Another mistress for Victor Hugo: Célina, by Catherine Axelrad, reviewed

Recently I visited Hauteville House, Victor Hugo’s home on Guernsey, now magnificently restored, where he spent 15 years of exile in opposition to the autocratic regime of Napoleon III. His third-floor eyrie, a crystal cage with walls and ceilings of plate glass, resembles a greenhouse. Hugo wrote there, standing at a small, flat-topped desk, gazing out across the water at the distant coastline of France. He slept in one of two adjacent attic rooms. In the other slept a chambermaid, summoned by her master with a few light taps on the partition wall.

The publication in the 1950s of coded entries in Hugo’s account books revealed payments for sex to a succession of serving maids. One of these was Célina Henry, the narrator of Catherine Axelrad’s novella. Published in France in 1997, the book has been translated into English by Philip Terry with some nice demotic touches.

Axelrad takes the bare facts about Célina – born into poverty on Alderney, joining the Hugo household in the late 1850s, and dying from tuberculosis in 1861 – and weaves them into a story of a vulnerable but resilient young woman who accepts the two francs left under her pillow for a night of sexual favours while eavesdropping during the day on the life taking place above stairs. Célina’s curiosity and intelligence provide her with insights about Hugo’s marriage and his relationship with the mistress he keeps down the street. She adopts the tragedy of Hugo’s family life, the drowning of his elder daughter in the Seine years earlier, as if it were her own. She grows jealous for her intimacy with Hugo when he briefly turns his attention to the local seamstress.