Pierre Loti (French:[pjɛʁ lɔti]; pseudonym of Louis Marie-Julien Viaud[lwi maʁi ʒyljɛ̃ vjo]; 14 January 1850 – 10 June 1923)[1] was a French naval officer and novelist, known for his exotic novels and short stories.[2]
Born to a Protestant family,[3] Loti's education began in his birthplace, Rochefort, Charente-Maritime. At age 17 he entered the naval school in Brest and studied at Le Borda. He gradually rose in his profession, attaining the rank of captain in 1906. In January 1910 he went on the reserve list. He was in the habit of claiming that he never read books, saying to the Académie française on the day of his introduction (7 April 1892), "Loti ne sait pas lire" ("Loti doesn't know how to read"), but testimony from friends proves otherwise, as does his library, much of which is preserved in his house in Rochefort. In 1876 fellow naval officers persuaded him to turn into a novel passages in his diary dealing with some curious experiences in Istanbul. The result was the anonymously published Aziyadé (1879), part romance, part autobiography, like the work of his admirer, Marcel Proust, after him.
Loti proceeded to the South Seas as part of his naval training, living in Papeete, Tahiti for two months in 1872, where he "went native". Several years later he published the Polynesian idyll originally titled Rarahu (1880), which was reprinted as Le Mariage de Loti, the first book to introduce him to the wider public. His narrator explains that the name Loti was bestowed on him by the natives, after his mispronunciation of "roti" (a red flower). The book inspired the 1883 opera Lakmé by Léo Delibes. Loti Bain, a shallow pool at the base of the Fautaua Falls, is named for Loti.[4]
This was followed by Le Roman d'un spahi (1881), a record of the melancholy adventures of a soldier in Senegal. In 1882, Loti issued a collection of four shorter pieces, three stories and a travel piece, under the general title of Fleurs d'ennui (Flowers of Boredom).
In 1883 Loti achieved a wider public spotlight. First, he published the critically acclaimed Mon Frère Yves (My Brother Yves), a novel describing the life of a French naval officer (Pierre Loti), and a Breton sailor (Yves Kermadec, inspired by Loti companion Pierre le Cor), described by Edmund Gosse as "one of his most characteristic productions". Second, while serving in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) as a naval officer aboard the ironclad Atalante, Loti published three articles in the newspaper Le Figaro in September and October 1883 about atrocities that occurred during the Battle of Thuận An (20 August 1883), an attack by the French on the Vietnamese coastal defenses of Hue. He was threatened with suspension from the service for this indiscretion, thus gaining wider public notoriety. In 1884 his friend Émile Pouvillon dedicated his novel L'Innocent to Loti.
In 1886 Loti published a novel of life among the Breton fisherfolk, called Pêcheur d'Islande (An Iceland Fisherman), which Edmund Gosse characterized as "the most popular and finest of all his writings."[2] It shows Loti adapting some of the Impressionist techniques of contemporary painters, especially Monet, to prose, and is a classic of French literature. In 1887 he brought out a volume "of extraordinary merit, which has not received the attention it deserves", Propos d'exil, a series of short studies of exotic places, in his characteristic semi-autobiographic style. Madame Chrysanthème, a novel of Japanese manners that is a precursor to Madama Butterfly and Miss Saigon (a combination of narrative and travelogue) was published the same year.[5]
Loti (right) with "Chrysanthème" and Pierre le Cor in Japan, 1885.
In 1890 Loti published Au Maroc, the record of a journey to Fez in company with a French embassy, and Le Roman d'un enfant (The Story of a Child), a somewhat fictionalized recollection of Loti's childhood that would greatly influence Marcel Proust. A collection of "strangely confidential and sentimental reminiscences", called Le Livre de la pitié et de la mort (The Book of Pity and Death) was published in 1891.
Loti was aboard ship at the port of Algiers when news reached him of his election, on 21 May 1891, to the Académie française. In 1892 he published Fantôme d'orient, a short novel derived from a subsequent trip to Constantinople, less a continuation of Aziyadé than a commentary on it. He described a visit to the Holy Land in three volumes, The Desert, Jerusalem, and Galilee, (1895–1896), and wrote a novel, Ramuntcho (1897), a story of contraband runners in the Basque province. In 1898 he collected his later essays as Figures et Choses qui passaient (Passing Figures and Things).
In 1899 and 1900 Loti visited British India, with the view of describing what he saw; the result appeared in 1903 in L'Inde (sans les anglais) (India (without the English)). During the autumn of 1900 he went to China as part of the international expedition sent to combat the Boxer Rebellion. He described what he saw there after the siege of Peking in Les Derniers Jours de Pékin (The Last Days of Peking, 1902).
Loti's later publications include: La Troisième jeunesse de Mme Prune (The Third Youth of Mrs. Plum, 1905), which resulted from a return visit to Japan and once again hovers between narrative and travelog; Les Désenchantées (The Unawakened, 1906); La Mort de Philae (The Death of Philae, 1908), recounting a trip to Egypt; Judith Renaudin (produced at the Théâtre Antoine, 1898), a five-act historical play that Loti presented as based on an episode in his family history; and, in collaboration with Emile Vedel, a translation of William Shakespeare's King Lear, produced at the Théâtre Antoine in 1904. Les Désenchantées, which concerned women of the Turkish harem, was based like many of Loti's books, on fact. It has, however, become clear that Loti was in fact the victim of a hoax by three prosperous Turkish women.[6]
In 1912 at the Century Theatre in New York City, Loti mounted a production of The Daughter of Heaven, a George Egerton adaptation of his French play La fille du ciel, commissioned in March 1903 by Sarah Bernhardt, written in collaboration with Judith Gautier and published in 1911.[7][8][9][10] The play was never performed in France, since apparently Bernhardt lost interest when she learned she would have to wear a black wig over her red hair.[11] In New York the title role was performed by Viola Allen.[8]
He died in 1923 in Hendaye and was interred on the island of Oléron with a state funeral.
Loti was an inveterate collector and his marriage into wealth helped him support this habit. His house in Rochefort, a remarkable reworking of two adjacent bourgeois row houses, is preserved as a museum.[12] One elaborately tiled room is an Orientalist fantasia of a mosque, including a small fountain and five ceremoniously draped coffins containing desiccated bodies. 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. The courtyard described in The Story of a Child, with the fountain built for him by his older brother, is still there. There is also a museum in Istanbul named after him located on a hill where Loti used to spend his free time during his sojourn in Turkey.
Contemporary critic Edmund Gosse gave the following assessment of his work:[2]
At his best Pierre Loti was unquestionably the finest descriptive writer of the day. In the delicate exactitude with which he reproduced the impression given to his own alert nerves by unfamiliar forms, colors, sounds and perfumes, he was without a rival. But he was not satisfied 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 are long sobs of remorseful memory, so personal, so intimate, that an English reader is amazed to find such depth of feeling compatible with the power of minutely and publicly recording what is felt. In spite of the beauty and melody and fragrance of Loti's books his mannerisms are apt to pall upon the reader, and his later books of pure description were rather empty. His greatest successes were gained in the species of confession, half-way between fact and fiction, which he essayed in his earlier books. When all his limitations, however, have been rehearsed, 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.
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic.
Rochefort, unofficially Rochefort-sur-Mer for disambiguation, is a city and commune in Southwestern France, a port on the Charente estuary. It is a subprefecture of the Charente-Maritime department, located in the administrative region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine. In 2018, it had a population of 23,583.
André de Latour, comte de Lorde (1869–1942) was a French playwright, the main author of the Grand Guignol plays from 1901 to 1926. His evening career was as a dramatist of terror; during daytimes he worked as a librarian in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. He wrote 150 plays, all of them devoted mainly to the exploitation of terror and insanity, and a few novels. For plays the subject matter of which concerned mental illness he sometimes collaborated with psychologist Alfred Binet, the developer of IQ testing.
Paimpol is a commune in the Côtes-d'Armor department in Brittany in northwest France.
Jean Raoul Robert Rochefort was a French actor. He received many accolades during his career, including an Honorary César in 1999.
Émile Pouvillon was a French novelist.
Ploubazlanec is a commune in the Côtes-d'Armor department in Brittany in northwestern France.
Pierre Schoendoerffer was a French film director, a screenwriter, a writer, a war reporter, a war cameraman, a renowned First Indochina War veteran, a cinema academician. He was president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts for 2001 and for 2007.
Georges de Beauregard was a French film producer who produced works by many of the French New Wave directors. In 1968, he was a member of the jury at the 18th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1983 he was awarded a Special César Award, the French national film prize.
Ramuntcho (1897) is a novel by French author Pierre Loti. It is a love and adventure story about contraband runners in the Basque province of France. It is one of Loti's most popular stories—"love, loss and faith remain eternal themes"—with four French film adaptations. It was first published in 5 parts, from 15 December 1896 to 15 February 1897, in the Revue de Paris. Calmann-Lévy published the novel in two parts on 10 March 1897. A dramatized version was staged in Paris in 1910, with incidental music by Gabriel Pierné.
An Iceland Fisherman is a novel by French author Pierre Loti. It depicts the romantic but inevitably sad life of Breton fishermen who sail each summer season to the stormy Iceland cod grounds. Literary critic Edmund Gosse characterized it as "the most popular and finest of all [Loti's] writings."
My Brother Yves is a semi-autobiographical novel by French author Pierre Loti. It describes the friendship between French naval officer Pierre Loti and a hard drinking Breton sailor Yves Kermadec during the 1870s and 80s. It was probably Loti's best-known book, and its descriptions of Breton seafaring life, on board ship and on shore, set the tone for his later acclaimed work An Iceland Fisherman (1886).
Le Mariage de Loti is an autobiographical novel by French author Pierre Loti. It was Loti's second novel and the first to win him great fame and a wide following. It describes Loti's romantic liaison with an exotic Tahitian girl named Rarahu. It is the basis of two operas
Pierre Larquey was a French film actor. He appeared in more than 200 films between 1913 and 1962. Born in Cénac, Gironde, France, he died in Maisons-Laffitte at the age of 77.
Madame Chrysanthème is an opera, described as a comédie lyrique, with music by André Messager to a libretto by Georges Hartmann and Alexandre André, after the semi-autobiographical novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887) by Pierre Loti. It consists of four acts with a prologue and an epilogue and is set in Nagasaki, Japan.
Madame Chrysanthème is a novel by Pierre Loti, presented as the autobiographical journal of a naval officer who was temporarily married to a Japanese woman while he was stationed in Nagasaki, Japan. It closely follows the journal he kept of his summer 1885 affair with Kiku (Chrysanthemum) née Kane a few blocks north of Glover Garden in the Jūzenji neighbourhood; modern day Jūninmachi, whence she fled to hometown Takeda due to xenophobia. Originally written in French and published in 1887, Madame Chrysanthème was very successful in its day, running to 25 editions in the first five years of its publication with translations into several languages including English. It has been considered a key text in shaping western attitudes toward Japan at the turn of the 20th century. It is known in Japan under the title of お菊さん, which is a direct translation of the French name.
Ramuntcho is a 1938 French drama film directed by René Barberis and starring Paul Cambo, Louis Jouvet and Madeleine Ozeray. It is based on Pierre Loti's 1897 novel of the same title.
Charles Derennes was a French novelist, essayist and poet, the winner of the Prix Femina in 1924.
Gustave Viaud was a French naval surgeon born in Rochefort, Charente-Maritime on 25 April 1836 and died off Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka, on 10 March 1865.
1 2 3 This article is derived largely from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911) article "Pierre Loti" by Edmund Gosse. Unless otherwise referenced, it is the source used throughout, with citations made for specific quotes by Gosse.
↑ Nemo, August (2019). Essential Novelists - Pierre Loti: literary impressionism. Tacet Books. ISBN9788577772698. "Pierre Loti," was born in Rochefort, of an old French-Protestant family, January 14, 1850..
↑ Judith Gautier & Pierre Loti (1911). La Fille du ciel. Paris: Calmann Levy.
↑ Danielle Mihram, "Judith Gautier", p. 174, in French Women Writers, edited by Eva Martin Sartori & Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN9780803292246.
Berrong, Richard M. (2013). Putting Monet and Rembrandt into Words: Pierre Loti's Recreation and Theorization of Claude Monet's Impressionism and Rembrandt's Landscapes in Literature. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in Romance Language and Literature. vol 301.
Aldrich, Robert (2002). Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II. Routledge; London. ISBN0-415-15983-0.
Winifred (Stephens) Whale. French Novelists of To-day. London: John Lane; New York, John Lane company. 1908; see chapter "Pierre Loti", biography and literary survey. From Internet Archive.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
