Hermès Paris - cuff bracelet engraved with "Marguerite Victor Hugo" c.1914, conservative spirit

Actors in a story, the objects in my collection have meaning...in a way "a soul". In the spirit of my research, I acquired a cuff bracelet signed Hermès, engraved with a Hugolian name, found in a house in the Gard department... I have just learned now, it was in Aimargues, where Marguerite lived.

With curiosity, I set out to discover the history of this object.

We don't talk much about Marguerite.

I searched for a while before discovering why Marguerite had the name Victor-Hugo.

In an article in Midi Libre, I learned that she had been a nurse during the Great War...a great clue!

Other inscriptions are engraved on the bracelet... Odette Loridan, a close friend!

From these elements, I was able to go back in time and I come to tell you a little more about Marguerite, an avant-garde character of this famous family.

A " nurse " cuff bracelet by Hermès Paris that belonged to Marguerite Victor Hugo. The silver-plated brass bracelet bears the inscription "Marguerite V Hugo" and OJL above the perforated line.

On the reverse the name "Odette Loridan" is engraved with the perforated line MV-H above it.

Hermès named this "memory jewelry" " Nurse Bracelet ." It was often worn by volunteer helpers (nurses, first responders, stretcher-bearers, etc.) during the war. This cuff model is uncommon; it is usually a chain bracelet like an identity tag.

Marguerite V Hugo (1896-1984)

Marguerite Hugo was born on October 10, 1896, in Paris. She was the daughter of Georges Charles Victor Léopold Hugo and Pauline Ménard-Dorian. At the time of her birth, her father and mother were 28 and 26 years old, respectively. Marguerite died on August 15, 1984, in Aix-en-Provence, where she lived on a shoestring.

Marguerite Hugo lived a large part of her life on an estate near Mas de Fourgues in Lunel, where her brother Jean had settled in 1929.

It was in Aimargues, at the Mas de Malherbes, inherited from their mother, a descendant of the Ménard-Dorian family, that she lived in the Petite Camargue, the world of bulls and bullfighting, an atmosphere that fulfilled her. Maggie, as she was nicknamed, despite her attachment to the Gard region, always kept a pied-à-terre in Paris.

She was close to the Marquis of Baroncelli and in particular to his wife, Fanfonne Guillierme, her neighbor from Mas.

Maggie had homosexual relationships with women, rumor had it that she had Fanfonne Guillierme as a lover, but apparently this was not true! It was just a long and deep friendship, as Robert Faure, biographer of Antoinette Guillierme, later demonstrated.

Jean and Marguerite are not great managers...

Marguerite died in great poverty. If Victor Hugo was a

A wise manager, this was not the case for his descendants. The Hugo family's southern estates declined in a difficult economic context, but Mas de Fourgues was still in the Hugo family in 2017.

Source: “Henri Gourdin explores Victor Hugo’s family. Including Jean and Marguerite,

two figures from the South." by Jean Marie Gavalda, Le midi Libre Groupe La Dépêche, 2017

She was one of the first women to ride a horse, not side-saddle but astride, Henri Gourdin tells us in his study of this Hugolian. During the First World War, she was a nurse in Meudon, and drove a van! She wore the bracelet at that time.

Marguerite à Meudon vers 1915

In 1902 his father, a writer and painter, obtained permission to change his name to Victor Hugo and signed his paintings Georges Victor Hugo or with the monogram GV-H.

Marguerite and François Hugo on their way to Guernsey - July 1914

Film photography

Copyright Paris Museums

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