A pardon arrived on Guernsey in 1859, addressed to a man who had spent eight years in exile. Napoleon III, the emperor who'd banished him, was offering Victor Hugo a full amnesty. Hugo refused it in writing, telling his supporters he intended to share the exile of freedom to the end, and that when freedom returns, so shall I.

Hugo had set his own terms for the exile the day it began, one exact, checkable condition, the fall of the empire that had exiled him. He stayed on Guernsey eleven more years after refusing that pardon, writing Les Misérables in a glass-walled room he'd built onto his roof so he could watch the Channel while he worked. On September 5, 1870, one day after Napoleon III's government finally collapsed in defeat to Prussia, Hugo boarded a boat for Paris. Crowds met him at the station.

The condition he'd named nineteen years earlier had been met exactly, and he left on schedule, to the day.