the LIFE of JULIETTE DROUET: Muse in shadow Victor Hugo

Fougères, Brittany, 1806. Julienne Gauvain loses her mother, then her father, before she turns two. Wet nurses, a convent, an uncle's orderly house in Paris: she learns early to keep quiet, to watch, and to keep her thoughts to herself. As Juliette Drouet, actress, she learns the rivalries of the wings, the salons that judge a woman before they listen to her, and the friendship of an actress who laughs at everything. Then a name begins to travel through Paris, the name of the man writing a new drama for the Porte-Saint-Martin: Victor Hugo. In February 1833 a story begins that will last fifty years. It will have its rules, its jealousies, its humiliations, exile on Guernsey, its griefs, and more than twenty thousand letters written by a woman history long kept in the poet's shadow. What is left of a whole life given to one man, when that man is the most famous of his century?