HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, ST PETER PORT, GUERNSEY – VICTOR HUGO (1802–85)
You never know quite what to expect when tracking a writer down to their lair. Some authors like to surround themselves with luxury, while some border on the ascetic, expunging all distractions from their surroundings, but nowhere surprised me quite like the home that Victor Hugo constructed for himself on the island of Guernsey. Externally it is an ordinary-looking, tall, double-fronted early nineteenth-century family house in the respectable neighbourhood of Hauteville Street. Inside, however, it’s a work of art, dramatic and highly eclectic in its style, by turns neo-Gothic, Louis XV and Chinese.
After labouring up the hill I was shown around by a young French curator – the house was donated to the city of Paris by Hugo’s descendants – who went to great lengths to interpret every room for me, seeing symbolism in the smallest detail. I was told that the fact that the ground floor was dark but the top floor where Hugo wrote was very light reflected the progress of humanity from ignorance and shadows, up to illumination and clarity. It might also have had something to do with the fact that each ground-floor room was lit by a relatively small window, while on the roofline Hugo was able to build a steel and glass conservatory, but I said nothing.
The author came to Guernsey in 1855. He had been living in exile on Jersey but had just been expelled, along with a number of others, for a letter that was critical of Queen Victoria. Victor Hugo was 53 and already the successful author of four novels including Notre-Dame de Paris, ten plays – two of which had been turned into operas by Verdi – and various volumes of poetry. But it was the runaway success of his volume of new autobiographical verse Les Contemplations in 1856 that made him a wealthy man and allowed him to buy 38 Hauteville Street. It also gave Hugo the income to decorate it as he wished. ‘Contemplations will pay for everything!’ he announced.
Guided tours around the house start on the ground floor in the Billiard Room, which is darkly panelled and decorated with formal paintings of the Hugo family. It’s only when you pass into the Tapestry Room that the audacity of Hugo’s ambition is revealed. He scoured Guernsey for antiques, including over 60 carved wooden chests that he cannibalised to panel the interior of the house. In this gloomy room there is not a piece of wall or ceiling that isn’t covered with either tapestry or carved wood. It is like the setting for some Gothic novel but full of didactic Hugo statements. On either side of the fireplace are carved the names of those Hugo considered the ‘geniuses of society’, including Moses, Socrates, Columbus, Shakespeare and George Washington. Behind a panel is revealed Hugo’s darkroom where he and others developed daguerreotypes (Victor Hugo really liked being photographed).
Across a corridor whose walls and ceiling are covered with dinner plates stands Hugo’s dining room, which is decorated with hundreds of Chinese tiles. The fireplace itself is in the shape of a huge ‘H’ which my curator friend insisted was not vanity and might have stood for Hauteville or even Humanity. I wasn’t convinced. A throne that Hugo called the Ancestor Chair dominates the dining table. It has the names of Hugo’s father on one arm and that of his earliest ancestor, ‘Georges 1534’ on the other. I was told that a chain across the chair indicated that it was only to be sat on by ancestors. Hugo was aware that sixteenth-century Georges was fictional but throughout the house he never let the truth get in the way of a good story. At the top of the chair the motto is spelled out: EGO HUGO. The house seemed to have the word ‘MOI!’ stamped on just about every surface.
Ascending the stairs, dramatically lit from a skylight, one comes to the Red Drawing Room and the Blue Drawing Room. The Red is very red indeed and its north-eastern wall is decorated with four life-sized gold-painted Chinese figures that were said to have come from the Bucentaur, the state barge of the doges of Venice. They didn’t, but again Hugo encouraged the story. The adjoining Blue Drawing Room is similarly oriental in style and as blue as the Red Room is red. The bedrooms of Hugo’s wife and daughter are also on this floor but because they preferred to sleep in rooms of a less idiosyncratic – and perhaps actually more restful – style, the city of Paris has not preserved their decor and now uses them as offices.
Up on the second floor is the Oak Gallery, which is full of even more recycled panelling and is dominated by a great wooden candelabra that Hugo designed using old bobbins as candleholders. ‘It’s a pity I’m a poet,’ he wrote. ‘What an architect I would have made!’ A table at its west end is presided over by three chairs. The word PATER is spelled out in brass studs on the middle one. These chairs face the red so-called Garibaldi Bed, which is housed in an absolutely enormous four poster frame. But Hugo’s Italian hero did not sleep here. The author invited him several times to Guernsey but the revolutionary never arrived. That didn’t have to get in the way of naming the bed, however.
Across the corridor lie the bedrooms of Hugo’s sons, which are too dull to be open to the public, but the corridor itself is interesting because it is completely lined with books. Victor Hugo said he liked books but disliked any kind of reading room or library and so the idea was that you took a book from shelves in the corridor and took it off to read wherever you wished.
The topmost floor is the most interesting but the least pyrotechnic of all. In 1856 Hugo moved the housemaids out into the basement and turned this garret into his own modest Chinese-style bedroom and his first writing room, which he called the Antechamber. Here in the middle of this low corridor between the bedrooms Hugo wrote Les Misérables, standing at a desk that faced out of the attic window. In 1862, with his masterpiece finally completed, he extended a conservatory-style room out across the roof to create what he dubbed ‘The Look Out’. It still has great views across the sea to France and in the corner a hinged flap on the wall can be raised to create a writing table.
This was where Hugo wrote his Guernsey novel, Les Travailleurs de la mer (Toilers of the Sea). It’s an odd book full of stormy weather and betrayal, and it is haunted by a giant octopus. The book was also responsible for introducing the Guernésiais word for octopus (pieuvre) into the French language. Hugo dedicated Travailleurs de la mer to the people of Guernsey. He later wrote that the lack of distraction on Guernsey enabled him to do as much work in a month here as he would get done in a year in Paris.
Visiting Hauteville House is an extraordinary experience. It is a work of art in its own right. Moreover, it is an insight into the mind of Victor Hugo. Walking through it is like coming face to face with the man himself; full of energy and ideas, brilliant, florid and off-the-scale egocentric. It’s impossible not to be impressed.
THE CHALET, SARK – MERVYN PEAKE (1911–68)
Everyone knows there are no cars on Sark. What is less well known is that you cannot ride a bicycle down to the harbour, or kill a seagull, or take anything washed up on the beach as it belongs by right to the Seigneur.
Sark is the nearest thing to a feudal state we have in Europe. There is no income tax, and property passes strictly down the male line. Except that Sark isn’t quite in Europe. It isn’t part of Britain either but rather owes its loyalty directly to whoever is sitting on the English throne. The Seigneur pays a small amount of money every year to the Crown and undertakes to organise defences so that the island doesn’t fall into the hands of the wicked French.
Sark is idiosyncratic to put it mildly, and the same might be said of Mervyn Peake, one of the most imaginative writers in the English language but also a superb illustrator. Peake came to Sark for the first time in 1933. He was 22 and arrived to join an artists’ colony, painting in a building that is still known as The Gallery at the end of The Avenue, Sark’s only named street. When the colony broke up in 1936, Peake left but he returned for a holiday in 1938 with his new wife. He was drawn back again after the Second World War, once the last of the Wehrmacht had left. The Dame of Sark, daughter of the Seigneur, had kept the French out but unfortunately been unable to defend her island against the wicked Germans.
From 1946 to 1950 Peake worked on Sark at his Gormenghast trilogy of novels and Mr Pye, a fantasy novel about a pious man, newly arrived on Sark, who sprouts angel wings. Mr Pye was printed in 1953 with Peake’s own illustrations three years after he, his wife and children had moved back to London. It was a publishing oddity that became mainstream when adapted in four episodes for television in 1985. The Mr Pye series was of course shot on Sark, making some of the island’s idiosyncrasies famous around the world.
I arrived on Sark after a journey that involved flying from Southampton airport to Guernsey, staying there overnight and then getting the early-morning ferry that takes tourists, supplies and the British newspapers on the 45-minute crossing to Sark.
As soon as you arrive at the tiny port, it is obvious that Sark is a very different world. Transportation is by horse and cart, or by tractor – which some Sarkese still dislike, likening them to armoured tanks. Otherwise you go by foot – or hire a bike. This means that Sark’s one street is congested each time a boat disgorges tourists. Bikes, horses, tractors and pedestrians congregate at the top of the harbour hill until dispersed in their various directions.
I took a pony and trap to La Sablonnerie, one of the island’s two hotels, which is on Little Sark. Here, as on so much of Sark, you step into a time warp because the owner offers no Wi-fi, no television, not even any radio.
Little Sark is the smaller of the two granite islands that comprise the Isle of Sark. They are attached to each other by a narrow causeway 250 feet above sea-level. Peake described the topography as ‘wasp-waisted’. A steep single track, known as La Coupée, runs over this narrow isthmus. Peake’s Mr Pye finally escapes his persecutors here, when the angelic wings that have sprouted on his back bear him into the sky, and his horse and buggy crash into the sea. La Coupée is immediately recognisable to those who have read the book. Before the Second World War there wasn’t even a handrail here, which meant that school children from Little Sark were advised on windy days to cross on their hands and knees to avoid being blown away.
I settled happily in to La Sablonnerie, which is a sequence of comfortably converted farm buildings round a lush garden and with no locks on the bedroom doors. After the initial unease I accepted this. Why would there be locks? Any thief who raided your room would have to queue up for the boat to Guernsey with everyone else, making it very easy for Sark’s one constable to finger his collar.
On my second day I set out in search of Mervyn Peake’s Sark. This meant cadging a lift with the hotel’s horse and carriage on its way to the harbour. The hotel owner explained to the toothless young driver that he was to drop me at Clos des Vins.
‘That’s not Clos des Vins,’ replied the coachman. ‘That’s Mervyn Peake’s house.’
It took 25 minutes to get there, partly because all passengers have to get down at La Coupée and walk across and then get back on board on the other side of this terrifying precipice. I could probably have walked the whole distance in the same time, but it’s a rare pleasure to travel by horse and carriage these days.
We stopped outside Clos des Vins, which was known as Le Chalet in Peake’stime. It sits behind a white gate and is whitewashed, with large picture windows and a huge garden. I’d been told the owner was in France, but by phone to La Sablonnerie she’d confirmed that she was happy for me to look through the windows. Here I saw big empty rooms awaiting redecoration but it was the exterior that threw me. The old mullioned windows were gone. The rough stone walls had been plastered smooth. One door had become a small window and a wraparound sun lounge had replaced the veranda. In short the place had been modernised beyond recognition. Nothing at Clos des Vins resembled the Gothic world of Gormenghast or even the Sark of Mr Pye. I suppose in my literary travels I was fortunate never to have encountered such a drastic makeover before.
In the afternoon I hired a bike and cycled up past La Seigneurie to Port du Moulin where there is a hidden shore carved out by the sea. Here the idealistic Mr Pye arranges for an invalid member of his flock to be lowered down to a prayer meeting during his beach festivity. Unfortunately she is left hanging in mid-air when everyone flees as the stinking carcass of a dead whale washes ashore.
You could see how the location would have inspired such an incident in the book. Later I found that a whale carcass did indeed wash up on Sark during Peake’s time. When ‘a large object on the shore’ was reported to the Dame of Sark, she asserted her seigneurial right before discovering what it was she had just appropriated. The crafty constable had made sure the responsibility to dispose of the whale was now hers.
That evening I cycled back as far as La Coupée (you’re not allowed to cross it by bicycle either) then walked the rest of the way to dinner, remembering Mr Pye’s apotheosis. I concluded that while the house where Mervyn Peake lived and worked could tell me nothing, the island itself spoke volumes.