The Project Gutenberg EBook of Madame Chrysantheme Complete, by Pierre Loti

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Title: Madame Chrysantheme Complete

Author: Pierre Loti

Last Updated: March 4, 2009
Release Date: October 5, 2006 [EBook #3995]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MADAME CHRYSANTHEME COMPLETE ***

Produced by David Widger

MADAME CHRYSANTHEME

By Pierre Loti

With a Preface by ALBERT SOREL, of the French Academy

PIERRE LOTI

LOUIS-MARIE-JULIEN VIAUD, "Pierre Loti," was born in Rochefort, of an
old French-Protestant family, January 14, 1850. He was connected with
the. French Navy from 1867 to 1900, and is now a retired officer with
full captain's rank. Although of a most energetic character and a
veteran of various campaigns--Japan, Tonkin, Senegal, China (1900)--M.
Viaud was so timid as a young midshipman that his comrades named him
"Loti," a small Indian flower which seems ever discreetly to hide
itself. This is, perhaps, a pleasantry, as elsewhere there is a much
more romantic explanation of the word. Suffice it to say that Pierre
Loti has been always the nom de plume of M. Viaud.

Lod has no immediate literary ancestor and no pupil worthy of the name.
He indulges in a dainty pessimism and is most of all an impressionist,
not of the vogue of Zola--although he can be, on occasion, as brutally
plain as he--but more in the manner of Victor Hugo, his predecessor,
or Alphonse Daudet, his lifelong friend. In Loti's works, however,
pessimism is softened to a musical melancholy; the style is direct; the
vocabulary exquisite; the moral situations familiar; the characters not
complex. In short, his place is unique, apart from the normal lines of
novelistic development.

The vein of Loti is not absolutely new, but is certainly novel. In him
it first revealed itself in a receptive sympathy for the rare flood of
experiences that his naval life brought on him, experiences which had
not fallen to the lot of Bernardin de St. Pierre or Chateaubriand, both
of whom he resembles. But neither of those writers possessed Loti's
delicate sensitiveness to exotic nature as it is reflected in the
foreign mind and heart. St