Few people know that the famous French playwright, prose writer and poet Victor Hugo twice met the ghost of his cousin Margot, whom he was hopelessly in love with in his youth. And this despite the fact that Hugo himself, in the details and colors inherent in the author, described these amazing meetings in his memoirs.
It happened in 1881, right after the woman's funeral. The writer decided to spend the night in his cousin's bedroom in her suburban Parisian mansion. Hugo was already seventy-nine years old then.
Scary ghost visit
For a long time, the middle-aged man suffered from chronic insomnia and severe migraines, but he fell asleep, surprisingly around midnight, a sound, serene sleep. After awakening three hours later, the Frenchman began to pace the room to exhaust himself and regain sleep. At a certain moment, the writer heard knocking in the bedroom. Surprised by someone's unexpected visit, Hugo opened the door and saw Margot on the doorstep, at whose funeral he had attended the day before. She walked slowly inside and closed the door behind her.
The Frenchman wrote that it was both terrifying and beautiful at the same time. His cousin looked incredibly alive in the candlelight, full of vitality. Her eyes were shining, her skin was soft and pink like a child's. The woman was dressed in a bright dress, in which she walked many decades ago.
At first, Hugo thought it was a dream. Pinching himself in such a situation was not enough for him, so he raised his hand to the candle flame. The pain from the burn turned out to be absolutely real, and the writer realized that everything was happening in reality. The man had a real ghost!
Suddenly, the phantom began to take on a gloomy look. The woman's eyes grew dull, her skin took on a grayish tint, and Margo's motley robe suddenly lost all color. Dumbfounded, Hugo could not utter a word.
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But the ghost spoke. With a note of reproach in her voice, the cousin informed the writer that their relationship did not last long, although Victor and Margot could have been together until the very moment of her death. “But it's okay,” the guest from the other world said with a constellation. "In four years we will be reunited again."
Unable to withstand the cold gaze of the deceased, Hugo closed his eyes and Margot fell silent. When the writer had the courage to open his eyelids, there was no one in front of him - the woman was gone. At the same moment the Frenchman gathered his things and left the cousin's bedroom. The room was locked. Despite this, for nine days, footsteps, women's sighs, as well as the rumble of things breaking and breaking were heard behind the locked door. From time to time a strong smell of motherwort and valerian tinctures appeared in the air. It was such sedatives that a relative of the writer often drank shortly before her death.
At the request of Hugo, the room was still opened. The furniture inside was turned upside down, the bedding was torn to pieces, the contents of the cupboard were smashed. All walls, carpets and pieces of furniture were literally saturated with motherwort and valerian, although these tinctures were no longer in the house, and for such "libations" they need at least two buckets. Just the same plot for a horror movie …
They removed all the broken and few surviving things from the bedroom, but footsteps and rustles continued to be heard from behind the door for another thirty days.
Hugo's second meeting with his dead cousin
After celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the late Margot, the writer went to an empty cemetery to visit her grave alone. It was there that Hugo saw the ghost for the second and last time. Margot walked along the central alley with a light, flying gait, just like in her youth. Despite the fact that she was far away, the Frenchman recognized her cousin precisely by her walk. The writer chose not to pay attention to the phantom and stood at the grave of his cousin. Nevertheless, he could feel Margot sliding very close among the gravestones and devouring him with his eyes.
On the night of the same day, Hugo left the cousin's mansion and never returned to it. And the prophecy did come true. In 1885, exactly four years after the mystical events described, the famous writer died of pneumonia.
Someone thinks that in the Victorian era the whole of Europe was raving about ghosts, and Victor Hugo simply succumbed to the general “supernatural hysteria”. Like, an elderly man crushed by the death of his former lover, all this dreamed, no more. However, the writer himself, to whom critical thinking was also no stranger, carefully weighed everything and came to the conclusion that the phantom really took place. How else to explain, for example, the spontaneous destruction of things in an empty room?..