Grove Koger
Incensed by the anti-democratic policies of Emperor Napoleon III, famed French novelist Victor Hugo exiled himself for fifteen years on the island of Guernsey, one of the two British Crown dependencies in the English Channel known as the Channel Islands.
Hugo had initially taken refuge in Belgium before moving on to Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands. But he soon found himself expelled for contributing to an anti-royalist (anti-British-royalist, that is) newspaper and moved on in October 1855 to Saint Peter Port on Guernsey, where he and his wife, Adèle Foucher, remained until 1870. While living there, Hugo purchased, remodeled, and redecorated the four-story Hauteville House, which stands on the port’s heights and which, from its handsome belvedere, offers commanding views of the port, the neighboring islands of Herm and Sark and, farther off, the island of Alderney and the French coast.
It was while he was in self-imposed exile that Hugo published Les Misérables, Toilers of the Sea (which he set on Guernsey), and The Man Who Laughs. But aside from his celebrated literary works, Hugo was also a strikingly original amateur artist who produced more than 3,000 sketches. One of these caught my eye the other day on Facebook, an almost frighteningly dramatic pen and ink wash sketch of the Casquets (or Caskets) lighthouse signed “Victor Hugo / 1866.”
The rocky and notoriously dangerous Casquets lie a little more than 20 miles northeast of Guernsey. As Hugo wrote in his historical novel The Man Who Laughs, “to be wrecked on the Caskets is to be cut into ribbons.” Given Hugo’s long residence in the Channel Islands, I assumed that he might have caught sight of the Casquets on an excursion at one time or another, but I haven’t been able to trace a reference to such a visit. At the very least, he would have had access to written accounts, and the level of detail he deploys in describing the structure of his own day suggests his reliance on them:
“The Caskets lighthouse … is a triple white tower, bearing three light-rooms. These three chambers revolve on clockwork wheels, with such precision that the man on watch who sees them from sea can invariably take ten steps during their irradiation, and twenty-five during their eclipse. Everything is based on the focal plan, and on the rotation of the octagon drum, formed of eight wide simple lenses in range, having above and below it two series of dioptric rings; an algebraic gear, secured from the effects of the beating of winds and waves by glass a millimetre thick…. The building which encloses and sustains this mechanism, and in which it is set, is also mathematically constructed. Everything about it is plain, exact, bare, precise, correct.”
However, Hugo’s sketch of the lighthouse reaches back to another age. The first Casquets lighthouse was built in 1724, and in The Man Who Laughs (which is set in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England), Hugo described the primitive structure of that period as “a flaming pile of wood under an iron trellis, a brazier behind a railing, a head of hair flaming in the wind.”
And that’s exactly what we see in his sketch.
Hugo’s sketch of the original Casquets lighthouse is large, nearly 36 by 19 inches. The Guernsey stamp showing Hauteville House was issued in 1975, and the wood engraving of the Casquets Lighthouses as they looked in Hugo’s day dates from 1868. The map of the Channel Islands was created by Aotearoa and is reproduced courtesy of Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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