Tahiti The Marriage Of Loti

Pierre Loti

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138983519
• eBook ISBN: 9781317847274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2002. Set in Tahiti in 1872, this is an autobiographical novel that tells of the love affair between a beautiful island girl and the French naval officer who wrote under the name of Pierre Loti.

Part I

The Marriage of Loti

I

BY LOTI’S FRIEND PLUNKET

LOTI was baptized on the 25th of January, 1872, at the age of twenty-two years an d eleven days. When the deed was done, it was about one in the afternoon by London and Paris time. On the other side, and the other way up of the terrestrial ball, in the gardens of Queen Pomaré, where the event took place, it was near midnight. In Europe it was a cold and dismal winter’s day. On the other side, in the queen’s gardens, it was a calm, languorous, enervating summer’s night.

Five persons took part in this ceremony of baptism amidst mimosas and orange-trees, in a fervid and fragrant air, under a sky starry with southern constellations. These five were Ariitéa, princess of the blood, Faïmana and Téria, ladies in attendance on her majesty, Plunket and Loti, midshipmen in the royal navy of Great Britain. Loti, who had hitherto been known as Harry Grant, still kept that name in all official documents and on the books of the ship he was attached to; but that of Loti was commonly adopted among his friends.

The ceremony was simple and performed without much speech or paraphernalia. The three Tahitian girls, who wore crowns of natural flowers and tunics of pink muslin with long skirts, after vainly endeavouring to pronounce such barbarous words as Harry Grant and Plunket—their Polynesian throats finding the harsh consonants impossible,—determined to know the youths by the names of Rémuna and Loti,1 being those of two flowers. Next morning all the court was informed of this decision, and Harry Grant had no further existence in Oceania, any more than his friend Plunket.

It was furthermore agreed that the first words of a native song: “Loti taimané, etc.”—sung discreetly and warily at night in the neighbourhood of the palace, should be understood to convey “ ‘Rémuna is here,’ or ‘Loti is here,’ or both of them; and they beg their fair friends to come out at their call, or at least to come noiselessly and open the garden gate.”. . . . . . . . . .

II

A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON RARAHU; PLUNKET’S REMINISCENCES

Rarahu was born in January, 1858, in the island or Bora-Bora, in 16° south latitude and 154° west longitude. At the moment when this tale begins she had just completed her fourteenth year.

She was a very strange little person, whose startling and savage charm was a thing quite apart from all the conventional rules of beauty recognized by the nations of Europe. While very young, her mother had sent her away in a long canoe with sails which was making for Tahiti. She remembered nothing of her native island but the enormous and terrible central tor which towers up from it. The profile of that gigantic block of basalt, rising like a stupendous corner-stone from the bosom of the Pacific, remained in her mind as the only image of her native land. Rarahu recognized it at a later day with mingled emotions, drawn in Loti’s sketch-book, and this incident was in the first instance what roused her great love for him.

III

Rarahu’s mother had brought her to Tahiti, the big island, the queen’s island, to make a present of her to a very old woman of the Apiré district to whom she was distantly related. This was in obedience to an ancient custom of the Tahitian race by which children rarely grow up in the care of their mother. Adoptive fathers and mothers (faa amu) are there most common, and the family is collected as chance directs. This time-honoured exchanging of children is one of the quaint peculiarities of Polynesian manners.

IV

HARRY GRANT (LOTI, BEFORE HE WAS RENAMED) TO HIS SISTER AT BRIGHTBURY, YORKSHIRE (ENGLAND)

TAHITI ROADS, January 20, 1872.

“ My dear Sister: Here I am, in sight of the distant isle which our brother loved so well, the mysterious speck of land which was for so long the scene of my childish dreams. A strange longing to come here contributed in no small degree to prompt me to adopt a seaman’s life—of which I am already sick and tired.

“ Years have gone by and made a man of me. I have been almost all over the world, and at last I behold the island of my dreams. But I have found nothing but melancholy and bitter disappointment.

“ And yet it is verily and indeed Papeete; there is the queen’s palace, over there among the greenery, the bay shaded by palms, the mountains beyond with their jagged outline—it is all just as I knew it would be. I have seen it all any time these ten years in the sketches George sent home, yellow with the sea and made poetical by distance; it is the very spot of earth of which the brother we have lost would talk so fondly.—Yes, all that, but minus the charm, the wondrous charm of vague illusions, of childhood’s strange and fantastic impressions.—Dear me! yes, an island, like any other; and I, Harry, gazing at it, the self-same Harry as at Brightbury or London or where you will; so much the same that I do not believe I have even travelled hither.

“Ah ! if this land of dreams was to remain the same to me I ought never to have laid my finger on it.

“ Besides, the fellows on board have spoiled my Tahiti, by picturing it from their point of view. Go where they will they can never escape from their commonplace selves; they smear all that is poetical with their slime of mockery, their own dulness and ineptitude. And civilization, too, has been overbusy; our hateful colonial civilization, with our conventionality, our habits and vices; and wild poetry flees away with the customs and traditions of the past. . . . . . . . . . .

“ In short, during these days since the Reindeer cast anchor off Papeete, your brother Harry has remained on board, his spirit crushed and his fancy cheated. . . .. . . . . . . . . .

“ As for John, he is not like me, and I believe he is charmed with this place; since we arrived I have hardly seen him. He is still the same faithful and unfailing friend, the kind and loving brother who watches over me like a guardian angel and whom I love most truly with all my heart. . . .. . . . . . . . . .

V

Rarahu was a little creature unlike any one else, though she was a perfect specimen of the Maori race which has peopled the Polynesian archipelagos, and which is one of the finest types of humanity. A very distinct race, too, whose origin and birthplace remain an unsolved mystery.

Rarahu’s eyes were of a tawny black, full of exotic languor and coaxing softness, like those of a kitten when it is stroked; her eyelashes so long and so black that you might have taken them for painted feathers. Her nose was short and delicate, like the nose in some Arab faces; her mouth, rather too thick and too wide for a classic model, had deep corners deliciously dimpled. When she laughed she showed all her teeth, somewhat large teeth of brilliantly white enamel, not yet polished by the wear of years but showing the striations of young growth. Her hair, scented with sandal-wood oil, was long, straight and rather harsh, falling in heavy locks on her bare shoulders. Her skin was of the same hue all over, from her forehead to the tips of her toes; a dusky brown, verging on brick-red, like that of old Etruscan terra-cotta pottery. Rarahu was small, beautiful in proportion and mould; her bosom was purely formed and polished; her arms as perfect as an antique. Round her ankles a pattern was tattooed blue to imitate anklets; across her lower lip were three faint blue lines like those of the women of the Marquesas; and on her forehead a still paler outline of tattoo suggested a coronet. The feature most characteristic of her race was the small space between her eyes which like the eyes of all Maoris were by no means deep-set. When she was laughing and gay this gave her face the mischievous shyness of a marmoset; when she was grave or sad, there was some-thing about her which can only be described as Polynesian grace.

VI

Queen Pomaré’s court was decked for a small reception on the day when I first set foot on the soil of Tahiti. The English admiral in command of the Reindeer was to pay his respects to her majesty on his arrival—she was an old acquaintance of his—and I, in full uniform, was his escort.

The thick foliage overhead screened us from the scorching sun of two in the afternoon; the shady avenues which constitute Papeete, the queen’s capital, were silent and deserted. The huts with verandahs, scattered among the tall trees in the gardens and great tropical shrubs seemed, like the inhabitants, to be sunk in the luxurious slumber of the siesta. Close to the palace even all was still and peaceful.

One of the queen’s sons, a tawny colossus, in evening dress, who came to meet us, led us into a drawing-room with closed shutters where a dozen women were sitting, all silent and motionless. In the middle of the room stood two large gilt armchairs, side by side. Pomaré, who was sitting in one, desired the admiral to be seated in the other, while an interpreter transmitted official compliments between the old friends.

This woman, whose name had so long figured in the exotic dreams of my childhood, I now beheld in the flesh, dressed in a long garment of rose-coloured silk, with the features of an old copper-coloured woman, stern and imperious-looking. In the massive ugliness of her old age I could still trace what might have lent her in youth the attractions and prestige of which the navigators of a past time have left a record. The women who attended her, in this twilight of shade and the stilly calm of a tropical day, had an indefinable charm. They were almost all handsome in the Tahitian style of beauty: black eyes, languishing looks, and the dusky amber hue of the Gitanos. Their hair, falling loosely, was decked with natural flowers, and their long gauzy dresses, unconfined at the waist, fell to their feet in straight flowing folds.

My eyes rested more especially on the Princess Ariitéa;—Ariitéa with her sweet, pensive, dreamy face, and pale roses twined here and there in her black tresses.

VII

The first civilities having been exchanged, the admiral said to the queen: “ This is Harry Grant, whom I wish to present to your majesty. He is a brother of George Grant, an officer in our navy, who lived for four years in your beautiful country.”

The interpreter had scarcely finished the sentence when Queen Pomaré held out her wrinkled hand to me; a bright frank smile—no official grimace, lighted up her old face. “ Rouéri’s brother !” said she, giving him his Tahitian name. “ You must come and see me again.” And she added in English: “ Welcome! “ which it would seem was a special mark of favour as the queen never speaks any but her native language.

“Welcome !” said the Queen of Bora-Bora likewise, displaying her large cannibal teeth in a broad smile. And I went away delighted with this strange court.

VIII

Rarahu, from her earliest infancy had scarcely ever left the cabin inhabited by her old adoptive mother, who lived in the Apiré district by the brook Fataoua.

Her business in life was very simple: to dream, to bathe—especially to bathe—to sing, and to wander through the woods with Tiahoui, her inseparable companion. Rarahu and Tiahoui were a pair of careless, laughing little beings, living almost entirely in the waters of their brook where they leaped and sported like a couple of flying-fish.

IX

It must not, however, be supposed that Rarahu was wholly unlearned; she could read her Tahitian Bible, and write in a large and very firm hand, the soft words of her native tongue; nay, she was strong in spelling by the rules of orthography as laid down by the brothers Picpus, who constructed a conventional code of syllables in the Latin character to represent Polynesian sounds. Many a child in our own fields is certainly less well-educated than this little savage maid. But it cannot have cost her any great pains at the missionary school at Papeete, for she was utterly idle by nature.

X

After following the road to Apiré for about half an hour, if you turn to the right through the thicket you come to a wide natural basin hollowed out of the living rock. Into this pool the Fataoua falls in a cascade of swift waters of delicious freshness.

There all day there was company to be found; the beauties of Papeete, stretched on the grass, and spending the tropical days in chattering, singing and sleeping, or else in swimming and diving like lively gold-fish. They plunged in dressed in their muslin gowns and kept them on, all wet as they were, to go to sleep as the Naiads did of old.

Thither seamen, on shore for a few hours, would come to take their pleasure; there the black witch Tétouara reigned over the revels; there, in the shade, was there much eating of oranges and guavas.

Tétouara was a black wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4