Victor Hugo and the Romantic Dream of China

chapter 6 Victor Hugo and the Romantic Dream of China Petra ten-Doesschate Chu The* tourist in Paris who visits the Maison de Victor Hugo1 may be puzzled and surprised to come across a room with an exuberant chinoiserie decor (figure 6.1). Chinoiserie, of course, is a mode of domestic decoration that we asso- ciate with the eighteenth-century rococo rather than the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, for which Hugo was one of the great standard-bearers. What is even more surprising is that the room was entirely designed, and in part executed, by Hugo. Indeed, for those who know Hugo primarily as the author of historical novels set in France’s distant and recent past (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables), the room may seem an anomaly in style and medium. The chinoiserie room in the Maison de Victor Hugo is not original to the writer’s Paris apartment. Instead, it was designed and in part fabricated by Hugo in 1863 for the house of his mistress Juliette Drouet (1806–1883) on the Channel island of Guernsey, where she had followed him into exile in 1855. After her death, Drouet’s house, Hauteville Fairy, was inherited by her nephew Louis Koch. Through the efforts of Hugo’s friend Paul Meurice, the founder of the Maison de Victor Hugo, and with the help of Koch, who became its first curator, the chinoiserie room was reinstalled in the house museum on the Place des Vosges in 1903.2 If the presence of a chinoiserie room in a house decorated in the early 1860s may strike us as belated, that belatedness becomes comprehensible when we consider chinoiserie as part of the nineteenth-century rococo revival. Hugh * Several people have helped me in the course of writing this chapter. I am especially grateful to Martine Contensou, Claire Lecourt, and Marie-Laurence Marco for their kind reception at the Maison de Victor Hugo and for giving me the most valuable advice and assistance. I thank Robert Alvin Adler, Jennifer Milam, and Kristel Smentek for their critical reading of various drafts. And I am indebted to Ruth Iskin for including an abbreviated version of this chapter as a paper in her 2017 CAA session, which generated valuable audience comments. 1 The house museum located in the hôtel on the Places des Vosges where Victor Hugo (1802– 1885) resided between 1832 and 1848. Hugo rented the second floor of the house. 2 On the early history of the Maison de Victor Hugo, see Arsène Alexandre, La Maison de Victor Hugo (Paris: Hachette, 1903). For a more critical view, see Elizabeth Emery, Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881–1914): Privacy, Publicity, and Person- ality (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 175–80 and passim. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004387836_008 150 Chu figure 6.1 Victor Hugo, Chinese room designed for Juliette Drouet at Hauteville Fairy, 1863. Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris Honour has shown that in the context of this revival, which began in the 1830s, a new vogue developed, in both England and France, for Chinese and Chinese- inspired knickknacks, then defined as chinoiseries.3 Honour quotes the French author and publisher Louis-Eustache Audot, who wrote in 1859, “Chinoiseries have come back into fashion in the last few years, and grotesque figures (magots) and porcelain vases (potiches), sold at high prices, have been reintegrated into the whatnots of little ladies.”4 The rococo revival of the mid-nineteenth century led not only to the collecting of Chinese or Chinese-inspired knickknacks but also to a revival of chinoiserie decorative schemes, complete with silk wall hangings à la Pillement, woven, according to Honour, “in the faded colours which eighteenth-century brocades by then had acquired.”5 Honour, like most 3 In accordance with the style of this book, I’ll use the term “chinoiserie,” set in roman type, as it is currently defined in art history; I’ll use the word “chinoiserie(s),” set in italics, to refer to its nineteenth-century (French) meaning of bizarre knickknack(s). See Introduction, p. 9. 4 “Les Chinoiseries ont repris faveur dans les dernières années, et les Magots et potiches ache- tés à grand frais ont été réintegrés sur les étagères des petites maîtresses.” Cited in Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 204. Unfortunately, Honour does not give the source of the quote. 5 Ibid., 205. Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728–1808) was a painter as well as a designer. He became especially known for his engravings of chinoiserie subjects, which were known and imitated throughout Europe..

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