Pierre Loti
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Louis Marie Julien Viaud (January 14, 1850 - June 10, 1923) was a French sailor and writer, who used the pseudonym Pierre Loti.
Biography
Viaud was born in Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, France. His education began in Rochefort, but at the age of seventeen, being destined for the navy, he entered the naval school, Le Borda, and gradually rose in his profession, attaining the rank of captain in 1906. In January 1910 he went on the reserve list.
His pseudonym is said to be due to his extreme shyness and reserve in early life, which made his comrades call him after le Loti, an Indian flower which loves to blush unseen. He was never given to books or study (when he was received at the French Academy, he had the courage to say, "Loti ne sait pas lire" ("Loti doesn't know how to read")), and it was not until 1876 that he was persuaded to write down and publish some curious experiences at Constantinople, in Aziyadé, a book which, like so many of Loti's, seems half a romance, half an autobiography. He proceeded to the South Seas, and on leaving Tahiti published the Polynesian idyll originally called Rarahu (1880), which was reprinted as Le Mariage de Loti, and which first introduced to the wider public an author of remarkable originality and charm. Le Roman d'un spahi, a record of the melancholy adventures of a soldier in Senegambia, belongs to 1881.
In 1882, Loti issued a collection of short studies under the general title of Fleurs d'ennui (Flowers of Boredom). In 1883 he achieved the widest celebrity, for not only did he publish Mon frere Yves ("My Brother Yves"), a novel describing the life of a French bluejacket in all parts of the world - perhaps his most characteristic production - but he was involved in a public discussion in a manner which did him great credit. While taking part as a naval officer in the Tonkin War, Loti had exposed in Figaro a series of scandals which followed on the capture of Hue (1883), and was suspended from the service for more than a year. He continued for some time nearly silent, but in 1886 he published a novel of life among the Breton fisherfolk, called Pêcheur d'Islande (Fisherman of the Island), the most popular of all his writings. In 1887 he brought out a volume of extraordinary merit, which has not received the attention it deserves; this is Propos d'exil, a series of short studies of exotic places, in his peculiar semi-autobiographic style. The fantastic novel of Japanese manners, Madame Chrysanthème - a precursor to, and probably an influence on, Madame Butterfly - belongs to the same year.
Passing over one or two slighter productions, we come in 1890 to Au Maroc, the record of a journey to Fez in company with a French embassy. A collection of strangely confidential and sentimental reminiscences, called Le Livre de la pitié et de la mort, (The Book of Pity and Death) belongs to 1891.
Loti was on board his ship at the port of Algiers when news reached him of his election, on May 21, 1891, to the Académie française. In 1892 he published Fantôme d'orient, another dreamy study of life in Constantinople, a sort of continuation of Aziyadé. He described a visit to the Holy Land, somewhat too copiously, in three volumes (1895-1896), and wrote a novel, Ramuntcho (1897), a story of manners in the Basque province, which is equal to his best writings. In 1898 he collected his later essays as Figures et Choses qui passaient (Passing Figures and Things).
In 1899-1900 Loti visited British India, with the view of describing what he saw; the result appeared in 1903: L'Inde (sans les Anglais) (India (without the English)). In the autumn of 1900, he went to China, as part of the international expedition set up to fight against the Boxer Rebellion. He described what he saw there, after the siege of Beijing, in Les Derniers Jours de Pékin (The Last Days of Peking, 1902).
He died at Hendaye and was interred on the Île d'Oléron.
Loti was an inveterate collector, and married into the money that helped him support this habit. His house in Rochefort, a remarkable reworking of two adjacent bourgeois row houses, is well preserved as a museum. One elaborately tiled room is an Orientalist fantasia, including a small fountain and five ceremoniously draped coffins (with the desiccated bodies inside). Another room evokes a medieval banqueting hall. Loti's own bedroom is rather like a monk's cell, but mixes Christian and Muslim religious artifacts.
Works
At his best Pierre Loti ranks unquestionably as the finest descriptive writer of his day. In the delicate exactitude with which he reproduced the impression given to his own alert nerves by unfamiliar forms, colours, sounds and perfumes, he had no rival. But unsatisfied with this exterior charm, he desired to blend with it a moral sensibility of the extremest refinement, at once sensual and ethereal. Many of his best books become long sobs of remorseful memory, so personal, so intimate, that a reader might express amazement to find such depth of feeling compatible with the power of minutely and publicly recording what one feels.
In spite of the beauty and melody and fragrance, of Loti's books his mannerisms tend to pall upon the reader, and his later books of pure description seemed rather empty. His greatest successes belong to the species of confession, half-way between fact and fiction, which he essayed in his earlier books.
With all his limitations, however, Pierre Loti remains, in the mechanism of style and cadence, one of the most original and most perfect French writers of the second half of the 19th century. Among his later works were: La Troisième jeunesse de Mme Prune (The Third Youth of Mrs. Plum, 1905); Les Désenchantées (The Disenchanted, 1906); La Mort de Philae (The Death of Philae, 1908); Judith Renaudin (Théâtre Antoine, 1904), a five-act historical play based on an earlier book; and, in collaboration with Emile Vedel, a translation of King Lear, also produced at the Théâtre Antoine in 1904.
External link
- Eyewitness account: When the Allies Entered Peking, 1900 (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1900Loti-peking.html), an excerpt of Pierre Loti's Les Derniers Jours de Pékin (1902).
- Official site of Maison Pierre Loti (http://www.ville-rochefort.fr/pierreloti), house museum in Rochefort, in French.
Original text from 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Please update as needed.
| Preceded by: Octave Feuillet | Seat 13 Académie française | Succeeded by: Albert Besnard |