Victor Hugo met her remonstrances with gentle reasoning and persuasive exhortations. However far Juliette went in her transports of anger, he was always able to pacify her. On September 27th, 1836, at the end of a long period during which the poet had not been able to give his friend even what she called the "joies du préau"--that is to say, a walk round the Boulevards--Juliette threatens to break out. For several weeks she has been attributing the sickness and headaches she constantly suffers from, to her sedentary life. Losing all patience, she addresses an ultimatum to him, proposing an assignation in a cab on the Boulevard du Temple. He does not appear. For three hours she waits inside the vehicle, then, in the certainty that he has failed her, she writes a letter in pencil, dated from the cab, No. 556, stating her intention to fetch her daughter and go off somewhere, anywhere, alone with her. "Thus," she writes, "I shall free myself for ever from a slavery which satisfies neither my heart nor my mind, and does not secure the repose of either of us."
However, the next day she did not start. She did not go out at all. She had resumed her chains and her prison garb. Her anger always evaporated thus, and turned to melancholy and resigned gentleness. In the end she came to feel that nothing existed for her, save a lover who sometimes came and sometimes stayed away. If he was present, she was alive; if absent, her mainspring was broken.
But Victor Hugo continued to lead an ordinary life, while his mistress spent her days in the confinement of a cloister. It was probably about this time that Juliette resolved to set up in that cloister an altar for the cult of her lover. Finding herself impotent to attract and keep him by the sole charm of passion, she endeavoured to win him over by devotion, minute attentions, tender interest in everything he undertook, and by unbridled adoration of his person and work.
According to Juliette, who secured several stolen meetings in the poet's own house,[28] Victor Hugo suffered from a complete absence of the most ordinary comfort at home. His lamps smoked, as did his chimney on the rare occasions when a fire was lighted; he worked in a "horrible little ice-house," with insufficient light and a half-empty inkstand; his bed was wretched, the mattress stuffed with what he termed nail-heads; when he dressed he found his shirts button-less and his coats unbrushed--as for his shoes, Juliette was ashamed of their condition. We learn from Théophile Gautier that the author of _Hernani_ was a hearty eater, but that his meals were served up in confusion: cutlets with beans in oil, beef and tomato sauce with an omelette, ham with coffee, vinegar, mustard, and a piece of cheese. He made short work of this extraordinary mixture, and no doubt was often reminded of a line his mistress had once written to him on the subject: "When I think of what you are and what you do, and of the discomfort in which you live, I am filled with admiring pity."