Epilogue

“It’s a pity that I’m a poet. What an architect I would have made.” ¹ Victor Hugo’s bold statement to Viollet-le-Duc was not a provocation. It highlights the poet’s inclination to an alternative area of creativity—architecture and interior decoration—and his awareness of an intimate relationship between poetry and space, an insight he was to give spectacular material shape in both his homes on the Isle of Guernsey. During his exile in the years between 1855 and 1870, following his opposition to the prince-president Napoleon Bonaparte, he in fact lived a period of particular creative force, publishing major works like Les Contemplations and Les Miserables, but also drawing, experimenting with photography and—most notoriously—building and decorating houses, both for his own family (Hauteville House) and for his mistress Juliette Drouet (Hauteville Fairy). The results of his efforts soon became objects of particular attraction to those interested in Hugo: the first illustrated guide Chez Victor Hugo par un passant (A Visit to Victor Hugo at his Home) was published as early as 1864. This interest however was not primarily directed to Hugo the versatile artist or the man, but to Hugo the writer: “I thought I knew Victor Hugo; in fact, I knew only half of him. Victor Hugo the architect, Victor Hugo the decorator can explain Victor Hugo the author.” ² And because of this interest both houses were turned into museums, Hauteville House in situ as it was projected and constructed by the poet himself (1927), and parts of Juliette Drouet’s home as of 1903 in the Parisian Maison de Victor Hugo, the apartment on the Place des Vosges where the poet had lived from 1832 to 1848. ³