His connection with the stage also had effects on his personal life. In 1831, a rupture developed in the Hugo household when Sainte-Beuve, one of Hugo's closest friends and a well-known Romantic critic, fell in love with Adéle Hugo and received some encouragement. The next year, Hugo met a young actress, Juliette Drouet, who in 1833 became his mistress and quit the stage. Supported by a modest pension from Hugo, she became for the next fifty years his unpaid secretary and traveling companion.
In 1843, the failure of Hugo's last drama, Les Burgraves, and the death of his eldest daughter, drowned on her honeymoon, caused him to abandon poetry temporarily for politics. This sharp change of direction in Hugo's career was paralleled in the lives of a number of other Romantic authors — for instance, Lamartine and George Sand. In the face of a rapidly growing and changing French society, plagued by social problems of all kinds, many writers came to feel that it was not enough simply to write beautiful and moving works of art but that their talents should be more directly applied in helping the poor and oppressed. In effect, this changing mood marks the end of the Romantic era in French literature and the opening of the Realistic-Naturalistic period.
Originally a royalist like his mother, Hugo's reconciliation with his father in 1822 broadened his political views, and he was, by this time, a moderate republican. He was made a peer of France in 1845 and made a number of speeches on social questions of the time.
