Pierre Loti

PIERRE LOTI, Portrait Of An Escapist
When Pierre Loti — adulated writer, naval officer, traveller, amateur acrobat and escapist — died in 1923, he was given a state funeral, the only French writer to have received such an honour other than Victor Hugo. Bohemian, exotic and fiercely romantic; adored and scorned by French society in equal measure, Loti spent his life escaping the constraints of bourgeois France — and in so doing redefined his age. He travelled the South Seas, Asia and the Middle East (his great obsession) and loved with intense passion and freedom wherever he went. Lesley Blanch's biography revived an interest in this "unjustly neglected" French writer and launched reprints of his novels and travel books in France. She says, "He was not just a mawkish and sentimental writer as some think. Remember, people like Henry James and Marcel Proust greatly admired him. He wrote beautifully and had very sensuous rhythms. He could also be ghastly grim — Aziyadé, a burning Turkish love story, opens with an execution."

LESLEY BLANCH "It's awfully easy to say of someone who wears high heels and a painted face that he was a pederast. I think Pierre Loti was everything. He loved men and he loved women and if there had been a third sex he would have loved that one too"