Co-edited with Gérard Pouchain
For over fifty years Victor Hugo’s lover and friend, former actress Juliette Drouet, wrote him about 22,000 letters, sometimes as many as five a day. In Lettres inédites de Juliette Drouet à Victor Hugo, Gérard Pouchain (specialist in both Drouet and Hugo) and Marva Barnett published and annotated for the first time 105 of Juliette’s letters found in these American libraries: the Pierpont Morgan Rare Book Library, Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Harvard University’s Houghton Library, and the University of Syracuse Library.
Covering the period from 1835 (two years into their affair) until 1878 (five years before Juliette’s death), these letters published in the original French give a good sense of Juliette’s deep love for Hugo (her “Toto”) and her frequent frustration with him. They also illustrate what has been called the “style Juju”: her vivacity, spontaneity, humor, hyperbole, sincerity, word play, and a Romantic mix of the sublime and grotesque. Transcriptions of these letters, along with thousands of other letters from Juliette, have been archived by a team of researchers headed by Florence Naugrette (Université Sorbonne, Paris) at Juliette Drouet, Lettres à Victor Hugo
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