50 years after Truffaut’s masterpiece, Laura El Makki tells the true story of Adèle H, before her mad wanderings across the Atlantic. Her source? The double diary kept by 22-year-old Adèle for two decades on the island of Guernsey.

In December 1851, Victor Hugo, a world-renowned writer, peer de France, academician and member of parliament, was declared public enemy number one by Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the future Napoléon III. Hugo chose to flee France, plunging his family into the unknown and into precariousness: the Hugos sold everything they had before leaving and arrived on the Channel Islands with just a few suitcases. Although the exile was supposed to be temporary, it was to last twenty years. To keep the family busy, Hugo organized everyone’s days: he took up photography with his sons Charles and François-Victor, who began writing; Mrs. Hugo began a biography of her husband; and Adèle, who played the piano assiduously, was in charge of chronicling their daily lives. In Paris, she had already started keeping her own diary. She continued it, but in the name of her family.

This will be the “Journal de l’Exil”, a document scrupulously written by Adèle and reread, amended and corrected by all family members. Adèle waits impatiently and anxiously for her father or brothers to return, sometimes fearing she’ll be “scolded” for forgetting a word or phrase. She gives a lot of thought to style and wants to follow her father’s advice. In the margins, she notes formal imperatives: avoid heaviness, choose details. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, her father knocks on her bedroom door to give her a note to add to her diary. So here we have Adèle, twenty-two years old in 1852, as a memorialist, recounting the slightest event, all the banalities of a life that was once grand and worldly, and now reduced to the rare visits of friends. A docile scribe, she wrote the words of others –especially men. Rarely her own.

Alongside this shared diary, there is a private diary written by Adèle out of sight. This diary flourishes in notebooks found in the bundle of documents belonging to the House of Victor Hugo, written entirely in a cryptic language, “gibberish”, to preserve the space of freedom so hard won. He welcomes an entirely different voice, full of humor, desire and excess. A voice that, over the years, moves from excitement to despair. Adèle expresses her desire for freedom and cries out for suffocation. She wonders about her relationship with her fiancé, Auguste Vacquerie, brother of the husband of Léopoldine, the other daughter who drowned in 1843. For Adèle, he was a teenage sweetheart. For Victor Hugo, he was the ideal son-in-law. He encourages his daughter to marry him because “it’s a woman’s role”. But Adèle refused: she wanted to please and have fun. In her notebooks, she recounts her flirtations with neighbor John Rose and English lieutenant Albert Pinson, who will turn her life upside down.