The Argosy — page 233: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

218 The Channel Islands. banker. After a time one loses a just conception of the value of money. It is so easy to write out a cheque for a hundred pounds for — say a Sévres vase. The vase is so beautiful; the slip of paper constituting the cheque so little and so trifling; it is so easily drawn. You do not hesitate, or hesitate only for ‘a moment ; the exchange is made, the bargain concluded. But if you had to hand over a hundred sovereigns in hard, golden coin in exchange for the vase, depend upon it, more often than not, you would never give yourself even the chance or danger of hesitation; the bargain would never be made. A just value of the money would be realised. There was little of this sort of thing to tempt us in St. Peter Port. Yet in one house we saw sufficient to satisfy the most inveterate lover of the ancient and the curious, but the objects were not for sale. This was the house of Victor Hugo. ‘The exterior is ugly and ordi- nary enough, but passing through the doorway, you find yourself at once in a new world’ All trace of the modern has disappeared ; nothing but the old, sometimes the very old, the quaint, the curious and eccentric is visible. The house, as a habitation, would be depressing ; for a passing yisit it is excessively interesting; for a week’s visit in the palmy days of its master it must have been enchant- ing. Gloomy staircases are draped with old carpet and tapestry, and encourage a slight feeling of suffocation as you pass upwards. No wonder that Victor Hugo himself made of his study the garret of the house, where a skylight, furnished and arranged to suit his own peculiar taste, let in the light of heaven, and glass doors admitted the fresh breezes, whilst they enabled him to pass out to the flat leads There he might ruminate, if in the mood, or gaze out upon the gardens and fields at his feet, the town beneath him, the fair sea beyond. Some of the rooms are fitted up with quaint Dutch tiles and curious old pottery and porcelain; other rooms are heavy with oak panelling and old oak furniture, and are almost funereal. Ancient, worm-eaten oaken doors shut in the rooms and close ponderously. One room contains a large, ancient, four-post bedstead, in which no one has slept since it was there installed. It is a double room,, full of quaintly-carved oak, and was fitted up expressly for Garibaldi. He never went there, and so the bed has remained untenanted. Alto- . gether, it is certainly the house of a man of genius, though not without that eccentricity which is sometimes said to accompany the exceptional gift. Victor Hugo now seldom visits Guernsey; has not visited it for some years: the house is closed, but on certain days is opened to visitors. ‘The silence and gloom were depressing; and as the old housekeeper threw back the shutters for us and admitted light upon the darkness, it somehow seemed to read one a sombre lesson on the shortness of life itself These rooms, closed, as it were for ever, had lately sparkled with life and light and animation; walls Eomichbooks.co