Remembering Pierre Loti, Spurred by the Recession in London Sadly

I shouldn’t have to explain to the sort of educated folk that browse China Rhyming who Pierre Loti was – but I will. French naval officer and novelist who spent time and wrote about Tahiti and the South Seas and took the pseudonym “Loti” (red Flower) while in Polynesia. He also served and wrote about French Indo-China, Tonkin in work that was not always pro-French and got him into hot water. His Japanese-inspired novel Madame Chrysantheme (1877) is seen as a precursor to both Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon. Of course in England he became notorious for his book L’inde sans les Anglais (India, Without the English – indeed!!!). Still, from the point of view of this blog it was Loti’s participation with the French forces in Peking in 1900 at the relief of the Boxer siege that is most interesting and his subsequent book Les Derniers Jours de Pekin (Last Days of Peking – 1902). Later, in 1912, he also wrote a stage version of the Sinologist Judith Gautier’s The Daughter of Heaven for Sarah Bernhardt in New York – chinois theatre! His house in Rochefort was apparently an Orientalists wet dream. I’ve also included this lovely portrait of him done by Henri Rousseau in 1891.

All of which was prompted to the front of my mind today while walking down Rathbone Place, just off Oxford Street in Fitzrovia where, sadly, a restaurant called Pierre Loti has just shut….perhaps the English are still not ready to the forgive Pierre Red Flower for that book about India!