marriage-bond.

It may perhaps be doubted whether he would in any case have
remained faithful all his life. He was, as Mr. H.W. Wack well
says, "a man of powerful sensations, physically as well as
mentally. Hugo pursued every opportunity for new work, new
sensations, fresh emotion. He desired to absorb as much on life's
eager forward way as his great nature craved. His range in all
things--mental, physical, and spiritual--was so far beyond the
ordinary that the gage of average cannot be applied to him. The
cavil of the moralist did not disturb him."

Hence, it is not improbable that Victor Hugo might have broken
through the bonds of marital fidelity, even had Sainte-Beuve never
written his abnormal poems; but certainly these poems hastened a
result which may or may not have been otherwise inevitable. Hugo
no longer turned wholly to the dark-haired, dark-eyed Adele as
summing up for him the whole of womanhood. A veil was drawn, as it
were, from before his eyes, and he looked on other women and found
them beautiful.

It was in 1833, soon after Hugo's play "Lucrece Borgia" had been
accepted for production, that a lady called one morning at Hugo's
house in the Place Royale. She was then between twenty and thirty
years of age, slight of figure, winsome in her bearing, and one
who knew the arts which appeal to men. For she was no
inexperienced ingenue. The name upon her visiting-card was "Mme.
Drouet"; and by this name she had been known in Paris as a clever
and somewhat gifted actress. Theophile Gautier, whose cult was the
worship of physical beauty, wrote in almost lyric prose of her