During the second half of the 19th century, the French publishers and translators make available translations of new American authors to the French readers, including those of Nathaniel Hawthorne. This article aims at trying to establish and explain the fate reserved to the illusio of The House of the Seven Gables in « Les Deux Familles ou la maison des sept pignons » (an anonymous translation published in la Revue britannique in 1852) and la Maison aux sept pignons (Émile Daurand Forgues’ translation published by Hachette in 1865). In order to achieve this, the censorship, the “révolution Charpentier” and the serialized novel, and the conceptions of translation that characterize the middle of the 19th century are taken into account. Then, the results of a contrastive analysis of the historical context (the novel’s heart) of the source text and the two target texts are presented.