Where Victor Hugo found freedom

Perched here in the "lookout," as he called it, Hugo wrote while standing at a foldout desk and gazing at the islands of Sark and Herm, and, in the hazy distance, his beloved France.

After mornings of work, Hugo spent his afternoons on brisk walks exploring the island. His hale figure was such a familiar sight that a statue in a nearby park, Candie Gardens, depicts him midstride, the wind catching his cloak.

I toured some of Hugo's haunts with Gill Girard, a guide (and the sister of Pontin, the pub owner), who shared rich local tales while whisking me around in her car.

She stopped to show me the Creux es Faies ("cave of fairies" in Guernsey French), a Neolithic-era burial chamber that fascinated Hugo.

At Pleinmont Point, on the southwestern corner of the island, our eyes strained through the fog to see a lonely house that might have inspired a scene in his "Toilers of the Sea".

Today, massive cement bunkers mar the view - built during World War II, they are an unyielding reminder of the German occupation - but the craggy lines of Hugo's beloved "ravaged, exposed" coast remain.

On my final afternoon, a fine rain dampened the skies. Undeterred, I set off to retrace Hugo's favorite walk, a one-hour hike south from St. Peter Port along coastal cliffs. Dark woods closed in above me, and the occasional drop of icy rain fell on my neck, but as I scrambled along the path, all distractions were swept away by the roar of the sea, which filled my ears even though I couldn't see it.

I rounded a corner, and Fermain Bay appeared below, the jewel-toned waters glowing through the mist. Hugo came to this sheltered cove, which is still accessible only by foot, to swim and sit and watch the rising tide. Surrounded by his thoughts, he found a kind of peace.

Hugo was prepared to die without setting foot again in France, declaring, "I will share exile and liberty to the very end." In 1870, however, the Second Empire fell, and a triumphant Hugo returned to Paris, though he visited Guernsey again three times before his death in 1885.

And yet Guernsey's influence on Hugo is evident not just in Toilers of the Sea but in the sheer volume of the work he produced there. The island's untamed seclusion was at once a burden and a gift, and the ambitious writer freely embraced both aspects. "A month's work here is worth a year in Paris," he confided in a letter to the writer Auguste Vacquerie. "This is why I sentence myself to exile."

The New York Times