Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Victor Hugo and Poe,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 1-23 (This material is protected by copyright)

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VICTOR HUGO AND POE

IN THE MAY, 1842 issue of Graham's Lady's and Gentlemen's Magazine of Philadelphia appeared “The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy,” by Edgar Allan Poe.(1) Written too late to be included in Poe's two-volume Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839; dated 1840), it was a consummate example of his most characteristic style and handling of plot, both in its re-creation of a nightmarish but voluptuous atmosphere and in its grim combination of death by plague with a bal masque. Many sources have been offered for this, one of Poe's most important and widely acclaimed pieces.(2) Yet among the dozen or more suggestions painstakingly and sometimes ingeniously traced, we do not find presented as a major source one which Poe clearly indicates in the tale itself, namely, Victor Hugo's Hernani.(3)

Let me recall to the reader the occasion for Poe's reference. Prince Prospero leaves his domain — presumably Florence, if we may equate this Medicean lover of the sumptuous and the artistic with the ruler of Boccaccio's plague-ridden city of 1348 — and shuts up his whole entourage of a thousand courtiers in a “castellated abbey” to defy the plague, called the “Red Death.” (The appearance of blood, a reminder of Virginia Clemm's January, 1842 lung hemorrhage, was the motif of the grim tale.) After a half year of seclusion Prospero gives a magnificent masked ball in a suite of seven rooms, illuminated only by lamps directing their rays through variously colored Gothic windows set into the corridor wall. The costumes of all are required to be magnificent and grotesque. “There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm — much of what has been since seen in ‘Hernani.’ ”(4) The setting is almost everything [page 2:] in this story, which concerns the appearance of a masker among the “mad revellers” who has “assumed the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood ...  . When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which, with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed. ... ” He then accosts the figure with drawn dagger in the last room of the suite, its black draperies lighted by a blood red window.(5) As the ebony clock sounds midnight he discovers that the cloak of the figure is “untenanted by any tangible form,” and all the guests drop in “the despairing posture” of their instantaneous death by plague, leaving the stage of Prospero's castle strewn with corpses.

This scene is strongly reminiscent of the masqued ball at the end of Act V of Hernani. Earlier in the drama, Hernani has courted Dona Sol, the niece of the great nobleman Don Ruy Gomez de Silva; the lovely girl is also being sought by Don Carlos, just before his accession to power as Charles V. The unrecognized nobleman Hernani is saved through Don Ruy's Castilian sense of the courtesy due a guest, even though he is a notorious bandit. Moreover, Hernani is seeking to snatch Dona Sol from both her aged uncle-suitor and Don Carlos. In return for asylum from Don Carlos and his soldiers, Hernani vows to sacrifice himself, even to his very life, at the sound of Don Ruy's horn. In Act IV Don Carlos has a complete change of personality and intention upon gaining the empire; he restores Hernani to his lands and title and gives him Dona Sol in matrimony. The last act consists of the seemingly extraneous episode of the masked ball, presented as part of the wedding ceremonies and attended by Don Ruy in the disguise of a spectral figure in a black domino. In his jealousy, he cuts short all festivities and life itself for Hernani and his bride by sounding his horn and demanding the sacrifice. Hernani is allowed to choose the manner of his death and accepts poison in a goblet, half of which Dofia Sol snatches for herself. As the two lovers lie dead, Don Ruy, stricken with remorse, drops also in a “despairing posture.” [page 3:]

The points of similarity with Poe's “Mask of the Red Death” are so many that I must conjecture that French critics, reading the reference to Hernani, must have nodded in agreement and then gone on to some more esoteric comparison.(6) Even in critical studies and biographies such as those of Celestin Pierre Cambiaire, Emile Lauvriere, and Alfred Coiling, there seems to be no treatment of the Hernani theme in this tale or of the influence of Hugo in general upon Poe.(7) Neither do I find reference to this subject in the contemporary French reviews of Poe's tales.(8) Even Baudelaire, Poe's major translator and French commentator, whose “artistic parent” Victor Hugo was said to be,(9) limits himself to a very allusive comparison at the end of his preface to the 1857 Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires: “Our preferences are easy to guess, and every person captivated by pure poetry will understand me when I say that among our antipoetic race, Victor Hugo would be less admired if he were perfect and also that he could have had himself pardoned for his lyric genius only by introducing into his poetry forcibly and brutally what Poe would consider as the major modern heresy — instruction.”(10) The uniform silence on the subject of the Hugo-Poe relationship is especially remarkable, since Poe refers not only to Hernani but also to Hugo himself and to Notre-Dame de Paris elsewhere.

Both “The Mask of the Red Death” and Hernani are conspicuous examples of the use of the grotesque, which entered so much into the admiration of Baudelaire and his contemporaries. It seems possible that either through the text itself or indirectly through a British review, Poe absorbed ideas from the famous preface to Cromwell; this embodied Hugo's early aesthetic credo and presented a challenge to concepts of classical beauty in literature. Usually Poe's use of the terms grotesque and arabesque, as in his preface to the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque of 1839, is ascribed to Sir Walter Scott's long article reviewing the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann.(11) The two words of Poe's book title may have come from Scott's piece “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” but in that case Poe would have had to ignore Scott's strong disapproval [page 4:] of Hoffmann's style.(12) How much more in tune with Poe's preface and practice was Hugo's statement in the preface to Cromwell of 1827, here briefly excerpted: “Here is a principle alien to antiquity, a new type introduced into poetry; and, as one factor more in a being modifies the entire being, here is a new form which is developing in art. This type is the grotesque. ... You make out of the ugly a type for imitation, out of the grotesque an element for art. ... In the thinking of contemporaries ... the grotesque plays a great role. ... It creates the deformed and the horrible, ... the comic and the buffoon. ... The grotesque is, in our opinion, the richest source that nature can open to art. ... The beautiful has only one type; the ugly has a thousand.”(13) These are, of course, only apothegms and principles which are successively elaborated by Hugo in a reasoned, if not entirely reasonable, fashion. When one considers the many representations of horror and deformity in Poe's tales, such as “Hop-Frog,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat,” one would be inclined to regard Hugo as an ideal spokesman for Poe's practice, whether or not Poe had read this widely discussed and extensively publicized document. In actual fact, The Foreign Quarterly Review of the next year (June, 1828) presented a review of Cromwell with a convenient summary of Hugo's history of literature — the ages of the ode, the epos, and the drama — with this statement:

There is little question of Poe's interest in the past and current issues of this journal.(14) [page 5:]

One aspect of Hugo's theory of the grotesque in art, the union of “les qualites les plus opposees” (Cromwell, p. 27) was especially developed in Hernani, which he wrote in 1829 and which produced such an uproar upon its performance, February 25, 1830. Julleville declares that the leading characteristic of his dramas is “l’absurdite” which springs from the fact that “his personages say the opposite of what they ought to say and do the opposite of what they ought to do.” Concerning Hernani, he declares that antithesis is the fundamental trait: “He insistently contrasts black and white, the grotesque and the sublime ... the young man and the old, the bandit and the king.”(15) In Poe this principle is always used effectively, as in “The Mask of the Red Death” where the music, dancing, and decoration are brilliantly counterpoised to the ugliness of the plague and the terror of the grave. It is particularly this contrast which Hugo has caught in the last act of Hernani; it is this which provides Poe with a general mise-en-scene for his whole story and also with specific ideas and even phrases. Paul Henry Lang well summarizes the quality which must have attracted Poe and given him inspiration in the fifth act: “Hugo brings about this state of intoxication by the lavish use of stagecraft, costumes, crowds, the brilliant, though often false application of local color. Most of all, however, by his language, his verse, and his lyric rhetoric.”(16)

Even the stage directions for the fifth act of Hernani show a parallel with Poe's tale: “Trumpets afar off are heard. Masks and dominoes, either singly or in groups, cross the terrace here and there. At the foot of the stage a group of young lords, their masks in their hands, laugh and chat noisily.”(17) This direction, which, I believe, must have been followed in the performance that Poe saw, explains a puzzling circumstance in the story, the fact that, despite the masks, the faces of the human beings can be seen: “While the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale” and “when the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image ... he was seen to be convulsed in the first moment, with a strong [page 6:] shudder of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage.” Hugo makes it clear that the dramatis personae have “les masques a la main,” probably on a short stick for ease in raising and lowering their disguise. In Poe's tale it is only the Red Death whose mask is fixed, and so it is with Don Ruy in Hernani, as he engages in many actions such as handing the poison to Hernani. The correspondence of these two spectral figures in appearance and movements is close; one of the lords at the nuptial ball says:

Poe uses three paragraphs to show how the gay revellers become increasingly conscious of the intruder in their midst in the “habiliments of the grave,” an intruder who “with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers.” Of Don Ruy, Don Sancho says: “If the dead walk, that is their step,” and “if he's the devil, he’ll find one he can address. / Ho, Demon! Comest thou from Hell?” To this query the masked figure replies: “I come not thence — ‘tis thither that I go.” Another lord observes: “Sepulchral is his voice, as can be heard.” Poe certainly catches up the stage directions and actions of Hugo's characters in his own “dance of death” tale. After the Red Death has extinguished all life in the castle, it is as though Poe is envisioning the play that he had recently seen, with its three corpses giving him his own stage set where “Darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”(18)

A question arises, of course, as to whether Poe did in reality see a performance of Hernani early in 1842 when he was probably writing the tale. I say “probably” because it was very rare for Poe to retain any unpublished work for long; he was [page 7:] always in desperate need of funds for his family, especially now that Virginia had been stricken. The tale was to appear in Graham's Magazine in May, 1842, a month after Poe left the magazine and was in dire circumstances; he continued to contribute to Graham's Magazine for several more years. To deal with the question of performances in America I must give a brief history of the early English-language translations and British productions of Hernani. One is a bit handicapped by the lack of any study of Victor Hugo's popularity in America equivalent to Kenneth W. Hooker's The Fortunes of Victor Hugo in England. Early in 1831 Hernani was played at the Royal Theatre of Drury Lane, London, for a few nights. James Kenney, well known as a writer of farces and light comedies (DNB), had offered what Kenneth Hooker calls his “neat, well-made version, entitled The Pledge: or Castilian Honour” as early as October, 1830.(19) I quarrel with Hooker's adjectives, for the translation strips the play entirely of Hugo's flashing poetry and brilliant phrasing. It uses a peculiar kind of popular stage diction, a pseudo-English that was never spoken in life. Specific speeches are sometimes quite literally translated, but Kenney veers sharply away from the wording of Hugo whenever he wishes; the episodes of the plot follow closely those of Hernani.(20) His poor version of Hugo's eloquent lines was almost immediately put into print in two separate editions of 1831.(21) The names of the uncle and his niece were altered to “Don Leo” and “Donna Zan’the.” The play was produced in London on April 8, 1831, with minor success despite the brilliance of the cast, which included Wallack, Cooper, and Mac-ready. In general the British thought the theme of Castilian honor overstrained and found no compensating poetry in their stage version to warrant its being repeated often.(22)

In the Drury Lane company was an actor named William Barrymore, who had made his debut there in 1827.(23) Like many British actors he also indulged in dramatic composition, his forte being farces, pantomimes, and melodramas. Barry-more apparently felt that he had sufficiently exploited the [page 8:] British stage, and at the end of the year of the showing of Hernani, he left the Drury Lane theater for New York, where the Park Theatre announced that it had engaged him and his wife. The 1831-32 season of the Park also included a production of Hernani, said to be adapted from the French, the author of the adaptation unnamed. The cast of characters lists Don Leo and Donna Zanthe for April 12, 1832, and it may be assumed that this was Kenney's version of the play, although possibly not so attributed. I feel rather certain that Barrymore imported it, in the light of later events in Philadelphia.(24) There is no further record of a New York performance of the work until 1837, and our pursuit of the matter must take us to Philadelphia, where we shall again meet Mr. Barrymore.

One of the chief theatrical personages of that city was Francis Courtney Wemyss, author of a very particularized account entitled Theatrical Biography: or, The Life of an Actor and Manager. He tells of his failures and successes, chronologically, with different productions at the theaters that he successively operated. In reading his self-explanatory account for January, 1835, please remember that a performance of the work described was given also in January, 1842, while Poe was writing his tale in Philadelphia.

Gustavus III, or the Masqued Ball was Auber's opera, using Scribe's drama; it had opened at the Paris Opera as recently as February 27, 1833. Since the beginning of the season, Francis Wemyss had had his whole wardrobe staff working incessantly on the costumes of the masqued ball. This kind of spectacle, a dramatic fad in Paris,(26) was becoming increasingly popular in the American theater and helps to explain some of the theatrical effects in the poems and tales of Poe, an inveterate theater-goer.

The play script quickly produced by William Barrymore was, of course, no adaptation of Zanthe but Kenney's play itself. There was never any need to worry about royalties to the writer at that time for works that were “borrowed” from England or France before the establishment of international copyright agreements. One doubts that Barrymore did more than change a few lines, especially in view of the very different type of drama for which he was known.(27)

A further account of the early performances of Zanthe, given by Wemyss, explains the impression that the play would make upon the imagination of the “histrionic Mr. Poe,” as M. Bryl-lion Fagin called him in his study.(28) Wemyss speaks of the unusually large cost of the play requiring a “brass band, four drummers,” 125 supernumeraries, “many pounds of wax candles,” “red fire” (cf. the red illumination of the room of death in Poe's tale), and lavish dresses and properties, all of which made it a great success.(29) When Wemyss moved out of Philadelphia to Baltimore, he produced Zanthe on November 1, 1841. A small circumstance indicated for that performance helps us to understand a detail in Poe's tale: “A celebrated slack wire dancer, Madame Romanini, added to the attractions of the Bal Masque, in ‘Zanthe; astonishing the good people of Baltimore by the agility of her movements” (Wemyss, p. 360). This feature is certainly very far from the fifth act of Hernani with its lyric quality, but, probably added to the Philadelphia version of Zanthe, it helps us to understand why Poe wrote: “There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, [page 10:] there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.” One might add that the music of Prospero's ball was not that of the early Renaissance or late Gothic, to match the windows of the “castellated abbey.” It was rather the “voluptuous” strains of the relatively new dance, the waltz, which had been imported from Austria via Paris.(30)

The performance of the drama that Poe did see, I feel certain, was one of two given at the Walnut Street Theatre, on January 10 and January 11, 1842. There is every reason to believe that Poe was involved with the theatrical circles of Philadelphia at the time. Quinn speaks of the tradition that he attended “meetings of artists, actors, and writers in the old Falstaff Hotel” of Philadelphia.(31) His first employer there, William Burton, actor and manager as well as proprietor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, could have made free tickets available to him at the Walnut Street Theatre, at least during 1839-40. Francis Wemyss had employed Burton as a star during 1839 and would thus have known Poe. Moreover, Poe was friendly with the Philadelphian Richard Penn Smith, fifteen of whose twenty plays were performed on the stage and several of which were adaptations of French works.(32) It can be assumed that in January, 1842, Poe was likely to see the Walnut Street Theatre production of Hernani or Zanthe and to use its atmosphere in developing “The Mask of the Red Death.”

There is little likelihood that Poe could have been referring to the printed version of Hernani. He is very clear about its being “seen” on the stage; he would not have sought out the French text. Regis Messac declares that the domain of French verse was basically closed to him, despite his quotations from Béranger, for example. He rather tellingly proves Poe's ineptitude in recognizing the rules of French versification. Wood-berry earlier makes rather caustic but well-documented attacks upon the solidity of Poe's knowledge of French and comes to the reasonable conclusion that although Poe had started out with a good schoolboy's knowledge of French, enabling him to read fluently a text such as Gil Blas, he lost much of it [page 11:] through lack of time for practice and lack of a good supply of French works.(33) Edith Philips subsequently provided more evidence against the firmness of Poe's knowledge of the tongue.(34) Even his most devoted commentators are inclined to suspect the thoroughness of his knowledge of the refinements of French, while insisting upon the fluency of his reading skill.(35) I surmise that Poe used the name of Hernani for its prestigious effect, when he had witnessed in reality an inferior version in Zanthe.(36) An essential source lies in Hugo's contrast between the bal masquC and the spectral figure of Don Ruy, who brings death. Since this contrast was conveyed in Kenney's version and represented on the Philadelphia stage lavishly, we may be confident of its effect upon Poe's creative imagination.

Poe's other references to Hugo and his writings are also of great interest with respect to his critical methods and theories as well as his creative works. The first item is very extensive, occurring in his review of R. M. Walsh's Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, which appeared in Graham's Magazine of April, 1841 (Harrison, 10.133-139). This is about one year before “The Mask of the Red Death” and also before all his other markedly favorable references to Hugo. Walsh's book, however, includes a grossly severe critique of Hugo written originally by Louis Leonard de Lomenie, although Lomenie is not named by Walsh nor known to Poe. The Sketches was a book compiled and translated from the individual studies in Lomenie's Galerie Populaire des Contemporains, a series, says Walsh, published “in weekly number” in Paris and then in volumes by “un homme de rien.” Walsh seems to have translated, for his American publication, the whole of Vol. 1 plus the first three numbers or “livraisons” of the second set, before Vol. 2 came out. Hugo is treated in the first set along with Béranger and Andre-Marie-Jean-Jacques Dupin, the original of the sleuth in Poe's three “detective” tales, which he was to begin later in 1842.(37) Poe is impressed by Lomenie's “vigorous and vivacious” style (Harrison, 10.133). The sketch of Hugo, he says, is one of those which he finds [page 12:] most interesting; his review, therefore, comments on Hugo, whom he calls “that absurd antithesis-hunter.” The phrase is derived directly from the words of Lomenie, via Walsh: “By dint of hunting after this perpetual antithesis of two contrary elements, Hugo ... ” (p. 202).(38)

The most flagrant instance of borrowing by Poe occurs in a sentence which combines a strong condemnation of Lomenie's praise of Hugo as a poet with unacknowledged approval of Lomenie's criticism of Hugo's fiction. “What can we do but laugh outright at such phrases as the ‘sympathetic swan-like cries’ and the ‘singular lyric precocity of the crystal soul’ — of such an ass as the author of ‘Bug-Jargar?” (10.137). In reality this is a pastiche of widely scattered observations in the book reviewed. Lomenie had written that “Lamartine has just delighted for the first time the ears of the world with his swanlike voice. To this melodious song, Victor Hugo answers with a sympathetic cry” (p. 194). Earlier in the chapter is this statement: “Born almost beneath a tent, in the most brilliant days of the empire, Victor Hugo had one of those erratic, adventurous childhoods, so fruitful in emotions of every kind, which explains the singular lyric precocity of his crystal soul” (pp. 190-191). The apparent reason for Poe's combining this last phrase, italicized by Walsh, with the epithet “ass” for the author of Bug-Jargal is Lomenie's condemnation of that book, of which Poe unquestionably had no firsthand knowledge. The Sketches speaks of its “deformed, odious, cruel dwarf, named Habibrah ... a worthy brother of Han d’Islande,” who is a “kind of ogre,” eating “raw flesh” and drinking “human blood.” Worst of all, in the eyes of the courtly and chivalrous Poe, “by the side of these hideous creatures, the young novelist placed some beautiful and poetic figures — Ethel, Ordener and Marie ... who resemble the virgins of Raphael” (p. 195).

This is the only adverse comment on Hugo in all of Poe's works, and it springs entirely, I think, from his need to write quickly a lengthy review of a book which, for the most part, presents Hugo unfavorably. It illustrates Poe's frequently irresponsible [page 13:] critical method but not his underlying opinion of Hugo; when he read — or reread — Notre Dame de Paris, probably not long after this review, he felt it necessary to exempt Hugo from his generally unfavorable view of novels, which lack the virtues of the short story. Harrison records an apparently unfavorable reference to Hugo in the “Marginalia” of Poe, presented as a reprint from Graham's Magazine of March, 1846 and indexed as “a sarcastic allusion to Hugo.”(39) The text seems to say that “one of Hugo's progenitors” was the man “who had the blood of an ass” and of an “astrological quack” in his veins. In reality, the original item in Graham's Magazine prints the name as “Hague” and has nothing to do with Hugo. The allusion there was to Thomas Hague, a charlatan of Philadelphia, whom Poe had mockingly attacked in one of his articles of 1840 in Alexander's Weekly Messenger, uncollected by Harrison.(40)

In the creative writings of Poe one slight consequence of his perusing the pages of Walsh's Sketches for the review may have come from the article on Hugo. The book spoke of Hugo as author of Hernani and Marion Delorme (sic for de Lorme; p. 189). This name, slightly transformed, was’ inserted into Poe's poem “Bridal Ballad” when he republished it in the Saturday Evening Post on July 31, 1841, a few months after his review of Sketches. When first printed in the Southern Literary Messenger of January, 1837, the poem lacked a parenthetical line now inserted into the third stanza: “(Thinking him dead D’Elormie).” I suggest that Poe used Hugo's title Marion de Lorme, varied of course, only for the phonic effect of its rhyme with “before me.” Killis Campbell has observed that Poe's 1839 review of one of G. P. R. James's books mentions his earlier work, the novel De L’Orme (1836); and in the next number of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (August, 1839), Poe has a passing reference to a business establishment named “De L’Orme's” in his story “The Man That Was Used Up.”(41) However, the change in the form of the name in the poem and the deliberate insertion of the line only three months after his [page 14:] review of Walsh's Sketches points to the chapter on Hugo as stimulating his revision of the poem.

More significantly, Poe was now about to become familiar with one of Hugo's major masterpieces. Notre-Dame de Paris very soon was to furnish Poe with a large number of quotations and references. In February, 1842, during the genesis or writing of “The Mask of the Red Death,” in two reviews in Graham's Magazine Poe makes three allusions to the novel; these are important in their placement and in their form, for two are in Poe's own French — very different from Hugo's. First, in a review of Wakondah by Cornelius Mathews, editor of the magazine Arcturus, Poe speaks of the poem as having been “set forth” in the preceding December issue of Arcturus “avec fair d’un homme qui sauve sa patrie” (Harrison, 11.25). He places quotation marks around this italicized phrase without indicating the source. It is actually taken from Notre-Dame with several variations that betray Poe as translating it from an English edition. Hugo wrote:

A standard English version translates the last phrase: “with the air of a Roman saving his country.”(43) Poe must have felt it better to reduce the specific “Roman” to a generalized type of hero. He misses the idiom in de lair by using avec and introduces a clumsy construction in qui sauve. English translations, of course, were available to Poe; he knew Frederic Shoberl's version, published in 1833 as no. 32 in Bentley's popular “Standard Novels” and promptly pirated in Philadelphia by a publishing firm familiar to Poe.(44)

The second paragraph of Poe's Wakondah review reveals why he neglected to identify the first quotation as coming from Hugo — his desire to use another phrase from Notre-Dame with Hugo's name added. Here he is dismissing Wakondah as [page 15:] almost beneath criticism, but he promises to do his duty as a reviewer. “And very distinctly shall we speak. In fact this effusion is a dilemma whose horns goad us into frankness and candor — ‘c’est un malheur,’ to use the words of Victor Hugo, Vail on ne pourrait se tirer par des periphrases, par des quem-admodums et des verumenimveros’ “ (Harrison, 11.26). The original in Hugo is to be found at the end of the paragraph which begins the discussion of Claude Frollo's young brother, Jehan, as usual out of purse and luck.(45) Hugo wrote thus about the penury of Jehan: “O consul Cicero! ce n’est pas la une calamite dont on se tire avec des periphrases, des quemadmo-dum et des verum enim vero!” Now it must be observed that every English translator would be inclined to pluralize the Latin construction, unless he wished to avoid a plural by a circumlocution such as “instances of quemadmodum expressions.” Thus the Dent translation says: “O Consul Cicero! This is not a calamity from which one can extricate one's self by a peri-phrasis — by quemadmodums and verumenimveros!” (p. 245). Poe slavishly follows his English edition in preserving the plural form for both Latin constructions and ignoring the fact that French conveys plurality here in the article alone. Note the difference in idiom between Poe's d’at and Hugo's dont. Poe wished to have the credit for reading Hugo's novel in French and also for disparaging the poor poet, Mathews, in three tongues, so to speak. The sentence of Hugo's perhaps caught his eye because of its italicized prominence at the end of the paragraph.

Poe's third reference to Hugo at this time seems to indicate a more intensive reading. It occurs in the important review of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, of February, 1842, and demonstrates clearly that he now admires Hugo. He writes: “The effect of the present narrative might have been materially increased by confining the action within the limits of London. The ‘Notre Dame’ of Hugo affords a fine example of the force which can be gained by concentration, or unity of place” (Harrison, 11.59). The preservation of unity became such a keynote [page 16:] of Poe's criticism that it inevitably led him into the practice of writing only short stories, despite the promising lead of his long Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in 1837.

In 1845 Poe repeated a previous borrowing from Notre-Dame. He had been engaged in one of his notorious charges of plagiarism against Longfellow. This chapter in Poe's attack was especially unsavory since his chief aim was probably to stimulate publicity for the Broadway Journal on which he was serving. In five successive issues of the weekly magazine, he replied to a very reasonable defense of Longfellow by “Outis,” presenting articles which were totally intemperate, contradictory, and illogical. There is no need to retell what many commentators have handled very well. The second of the series, in the Broadway Journal of March 15, 1845 (1.161-163), included the quotation from Hugo which he had used in 1842 in a slightly different form:

This time Poe has preserved the nationality of Hugo's metaphorical patriot, but he still misses the idiomatic de fair and the participle in sauvant as in the review of Wakondah. Perhaps there is a little ironic jesting in Poe's twice using an unacknowledged quotation — one of many — from Hugo, as though shaking a bit of the spice of learning into the gallimaufry of petty charges and self-defenses of the “Outis” series.

Out of Poe's notebook must have come another of his recorded allusions to Hugo's Notre-Dame, the first of several in 1844-45. It is used twice, initially in the sixth of the “Letters” or articles that Poe was writing from New York City for the Columbia Spy of Pottsville, Pennsylvania. In the June 29, 1844 issue, in the course of literary chitchat about the sketch of his friend N. P. Willis which had appeared in Graham's Magazine, Poe observes that it was being attributed to Longfellow, [page 17:] “whose manner it about as much resembles as a virgin of Mas-saccio [sic] does a virgin of Raphael.”(46) A year later Poe uses the same comparison of the work of the two painters in his “Fifty Suggestions,” which appeared in Graham's Magazine of May and June, 1845. He gives it a significant place at the end as “Suggestion L.” As with other items from Notre-Dame, he seems to favor an association between Hugo and critical judgment or refinement of taste:

Poe derived the comparison of Masaccio and Raphael paintings from Hugo's description of Esmeralda: “Elle ressemblait a ce q’elle-avait ete comme une Vierge du Masaccio ressemble a une Vierge de Raphael: plus faible, plus mince, plus maigre” ( VIII, vi, 396). In the Dent edition it is given as “She resembled what she had been just in the degree that one of Masaccio's Virgins resembles one of Raphael's — looking weaker, slenderer, thinner” (p. 322). The similarity of idea and of wording is undeniable. Poe probably liked the comparison because it demonstrated a refined artistic judgment, especially since he had marked proclivities for the art of sketching. Both his criticism and his creative work are full of references to the graphic arts. Characteristically this concluding “Suggestion” combines a slashing reference to his fellow-critics with an instance of epicurean taste.

Notice that this excerpt from Notre-Dame refers to Esmeralda after her condemnation as a witch by the holy tribunal and her imprisonment. It alludes to her “ghostly” appearance on the tumbril, as she goes to her execution, just before her rescue by Quasimodo. No one, to my knowledge, has pointed [page 18:] out how closely the initial situation and details of Poe's “The Pit and the Pendulum” are connected with Esmeralda's sentence by the “Inquisition” and her incarceration in the dungeon of the Palais de Justice (VIII, i-iv, Dent ed., 281-309). The only sources which have been suggested for the tale refer to the events after the prisoner of the Inquisition in Toledo awakens from his swoon in the dark dungeon. The details of the pendulum and the closing in of the heated walls of iron suggest Poe's reading of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, Llorente's Critical History of the Spanish Inquisition, and William Huntley's “The Iron Shroud.”(47) To my mind, however, the opening courtroom scene and the well or pit come from Notre-Dame. Esmeralda, having been denounced by the frustrated Archdeacon Claude Frollo, is brought into “a hall ... spacious and gloomy” with “several candles lighted here and there upon the tables.” On “a raised platform, were a number of judges, the farther rows just vanishing in the darkness — motionless and sinister visages ... the maitres in black gowns” (pp. 282-283). Esmeralda denies any dealings with the devil and is led out for torture. She is placed on the fearful apparatus, the “bed of leather,” with her foot inserted into the “brodequin or wooden boot” and with “a leathern strap” around her waist. The screw is tightened and her foot is constricted. At the first excruciating pang the delicate dancer screams out her “confession” of all the alleged “practices” (pp. 291-293). She returns to the courtroom: “Night had quite set in. The candles ... gave so little light that the walls of the spacious room could not be seen. Darkness enveloped every object in a sort of mist. A few apathetic judges’ faces were just visible. Opposite to them ... they could distinguish an ill-defined white point standing out amidst the gloomy background. It was the prisoner” (p. 294).

After her quick condemnation by the judges, Esmeralda is plunged into a dungeon. “She was there lost in darkness, buried, walled up” (p. 298). She loses track of time in the utter blackness, knowing only the dampness of the “mouldy stones [page 19:] of the vault” and the falling of water, which, “drop after drop, thus collected, fell into the pool ... beside her,” and was “the only clock to mark the time”; it was also the only movement “except, indeed, that she also felt from time to time ... something cold passing here and there over her foot or her arm, and making her shiver.” At intervals a turnkey brings her a “loaf of bread and a pitcher of water.” Once she saw “a reddish light” in an opened “trap-door made in the vault of the in pace” (p. 299). When the Archdeacon finally comes, he prostrates himself before her “on the wet floor” in an agony of desire; his love and his threats spurned, he promises that she will die the next day (p. 307). Esmeralda “fell with her face to the floor; and no other sound was now to be heard ... save the trickling of the drop of water which ruffled the surface of the pool in the darkness” (p. 309).

In “The Pit and the Pendulum” of 1842 Poe uses a similar situation, although the viewpoint is that of the first person narrator as in most of his tales. He starts at the point in the judgment room after his implied torture by the rack: “I was sick — sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.” Before he lapses into unconsciousness at the judgment of death, he notes details which are close to those of Hugo: The “black-robed judges” have lips that “appeared to me white. ... I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. ... Then my vision fell upon the seven tall candles upon the table” (Harrison, 5.67-68). Next he loses consciousness. “Their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up. ... Then silence, and stillness, and night were the universe.” When he awakes in the damp dungeon he is appalled by “the blackness of eternal night” (p. 71). He has lost track of time, like Esmeralda. He wonders about the exact mode of his death, and begins to explore the walls, “seemingly of stone masonry — very smooth, slimy, and cold” (p. 72). Eventually he proceeds across the floor, “treacherous with slime,” trips on his coarse robe and [page 20:] falls forward, his head over a circular pit, with water far below. At that point a trap door in the ceiling opens to emit “a faint gleam of light,” as his captors note his accidental escape from the well. Later he uses the rats of the dungeon to free him from the frame to which he is ingeniously bound beneath the slowly descending blade of the pendulum, by rubbing the food from his dish onto his bonds, which the vermin gnaw away.

There is no need to underscore the many parallels of situation and detail. We know that Poe was paying close attention to Notre-Dame during the early part of 1842, as the citations in his criticisms in Graham's Magazine prove. We also know that he was writing “The Pit and the Pendulum” during 1842 for its first appearance in The Gift for 1843, an annual issued in the fall of 1842. I conclude that Poe borrowed from Hugo his prison and courtroom scenes, the pathos of the victim, and the dream state of Esmeralda. Surely Poe wove in details from his other reading and his own experience, but Hugo cannot be ignored as a primary source.

Proceeding in time, we find a treatment of Victor Hugo entering into the Broadway Journal of 1845 in two ways. One was directly through a review of Hugo's book Le Rhin, discussed by Poe in the November 29 issue (2.321) as The Rhine although the correct title was Tour of the Rhine.(48) It was characteristic of Poe to change it in his review to one which more closely approximates the original French title. Many other examples of Poe's typical methods appearing in the two paragraphs enable us to attribute the item to Poe, although it was not collected by Harrison or marked as his own by Poe in the Halsey copy of the magazine.(49) Poe's hand in this review is easily recognizable:

The tone of dogmatism and omniscience through the whole is Poe's hallmark, as is his assertion of aptitude for determining the “Frenchness” of the style, even from a translation; he implies that he has read the original in both paragraphs.(50) Poe's contrast of Hugo as essayist and as “builder of brief fictions” is mystifying until one dips into the book itself — very successful in its day, with eight editions in France in 1842 and 1843 according to the English preface. It consisted of twenty-six letters, of which the ninth embodies “A Singular Legend” about the devil and the church at Aix-la-Chapelle and, more important, the twenty-second consists of nineteen separate episodes or brief fictions in “The Legend of Pecopin and the Beautiful Bauldour.” These short tales, somewhat in the manner of Washington Irving's Alhambra, naturally directed Poe's mind to the greatly admired long fiction Notre-Dame. The last sentence accords completely with his other statements about the book, from which he continued to borrow.

In 1845 Poe used another excerpt from Notre-Dame in a striking way. Always included among the tales of Poe is a brief essay entitled “The Island of the Fay,” based upon an engraving which shows a romantic lake scene with a tiny fairy in a boat. It was one of the regular features of Graham's Magazine to open each issue with a “plate” and an accompanying essay or story. Poe pretends to have come upon this scene while rambling through a region reminiscent of the Ragged Mountains near Charlottesville, scene of his brief career at the University of Virginia in 1826. In his reverie he thinks that he glimpses one of the last of the race of fairies, although the creature also becomes symbolic of the course of the year in [page 22:] her revolution around the island and, by association, also of death. When it was first published in Graham's Magazine, June, 1841 (18.253-255), it bore no motto. Poe reprinted the narrative essay in his own Broadway Journal, October 4, 1845 (2.188-190), without the engraving. Indeed, most readers are unaware that it was intended as a description of a picture. In 1845, however, he inserts an epigraph:

The phrase owes its origin, indeed, to the Commentaries on Vergil's Aeneid by Servius Maurus Honoratus, but it was transmitted by Victor Hugo, with no acknowledgment from Poe. Originally it appeared as a gloss on V, 95 of the Aeneid, “Incertus, geniumne loci famulumne parentis,” and reads: “Geniumne loci quia, ut diximus, nullus locus sine genio.”(51) In Servius the words enim and est are lacking. They are inserted by Hugo in the penultimate paragraph of Book VIII, chapter v (p. 325); the chapter follows the one which had already given Poe the double Latin phrase used in the Wakon-dah review of 1842. In this context Hugo is writing about the noises made by the young brother of Frollo, who is chewing stale food while in his furnace hiding place. The Archdeacon has told an unwelcome visitor: “It is a cat of mine ... who is enjoying himself beneath it with a rat.” The visitor replies to the reputed alchemist: “All great philosophers have had their familiar beast. You know what Servius said: Nullus enim locus sine genio est.” The quotation, which was italicized in the original and, presumably, in all translations, obviously caught Poe's attention. It is clear that the two Latin words were first added by Hugo and not by Poe. The American was once again paying his respect to the classical erudition of Hugo. He must have thought that the idea of the spirit of the locality thus underscored by the motto was a good compensation for the omission of the engraving illustrating “The Island of the Fay.”

During the last year of Poe's life he twice makes use of [page 23:] Hugo material, the first time in a rather indirect although definite way. It occurs in Poe's reference to Du Bartas in the February, 1849 Messenger review of Griswold's Female Poets of Arnerica.(52) Poe borrows from an English translation of Notre-Dame part of his designation of Du Bartas as “the poet who was in the habit of styling the sun the ‘Grand Duke of Candles.’(53) Later, for the July, 1849 Messenger, in the “Marginalia” section, Poe found himself able once more to use the Latin garnishing of Notre-Dame. He is again vindicating the role of the severe critic, as he did in the Wakondah review. Poe was often judged abusive, and he apparently felt that he must justify his candor:

This time he varies his own variation of Hugo, in the tense of the verb — clearly showing his freedom from any slavish reference to his original text. The need for an aggressive criticism which would reform the condition of the literary art had also been upheld by Hugo in his preface to Cromwell, years before.

The citation shows the considerable respect that Poe had acquired for the work of Hugo. In view of the significance of Hernani and Notre-Dame in Poe's literary development, we might fairly say that Hugo had played a role in two of Poe's major tales as well as in his critical concepts.(54) Certainly, without the adaptation of Hernani on the Philadelphia stage the literature of America and, by a curious interaction, that of France, would be immeasurably poorer.(55) And yet the above array of citations and themes does not constitute the whole of Hugo's contributions to Poe's writings. In the following two chapters I shall indicate how three more of his tales profited from Hugo's fertile inventiveness and rich vocabulary.