30th June 1862
Dear Sir, — I readily answer your letter, for I recognize in you a valiant combatant for truth and right, and I greet a noble mind. After having, like you, fought against the Second of December, I was banished from France. I wrote Napoléon le Petit at Brussels; I had to leave Belgium. I went to Jersey, and there fought for three years against the common enemy; the English government was subjected to the same pressure as the Belgian government, and I had to leave Jersey. I have been in Guernsey for seven years. I have bought a house here, which gives me the right of citizenship and protects my person; here I am safe from a fourth expulsion. However, I am bound to say that Jersey two years ago, and Belgium a year ago, spontaneously reopened their doors to me. I live near the sea in a house built sixty years ago by an English privateer and called Hauteville House. I, a representative of the people and an exiled soldier of the French Republic, pay droit de poulage7 every year to the Queen of England, sovereign lady of the Channel Islands, as Duchess of Normandy and my feudal suzerain. This is one of the curious results of exile. I live a retired life here, with my wife, my daughter, and my two sons, Charles and François. A few exiles have joined me, and we make a family party. Every Tuesday I give a dinner to fifteen little children, chosen from among the most poverty-stricken of the island, and my family and I wait on them; I try by this means to give this feudal country an idea of equality and fraternity. Every now and then a friend crosses the sea and pays me a visit. These are our gala-days. I have some dogs, some birds, some flowers. I hope next year to have a small carriage and a horse. My pecuniary circumstances, which had been brought to a very low ebb by the coup d’état, have been somewhat improved by my book Les Misérables. I get up early, I go to bed early, I work all day, I walk by the sea, I have a sort of natural armchair in a rock for writing at a beautiful spot called Firmain Bay; I do not read the seven hundred and forty articles published against me during the last three months (and counted by my publishers) in the Catholic newspapers of Belgium, Italy, Austria, and Spain. I am very fond of the worthy, hard-working little people among whom I live, and I think they are rather fond of me, too. I do not smoke, I eat roast beef like an Englishman, and I drink beer like a German; which does not prevent the España, a clerical newspaper of Madrid, from asserting that Victor Hugo does not exist, and that the real author of Les Misérables is called Satan. Here, dear sir, you have nearly all the details for which you ask me. Allow me to complete them by a cordial shake of the hand.
Translated from French by Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer
7 The payment of two hens a year to the British monarch.