solution. Romance for Loti means an escape from the classical circle of humanity and an adventure outside its law.
How foolishly we say that the French, conceiving Paris as the end of every man's desire, are no travelers. True, they seldom visit us except on business; to the Parisian sense New York is more of the same but not so good. But tell the French of something rich and strange, talk to them of lands where "the cypress and myrtle are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime," and none are so attentive as they. Consider the reflection of Algiers, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, China, Japan and the two Indies in their imaginative literature and in their art and you conclude it is near the mark to call the French the discoverers of travel. I speak of travel not as an aspect of commerce but as an aspect of culture. The American visits Paris to confirm his Americanism. The English poet visits Italy to recover his cultural inheritance. The French poet visits Senegambia to get rid of his. They cross the sea to change their minds. They travel precisely because Paris contains everything that a civilized heart desires—except an escape from civility. For a hundred years the French have been contriving fascinating tours and detours for those tired hearts in which the Parisian paradise palls and desire is a burden, and the century moves forward with an ever more listless and monotonous hum.
Pierre Loti is not the first but only the most proficient of the long line of French prose masters who offer travel as something better than hashish or absinthe as an exit from the cul-de-sac of civilization. The man savors contrasts, and on his admission to the Academy he declared that Loti was no reader. But
