Even before he took to creating art with words, Pierre Loti (1850-1923) was an avid drawer. ⁽¹⁾ So much so that, when he did write, he sometimes felt the need to supplement his verbal efforts with visual ones. In one of his autobiographical novels, Le Roman d'un enfant (1890), he recounts how, at the age of eight, Pierre and his friend Lucette left absurd and incoherent letters in the street so that they could enjoy the reactions of those who stopped to read them. The adult Pierre explains that these notes were written "avec dessins à l'appui intercalés dans le texte" (XXVIII). ⁽²⁾ At the age of fourteen, inspired by Rudolphe Töpffer, the inventor of the modern comic book ⁽³⁾, Loti sketched out the text and some illustrations for a graphic story entitled Les Aventures de M Pygmalion Piquemouche et de Melle Clorinde sa poétique fiancée. ⁽⁴⁾ Even after he entered the navy three years later and began to travel the world, he continued to make many often very impressive drawings, some of which were published in the big Parisian illustrated papers, and at least a few interesting watercolors. ⁽⁵⁾ One commentator, Michel du Coglay, has gone so far as to proclaim that "à part Victor Hugo, . . . aucun homme de lettres n'a dessiné et peint comme Loti" (112), and while one might accuse him of Francocentrism and even forgetfulness-Fromentin, for example, was a significant painter-there is no denying that Loti was a strikingly accomplished artist.. ⁽⁶⁾ In his late twenties, around the time he began writing novels, he evidently stopped painting. In 1910 the authortold his personal secretary, Gaston Mauberger, "il y a trente ans que je n'ai pas pris un pinceau." ⁽⁷⁾ Nonetheless, Loti continued to think in terms of painting when creating worlds with words: in his literary works he often spoke of the scene he was describing as a "tableau," strove to convey the exact shades of its colors, ⁽⁸⁾ etc.

It is not surprising, therefore, that when, in 1885, he went to Japan, he felt the same sort of powerful aesthetic reaction that his contemporaries who focused on the visual arts had been experiencing as they came into contact with that country's art. ⁽⁹⁾ On the positive side, he found its apparent simplicity fascinating. In Madame Chrysanthème (1887), his novelisation of his sojourn there, the protagonist, Loti, describing a group of vases that he observed one day, remarks that "d'autres, en plus grand nombre, . . . sont sveltes et simples, -mais d'une simplicité si cherchée que, pour nos yeux, c'est comme une révélation d'inconnu, comme un renversement de toutes les notions acquises sur la forme" (XXXIV). On the other hand, the character Loti was less impressed by what he saw as a lack of perspective and therefore realism in its depiction of the world. Near the end of Madame Chrysanthème, as he prepares his departure from Japan, he decides to draw the room he shared with the title character:

Donc, je cherche une feuille d'album et je commence tout de suite, assis par terre, appuyé sur mon pupitre à sauterelles en relief, -tandis que, derrière moi, les trois femmes [Chrysanthème, Loti's landlady Mme Prune, and her daughter Mlle Oyouki], bien près, bien près, suivent les mouvements de mon crayon avec une attention étonnée. Jamais elles n'avaient vu dessiner d'après nature, l'art japonais étant tout de convention, et ma manière les ravit. Peut-être n'ai-je pas la sûreté ni la prestesse manuelle de M. Sucre [his landlord] lorsqu'il groupe ses charmantes cigognes, mais je possède quelques notions de perspective qui lui manquent; . . . alors ces trois Japonaises sont émerveillées de l'air réel de mon croquis. (LI; first emphasis mine) ⁽¹⁰⁾

Loti's next two book-length works, Au Maroc and Le Roman d'un enfant, both of which came out in 1890, show that the author continued to be preoccupied with the artistic issues that his trip to Japan had raised. The first is a depiction of his travels in Morocco in 1889 as part of a diplomatic mission, the second a depiction of the childhood and early adolescence of his protagonist Pierre that Loti modeled very much on his own. ⁽¹¹⁾ Japan receives only the scantest mention in each, but on close inspection it becomes clear that both are extensions of his encounter with that country and its art, the first as praxis, the second as theory.

In his Préface to Au Maroc, the first introduction he wrote for one of his books, Loti explains that in this volume the reader will find only "pures descriptions,"since that is what he wanted to "limit myself" to here. Indeed, the following text is just that, a series of descriptions of what Loti saw as he traveled from Tangier to Fez and then back. There are almost no conversations, little background or ethnographic information, etc. Though he traveled to Fez as a part of the entourage of Jules Patenôtre, recently appointed minister to Tangier, and returned with H. de Vialar, there is virtually no text devoted to personal interactions, either with the Europeans or with the Moroccans. As he is about to begin his exploration of Fez, for example, he notes that he is looking forward to being able to "circuler en liberté et voir d'un peu plus près les gens et les choses" (XXI; emphasis mine). As the repeated use of words like "tableau" and "encadrer" emphasizes, in this book Loti took advantage of the absence of a story line, characters, etc., to focus on painting with words what he describes as having encountered. The reader often has the impression that, rather than reading a narrative, he is walking through an art gallery-albeit a modern one, since Loti is very careful to note tactile, aural, and sometimes olfactory as well as visual perceptions.

It should come as no surprise, given the closing scene in Madame Chrysanthème, that one of Loti's major concerns in developing these word paintings is perspective. With a frequency that cannot be the result of chance, the narrator, in describing one thing, repeatedly mentions something else in the same field of vision that is at a distance behind or in front of it. As they start out across the open terrain one morning on the way to Fez, "à quelque cinquante mètres en avant de nous, sur les tranquilles lointains verts sans cesse déroulés,-toujours se dessine cette même première avant-garde, qui nous guide et que nous suivons dans sa continuelle fuite" (VI; note Loti's choice of the verb "dessiner"). Another morning he exclaims, "Sur ces lointains si sombres comme nos tentes sont blanches!" (VIII). When they arrive before the walls of Fez, he remarks how "les bannières rouges, les bannières vertes, les bannières jaunes s'agitent en l'air, sur le fond noirâtre des murailles" (XIX); etc. Sometimes Loti even marks out three different depths in the same sightline. As he returns toward Tangier, he describes how, "au-delà des lignes immenses de la plaine, les montagnes où nous entrerons demain sont dessinées comme d'un pinceau net et ferme, en couleurs franchement intenses, sur un vide très clair qui est le ciel" (XXXVI; note again the use of the verb "dessiner," and here the mention of "un pinceau").

Sometimes, rather than presenting two or three things at different distances in the same line of sight, Loti, so that we appreciate the depth in his tableau, leads our gaze from foreground to background. During a tour of Mekinez, for example, he notes that "de longues lignes de remparts crénélés s'en vont se perdre on ne sait où, parmi les halliers et les herbages, dans les lointains de la campagne déserte" (XXXIII).

As several of these examples illustrate, the author also used his foreground/background presentations like a painter to set one color off with another: the darkness in the distance makes the tents look particularly white, the blackish walls of Fez set off the red, green, and yellow banners flapping in the air before them, etc. Elsewhere, he describes the Sultan's infantry as "une haie entièrement rouge, d'un rouge vif qui tranche sur le gris monotone de la foule" (XIX). The monarch's musicians create an even more striking effect for the same reason:

encadrée dans les rangs de l'infanterie écarlate, . . . leurs couleurs sont . . . rangées au contraire comme à dessein pour s'aviver encore les uns par les autres: une robe pourpre à côté d'une robe bleu de roi; une robe orange entre une robe violet évêque et une robe verte. Sur le fond neutre des foules environnantes, et parmi les cavaliers voilés de mousseline, ils forment le groupe le plus bizarrement éclatant que j'aie jamais vu dans aucun pays du monde. (ibid; emphasis mine)

One of the most striking, most painterly such passages occurs on the journey to Fez. Having described the fields before him, Loti goes on to explain that

ce vert intense s'assombrit sous les nuées lourdes qui traînent; il tourne au gris sombre, puis, vers l'horizon, se mêle peu à peu, par plans dégradés, avec le noir des montagnes et du ciel. . . . [The mules'] hautes selles à dossier, recouvertes de drap rouge, forment des taches de couleur éclatante sur ces fonds de teintes neutres, sur ces derniers plans d'un gris violacé d'encre. (VIII)

If the use of darker or duller colors in the background to set off brighter or more lively colors in the foreground had been a standard painterly technique for centuries, the fascination with colors that move through shades into different colors, expressed in the last example, recalls more specifically Loti's contemporaries, the Impressionists. In a similar vein, the author elsewhere describes a night sky as "un vide immense, profond, limpide, qui est ce soir d'un bleu irisé, d'un bleu tournant, à l'horizon, au vert d'aiguemarine; il y a partout grand resplendissement, grande fête et grande magie de lumière" (XIV; note also the attention to light). Near the end of the journey, he paints a "ciel bleu qui commence à palir, à tourner au vert limpide" (XXXVII). One might think of the English pre-Impressionist James McNeil Whistler when Loti juxtaposes not two dissimilar colors, but two only slightly different shades of the same largely muted tone: as he leaves Fez behind him, for example, he writes that "ça et là nous rencontrons de petits campements bédouins, aux teintes également brunes comme la terre, d'où sortent des fumées qui montent tout droit sur le gris foncé des lointains" (XXXII). One can easily imagine a canvas entitled "Study in Browns and Greys."

Au Maroc set the style for the eight other book-length travel narratives that Loti would publish over the next twenty-two years in alternation with his remaining novels. ⁽¹²⁾ Like it, they are all short on dialogue, historical background, and character presentation, all long on the depiction of objects and colors in relationship with other objects and colors. As Au Maroc makes clear, Loti took advantage of the freedom from the need to develop plot or characters that the travelog genre afforded him to concentrate on honing textual equivalents of the painterly skills with which he had impressed Mme Chrysanthème, Mme Prune, and Mlle Oyouki during his sojourn in Japan. ⁽¹³⁾

Unlike some of his contemporaries such as Zola, Loti was not given to writing theoretical treatises on literature. Nor, unlike Flaubert or the Goncourts, did he discuss his views on the subject to any great extent in his correspondence or diary. These views do, however, emerge from some of his novels, and perhaps not surprisingly in none more extensively than in Le Roman d'un enfant, the narrative that Loti penned at the time that he brought out Au Maroc. One of the novel's early avid readers was the young Marcel Proust, who quoted it in letters to his mother ⁽¹⁴⁾ and whose Combray clearly owes something to it. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Just as Proust in his work would use scenes in the childhood of the narrator to present his own mature ideas on art and literature, so, two decades before the younger author began work on what would become the first section of A la recherche du temps perdu, Loti used this somewhat fictionalized account of his own childhood and early adolescence to set forth, among other things, his ideas on literature and the visual image and why he did not want altogether to forsake the latter in devoting himself to the former.

The first and most obvious reason for his desire to retain aspects of visual art in his writing was that Loti appreciated the power of pictorial images to make us imagine things with which we are not familiar. In recalling how, during his childhood, he had been fascinated by the apocalyptic passages in the last book of the New Testament, the narrator explains that "il y avait un livre du siècle dernier . . . dans lequel je voyais vivre ces choses: une Histoire de la Bible avec d'étranges images apocalyptiques où tous les lointains étaient noirs" (XXIV; note the effect of the dark background in making the foreground images that much more effective). While he admires "toute cette poésie de rêve et de terreur" in the Biblical text itself, the visual artist's images, here with a contrasting background, are what made him "vo[ir] vivre ces choses." As in his travelogs, visual artistic images stimulate more than just the visual part of the imagination, furthermore. In paging through an illustrated article in Le Magasin pittoresque devoted to Egypt, the young Pierre experienced "l'impression subite d'un chaud et morne soleil" (XXV; emphasis mine).

That he was so affected by visual images Loti explains, in part, by noting that he grew up in Rochefort, a city of whitewashed houses lacking almost any color: "au cours de ma vie, j'aurais donc été moins impressionné sans doute par la fantasmagorie changeante du monde, si je n'avais commencé l'étape dans un milieu presque incolore" (VIII). But, he goes on to add, there were other reasons as well. According to him, "les gens doués pour bien peindre (avec des couleurs ou avec des mots) sont probablement des espèces de demi-aveugles, qui vivent d'habitude dans une pénombre, dans un brouillard lunaire, le regard tourné en dedans, et qui alors, quand par hasard ils voient, sont impressionnés dix fois plus vivement que les autres hommes" (ibid; note that he refers to writers as those who "paint" with words).

Of course, words can also produce such effects. At one point the narrator remarks that Castelnau "est un nom ancien qui évoque pour moi des images de soleil, de lumière pure sur des hauteurs, de calme mélancholique dans des ruines, de recueillement devant des splendeurs mortes ensevelis depuis des siècles" (XLV). If here language evokes an image that Pierre had already acquired visually in person, elsewhere, like that book of illustrated Bible stories, it makes him see things with which he had had no personal contact: having been forced to read (an apparently unillustrated edition of) Fénélon's even-then old-fashioned Télémaque, "je voyais assez nettement la Grèce, la blancheur de ses marbres sous son ciel pur" (XLIV; note that he remembers what the novel made him see, not what if any effect it had on his idea of education, which is its ostensible intent). In the same sense, he notes that, having come across an old ship's log that described a South Seas voyage, "je vis en esprit tout autour de moi le morne et infini resplendissement bleu du Grand Océan austral" (LXXIV; emphasis mine). Like a visual artist's creations, language can also evoke non-visual perceptions: in Vergil's Ninth Eglogue "la sonorité de ce mot Bianoris . . . évoqua pour moi, tout à coup, avec une extraordinaire magie, l'impression des musiques que les insectes devaient faire autour des deux voyageurs, dans le silence d'un midi très chaud éclairé par un soleil plus jeune, dans la sereine tranquillité d'un mois de juin antique" (LXV; note that it is not a description of the insects' sound or the heat or the sunlight that does this, but rather the sound of the word "Bianoris." This is very much in line with the Flaubert of Salammbô, Loti's favorite novel, and the poets who appreciated the evocative potential of the uncommon, exotic word.).

Even if language can accomplish all this on its own, Loti seems to have preferred to join the visual image to it when trying to make the scenes that he was describing seem present-"réelles," as he says in Madame Chrysanthème-to his readers. This is because he believed that memory stored experiences using visual images. In "Rêve", a piece he first published separately in 1888 while working on this issue, Loti explains, with regard to a recurring dream: "dans ma mémoire, je retrouvai d'abord la vision à son moment le plus intense, celui où tout à coup j'avais songé à elle [the woman in his dream], en reconnaissant son grand chapeau jeté sur cette chaise, et où, derrière moi, elle avait paru. . . Puis lentement, peu à peu, je me rappelai tout le reste." ⁽¹⁶⁾ In Fantôme d'Orient, a novelization of his 1887 return to Istanbul that Loti published in 1892, he remarks, with regard to the elderly Kadidja, that "cette image d'Aziyadé [a woman he had known during his previous visit there] . . . persistait encore au fond de sa tête finissante" (329; emphasis mine). In "Vies de deux chattes" he says, of the sight of a white cat on a red cushion, "c'est l'image persistante, définitive, qui devait me rester d'elle, même après sa mort: une folle petite bête blanche, inattendue, s'ébattant sur fond rouge entre les robes de deuil de maman et de tante Claire" (IV; emphasis mine; note the role of the contrasting backgrounds). Because memory stores experience around visual images, similar visual images call up memories directly and easily: in Le Roman d'un enfant, Loti speaks of "ces associations incohérentes d'images qui m'étaient jadis si habituelle" (XLVIII). Moreoever, as Proust would argue at length two decades later, because our memories have attached to them all the things that we felt when we experienced them-"tout le reste," as Loti refers to them in the passage from "Rêve" quoted above-visual images can evoke in us not only an aesthetic reaction, but also feelings that we already have stored inside us, thereby producing a sometimes very powerful response.

Loti had already suggested this in Pêcheur d'Islande (1886). When, after learning of his friend Sylvestre Moan's death in Vietnam, Yann Gaos goes up on the deck of the Marie and gazes at the cloudy North Atlantic sky, the text notes:

Mais, en un point de ce ciel, très bas, près des eaux [the clouds] faisaient une sorte de marbrure plus distincte, bien que très lointaine; un dessin mou, comme tracé par une main distraite; . . .

Lui, Yann, à mesure que ses prunelles mobiles s'habituaient à l'obscurité du dehors, il regardait de plus en plus cette marbrure unique du ciel; elle avait forme de quelqu'un qui s'affaisse, avec deux bras qui se tendent. Et à présent qu'il avait commencé à voir là cette apparence, il lui semblait que ce fût une vraie ombre humaine, agrandie, rendue gigantesque à force de venir de loin.
Puis, dans son imagination . . ., cette ombre triste . . . se mêlait peu à peu au souvenir de son frère mort, comme une dernière manifestation de lui. . . .
A contempler ce nuage, il sentait venir une tristesse profonde, angoissée, pleine d'inconnu et de mystère, qui lui glaçait l'âme ; . . . Il revoyait la figure douce de Sylvestre, ses bons yeux d'enfant ; à l'idée de l'embrasser, quelque chose comme un voile tombait tout à coup entre ses paupières, malgré lui, . . . les larmes commençaient à couler lourdes, rapides, sur ses joues ; et puis des sanglots vinrent soulever sa poitrine profonde. (III:9; emphasis added)

In describing the one section of the cloud-covered sky as "un dessin mou, comme tracé par une main distraite," Loti presents it not simply as a visual image but as the work of a visual artist. Because of the similarity between the cloud form and a human form, Yann recalls his recently murdered friend Sylvestre. And with the recollection of Sylvestre comes all the emotion associated with him, "tout le reste," producing a "tristesse profonde"-depth, and therefore another kind of "perspective."

Therein, for Loti, lies the challenge in creating non-visual art. If verbal art connects with our memories it calls up and has the effects associated with those memories; since the writer uses words rather than images, however, the connection will not be as direct, as immediate, or as easy. Speaking of his first novel, Aziyadé, the narrator in Fantôme d'Orient remarks: "j'avais essayé de l'exprimer [the sadness that hangs over Constantinople], dans un de mes premiers livres, mais je n'avais pu y parvenir, et aujourd'hui, à chaque pierre, à chaque tombe que je reconnais sur ma route [visual images], me reviennent les impressions indicibles d'autrefois, avec ce tourment intérieur, qui aura été un des plus continuels de ma vie, de me trouver impuissant à peindre et à fixer avec des mots ce que je vois et ce que je sens, ce que je souffre. . ." (271; note the painting vocabulary). The visual images ("chaque pierre," "chaque tombe," etc.) evoke feelings ("les impressions indicibles d'autrefois"), but Loti finds it much more difficult to "fixer avec des mots" both the visual ("ce que je vois") and the feelings attached to it ("ce que je sens, ce que je souffre"). ⁽¹⁷⁾

Loti saw one possible way of dealing with this challenge, however.

While they were fundamental in his conception of effective art, the author does not appear to have seen visual images as primary. In a passage in Le Roman d'un enfant that is essential to a comprehension of his aesthetic, he recounts how, at the age of five or six, the young Pierre made a simple drawing that he entitled "Le Canard malheureux" on the blank verso of some printed page. As he looked at it,

les lettres, les lignes transparaissaient en taches grisâtres qui subitement produisirent à mes yeux l'impression des nuages du ciel; alors ce petit dessin, plus informe qu'un barbouillage d'écolier sur un mur de classe, se compléta étrangement de ces taches du fond, prit tout à coup pour moi une effrayante profondeur; . . . il s'agrandit comme une vision, se creusa au loin comme les surfaces pâles de la mer. J'étais épouvanté de mon oeuvre, y découvrant des choses que je n'y avais certainement pas mises et qui d'ailleurs devaient m'être à peine connues. (IX; emphasis added)

It is, again, another artistic visual image, "ce petit dessin," that strikes the young Pierre so powerfully. But here, the intentional part of the artist's work is "completed" with the addition of the clouds, which, with the part that Pierre had sketched on his own, form the whole that has such an effect on him, in part because of its "profondeur"-again, as in the passage from Pêcheur d'Islande quoted above, the quality that Loti strove to give his word paintings in Au Maroc, the quality in his drawing that so struck Mme Chrysanthème, Mme Prune, and Mlle Oyouki. Though Freud-who would claim that he learned much about psychoanalysis from reading literature-had yet to formulate the terminology, Loti here proposes that the effective artist creates the artwork in part from his conscious intentions, in part from images that seep though from what Freud would name the subconscious, which originally consists of some sort of primary, unseen language (the unseen words on the recto of that page). ⁽¹⁸⁾ These images that seep through from the writer's subconscious give a written text, even one that has nothing to do with the description of terrain, depth ("profondeur") and therefore a type of "perspective." This depth makes the literary work of art moving and memorable for the reader, just as in the scene in Pêcheur d'Islande, no doubt because it causes the work to strike a chord with something already in the reader's subconscious: the passage continues "et [je] le regardais si attentivement au contraire, qu'aujourd'hui, après tant d'années, je le revois encore tel qu'il m'apparut là, transfiguré."

When, in "Rêve," Loti begins by announcing that "je voudrais connaître une langue à part, dans laquelle pourraient s'écrire les visions de mes sommeils. Quand j'essaie avec les mots ordinaires, je n'arrive qu'à construire une sorte de récit gauche et lourde, à travers lequel ceux qui me lisent ne doivent assurément rien voir; moi seul, je puis distinguier encore, derrière l'à peu près de ces mots accumulés, l'insondable abîme" (emphasis mine), it would seem that he was longing for some literary equivalent of that primary language of the subconscious that would allow him to convey directly to his readers "l'insondable abîme," all the feelings that are linked with the visual image ("vision") and that reside in the subconscious. In Le Roman d'un enfant, he at one point remarks that "il me semble que de tout temps j'ai su, avec des crayons ou des pinceaux, rendre à peu près sur le papier les petites fantaisies de mon imagination" (XXVIII) ⁽¹⁹⁾, but having chosen to work in the medium of language, Loti wanted to be able to convey that "insondable abîme" with words. As Proust would argue along the same lines two decades later, Loti seems to have felt that such a language would allow him to connect with his readers because there exists what, in Fantôme d'Orient, he called a "uniformité des sentiments humains" (257). If he could capture in his text part of his own subconscious feelings, therefore, this text would have a deep effect on readers because they shared those feelings.

Coming up with such a primary language would not be easy, however. In "Pays sans nom," the recollection of a dream he had during his Moroccan trip that Loti published as part of Le Livre de la pitié et de la mort, he despaired that "les mots humains ne peuvent rendre les dessous de cette vision, le mystère et la tristesse de cette plaine ainsi réapparue, tout ce qui s'ébauchait en moi d'inquiétudes désolées" (emphasis mine). A few years before, in the central scene of Pêcheur d'Islande when Yann sees his dead friend Sylvestre in a cloud formation over the North Atlantic and finally confronts his grief, Loti had written: "Mais les mots, si vagues qu'ils soient, restent encore trop précis pour exprimer ces choses; il faudrait cette langue incertaine qui se parle quelquefois dans les rêves, et dont on ne retient au réveil que d'énigmatiques fragments n'ayant plus de sens" (III:9; cf. also the passage in "Rêve" just quoted). Regular "human language" was, for Loti, too different from subconscious emotion to be able to convey it.

On the other hand, his sketchy childhood drawing, "Le Canard malheureux," had seemed to work. This leads Loti to remark: "j'ai souvent remarqué du reste que des barbouillages rudimentaires tracés par des enfants, des tableaux aux couleurs fausses et froides, peuvent impressionner beaucoup plus que d'habiles ou géniales peintures, par cela précisément qu'ils sont incomplets et qu'on est conduit, en les regardant, à y ajouter mille choses de soi-même, mille choses sorties des tréfonds insondés et qu'aucun pinceau ne saurait saisir" (IX). If, as the Pêcheur d'Islande narrator notes, regular language is "trop précis" to capture subconscious feelings, then perhaps one can develop a simpler language, like "cette langue incertaine qui se parle quelquefois dans les rêves." Rather than strive for absolute precision of description as his contemporaries the Realists and the Naturalists were attempting to do, if a writer employed such an intentionally uncertain style, the reader would, even without thinking, delve into her or his own "tréfonds insondés" to fill the gaps, thereby providing the necessary depth and perspective to make the literary work appear "réel." ⁽²⁰⁾ If there is a "uniformité des sentiments humains," the result might even coincide with the author's own experiences and feelings, though that is not of primary importance.

All this explains why and how Loti tried to do with words the same things visual artists, and in particular Impressionists like Monet, achieved with pencil or paint. Since, furthermore, for him memory stored experience in images, it is not surprising that he hoped his verbal paintings would not only connect with already existing visual images in his readers' minds, but also leave new ones there. He begins Le Livre de la pitié et de la mort with an "Avertissement de l'auteur" in which he expresses his desire that "la mémoire de ces frères [his readers] gardera peut-être vivantes de chères images que j'y aurai gravées" (emphasis mine).

Just as he feels the wealthy tourists who stop by the charity hospital for crippled children in Pen-Bron will finally understand both the children's suffering and the merit of the work being done for them once they actually see them, ⁽²¹⁾ so, having chosen a career as a writer rather than a visual artist, Loti decided that he had to be able to give his writing some of the qualities of drawing or painting, and in particular Impressionist painting, if it was to have the sort of deep and lasting effect on his readers that he sought, and that he knew visual images, and in particular artistically-crafted visual images, produced. Some of these qualities he practiced most extensively in his travelogs; others, such as the depth that came from contact with subconscious feelings, he worked on primarily in his novels. Reading both, it is, hopefully, now easier to understand why his contemporaries so often called Loti a painter with words, even if they did not know how very seriously he undertook that project and how very important for literature he saw it to be.

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----. Le Roman d'un enfant.

----. Le Roman d'un spahi. Nouvelle Collection Illustrée 50. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1893.

Mauberger, Gaston. Dans l'intimité de Pierre Loti (1903-1923). Ed. Alain Quella-Villéger. Paris: Le Croît vif, 2003.

Proust, Marcel. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb. Paris: Plon, 1970. Vol. I.

Rosenblum, Robert, H. W. Janson. 19^th-Century Art. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 2005.

Sabatier, Pierre. L'Esthétique des Goncourt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970.

Scaon, Gaby. "Les aventures de Monsieur Pygmalion Piquemouche." Lettre d'Information de l'Association pour la maison de Pierre Loti 8 (2003): 3-11.

Töpffer: L'Invention de la bande dessinée. Ed. Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters. Paris: Hermann, 1994.

1. Various of Loti's early drawings have been published in different books. See, for example, the edition of his novel Pêcheur d'Islande published by Michel de l'Ormeraie (Paris: 1985), which includes a drawing he did at the age of 12 (p. 195) and an evocative landscape that he sketched in his arithmetic notebook (p. 97).

2. I follow the practice traditional in Loti scholarship of citing his novels by chapter number, since there are so many different editions of his works and the chapters are so short.

3. On Töpffer, cf. Töpffer: L'Invention de la bande dessinée, ed. Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters (Paris: Hermann, 1994).

4. A facimile edition was published in Le Manuscrit autographe 42-43 (1933) 120-137. For a study of it, see: Gaby Scaon, "Les aventures de Monsieur Pygmalion Piquemouche," Lettre d'information de l'Association pour la maison de Pierre Loti, 8 (Novembre 2003) 3-11.

5. On Loti's artwork, see, in addition to the sixteen volumes of his works that Michel de l'Ormeraie brought out in the 1980s (cf. ft. 1 above): C. Wesley Bird, Pierre Loti, correspondant et dessinateur 1872-1889 (Paris: P. André, 1948), Claude Farrère, Cent dessins de Pierre Loti (Tours: Arrault, 1948); Pierre Loti, Julien Viaud ou Pierre Loti: coureur des mers et coureur de rêves (Paris : Galerie Régine Lussan, 1994) vol. I.

6. Loti's principal publisher, Calmann-Lévy, used thirty-three of the drawings Loti had made during his 1872 tour of duty in the South Pacific to illustrate a de luxe, large format edition of Le Mariage de Loti in 1898; they had already used sixteen of the water colors and drawings that Loti had done during his 1873 tour of duty in Africa to illustrate a more modest edition of Le Roman d'un spahi in 1893.

7. Gaston Mauberger, Dans l'intimité de Pierre Loti (1903-1923), ed. Alain Quella-Villéger (Paris: Le Croît vif, 2003) 81.

8. In his efforts to convey the exact shade of a color, Loti followed in the path set out by the Goncourt brothers in the novels they had written in the 1860s. Cf. Pierre Sabatier, L'Esthétique des Gonocourt (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970) 296-305.

9. The bibliography on the influence of Japanese art on late nineteenth-century European painting is enormous. Edmond de Goncourt went so far as to declare that "tout l'impresssionnisme . . . est fait par la contemplation et l'imitation des impressions claires du Japan," Journal 19 avril 1884, reprinted in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Artes et artistes, ed. Jean-Pierre Bouillon (Paris: Hermann, 1997) 188.

10. It should probably be noted, to forestall reaction from those who know Japanese art, that Loti does not here say that all Japanese painting lacked perspective, just M. Sucre's work. If his landlord's art lacks perspective, it is, perhaps, because the world in which he lives does so as well. Early in Madame Chrysanthème, on his way to meet the mariage broker who will eventually set him up with the novel's title character, Loti the narrator observes an "absence de lointains, de perspectives" (III) that, for him, distinguishes most of the Japan that he encounters.

11. Assigning most of Loti's works to genres is futile. Au Maroc is a travelogue, but then so is Madame Chrysanthème, which is always regarded as a novel. Le Roman d'un enfant is clearly autobiographical, but very much a novel in the sense that Proust's Combray is. Loti himself dismissed attempts to pigeon-hole his works into genres. In the Discours de réception he gave upon his election to the Académie française in 1892, he declared that "peu m'importe d'abord qu'un livre s'appelle roman ou s'intitule de tel autre nom qu'on voudra . . . je fais un égal dédain des étiquettes et des règles, et je laisse disputer, sur la matière, les ergoteurs, impuissants à créer" (Discours de réception de Pierre Loti [Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1892] 64).

12. Le Désert, Jérusalem, and Galilée (1895), Les Derniers jours de Pékin (1902), L'Inde (sans les Anglais) (1903), Vers Ispahan (1904), La Mort de Philae (1909), Pèlerin d'Angkor (1912).

13. As we saw in the passage above, one of the aspects of his visual art that the narrator emphasizes in Madame Chrysanthème is that it is done "d'après nature" and is therefore "réel." In this way, too, Loti resembled the Impressionists, and in particular Monet, who made much of their "plein air"-as opposed to studio work-approach to painting, arguing that it made for a more "real" depiction of the effects on which they focused. Like Monet on this issue, Loti "exaggerated" the truth. Though, like his painterly contemporary's work, the word paintings in Loti's travelogs are based on observations he made during his travels, something that he emphasizes by putting dates on each section as if to suggest that we are actually reading the pages of his diary that he wrote while on those expeditions, in fact the travel narratives are often substantially different from the relevant diary entries, worked up months and sometimes even years later, just as Monet, after having started a canvas "en plein air," sometimes completed it back in his studio. As Robert Rosenblum notes, "we now know, too, that far from executing all of his paintings entirely on the spot, [Monet] was quite capable of reworking them in his studio in order to create more satisfying aesthetic wholes, even at the expense of an impersonal snapshot veracity" (369). In particular, some of Loti's most beautiful wordpaintings are totally new with the travelogs, drawn therefore either from his admittedly very visual memory or from his equally visual imagination. As with Monet, Loti strove to make the reader-viewer believe she/he was seeing the artist's impression of/reaction to nature itself, but also to create a satisfying work of art. The latter was, in the end, more important than the truth of the former - which is, if I might be allowed a personal interjection, the difference between a theoretician and an artist. Still, Loti's success at the former can be seen in comments such as du Coglay's: "[Loti] ne transpose point: aucun prisme entre les êtres, la nature et lui" (115); the sites described in Loti's books "se réfléchissent en l'eau transparente et fidèle du miroir que leur présente Loti" (116); "Loti n'avait pas l'imagination; il ne pouvait peindre que ce qu'il avait regardé et vu; ses romans ne sont guère que des transpositions" (117); etc.

14. Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1970) I: 136.

15. On similarities between Le Roman d'un enfant and A la Recherche du temps perdu, see: Richard M. Berrong, In Love with a Handsome Stranger: The Emergence of Gay Identity and the Novels of Pierre Loti (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) Chapter 8.

16. First emphasis mine. Loti published "Rêve" independently in the August 1, 1888 issue of the Fornightly Review, and then included it a collection of pieces entitled Le Livre de la pitié et de la mort (1891). That collection also includes "Vies de deux chattes," quoted below.

17. Loti seems to have felt that music was also more direct than words at evoking stored visual images and the feelings associated with them. In Le Roman d'un enfant he recounts how, after having lost his dog Gaspard during a walk in the woods, a guest's desolate violin playing later that same day

fut pour moi comme une évocation de routes noires dans les bois, de grande nuit où l'on se sent abandonné et perdu; puis je vis très nettement Gaspard errer sous la pluie, à un carrefour sinistre, et, ne se reconnaissant plus, partir dans une direction inconnue pour ne revenir jamais. . . Alors les larmes me vinrent, et comme on ne s'en apercevait point, le violon continua de lancer dans le silence ses appels tristes, auxquels répondaient, du fond des abîmes d'en dessous, des visions qui n'avaient plus de forme, plus de nom, plus de sens. (XI; emphasis mine)

This is a particularly good depiction of Loti's view of art, how it succeeds by calling up something in us that is already freighted with feeling. Of course, this passage very much recalls several in A la recherche du temps perdu dealing with Vinteuil's music and its effect on first Swann and then Marcel. Still, one should note that what makes the violin playing so powerful here is that it suggests visual images-"je vis très nettement . . ."-of what happened. It is these visual images that move Pierre, again.

18. Lacan has argued something similar in our own time.

19. Though in that final scene of Madame Chrysanthème the narrator does confess that

si [the three Japanese women] sont satisfaites de mon dessin, . . . moi je ne le suis guère. J'ai mis tout à sa place, bien exactement, mais l'ensemble a je ne sais quoi d'ordinaire, de quelconque, de français, qui ne va pas. Le sentiment n'est pas rendu. . . . il manque à ce logis dessiné son air frêle et sa sonorité de violon sec. Dans les traits de crayon qui représentent les boiseries, il n'y a pas la précision minutieuse avec laquelle elles sont ouvragées, ni leur antiquité extrême, ni leur propreté parfaite, ni les vibrations de cigales qu'elles semblent avoir emmagasinées pendant des centaines d'étés dans leurs fibres desséchées. Il n'y a pas non plus l'impression qu'on éprouve ici, d'être dans un faubourg bien lointain, perché à une grande hauteur parmi les arbres, au-dessus de la plus drôle de toutes les villes. (LI; see also XVI)

In this instance, Vergil seems to have succeeded better than Loti's drawing in conveying the atmosphere of the place and the moment.

20. It is easy to see why, in certain of his texts, Loti worked toward creating a verbal equivalent of Impressionist painting.

One might recall Loti's admiration for the Japanese vases decorated with "une simplicité si cherchée que, pour nos yeux, c'est comme une révélation d'inconnu, comme un renversement de toutes les notions acquises sur la forme" (XXXIV). This simplicity takes artistic effort: it is "cherchée."

One might also recall Loti's admiration for the way certain Japanese set off a few pieces in their houses, surrounding them with empty whiteness or space. Speaking of Mme Prune's house, for example, Loti remarks that "l'intérieur de ma belle-mère révèle à lui seul une personne raffinée: nudité complète; à peine deux ou trois paravents posés ça et là. . . ." To those Europeans of his era who were trying to decorate their homes in what they imagined to be Japanese style, "je leur conseille, à ces personnes, de venir regarder comment sont ici les maisons des gens de goût, - de venir visiter les solitudes blanches des palais de Yeddo . . . une simplicité apparente extrème dans l'ensemble . . . telle est la manière japonaise de comprendre le luxe intérieur" (XXXV).

21. "L'Oeuvre de Pen-Bron," first published in Le Figaro January 23, 1889, subsequently included in Le Livre de la pitié et de la mort.