A novel setting

In most other ways, though, the island is much as the book described it, rural and bucolic, with a morning mist rolling over the pasture land. Horses share the narrow roads with cars, bicycles, and buses. Here and there, you’ll find bouquets of flowers in wooden shadow box-like crates placed along country roads; deposit money in a can and help yourself. The harbor town of St. Peter Port rises from the sea on a series of terraces, “with a church on the top like a cake decoration,’’ the novel observes. On a clear day, you can see Normandy.

Everywhere are scattered treasures: dramatic cliff walks; the 13th-century Castle Cornet, standing guard over the harbor; the grand Sausmarez Manor, which tour guide Annette Henry is convinced is the inspiration for Lord Tobias Penn-Piers’s manor house in the novel. There are visual treasures such as The Little Chapel, barely big enough to hold two adults, based on the Grotto at Lourdes and covered completely in shards of Wedgwood china.

Though it barely figured into the novel, I was - to use a term in favor here - gobsmacked by one attraction: Victor Hugo’s home, Hauteville House. Another obscure fact about Guernsey is that Hugo, who called Louis Napoleon a traitor, was exiled here for 15 years, from 1856 to 1870. The average person might not know about the house, since it’s owned by the City of Paris. (You go to the Paris website to learn more about it, a circuitous route if ever there was one.)

Hugo was also an artist - both a painter and a remarkable designer. Every room is like a dramatic theater set, rich with luxurious tapestries, secret doors, symbolic engravings, and political messages such as “Exilium Vita Est’’ (“Life Is Exile’’) etched into the woodwork. Some of his paintings hang on the wall. His son Charles described the house as a “veritable three-story autograph, a poem in several rooms.’’

Hugo wrote standing up in a glassed-in attic chamber overlooking the harbor, castle, and sea, and facing his homeland; he finished “Les Misérables’’ here. The house is an attraction not to be missed.

The night before I left London, I had a chat with a Londoner about Guernsey. He thought it was odd, in the extreme, that I was going there: “We pretty much just ignore it,’’ he said. “Why would you want to go there?’’

I didn’t have an answer then, but now I do. It’s beautiful, of course, and relaxing. It offers a fresh perspective on a much-examined period of history, and how often does that happen when you visit Europe?

Indeed, I came away inspired. Should I ever stumble across a bunker in the course of daily life, I have all sorts of ideas about what to do with it.

Linda Matchan can be reached at l_matchan@globe.com.