Having thus cultivated the sensibilities of the flower committed to his charge, Pradier was rewarded by the prestige attached to his rôle of master and guide; the father reaped in tenderness what the artist had expended in intelligence and effort. From her earliest infancy Claire showed a marked preference for this man, so ardent, so gay, who taught her to breathe and live among works of art; all her life she felt for him an affection that neither his mistakes nor his carelessness, or even his injustice, could damp. Meanwhile, ever prolific in good intentions, always ready with vows and promises, the artist was forming high hopes and ambitions for his daughter.
"We must hope," he wrote to Juliette on that October 15th, 1828, when he took the child away from her nurse, "that she will live to grow up, and that we shall make a distinguished personage of her." A little later, on September 28th, 1829, he writes: "Dear friend, you are fortunate in the possession of a Claire who will be a great solace to you in your old age." Again, on July 4th, 1832: "Who can love her better than I do, especially now that I see her rare intelligence developing so satisfactorily and encouragingly for our designs?"
He planned for his little daughter the most singular and unexpected gifts: once it was to be the proceeds of his bust of Chancellor Pasquier, a commission he owed to Juliette and her friendship with the subject; another time it was the price of a house he possessed at Ville d'Avray and wished to sell; again, he designed to settle upon Claire the sum of 2,000 frs. he had lent to a cousin--fine words, as empty as the hollow mouldings that decorated the studio of the man. The cousin never returned the loan, the house at Ville d'Avray was sold, by order of the court, at a moment when the mortgage upon it far surpassed its value, and the bust of Chancellor Pasquier, though ordered, was never even rough-cast by Pradier.
Juliette had determined to live with Victor Hugo in the conditions of poverty indicated in a former chapter. Her natural delicacy prompted her to make the future of her child secure, and at the same time to release the poet from all anxiety on that score. In the latter part of the year 1833, therefore, she wrote to Pradier asking him to acknowledge Claire. The answer of the sculptor was as follows: