Viaud, LOUIS-MARIE-JULIEN

Viaud, LOUIS-MARIE-JULIEN, a charming, but hardly a great writer, who, under his pen-name of Pierre Loti, quickly reached the heart of France, and climbed into a chair at the Academy as early as 1891. Born in a Huguenot home at Rochefort, 14th January 1850, he entered the navy at an early age, and was thus enabled to reap in his voyages round the world that harvest of exotic impressions which was yet to give him a literary stock-in-trade of a quite individual character. Lieutenant-de-vaisseau by 1881, he was a year in disgrace for a too truthful series of letters in Figaro on the conduct of the French soldiers at Hué in 1883. His first work, Aziyadé (1879), a series of pictures of life on the Bosporus, was weak and spoiled by affectation; the second, Le Mariage de Loti (1880), carried the imagination captive with all the charm of the coral seas. To Tahiti and the story of Rarahu followed Senegal and the story of Fatou-gaze in Le Roman d'un Spahi (1881); next with Mon Frère Yves (1883) Brittany and the seas of Southern Europe; and again in his masterpiece, Pêcheur d'Islande (1886), Brittany and the seas of the frozen North. To the standard of these two the later works have not attained: Propos d'Exil (1887); Madame Chrysanthème (1887); Japonneries d'Automne (1889); Le Roman d'un Enfant (1890), Le Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort (1891; Eng. trans. by T. P. O'Connor, 1892), Fantôme d'Orient (1892), Le Desert (1894), La Galilée (1895), Ramuntcho (1897). Le Roman d'un Enfant is a work of wonderful subtlety and charm, which for insight into the secrets of child-nature, for vivid truthful rendering of the impressions and experience of childhood, has no equal in literature. The simplicity yet intensity of his sensuous impressions, the pervading emotional sympathy with all nature, the tenderness and elemental melancholy in the mists of Brittany, suggest, but do not explain, the secret of the charm of Pierre Loti. But for depth of thought, broad views of human life, any real humour, we must look elsewhere.