteps (1985), Bostridge makes himself and his adventures as a researcher part of the narrative, tracking the houses and landscapes variously inhabited by Adèle. Through several of the fortuitous discoveries and coincidences that bless luckier literary foragers, he manages to uncover far more about Albert Pinson than was previously known and feels inclined to exonerate him. Points in Adèle’s history resonate with Bostridge’s own: the death of his baby half-sister, the obnoxious behaviour of his unstable womanising father, sexual infatuations that led to nothing but psychotherapy, and the more recent nervous collapse of his partner are all incorporated into the narrative. This could be tiresome, but Bostridge handles delicate material tactfully and without self-pity. The result is a book full of pain and sadness, but one that is a melancholy pleasure to read.
Rupert Christiansen’s books include Tales of the New Babylon: Paris, 1869-75. In Pursuit of Love is published by Bloomsbury at ￡20. To order your copy for ￡16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
