On 2 December 1851, Prince Louis-Napoléon engineered a coup d’état that restored the French empire – and in the process banished a number of Republicans, Victor Hugo among them. Hounded by the police, Hugo fled to Brussels, and from there repaired to the Channel Islands, which at least gave him the impression of still being in France. After a first sojourn in Jersey, he crossed to Guernsey in 1855, where the half-timbered houses and steep alleyways of St Peter Port reminded him of Normandy; in those days French was still the dominant language on the island. Its wild coastline formed a seductive contrast to inland valleys basking in a temperate, Gulf Stream climate. After three years of revolt and anxiety, and especially after his savage indictment of Napoléon II’s Second Empire in Les Châtiments, Hugo was ready to enter a more serene creative period, and for this he needed to have a proper home again.
So he bought Hauteville House, a rambling bourgeois building overlooking St Peter Port. On the garden side the view took in the harbour and islands, with France on the horizon. Mme Hugo expressed her concern in a letter to a friend: ‘For me, this is real proof of our exile. My husband is going to settle here, and he will arrange the house to suit his own taste and furnish it like a place in Paris, not at all like the kind of country house that allows one to be free and unencumbered. He will pour into it his gilts, his tapestries, all his fantasies and all his most loving attentions.’
It would take Hugo three years to create this new home. During that time he spent his afternoons dashing around neighbouring farms and antique dealers accumulating old furniture, woodwork, porcelain, silks and paintings, many of them originally plundered by pirates based on the island. For Hugo, such objects were a way of communicating with the past – a past transformed by his poetic vision. He had his carpenter, Thomas Gore, dismantle the chests, wardrobes and cabinets that he brought back home, then reassemble them with new panels, which he sometimes carved with his own hands, paying little heed to the style of the original pieces. As a man of the theatre, Hugo needed a background against which he could develop the plots of his own imaginary world. His grands meubles, each of them created from the broken pieces of other bits of furniture, resembled the drawings that he developed around ink stains, turning them into trees, towers and, finally, whole fantasy cities. In the dining room at Hauteville House, the delft tiles were arranged in the form of a monumental H above the fireplace, glorifying the Hugos. ‘I missed my vocation, I was born to be a decorator,’ the great man confessed as he began his project to turn the house into a ‘space filled with dreams’.
He paid no attention to the original function of the objects he so blithely altered and distorted. He plopped antique chandeliers upside down in the arms of Venetian blackamoors, transforming them into torchères by crowning them with dishes taken from weighing machines. A Chippendale chair, also turned upside down, became part of a pelmet. A belt from a uniform and a silver plate were incorporated into a chimney piece. He amputated table legs and used them for banisters and decorative vases. No surface escaped Hugo’s passion for collage; he even cluttered the ceilings with tapestries and china dinner plates.
Just as he did in his poetry and plays, Hugo the decorator took liberties with history. Truth was sacrificed on the altar of drama, and objects were assigned fabulous provenances that incorporated the themes of his great work, La Légende des Siècles, into the walls of the house. The glass-bead embroideries allegedly came from Queen Christine’s apartment at Fontainebleau, preserving the memory of the murder of her lover, the traitor Monaldeschi. Meanwhile, the gilded blackamoors came from the Venetian doge’s ceremonial galley, where they witnessed the great nuptial festivals of the Most Serene Republic and the sea. Some of the anachronisms of the house have the force of moral fables: the columns of a bed that belonged to Mme de Maintenon, the austere morganatic spouse of Louis XIV, face a tapestry screen once owned by Mme de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV and protector of artists.
In Jersey, Hugo had dabbled in table-turning and mediumism. At Hauteville, the house itself became his means of contact with the world beyond. Phrases dictated to the poet by the spirits and figures that peopled his imagination are carved on walls and panels. The password of the conspirators in his play Hernani is given in reply to Latin maxims of the poet’s own devising. Words, in fact, are what give life to the building, which is both the receptacle and the mirror of the poet and playwright’s private world: and so the statuette of Bishop Afranus, a character in La Légende des Siècles, confronts that of another hero, the Roi d’Yvetot. Quasimodo and Esmeralda from Notre-Dame de Paris conduct dialogues with Socrates, Christ, Luther or George Washington. Real or imaginary forebears of the Hugo clan were present at family meals on the sacred ‘throne’ reserved for their use – an iron chain was placed across it to prevent interlopers from parking their bottoms on it.
Hauteville House is weighed down with all this imaginary baggage, which really only made sense to the man who created it. It has a suffocating atmosphere, multiplied and distorted by mirrors, full of concealed cupboards and secret doors. Symbolic elements abound, such as the peculiar ‘Eye of Cain’, a Celtic cherub who pursues the visitor through the house. Two big red-and-blue columns, ‘Hiakim’ and ‘Boas’, turn the Garibaldi Bedroom into a kind of masonic lodge. The whole house bears the indelible stamp of the master, who himself carved inscriptions and mottoes, sculpted statuettes and friezes, decorated the dome above the staircase and embellished the shutters with his inventions. Under the hand of the visionary draughtsman, this Gothic Romantic offers a foretaste of Symbolism – with its gnomes, flowerwomen and princesses lointaines.
So Mme Hugo was right to worry. Her husband hurled himself into his décor so completely that his poor family found themselves excluded, relegated to the simple, rather bare bedrooms on the street side of Hauteville House. Victor Hugo’s mistress, Juliette Drouet, who had followed him into exile, was better provided for than his lawful wedded wife. Juliette lived in a nearby house, for which Hugo created a complete Chinese décor around a fantastically elaborate fireplace. The Hugos only met at mealtimes or when friends came to call. For Victor, there were more important things to be attended to in his eyrie, or ‘lookout’, high on the roof of the labyrinth. The lookout was a kind of greenhouse construction of steel and glass, where he pursued his author’s calling in direct contact with the forces of the cosmos. ‘Perched on the top of the rock,’ he wrote, ‘with all the great foaming waves of the sea and all the great clouds of the sky before my window, contemplating this prodigious spectacle and the immensity of living thought in which I am plunged, I find in the end that I am nothing but a kind of witness to God.’ Close by Hugo’s workroom was the modest cell in which he slept on a simple divan. From time to time he awoke and feverishly jotted down his night inspirations. Nobody dared disturb him here in this, his private kingdom.
In June 1870, the restoration of the Republic in France finally brought the end of Victor Hugo’s exile. The prophet in his tower, the seer of Guernsey, gave way to the politician once more. After an absence of 18 years, he returned to Paris, where he was escorted to his home by a crowd of admirers. Exile had transformed Hugo into a living legend.
A version of this article also appeared in the January 1999 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
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