Sophie Trébuchet

Sophie Françoise Trébuchet (19 June 1772 in Nantes – 27 June 1821 in Paris) was a French painter and the mother of Victor Hugo.

Early life Sophie Françoise Trébuchet was born on June 19, 1772, in Nantes, rue des Carmélites, the fourth of eight children. Her father, Jean-François Trébuchet, was captain of a ship, and her mother, Louise Le Normand (1748–1780), from Saint-Fiacre-sur-Maine, was the daughter of the seneschal Château-Thébaud. Some time after her birth, Trébuchet was baptized in the church of Saint-Laurent.

She became an orphan at the age of eight, when her mother died on August 14, 1780, three weeks after giving birth to her eighth child, who did not survive. Her father, in financial trouble, was forced to accept a mission in the Indian Ocean from shipowners in Brest. He auctioned off some of the couple's property in order to pay for the equipment of the ship "The Count of Grasse", and then embarked. He took care before his departure to place his seven surviving children in boarding school, while the two eldest went respectively to his nephew Louis Trébuchet and his sister-in-law Louise Mathurine Le Normand du Buisson. She came to sympathize with the royalist cause after witnessing the execution of two young girls and their mother, Madame de La Biliais, whom she knew during her childhood. This episode remained in her memory for the rest of her life. During the Terror, sparked in Nantes by Jean-Baptiste Carrier, Trébuchet returned to Châteaubriant. But on February 11, 1796, she witnessed a battle in Grand-Auverné between Republicans and Chouans. The same year, she met Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo in Châteaubriant, a Republican soldier with whom she fell in love. On November 15, 1797, they were married in Paris. Sophie followed the funeral convoy to the Vaugirard cemetery.

On December 31, 1813, the family moved to rue des Vieilles Thuileries (now rue du Cherche-Midi). Léopold arrived at Thionville where he presented Catherine Thomas as "General Hugo". Trébuchet decided to locate her husband, after he stopped paying their rent. She entrusted Eugene and Victor to the Foucher family and left with Abel. Léopold again asked for divorce, on grounds of adultery, and placed his sons in boarding school.

When Sophie returned to Paris, she discovered her apartment under seal and therefore asked the Fouchers for hospitality. Later, Léopold arrived in Paris with Catherine Thomas, whom he presented in the Salons; he returned to Thionville during the Hundred Days. Sophie regularly visited her sons at their college.

Death

After finding her apartment, Trébuchet, impoverished, was forced to move to rue des Petits-Augustins, now rue Bonaparte. She recovered the custody of her children in 1818, when the civil court of the Seine pronounced the separation of the bodies and property of the Hugo couple. Abel was 20 years old, Eugène 18, and Victor 16. The eldest became a half-pay lieutenant and the younger two joined the Faculty of Law, while their father thought they were going to the Polytechnique. Discovering that Victor had extraordinary talents in poetry, Trébuchet sought to develop her own artistic talents. Victor dedicated his first poems to his mother.

The family was very close to Foucher, meeting regularly for a number of years since Mrs. Foucher had first received Trébuchet's sons for evenings at the Foucher home in Toulouse. One day, Trébuchet discovered that Victor and Adèle Foucher were in love. Not thinking much of the girl, she opposed their relationship.

In the spring of 1820, Sophie Trébuchet tended the garden, but suffered from the cold. She fell ill and died in bed in the afternoon of June 27, 1821.