« La fleur est de la terre et le parfum des cieux! »
‘The flower is of the earth and its scent is of the heavens!‘
Les Chants du crépuscule, 1835, translated: Karen F Quandt
One of Victor Hugo’s earlier poems, Date lilia. The title is a well-known phrase taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, VI.883, manibus date lilia plenis ‘offer handfuls of flowers’, where he mourns the death of Augustus’ nephew and bright hope for Rome, Marcellus. Victor Hugo was very influenced by classical poetry, especially Latin, which he was well taught in his youth. Dante, another of Victor Hugo’s great models, quotes this phrase in La Divina Commedia, as he leaves Virgil in Purgatory.
The poem describes Victor Hugo’s wife and young children going to visit the grave of his wife’s mother, and compliments his wife on her filial and maternal dutifulness. At this time Hugo was two years into his affair with Juliette Drouet and the relations between him and his wife Adèle, who had betrayed him with a mutual friend, the critic Charles Saint-Beuve, were not particularly good. This collection of poems was published at a time when the future in France seemed uncertain, hence its title – Songs of Twilight.
This quotation succinctly illustrates how Victor Hugo had already conceived his vision of duality: plants, like people, are held down by the material; yet plants grow towards the light and release their perfume into the air, as humans strive towards the Ideal, which is to be found in the immaterial realm of air and light. The soul of both plants and people is one soul, and it aims always for the Ideal.
The quotation was chosen for the garden by Professor Karen F Quandt, of Wabash College in the USA. Professor Quandt makes a particular study of Victor Hugo, gardens and the enviroment.