The Villequier tragedy

The recent death of Georges Victor Hugo has brought attention back to the family of the great poet. It is therefore curious to recall the memory of his eldest daughter who died so tragically and whose Figaro recently published some curious letters:

On Saturday, September 9, 1843, in the dining room of the "Café de l'Europe" in Rochefort, a traveler, who had just sat down at a small table and ordered his lunch, was looking through the newspapers while waiting to be served. Those around him suddenly saw him suffer, putting his hand to his heart as if to stop it from bursting. He got up, ran straight to the ramparts and, there outside the city, continued to walk for a long time like a madman.
This distraught traveler was Victor Hugo. Reading a newspaper had just informed him of the tragic death of his eldest daughter, Léopoldine, who, five days earlier, had accidentally drowned in Villequier, with her husband, Charles Vacquerie.

The poet hurriedly set off on the return journey. All the seats on the stagecoach having already been reserved, he had to hoist himself up as best he could next to the luggage.
Did he evoke, between two sobs, during the interminable journey, the hour so close to the joyous departure before which he had gone to embrace, in Villequier itself, the one he was never to see again? It was barely three months since he had left Paris for this journey to the Pyrenees, of which a picturesque account, written day by day, well before that of Taine, on album pages illustrated with pen sketches, allows us to follow the itinerary. Bordeaux, Bayonne, Biarritz, San Sebastian, Pamplona, ​​Gavarnie, then the island of Oléron, such were the main stages of this long zigzag walk, which had allowed the poet to note, along the way, landscapes (which he remembered in particular for the Little King of Galicia), and also to relive his childhood memories. But he had not found, even in Bayonne, the serenity of yesteryear. Oléron, which he had just left, had seemed to him "funereal and melancholic like a large coffin lying in the sea". A sort of sad presentiment darkened him. "I had death in my soul", he wrote on September 8, on the eve of the day when reading a newspaper in this café in Rochefort was to reveal the terrible news to him. Hugo arrived in Villequier only to kneel on a grave. Situated on a bend in the Seine, not far from Caudebec-en-Caux and the abbey of Saint-Wandrille, at the foot of wooded hills dominated by a Louis XV castle, the small village of Villequier was the favourite residence of the Vacquerie family, who owned a house on the quays there. Auguste Vacquerie, the author of Tragaldabas and Profils et Grimaces, was born in Villequier. His brother Charles, whose marriage to Léopoldine Hugo had been celebrated in Paris, in a chapel of the Saint-Paul church on 15 February 1843, had not failed to come, with his young wife, to spend the summer in Normandy, in the family home. It was there that Victor Hugo had gone to kiss them when he left for the Pyrenees. As he was about to set off, he was still writing to his daughter, on 18 July, to tell her of all the joy he had just felt at seeing his young happiness up close.
We know what a void the marriage of this nineteen-year-old girl had left in her father's home, from the verses that Victor Hugo dedicated to her in the last days of her engagement:
Love the one who loves you and be happy in him. Farewell! Be his treasure, oh you who were ours. Go, my darling child, from one family to another; Take away happiness, and leave us boredom. Boredom! What was it, compared to the heartbreaking sadness that was to overwhelm the poet, when he learned all the details of the tragedy that was putting him in mourning!

A few minutes later, a boatman, attracted by cries of distress, saw the wrecked boat from the shore and went to get reinforcements. The boat was put back on its keel, and the body of Pierre Vacquerie was found under the sail. His hand was still holding the rudder. As for his young son, he had disappeared, like Charles Vacquerie and his wife. The lifeless body of the latter was brought back at the first stroke of the seine. Her only injury was a bad scratch on her neck. The contraction of her fingers and the bruises on her hands showed that she had had to cling to the submerged edge. Her dress was in pieces, one of her stockings in tatters. A closer examination revealed that one arm was dislocated. Charles Vacquerie was found next to his wife, his eyes fixed and his arms thrown back convulsively. He had dived six times in a row, peasants, from afar, had glimpsed the scene and were able to specify these details to try to detach the little hands clinging to the overturned boat. "Charles Vacquerie," stated Alphonse Karr in an article published the day after the accident, "did not want to be saved." And everything suggests, in fact, that this experienced swimmer let himself sink out of despair.
Having been unable to save her, he wanted to die, Victor Hugo later wrote in a poignant In memoriam:

It will not be said that he died like this,
That he will have, with a deep heart and seized by love,
Gave his life to my Dove
And that he will have followed her to the gloomy and veiled place
Without the voice of the father on his knees having spoken
To this soul in this tomb.

The horror of this rapid tragedy, which darkened the poet with fierce grief, and overwhelmed both Mrs. Victor Hugo and grandfather Foucher, aged in a few days by as many years as his dead granddaughter, must be reread, in order to fully understand it, the verses written for this adored daughter. Hugo was twenty-two years old when she came into the world, in 1824. She was, he told us, his "morning star, the child of his dawn", because his very first child had lived only a few days. The birth of Léopoldine is contemporary with the last Odes and Ballades, in which the poet was to write:

One guesses, from her eyes full of a pure flame,
That in paradise, from where her soul comes,
She said a recent farewell.

These are the verses that the poet wanted to see engraved at the bottom of a charming lithograph by his friend Louis Boulanger, which represents Léopoldine at four years old. "She was as beautiful as a beautiful day," if we are to believe Jules Janin. Victor Hugo, in Contemplations, likes to describe his two daughters, Léopoldine and Adèle, the older and younger sisters, sitting at the threshold of the garden in the house at Saint-Prix, near Montmorency:

One like a swan and the other like a dove,
Beautiful, and both joyful, oh sweetness!

Every morning Léopoldine came to find him in his room, cheering him up with a "Good morning, my little father" that interrupted his labor. But in vain did she open her books, take up her pen, and arrange her papers: the dear presence did not drive away inspiration: She made my fate prosperous, My work light, my sky blue. The poet would sometimes find, among his manuscripts, some sheet scrawled with a crazy arabesque:

And many a blank page, crumpled between her fingers,
Where, I don't know how, came my sweetest verses.

Léopoldine was seven years old when Feuilles d'automne appeared, all illuminated by the poet's tenderness for the child, this "beautiful angel with the golden halo". Is there any need to recall the stanzas where he speaks of the sadness of this depopulated hive "the House without children"? These verses sing in all memories. He had dedicated to Léopoldine the Prayer for All, written in June 1830, seven years before his daughter's first communion in the little church of Fourqueux:

It is the hour when children speak with angels,
Hands clasped and bare feet, kneeling on the stone.

It was one of the favorite poems of the child who had become a young girl. "I remember," wrote Alfred Asseline, "an evening in the country when she recited the Prayer for All to us. She was sitting near the window, in a blue dress, with the book open on her knees. When her memory failed her, she leaned over to find the printed verse; and the light of the lamp gently illuminated her forehead and her hair."

A year after the catastrophe, on the very day of the anniversary, Hugo wrote one of the most famous poems of the Contemplations. After the first revolts, here is her pain wrapped in a dark resignation. The poem - Mr. Grillet was the first to point this out - is full of reminiscences of the Book of Job. And Veuillot himself did not hesitate to find in it the most Christian verses that there were in our language:

I cease to accuse, I cease to curse,
But let me cry...

Short appeasement in the story of a weary and discouraged soul that revolt quickly seizes:

If this God did not want to close
The work that he made me begin,
If he wants me to work again
He had only to leave it to me.

Even glory does not console him. He thinks constantly of the small tomb towards which he walks on each birthday, "alone, unknown, his back bent, his hands crossed", of the "recumbent" whose voice he hears everywhere:

Perhaps, livid and pale,
She says, in her narrow bed:
"Has my father forgotten me
And is no longer there, that I am so cold?"

A whole book of Contemplations is the deep echo of this sorrow that inspired the poet some of his most beautiful verses. And it is through this that the drama of Villequier escapes from the simple news item to enter literary history. It is useful to evoke it in all its tragic horror, when we piously unroll the shroud of superb stanzas that the great poet has woven for this dear nuptial tomb.

Charles Clerc.