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

A most extraordinary place, looking like an old curiosity shop, or the Property Room of some gloomy vast old
Theatre. I was much struck by Hugo himself, who looks a Genius, as he certainly is, and is very interesting from
head to foot. His wife is a handsome woman with flashing black eyes, who looks as if she might poison his
breakfast any morning when the humour seized her. There is also a ditto daughter of fifteen or sixteen, with ditto
eyes, and hardly any drapery above the waist, whom I should suspect of carrying a sharp poignard in her stays, but
for her not appearing to wear any. Sitting among old armour, and old tapestry, and old coffers, and grim old chairs
and tables, and old Canopies of state from old palaces, and old golden lions going to play at skittles with ponderous
old golden balls, they made a most romantic show, and looked like a chapter out of one of his own books. 75
It is the objects that turn Hugo into a character from one of his own novels. If, as the
passing allusion to the Old Curiosity Shop suggests, they were accidentally to propel him into
one of his, Dickens makes clear that the effect would be mildly comic. Yet at the same time the
dark drama that Dickens reads, half-seriously, into the scene and its implicit sexual edge, quite
foreign to the world of Waverley, give a nervous undertow to his amusement. The Bohemian has
been well described by Elizabeth Wilson as ‘not simply a creative individual’ but one who
‘created and performed an identity’ and that is what both Langlois and Hugo were engaged in,
the uncompromising enactment of their own characters regardless or in defiance of social
norms. 76 Their physical context is an extension, a dramatisation of this and its effect is
correspondingly disconcerting to those used to the cosy clutter of Jonathon Oldbuck’s lair.
In August 1831 Le Figaro ran the first of a number of articles on the activities of Hugo’s
supporters, ‘les Jeunes France’, coverage which by the middle of 1832 had established them as a
‘bohemian group’ with the paper’s bourgeois readership. 77 That same month, as the ‘vie de
bohème’ was establishing itself in the culture, the Baron Dupont-Delporte, recently appointed
head of the Départment de la Seine-Inférieure, wrote to the Mayor of Rouen suggesting the
establishment of a museum in the city to display the antiquities rescued or excavated in the
region. 78 The proposed location was the Convent of the Visitation. Langlois was already living
in the building in the spectacular squalor described by Richard. He was also giving his drawing
classes there. This was clearly considered a positive advantage. Achille Deville, a tax inspector
75
Dickens to the Countess of Blessington, 27 January 1847, Letters, 5, p.15.
76
Wilson, Bohemians, p. 3.
77
Wilson, Bohemians, p. 25.
78
The account of the establishment of the museum is taken from Flavigny, Musée Départmental des Antiquités.
191