The English lieutenant’s Frenchwoman: the tragic story of Adèle Hugo

In 1882, a sneaky reporter from the Figaro managed to track down Victor Hugo’s only surviving, long-forgotten child to an expensive mental asylum on the edge of Paris. He stalked her as she was being taken for a walk in the local park. She had the ‘profile of a duchess’, ‘staring black eyes’, a perilous hopping gait and odd compulsions. According to the reporter’s inside source, ‘Mme Pinson’ had spent a month removing all the rocks from the asylum’s long driveway and then replaced them one at a time. Thirty-three years later, she could still play the piano and claimed to be writing an opera titled Venus in Exile. She also enjoyed tearing up the pages of books and stuffing the confetti into her bag.

It was not until the 1940s that a Canadian scholar pieced together the thousands of sheets of coded scribble which told her story. Mark Bostridge, the biographer of Vera Brittain and Florence Nightingale, first became fascinated with the tale when he discovered François Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adèle H and saw this fragment of her diary projected on the screen: ‘That incredible thing – a young woman, enslaved to the point of not being able to go out alone for five minutes to buy some paper… to fly over the sea, to pass from the old world to the new to rejoin her lover. This I will do.’

Balzac met the 13-year-old Adèle at Hugo’s house in the Place Royale in Paris. Writing to his future wife, he pronounced the girl ‘the greatest beauty I shall ever see’.  Charles Dickens saw her in the same theatrical, funereal drawing room when she was 17: ‘The wife is a handsome woman with flashing black eyes, who looks as if she might poison [Hugo’s] breakfast any morning when the humour seized her.