Les Miserables -- Let the seances end...for now... Episode 12 (6 of 8).

Starting in September 1853 Victor Hugo, exiled to an island off the coast of France because the now-Emperor Louis Napoleon has told the army to shoot Hugo on sight, has been holding a series of seances.  There are been hundreds of them.  They have all been transcribes.  Scores of people have participated.  Many have served as amateur mediums.

 he results have been spectacular; they’ve made contact with their tragically deceased daughter, and other ghosts on the island, and some of history’s most important figures, from Plato to Jesus to Shakespeare.

And then, in October of 1855, the seances abruptly stop.  Why?  Who ended them?  The spirits told Victor Hugo to pick up his unfinished manuscript and get it published…was that the reason the novel came into being?  Does the end of the seances say something about whether the seances were real.  WERE the seances real?  Did spirits from beyond the grave come to speak to Victor Hugo?  We might not catch ‘em, but we will chase those ghosts as far as we can in this episode of THM.

Transcript

Starting in September 1853 Victor Hugo, exiled to an island off the coast of France because the now-Emperor Louis Napoleon has told the army to shoot Hugo on sight, has been holding a series of seances.  There are been hundreds of them.  They have all been transcribes.  Scores of people have participated.  Many have served as amateur mediums.

 The results have been spectacular; they’ve made contact with their tragically deceased daughter, and other ghosts on the island, and some of history’s most important figures, from Plato to Jesus to Shakespeare.

 And then, in October of 1855, the seances abruptly stop.  Why?  Who ended them?  The spirits told Victor Hugo to pick up his unfinished manuscript and get it published…was that the reason the novel came into being?  Does the end of the seances say something about whether the seances were real.  WERE the seances real?  Did spirits from beyond the grave come to speak to Victor Hugo?  We might not catch ‘em, but we will chase those ghosts as far as we can in this episode of THM.

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 This is the final episode of the origins of Les Mis; it will make more sense if you give the first 5 a listen if you haven’t already done so.

 So today we’ll tackle, in order, why the seances ended, why Les Mis got published, and finally the mother of all big questions, were the spirits real?

WHY DID THE SEANCES END?

Jann Matlock 2000 (writing in Diacritics) University College of London, says this: “No one has ever known quite why the seances stopped. Some blame the death of Delphine de Girardin on June 29, 1855. Others say it was because a member of Hugo's circle on Jersey, Paul Allix, went mad in October 1855. Others attribute it in part to the madness and death of Hennequin the preceding year.27 Still others-and this, I think is the most likely explanation-associate the abrupt end of the seances with Hugo's expulsion from Jersey on November 2, 1855.“

o   Hennequin was a prominent spiritualist who did table turning, published a book, went insane, and died.  Death and madness were commonly attributed to his work as a medium – minor character and the source is Wikipedia.

o   But there are at least 4 possible reasons in there.  1) Delphine de Girardin died; she introduced the tables, died, didn’t come back, and in our previous episode we discussed how some took this to mean the tables were discredited in the eyes of Adele Hugo.  2) The madness of Jules Allix 3) The death of Hennedquin, 4) he had to leave the island.”

·       Others add to this: Chambers gives us a #5, Hugo lost faith because they just started saying things he already knew.  A #6 is that everyone lost faith in the tables because they had predicted that Louis Nap would be deposed within 2 years of 1953, and as it got into 1855 it was clear the table was wrong about that.  Stevens says even Vacqurie was beginning to think the table “merely articulated the thoughts of those present” (37).  A #7 is given by Robb – Mme. Adele (Victor’s wife) – uncharacterisitically put her foot down.  Victor was writing love poems to a ghost called the White Woman – described in the previous episode.  Adele got too jealous.  

·       Here are the ones I don’t buy:

o   They lost faith.  Talked to Shakespeare, who transcribed the whole act of a play in painstaking detail.  And Jesus, who outlined a new religion.  And Plato.  And great writers who said they loved Hugo’s stuff.  They could tell people what they were thinking, they could speak in foreign languages the medium didn’t know, Albert Pinson said his dead brother told him something so convincingly personal he couldn’t repeat it, their own dead child had got the ball rolling by not only appearing but spelling out her name.

o   Against all that, I can’t see giving up over 1 wrong prediction and 1 statement that affirmed Hugo’s own beliefs.  They didn’t know the prediction was wrong yet, they’d had another séance where they spoke with the hated Louis-Nap directly who had confessed all their sins, and Hugo generally loved it when a spirit came online to confirm something he’d already been speaking.

o   Like, seriously, the spirit of Shakespeare is through Act 1 of a new play from beyond the grave, but you cut him off because it looks like 1 prediction is off?  And I can’t overestimate how many great thinkers and big ideas are in these seances.  Plenty of ambiguous content, but I don’t think that’s enough.  I only bring it up because other authors have cited it.

·       I also don’t but that Adele is jealous of a poem to a spirit.

o   Victor: earlier I had said I was reluctant to judge the relationships he had with Juliette Drouet and his wife Adele 150 years after the fact.  There was a lot of sex going on and Adele herself had multiple affairs.

o   And I’m not judging Juilette or Adele; they knew the score, they knew Victor was unfaithful, they were living in a really restricted time where they didn’t have a lot of options, and I’m not sure it’s fair to judge them by today’s standards.

o   But Victor was an EXTREME outlier.  He is said to have had more lovers than poems; one 200 day period where is said to have had more than 200 lovers.  It wasn’t just his official mistress, but everyone from servants and workers on Jersey to the first person he met when he got to Waterloo to finish the book.  Robb says that his memoirs show an unusual attachment because he usually recorded the names, but he also says a strange number of his partners went mad or died.

o   I’m also not here to judge his sexual exploits either, although he was definitely taking advantage of women he well knew he was exploiting, and he knew the pain this was causing both Adele and especially Juliette.  He’s got a lot to answer for on that front, and yes, it is ironic that he would be such a publicly powerful advocate for women’s rights and such a privately creepy old man.  In his mind, I think he actually believed both and didn’t see a contradiction, but that philosophy wasn’t going to help any chambermaid he impregnated or any lover who found criminally guilty of adultery.   There were both.

o   But I also don’t see Adele as drawing a line at a poem to a ghost.  Like, you’ve had literally hundreds and maybe thousands of lovers, you brought your mistress to live 2 blocks away and keep inviting her over to my house to attendance seances, but I just can’t abide you writing a love poem to a dead woman.

o   Sidebar: I myself have written a love song to a ghost, but it was really experimental and it’s not very good.  It wouldn’t make anyone jealous.

·       It’s also not that he left the island of Jersey.  He went to Guernsey, which had it’s own ghosts, and brining along 2 tables is no big deal.  Robb might be right that once he got to Gurnsey he decided he was more interested in writing, but Monroe isn’t.  There’s a quote from Hugo about the dead being dead, which could mean many things, but there were other ghosts besides the spirits, including plenty on Guernsey, and there’s no evidence that they tried seances and they just didn’t work on the new island.  There are better explanations.

·       So that leaves 2 basic possibilities; they quit because it was too boring, or they quit because it was too scary and dangerous.  In the dangerous vein; Stevens reports Hugo couldn’t sleep, the ghostly knockings were creeping everyone out; the white woman was scaring people; Hugo’s doctor recommended they stop.

·       One particular danger was insanity and death.  One possible example is Hennequin.  Let’s talk about the person at the villa who went insane.

o   Grahm Robb: “One of the devotees, a young man called Jules Allix, turned up one day with a loaded pistol, announced that we has God, and had to be sent to the asylum.”

o   This is from Jann Monroe: “The seances only stopped in 1855, when Jules Allix-one of the other French exiles on the island- suffered a mysterious psychological breakdown while at Hugo's table.”

o   From Stevens: “As the last straw, Jules Allix, an enthusiast for the tables, had gone mad during a séance.   He sat immobile on the Hugos’ blue sofa for four hours and merely said ‘I’ve seen things,’ and two days later Augustine, his sister, found him flat on his stomach trying to magnetise a watch so that it stopped at 12 o’clock.”

o   Ahh!  That’s scary!  You mess with the tables and then a malevolent spirit possess or attacks you, and it drives you insane!  The Hugos find this has happened to poor Jules Allix, and couldn’t risk a further loss of sanity amongst their guests, and had to call it off.  Doesn’t that sound dangers?

o   OK, it’s a little weird that on Robb mentions the gun, and a little quirky that only Stevens mentioned the watch thing, but they all say he went insane AND that his madness was the last straw, so that must be a credible case for how dangerous these things were, right?

·       Well, let’s learn a little more about Jules Allix, this devotee and young man.  And let’s keep in mind that talking tables didn’t exist before 1848.

o   Born in 1818, so by 1848 he’s 30 years of age.  That’s not old, but it’s not young, especially in 1800s terms.  The guy could ruin any conversation he was in; this is from Shawn Wilbur, an translator: “Allix was recognizable among all his colleagues for his eccentricities: he constantly held in his hand a pince-nez that he leveled, with an imperturbable aplomb, at those who found themselves in front of him. He also had a mania for always wanting to talk, and his colleagues tried in vain to cure him of that malady, a true calamity for those obliged to listen to him.”

o   Why was he there?  Two reasons.  His sister was there and romantically entalged with Charles, and Emile de Girardin – yes!  The spouse of Gerladine, who had brought the tables in the first place – actually thought the snails idea had merit.

o   He had thus far distinguished himself in 2 ways.

o   The first is that he was part of an assassination plot in 1853 at the Hippodrome.  The plot was foiled and he was put on trial with many co-defendants.  Here’s what Wilbur’s translation has to say about his performance: “The performance of Allix in this trial, where nearly all the other defendants had a proud and dignified countenance, with the defense presented by his lawyer, Mr. Didier, would not have led one to suppose that Allix had ever had the pretention of becoming a politician. His recent sojourn in a nursing home, from which he had come far from completely cured, was not.”

o   Chambers puts it this way: “Jules had defended himself with such insance utterances at the trial that the judges had first wanted to send him to the asylum at Charenton; then, as a compromise, they decided to banish him to Jersey.  Allix had a reputation for eccentricity and violence that made most people try to avoid him.” (306)

o   The second thing he was known for was….snails.  But not like, snails as biological creatures a malacologist might study.  Yes, that is the word for one who studies snails, yes I had to look it up.  But NOT studying snails to learn about snails, studying snails as parapsychological transport agents.

o   Chambers again: “Four years earlier, in Paris, Jules had been involved with a half-mad occultist names Jacques Toussaint Benot in an ill-advised project that had made the two of them the laughingstock of th Parisian upper crust for several months.  Benoit had gotten it into his head that two snails that have mated always remain in permanent communication, no matter how far apart they are.  Benoit had come up with the idea of placing a box of 26 snails in every major city in the world.  Each snail represented a ltter of the alphabet, and all the snails that represented that letter had previously mated with each other…you could spell out a message by pressing one snail after another and, since the astral fluid of the snails was independent of space and time, the message would be received simultaneously in the destination city…Allix…had enthusiastically thrown his support behind Benoit’s project.  In late 1851 the occultist gave a demonstration in a room in Paris…the experiment was a total failure…Benoit was caught fraudulently manipulating the receptor snails.  This diminished not one whit Allix’s enthusiasm” (308).

o   So, I’m gonna go with Allix was crazy BEFORE the seances of 1853, and he was not a promising young man and enthusiastic devote but a guy who was a party foul and killed any conversation he walked into.  If the spirits got rid of Jules Allix that was a reason to keep them around, not stop the seances.

o   So what was that séance like where Allix went insane?  The long-play version is worth reading.  Charles and Vacquerie are there and waiting for Allix to start the séance.  Before we take this as the unqualified truth, Chambers doesn’t include any footnotes here and he’s writing in that style that makes it seem like he’s dramatizing things, not giving a direct translation of the source material.  But, here it is.  Chambers (p 313)

o   Crazy footnote, Allix actually recovered and got elected to the Paris commune in 1890, but only by running in a precinct where nobody had ever heard of him.  His service was what you’d expect.  Wilbur again: “More myopic than ever, Allix regarded his neighbors more closely and insolently than before; he was also consumed by a constant desire to talk, which was only equaled by the desire of his colleagues not to hear him.”  Eventually the Paris Commune arrested him, he got out before the government came and killed the commune, but then the government too arrested Allix and sent him to an asylum where he died.

o   The takeaway: the academic sources in this are totally wrong about the role of Jules Allix.  And definitely wrong about it being a last straw.  Probably it’s the last straw for Charles, who hates doing it and is mad at Victor.  Just doesn’t want to do it anymore, and it’s not really gonna continue without him.

§  One more sidebar: Monroe says she saw the table, which isn’t really possible if Charles destroyed it.  But there are 2 tables, so maybe...

WAS IT REAL?

·       Monroe says there are 4 reactions to spiritualism, I’ll use that as a rought outline and update.  Two approaches held that it WAS real.  

·       One, from the Catholic church, was that it was real and evil and the only debate was whether this was a NEW evil or an ANCIENT evil.  

·       Second, those who think it’s real and it’s great.  Chambers is all on the existence of spirits – he thinks science has already proven they exist – and he cites a guy named Denis Saurat who thinks he was real and Hugo became like an old testament biblical prophet.  

·       Third, others thought it was fake – in 19831 a French surgeon named de Mutigny thought he could diagnose a rare and specific mental condition for Hugo.  Also, he and others have problems with the word counts and the time it would take to tap them out…not a bad point, but speak more to the verbatim nature of the transcripts, which are themselves incomplete.  And, anyone who doesn’t believe in spiritualism – like Houdini – would think it fake.  But Chambers dismisses all this, noting that is possible that Hugo doctored the transcripts (he doctored Adele’s diary) but that the experience could still be real.

o   I think he’s a little too high functioning; the condition he supposedly had I don’t know much about but got worse with age…and Hugo was doing pretty well later on.  He’d also go on to publish his most commercially successful poetry and the greatest novel in French history within 7 years, so that’s a kind of disease that I’d like to have.

·       The fourth and modern approach, shared by John Porter Houston, Tim, and Robb is that somehow Victor was projecting his ideas onto his conflicted son Charles.  But, an interesting thing is that both Matlock says that the spirits influenced Hugo…and Chambers interprets Houston as unequivocally saying that they did.  If that’s true, the point that Victor might have influenced Charles begs the question of what influenced Hugo.

·       A fifth approach, shared by Hugo, is that it’s possible to test them.  Hugo’s idea was that you asked science questions and put them in sealed envelopes that scientists can open after they’ve solved the problems, and Chambers believes there’s already better evidence.

·       Finally, Monroe says that the most common reaction were that they were a fun party trick that were entertaining and might have something to them.  Ya never know.

·       So, were they real?  Which of these 6 approaches seems most likely.

·       Let’s start with what seems likely and see the implications of those conclusions.

o   The best explanation for the content is indeed that Victor was somehow influencing Charles.  This is why the transcripts sound like Hugo, the spirits sound like characters by a good writer, and all the content agrees with Victor.  

o   But nobody has really explained HOW that would happen.  Victor wasn’t the medium; Charles didn’t want to be.  Many things happened without Victor in the room.  Maybe Charles was doing it to win the affection of his father even though he hated it, but that was a really weird way to do it, and they fought all the time.  EVEN THEN, how did Victor influence Charles?  

o   I mean, why not Francois-Victor?  He was the one who knew how to translate Shakepseare to French, not Charles.  And Charles was the more responsible one who basically had to drag Francois-Victor to the island and away from a stupid love affair.  Francois-Victor was an avowed skeptic, but if the motivation was pleasing Victor couldn’t Charles just have written a novel, like Victor wanted him to?

o   And they did it right, if you were trying to find the truth.  They rotated mediums, they only trusted things that only the spirit could know.  Forgetting whether it was really ghosts, how was Victor able to influence so many different people on so many different topics while himself expressing skepticism.  For this to work, Victor has to be ALL IN, and some interpret him that way, but there’s also evidence that he himself was not fully sold.

§  This isn’t to say that they had scientific proof, but if nothing else it does make it more and more unlikely that somehow Victor was subconsciously manipulating everyone else to write down exactly the conclusions he wanted.

o   So, I’ll just put a pin in there, and say that a sad fact is that most good ghost stories end with maybe.  This will not, I am afraid, be the place where we can answer whether ghosts exist once and for all.  BUT…there is an answer that’s maybe more interesting, and it does explain the relationship of the seances to the book.

·       Rewind to the 2 inaccuracies; Leopoldine is spelled out, and Jules Allix is driven mad by the spirits.  Both exaggerate the likelihood that the ghosts are real.  Both are perpetrated by Graham Robb, which is really curious, because he does not believe the ghosts are real.

o   I don’t think Robb is purposefully lying, but his description of events sounds like every Hollywood horror script – there’s a séance that spells a name and then a malevolent spirit is unleashed that drives someone to madness or death.  That is the plot of the Exorcist and its so dominant it’s the way ghost stories are now written after its debut in 1973.

o   And, when I am not watching lifetime movie offerings, I have spent a LOT of time watching “true ghost” stories – ghost hunters, paranormal files, paranormal truth, crimes of the paranormal, paranormal 911, the unexplained, paranormal witness, my haunted house.  This is absolutely common tale.  

o   Robb is superimposing a modern Hollywood plot onto events of the Hugos.  

o   But the Hugos, and especially Victor, didn’t see it that way.  Hugo was using it to work out a cosmology, a system of thought that explained what he thought about the existence of spirits, of life after death, how that linked to politics.  That’s the overwhelming bulk of the seances – an abstract entity or great historical figure shows up and dialogues with Hugo about philosophy, life, the universe, and everything.

o   In the Hollywood ghost story, evil is let and then it escalated until someone is killed, possessed, driven mad , OR the demon is defeated.  That’s not what happens with the Hugos.  While evil was present – the white woman is murderess after all – those are side shows.  And the story arc is entirely different.

o   Whether its Hugo somehow getting everyone else in the house to express his own thoughts by tapping out messages in a painfully slow pace, or whether there are really spirits he’s talking to, or something else, what he’s using the conversations for is to develop a system of thought.  And the thought he arrives at is the theme of Les Mis, which Hugo always insisted was a religious book.  The conversations between the priest and the old politician are what is added after 2 years with the sprits, and those are the sections that Lashmet and others believe are the key to understanding the book.  What the conversations with the spirits did was refine Hugo’s thinking on the relationship between God and politics, and clarify the thought at the heart of Les Mis.

·       And that thought is that our holiness is judged NOT by how well we worship an abstract entity, but by how well we treat the most unfortunate members of society.  Another version of this same theme comes from Matthew the Apostle recounted the words of Jesus himself in the very first book of the new testament, “‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’  “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

·       That is the conclusion of both Matthew’s gospel and theme at the very heart of Les Mis, and it was developed and refined in the mind of Victor Hugo during the seances.  

WHY WAS IT PUBLISHED?

This is not an exhaustive list, but the basic timeline is that the seances end on Jersey in 1855, they all move to Gurensey where by all accounts Victor can now write, and he publishes a book of poetry called The Contemplations 1856, which is his most commercially successful.  He works on and finishes another book of poetry called the End of Satan between 1854-62, and he picks up Les Mis on Dec of 1860 and publishes it by 1862.

One explanation for why he finished Les Mis was just that after getting exiled it took him a few years to get back into writing.  There are sources, including Robb, that say he’d had a life-threatening disease and wanted to produce a magnum opus before he did, so he turned to Les Mis.

But there were a lot of unfinished manuscripts in that trunk, and some didn’t get published until after his death.  If he did publish Les Mis because he thought it was his best, that thought was helped along by the voices in the séance – voices that both Matlock and Houston think influenced him.

 Whether or not the spirits were real, they were one of the things in Victor Hugo’s mind that pushed him toward finishing Les Mis.  Would the manuscript have been finished without the seances?  Maybe, but the seances helped them along.

CONCLUSION

We have covered the revolution and how it relates to the text.  We have covered the text, how it was saved for history, what it means, how it relates to the history it was saved from, and the fascinating interlude with seances during the 18 years in exile.

But this story will make it’s way to Broadway…and we’ll take up that leg of the journey in the next episode of THM.