Les Miserables -- Episode 11 (5 of 8). Let the seances begin!

Seance transcript images:

Pages 1187 and 1189 of the seance transcripts contain the words "fille" and "morte," but neither includes the words Leopoldine.  Page 1189 of the seance transcripts.  Page 1187 of the seance transcripts.

Show summary:

It is September 11, 1853, and the already famous author Victor Hugo has been mourning the loss of his daughter for 2 years.  He’s also been exiled from France, and having barely escaped with his life he’s now living on a small island off the French coast named Jersey.  He’s there with his wife, his mistress, his children, and some friends.  He’s sitting on 2/3rds of a manuscript for Les Misérables, and his plans for it’s future and its publication are in limbo, as is the rest of his life.

Days earlier they have received as a guest the distinguished Mademoiselle de Girardin, herself an accomplished author, member of high society, and well-connected member of the continent’s literary class.  She has brought with her a device that is all the rage in the Europe that Hugo can’t visit…a séance table.  It’s not sophisticated, and it’s really just a small table on top of a large table that’s supposed to tap when the spirits arrive.  In a few tries so far it hasn’t really done anything.

But the group has gathered again, with a designated transcriber ready to take the minutes of the event to save an accurate transcript for the historical record.

Tonight IS different.  When called upon, the spirits will move the table.  In fact, they will tap out a message so precise and so clear that nobody could doubt it’s authenticity…and nobody did.  Skeptics were turned into believers instantly.  What did the table say?  Why did it resonate so strongly with the Hugo family?

This table would send Victor Hugo a very specific message about the  Les Misérables manuscript … and introduce the family to William Shakespeare as well.  What did the table say about Les Mis, and how would that affect the eventual production of the novel?  We’ll talk to the ghosts on this episode of THM.

Transcript

Episode 11 – Seances

It is September 11, 1853, and the already famous author Victor Hugo has been mourning the loss of his daughter for 2 years.  He’s also been exiled from France, and having barely escaped with his life he’s now living on a small island off the French coast named Jersey.  He’s there with his wife, his mistress, his children, and some friends.  He’s sitting on 2/3rds of a manuscript for Les Miserables, and his plans for it’s future and its publication are in limbo, as is the rest of his life.

Days earlier they have received as a guest the distinguished Mademoiselle de Girardin, herself an accomplished author, member of high society, and well-connected member of the continent’s literary class.  She has brought with her a device that is all the rage in the Europe that Hugo can’t visit…a séance table.  It’s not sophisticated, and it’s really just a small table on top of a large table that’s supposed to tap when the spirits arrive.  In a few tries so far it hasn’t really done anything.

But the group has gathered again, with a designated transcriber ready to take the minutes of the event to save an accurate transcript for the historical record.

Tonight IS different.  When called upon, the spirits will move the table.  In fact, they will tap out a message so precise and so clear that nobody could doubt it’s authenticity…and nobody did.  Skeptics were turned into believers instantly.  What did the table say?  Why did it resonate so strongly with the Hugo family?

 This table would send Victor Hugo a very specific message about the  Les Miserables manuscript … and introduce the family to Willaim Shakespear as well.  What did the table say about Les Mis, and how would that affect the eventual production of the novel?  We’ll talk to the ghosts on this episode of THM.

Book-keeping:

Shout out to Podify.

Shout out to you – theater is all about community, and this podcast won’t work if it doesn’t build community.  Please hit “follow” or “subscribe” so new episodes automatically show up on your feed.  I am truly appreciative.

This is the 5th episode, will brush past a bunch of dates and characters quickly, so if you haven’t heard the first 4, I’d go back and download them.

Today: Numerology cleanup, Backstory, the seances themselves.  In the next episode we’ll talk about why they ended, how they influenced the publication of Les Mis, and take on the daunting question of whether the seances were real.  But before we get to that, let’s get as deep into the backstory of this fascinating episode in the life of a fascinating author.  And let’s start by fixing some of my oversights.

Numerology

 ·       In our previous episode, we walked through the text to find the hidden numerology that’s in the text.  There were 3 key elements:

o   JVJ’s original prison number is 24601, which works out to the date of Hugo’s conception.

o   The second is his second  prison number, 9,403.  This is a reference to his daughter Leopoldine’s  death.  She’s pregnant and on a cruise with her husband when there’s a sea accident and they both die.  JVJs second, 9430 is a reference to this “Sept 1843, nothingness.”

o   Third is the date of the marriage of Cosette and Marius, Feb 16, which is the anniversary of the first evening Victor Hugo spent with his lifelong mistress, Juliette Drouet.  Celebrated every year for 50 years.

o   Lot to unpack there (really?  Date of conception?  Mistress-a-versary?).  Ruminate on those by listening to the prior episode.

New additions come from Graham Robb, the definitive Hugo biographer, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (British), 1998.  Good book, well documented, fun to read.  Not, as we will learn today, always 100% accurate.  Very influential on Hugo researchers

·       New one: Marriage of Cosette is on Feb 16, but on Sept 7 JVJ is forced to give up her hand in marriage.  That is ALSO the date Hugo learned of Leopoldine’s death.  Not the date of the death, but the date Hugo found out about it.  Symbolically, it’s the date JVJ loses his daughter Cosette, and literally, it’s the date Hugo lost his daughter Leopoldine.  Not sure if there is textual significance there, but it’s an easter egg, at least according to Robb.

·       Second, the 16th of October is the date JVJ jumps into the sea at Toulon to fake his own death; also the date that Hugos brother Eugene wrote his last letter from the insane asylum.

·       Third, the address that brings the plot together is a tenement with the numbers 50 and 52.  This is the date that indicates the break in Hugo’s own writing, and marks the pause when he had to stop writing because of the death sentence, forcing him to leave France around 1850, and when he started writing again, experimenting with poetry while on the isle of Jersey around 1852, or right about when the seances started.

·       Are these easter eggs, plot points, or just small ways for Hugo to memorialize things that were interesting to him?  Shouldn’t I have read Robb’s biography first so that all these tidbits could have gone in the last episode?  Are you judging me? Do we need all these questions about my reading habits?  The answers to those questions, in order, are maybe, yes, probably, and no.  

·       Anyway: there are definitely numerological delicacies inside the 1,500 page sandwich that is Les Mis, and they are part of what makes the text so rich.

With those nuggets of fun updated, let’s get on to the work at hand see how the seances influenced the book, which in turn resulted in a musical.

Backstory

First, a quick timeline.

·       September of 1843, Leopoline and her husband drown.  Victor is on a vacation with his mistress, and reads about the tragedy in the paper 4 days later.

·       1848: With the very active support of Victor Hugo, Louis Napoleon (Nap the 3rd, the great general’s nephew), comes to power in France about 30-35 years after Napoleon the first.

o   Let’s remember 1848.  

·       1851: Hugo has fallen out with Louis Nap so badly that Nap has ordered the army to shoot Hugo on site; after a harrowing escape Hugo arrives on the island of Jersey in August.

·       Almost at the same time, Hugo has a 600-page attack on Louis Nap published as an underground, subversive book.  Aggravates those in power but establishes him as a leading voice of the opposition, even if in exile.

·       1853, After about 2 years on the island, the group will set up the first séance on Sept 6, but it won’t work until September 11.  It is all basically on the 10-year anniversary of Leopoldine’s tragedy.

Second, a roll call.

·       Victor is there, with his wife Adele.

·       Older son Charles is there.  Per Robb, he’s got literary aspirations but per Robb will keep those secret from his famous father.

·       His younger son Francois-Victor arrives, but has to be pried out of Europe.  He will eventually provide the first complete translation of Shakespear from English to French.

·       Adele the younger.  She journals everything and will eventually have some romantic trouble.

·       Auguste-Vacquerie is there as a suitor to Adele.  His brother was married to Leopoldine.  So; Leopoldine and husband die in a boat accident, the husband’s brother is now wooing Adele.

·       General Le Flo – lives on the island, very bloody military service in Algiers for 14 years, arrived the previous December (Victor et al arrive in August).

·       Albert Pinson; officer and visitor on the island; enlisted to avoid debtors prison, not got the military chops of Le Flo.

·       Juliette Drouet, his mistress, who lives a couple of blocks away, attends some seances, but isn’t a big fan of them.

·       Emile Allix, who has a romantic interest in Charles, and with her Jules, her brother.  Jules…is a lot.

Third, a brief history of seances.  Two main sources are John Monroe, History of Religions, 1999 (degree from Yale, works at Iowa State).  Second is Chambers, John (1998/2008).  Victor Hugo’s conversations with the spirit world:  A literary geniuses’ hidden life.  Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. MA in English from Univ of Toronto, 3 years at University of Paris.  Also the director of “New Paradigm Books” and he definitely believe in ghosts, like, he thinks science has proved they exist.  His book starts with an introduction by Martin Ebon, who spent 12 years as the administrative secretary for the parapsychology foundation of NYC.  Small digression on sources: Everyone has a perspective.  I’m not writing to discredit, but to make sure you know where these sources are coming from.  Will help us understand what they have to say.

·       1848: Starts with the Fox sisters in New York, who communicate with spirits with knocking noises, and eventually by tables rapping out the slowest possible code, 1=A, 2=B, etc.  They are a sensation, there are retractions, and retractions of the retractions.  Called “Spiritualism”

·       1851 it leaps to the continent takes Europe by storm.

·       Meanwhile, in Austria, a physician named Friedrich Anton Mesmer, per Chambers “theorizes that we all have a critically important nonmaterial fluid in our bodies – one shared by by all of the universe and linking us to the entire universe”

·       Does that sound familiar?  Here’s sir Alec Guiness describing a similar concept in the 1980s: [insert audio clip here]

o   You say energy field, I say nonmaterial fluid, some egghead calls it the Higgs-Boson field, aren’t we all talking about the same thing here?

·       This is what Victor Hugo believed in – the fluid as much as the spirits; mesmerism as much as spiritualism

·       Per Monroe, Allan Kardec becomes the leading figure in about 1857 and there’s a system of peer review to separate the faker mediums from the real deal; they make transcripts and send them up the line and if Kardec likes them he publishes them in a journal called Revue Spirite.  Others who publish anything, but transcribing a session is common.

Fourth, the specific séance manuscripts of the Jersey sessions.  This account comes from Jann Matlock 2000 (writing in Diacritics) University College of London

·       Hugo didn’t want the séance manuscripts published because he thought he’d be a laughing stock; his career as a political would be shot (Robb).

·       But by 1890 the events had leaked thanks to a friend and the press and public were aware of them

·       First published in 1923 by Gustave Simon, then they go on display, then they disappear.  Two are eventually recovered and go in the French National Archives, and those 2 surviving manuscripts are the basis of a 1968 publication.  They are part of the complete, chronological works of Hugo which are supervised by a guy named Massin, work by Jean and Shelia Gaudon.  There are 18 volumes in the set and the transcripts are in volume 9.

·       Are now other editions (Timothy Day, Interdisciplinary Science Review, 2023), but the only English-language one is by the previously introduced Chambers, which does in include some direct transcription, but reads more like a novel.

·       So there ARE verbatim transcripts of many of the seances, but a full set of them is hard to find and not all the translations fully agree

·       Per Monroe, this is all happening at a key time, where science is producing air flight and wireless communication, religion is still focused on heaven and hell, this fills a gap that might add an empirical element to the spiritual world

Fifth, Jersey itself.  It has known ghosts, especially a white lady.  It has druid stones.  Adele’s journals revealed that the family was talking about spirits before the seances.

Summarize: There’s an entire movement afoot, Hugo’s not the only one doing them, Hugo is actively thinking about spirituality and is skeptical of organized religion but interested in faith and spirituality, and there are a bunch of people on the island that include fellow emigres and also Hugo’s inner circle.  We are now set for the arrival of the tables.

LET THE SEANCES BEGIN

·       Sept 4 is the 10 yr anniversary of Leopoldine’s death

·       Sept 6 Delphine de Girardin arrives; she’s an author, very connected with the literati of Europe, and she has séance table (Stevens)

o   Side bar, Stevens puts the table craze in Europe in 1850, Monroe says not until 1851

·       On Sept 6, set it up, Hugo is NOT there, and nothing happens.  Fiddle with the design.

·       On Sept 8, try it WITH Hugo there, and nothing happens again.

·       On Sept 9, try it with 3 legged table, again fails

·       On Sept 10, fails, Vacquerie mocks them.  This is all per Stevens.

·       Then, on Sept 11, Hugos, the LeFlos, Vacquerie, de Girardin, and someone named Pierre de Treveneue (not important) are there.  De Girardin and Vacquerie place their hands on the table, and it speaks.  [Stevens page 33 & 34; no footnotes]

o   Le Flo asks it to name what he’s thinking of and the table says “Fidelity.”  LeFlo says he was thinking of his wife.

o   They switch up Charles & Le Flo now have their hands on the table.  It then reveals itself as “dead daughter,” repeats it in Latin, says it’s happy.

o   Per Stevens, this immediately converts Hugo, Charles and Vacquerie and starts a series of 100s of seances over the next 2 years

·       Chambers (32-33) has an almost identical account.  Provides as a footnote Vol 9 of Massin’s complete works

·       Robb, the most serious academic of the 3, provides this account: “On the evening of 11 September 1853 (almost exactly ten yeas since Hugo heard of the news from Villequier [where he was when he heard of Leopoldine’s death]), the table twitched into life and splled out the words ‘fille’ and ‘morte’ then an amazing sequence of letters: L e o p o l d i n e.”  Later Robb writes: “Hugo understandably found it hard to be sceptical.  Nobody would have used Leopoldine as a practical joke.  Even more impressively, the table began to spell out ideas, images, whole lines of verse, even the final title of Les Miserables, which were known only to Hugo, often when he was not even in the room.” (332)

o   That spelling of “Leopoldine” is a new detail!   And it makes it much more credible, no?

o   For that whole 2 pages there’s one footnote (#55) and that cites Massin.

o   This account, with the spelling of Leopoldine, reappears in Monroe and Day.  Our 3 most distinguished scholars.

o   I don’t know where Robb got that, because it is not the text (see show notes).

o   Possible it came from a different source, but if so, it’s not cited.

·       Hugo is sold, so is Vacquerie:

o   In Monroe, quoting a Vacq memoir: “Here, defiance was no longer possible: no one would have had the heart or the effrontery to turn this tomb into a stage before our eyes. A mystification was al- ready difficult to admit, but an infamy! Suspicion would have mistrusted itself. The brother questioned his sister, who had come from death to console the exile; the mother cried; an inexpressible emotion welled up in our breasts; I distinctly felt the presence of the girl who had been torn from us by the dire blast of wind. Where was she? Did she still love us? Was she happy? She responded to all the questions or responded that she was forbidden to respond. The night melted away, and we remained there, souls fixed on the invisible apparition. Finally, she told us, Farewell! And the table stopped moving.”

·       Per Stevens, big believers are now Hugo, Charles, Vacquerie.  I think Adele the daughter is into it.  She will be courted by 3 men on the island, Vacquerie, Pinson, and Jules Allix.  While she’s getting cold on Vacquerie and warm on Pinson, she turns to her deceased sister and gets some truly bad relationship advice: (Stevens, pp. 12-13)

·       There are hundreds of visitors they meet, from significant historical figures (Shakespeare, Cesar, Jesus) to mythical beasts to abstract entities (Death, the idea, inspiration), to snails, to an astral voyage to the planet mercury.  Huh.  Snails kind of stands out on that list as an outlier.  Maybe we’ll get back to that.

·       Not all love it; according to Stevens, Juliette Drouet considers them “diabolical” and doesn’t like that they are taking Victor’s time away from her

·       As the seances go on, it becomes clear that Charles is the best medium.  By all accounts, Charles does not like this.  According to both Charles and Robb, this is because to be a medium your own personality has to become blank, clear, invisible, and pushed aside.  This he considers an insult to his ego.

·       Francois-Victor is the most skeptical, others laugh because he’ll say it’s all fake and then throw salt over his should to protect himself (per Stevens).  But he loses interest and stops attending the seances.

·       Hugo is…into it, but a little skeptical.  Stevens: “Hugo said that he did not believe in the  message of the tables blindly, but he was not perplexed by the phenomenon…There was only one way to prove the message of the tables: ask them secretes…and send the answers to the Academy of Sciences which could verify or falsify them in due course.” (35)

·       But, the tables did seem to be Hugo-friendly.

·       Stevens: “Hugo did not usually hold the table, but it often seemed to speak in his style and about his preoccupations.” (35)

·       Robb: Not just that, the table always tells him what he wants to hear.  “The spirits gave him the best reviews he ever had” – all his literary heroes tell him they read his stuff and think it’s great.  Other great religious figures show up to confirm his beliefs about God and the after-life.

·       In Stevens there is an account of Albert Pinson.  He and Charles are operating the table; the spirit reveals itself to be Andrew, Albert’s brother, who had “not been heard from in some time.”  Only Pinson really knew his brother’s name, and the rest of the conversation was in English, although only Pinson spoke it.

o   Other version is in Chambers; in this, Charles is the medium and Pinson is translating the English.  Andrew has been missing for 12 years, and reveals something so personal he Albert can’t tell anyone.  Sir Walter Scott then appears who produces a couplet in English, which Charles can’t speak, so Pinson is translating the whole time.

·       Per Stevens, the table would often guess the thoughts of those not touching the table “which suggests that extra-sensory perception was at work.”  Not just Hugo who is influencing the answers.

·       Shakespeare would be a star; he declared that he preferred French to English, which worked out well because Victor couldn’t speak English, and then Shakespeare dictated through Charles poetry and the first act of a new play.  That text of that play is reproduced in Chambers as an appendix, and Robb’s account is that Shakespeare showed up night after night to do line-by-line editing.  This is the same process Robb describes for how Hugo finished Les Mis – didn’t take up where he left off, he re-read the whole thing and made a bunch of edits.

·       The séance transcripts are striking and different from other séance texts.  According to Matlock, there is a far greater interest in what the spirits are saying and who they are, and secondly, they produced poetry.  In particular a few of the poems that came from the seances were produced in the Contemplations, a book of poetry published in 1856.  

o   This actually became a sore spot for Hugo, essentially an afterlife plagiarism question.  Were they really Hugo’s poems?  This authorship question has been the subject of an academic article by a Suzanne Guerlac, who has some big questions about the nature of poetry and authorship.

·       Robb: “Compared to the soul-destroying banality of most séance texts, the Marine Terrace corpus (only a quarter of which has survived) is a literary masterpiece, the unconscious product of a naturally dramatic mind.  Many of the spirts have such rich personalities that  a very rare sub-phenomena sometimes occurs: One spirit communicating directly with another.” (336)  Marine Terrace is the name of house Hugo lived in on Jersey.

·       In an early séance in 1853 the spirits predicted that Louis Nap would be out of power within 2 years.

·       Speaking of Louis Nap, both Chambers and Robb have a pretty detailed account of Hugo meeting his arch nemesis in a dream.  On September 13, 1853, séance table connects Hugo to a sleeping Louis Nap and the interrogation goes on for 6 houts.  Louis Nap admits its all a fraud – he knows Hugo is genius, he admires Hugo’s poetry, he admits that he’s a fraud, he predicts he’ll be overthrown by the people, he admits that his famous uncle hates him, he asks Hugo’s forgiveness, he says he’s just keeping the charade up because he likes being Emperor.  Chambers whistfully notes that Louis Nap left no account of the dream he had that night, in a tone that suggests he should have.

·       Geraldine de Girardin dies in June of 1855, and rather rudely does NOT appear to the group in a séance.  According to Chambers, this weakens Adele Hugo the elder’s faith in the whole enterprise.

·       Two of these encounters pertain to Les Mis.  As noted earlier, one of them is about the title.  The title is a big deal.  David Bellos’ 6th chapter dwells at length on the subtelties of the title; part of the reason that the title in the English Production is unchanged from the French is all that’s lost with any attempt at direct translation.

·       Second, Henrick Bering, writing for LA times review of books, gives this description while reviewing Bellos’ book: “One day, the personified Spirit of Civilization itself commanded Hugo in suitably deferential terms: “Great Man, finish Les Misérables.””

·       One more prediction of note, one more ghost story.

·       From Stevens directly: “On 28 December 1854 Mme. Hugo and Charles held the table while Hugo wrote.  ‘Joshua’ spoke: ‘Man is not a single but a complex ego.  Within his skin there are millions of beings.”  At this point Hugo wrote: ‘An idea that came to me three days ago.’  As he realized that this pantheism owed nothing to the tables in themselves, so the days of turning were numbered, and he was at paints to point out that only two small details in Les Contemplations were due to the tables.” 37

·       2 things.  First, that latter reference is to the ghostly plagiarism kerfuffle.  Second, according to Stevens, Hugo is losing interest in what the tables have to say because it’s not original and Hugo already thought of it.  I’m not so sure; Hugo seemed happy when the tables confirm his other beliefs.

·       Second, the white lady.  Appears in a séance and says she doesn’t like the house so they have to meet her outside.  Victor, Charles and Francois-Victor all have a physical encounter with her, although Victor never leaves the room.  She’s a pre-existing ghost on the island, and a malevolent one, and is encountered outside the tables.  Francois Victor remains the least convinced.

·       That’s a quick overview of the seances – there were hundreds, they were transcribed, hundreds of very famous guests, speak to issues Hugo wants to hear about but it’s not just Victor they speak to.  And they have things to say about the unfinished text of Les Miserables.

CONCLUSION:

That will do it for this episode but not all the questions have been answered answered.  Why would the seances end?  They went on for 2 years but Hugo was in exile for 19, and while they did leave the Isle of Jersey there were plenty of ghosts waiting for them on their next stop in Guernsey – in fact, the house they stayed in had been abandoned by it’s prior occupant because it was haunted.  So why stop the seances after only 2 years?  

And why did Hugo decide to come back to writing, finish Les Miserables, and publish it?  Was it because the ghosts told him to, or was he going to do it anyway?

And the big question: Was it real?  Were the spirits actually communicating with the living?  Is this ghost story real?  Like our own Ghost Hunter reality TV show we’ll hunker down around the séance table and try to figure it out in the next episode of THM.