Victor Hugo and Spirits

Article by Sébastien Thill

To the question "Spirit, are you there?", knocks began to resound on a small pedestal table, flanked by two men, their hands resting on its top. Nineteen knocks first, like the 19th letter of the alphabet, S, then 8, for "H" etc. until the name Shakespeare was formed. It was the famous playwright who had come to haunt the place! 

The knocks on the pedestal table never stopped. 

What was this message that Shakespeare was trying to communicate? Could it be the text of a new play? 

In any case, a text of rare intensity would be born from these 4 grueling hours of uninterrupted session. 

Like many 19th-century authors, Victor Hugo was fond of seances. 

It was on April 27, 1854, that he attended one of the most astonishing spiritualist sessions.  

In 1852, Victor Hugo settled in Jersey to flee France, the Second Empire established and maintained by the force of its author: Napoleon III. 

It was from here that he would fiercely attack him with his anti-Bonapartist pamphlets. 

A year after his arrival, he met Delphine de Girardin. 

A great author, known throughout Paris and a spiritualism enthusiast, she wanted to convince the writer's small circle that the living could communicate with the dead. At that time, high society circles were passionate about paranormal experiences. There were theories on magnetic somnambulism, the ancestor of hypnosis, but also a new trend from the United States: the table-turning of the Fox sisters. 

Arriving at Marine Terrace on September 6, 1853, Delphine de Girardin initiated Hugo's entourage into spiritualism. The first attempt took place on September 7, but it failed: no revelation from the Table. 

The sessions would continue for nearly two years, initially using this technique: a tripod pedestal table was placed on a larger table. Two participants would place their hands flat on the Table, which dictated its message, letter by letter, through knocks: one for A, two for B, etc.; to questions, the Table would answer by knocking once for yes, twice for no. One of the participants recorded questions and answers in the Book of Tables. 

Finally, on September 11, the Table quivered: the first revelations deeply moved those present, who were convinced that Léopoldine was communicating through the Table. 

"DAUGHTER... DEAD..." 

Hugo asked: "Are you happy?" 

"YES" 

"What must I do to reach you?" 

"LOVE" 

Victor Hugo was troubled, moved, overwhelmed by this communication, exhausted by ten years of impossible grief. 

Could it be his daughter Léopoldine, who had drowned ten years earlier, communicating with him? 

It is said that the dead never stopped communicating at Victor Hugo's: Dante. Galileo, Molière, Plato, Dante, Jesus, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Moses, Napoleon I, and even Napoleon III in his sleep! 

Exhausting evenings, considering that the Table could dictate up to four thousand words! So another method was proposed: the letters of the alphabet would be inscribed on a dial with a needle in the center that spirits would make turn. 

The attendees would write down the letter where the needle stopped. On the other hand, at his request, the participants used a tripod table, one of whose legs was equipped with a pencil. From there came the spirit drawings. 

It was the Table that supposedly asked Hugo to resume writing Les Misérables, or to write a poem: that would be "What the Shadow's Mouth Says." 

The sessions continued to solidify the reputation of the House of Jersey. 

However, these spiritualist sessions only seemed to work in the presence of Charles, Victor Hugo's son, former secretary of Lamartine, writer and journalist, as if he alone possessed the "fluid" necessary for the experience. 

Is it the unconscious revenge of a son overshadowed by a brilliant father? Charles, a medium, "has the power to say everything, the admirable faculty of being, for the duration of an absence, the prophet of a poetry not yet born." The spiritualist period in Jersey, indeed, evokes "the era of sleeps," the automatic writing of the surrealists. 

What if Charles Hugo had been touched by his father's rekindled heart? 

Rekindled by the idea of conversing with spirits? (these being, moreover, quite compliant towards him!) 

Also rekindled by the idea of life after death? 

What if Charles had the idea of summoning the geniuses of the past to divert his father's mind from his daughter Léopoldine's death but also to help him find the strength to stand against the Emperor and devote himself to writing the masterpieces we know? 

Three years passed, and from 1855, the situation changed: during a session, a madman attacked Charles to kill him, the predictions of Napoleon III's downfall were slow to materialize, and Queen Victoria decided to expel all refugees from the island of Jersey, forcing the Hugo family to take refuge on the island of Guernsey. 

The minutes of these sessions form four handwritten notebooks, collected under the title "Le Livre des Tables" (The Book of Tables); only two of them have survived, one of which is unpublished. 

While one can doubt the veracity of these departed geniuses' visits, these spiritualist sessions allowed Victor Hugo to write texts that have become indispensable monuments of literature, as if under the influence of automatic writing, by forcing himself, probably unconsciously, to write "in the manner of." 

Perhaps we could adopt this practice to create our own magic, a bit like Dominique Duvivier who imagined virtual visits from illustrious magicians, knocking at his door and asking him to fool them? 

For example, how to fool Derek Dingle with a triumph? Probably by genuinely mixing the cards face up and face down! 

All that remains is to figure out how to finish the trick... 

Without needing to turn a table!