Juliette Drouet, Victor Hugo’s illegitimate companion for the fifty years between 1833 and 1882, wrote a diary in the shape of the 22,000 letters of her correspondence. Long kept away from his social life by Hugo (except at the end of their life together, when she was living with him), confined to waiting for him and weighted down by the lack of anything to do, she watched the world go past from her windows, or listened to what her servants had to say about it, and described it, analysed it, commented and sat in judgement upon it. The originality of her point of view is due to her own difficulties in locating herself in this social world which excluded her because of the lack of clarity of her relationship to Hugo, so that she felt both inferior, as a social outcast, and superior, because of her special relationship to genius. She sublimated the rejection she suffered into pride – and this gave rise to the acerbic freedom of her sketches, anecdotes, satires, as well as the fervour of her empathetic exhortations against social poverty, injustice, and hypocrisy.