He boasted, on the day of his reception into the French Academy, that
he had never read. Many protested, some smiled, and a large number of
persons refused to believe the assertion. Yet the statement was actually
quite credible, for the foundation and basis of M. Loti rest on a naive
simplicity which makes him very sensitive to the things of the outside
world, and gives him a perfect comprehension of simple souls. He is not
a reader, for he is not imbued with book notions of things; his ideas
of them are direct, and everything with him is not memory, but reflected
sensation.

On the other hand, that sailor-life which had enabled him to see the
world, must have confirmed in him this mental attitude. The deck officer
who watches the vessel's course may do nothing which could distract his
attention; but while ever ready to act and always unoccupied, he thinks,
he dreams, he listens to the voices of the sea; and everything about him
is of interest to him, the shape of the clouds, the aspect of skies and
waters. He knows that a mere board's thickness is all that separates him
and defends him from death. Such is the habitual state of mind which M.
Loti has brought to the colouring of his books.

He has related to us how, when still a little child, he first beheld
the sea. He had escaped from the parental home, allured by the brisk and
pungent air and by the "peculiar noise, at once feeble and great," which
could be heard beyond little hills of sand to which led a certain path.
He recognised the sea; "before me something appeared, something sombre
and noisy, which had loomed up from all sides at once, and which seemed
to have no end; a moving expanse which struck me with mortal vertigo;
. . . above was stretched out full a sky all of one piece, of a dark gray
colour like a heavy mantle; very, very far away, in unmeasurable depths
of horizon, could be seen a break, an opening between sea and sky,
a long empty crack, of a light pale yellow." He felt a sadness
unspeakable, a sense of desolate solitude, of abandonment, of exile. He
ran back in haste to unburden his soul upon his mother's bosom, and,
as he says, "to seek consolation with her for a thousand anticipated,
indescribable pangs, which had wrung my heart at the sight of that vast
green, deep expanse."

A poet of the sea had been born, and his genius still bears a trace of
the shudder of fear experienced that evening by Pierre Loti the little
child.

Loti was born not