Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

to the past, the abstract argument with implications for the present, to what was closer to the
British pleasure in history, colourful characters and a well-paced sequence of dramatic events set
in olden times.
By the time Notre Dame was published in 1831 E-H Langlois had been living in Rouen
for fifteen years, struggling to pursue his antiquarian studies and support his alcoholic wife and
their children by a mixture of teaching and illustration work. He had become, to English
antiquaries, one of the sights of Normandy. A visit to his cold, cluttered and semi-ruinous
apartments in the former Convent of the Visitation, was an essential stop on an antiquarian tour
for ‘les étrangers de distinction, les savans anglais surtout, voyageant dans la Normandie’
[distinguished foreigners, especially English scholars, travelling in Normandy]. 148 Described by
Dibdin, who visited him, as ‘tout à la fois l’orgeuil et la honte de la France’ [at once the pride
and the disgrace of France] his efforts still went largely unrewarded by his fellowcountrymen.
149 After the intervention of the Duchessee de Berry had secured him a regular
income he rose, as Charles Richard his friend and biographer put it, from destitution to mere
poverty. 150
Langlois was only a minor player in the drama of French Romanticism, in which Hugo
took the lead, but he had been close to its great events and his career embodied its contradictions,
as well as much of the essence of active antiquarianism. He was a pupil in David’s studio in
about 1798, at the time when a group of the students, disillusioned with David’s classicism and
calling themselves the ‘Barbus’, ‘bearded men’, began growing their hair, dressing in cloaks and
pantaloons and reading the works of Ossian. It was among these young artists that the Style
Troubadour was conceived, emerging first in the salon of 1802. I have found no proof that
Langlois was among the barbus but he must have known them and the fact that it was said later
that ‘les fables d’Ossian étaient pour lui les chefs-d’oeuvre’ [the tales of Ossian were for him
masterpieces] suggests he would have sympathised with them. 151 His interest in the past seems
148 Richard, ‘Notice sur E-H Langlois’, p.8.
149 Quoted in Richard, ‘Notice sur E-H Langlois’, p.11.
150 Richard, ‘Notice sur E-H Langlois’, p.74.
151 Jules Adeline, quoted in E-H Langlois, p.86.
147