choly, like the music of Chopin and the poetry of Musset, in which his adolescence reveled. It has overtones of almost mystical rapture and undertones of philosophical despair. It is begotten of life poignantly conscious of itself and shuddering wide-eyed before the black gulf of annihilation. The fourteenyear-old islander Rarahu, with the red hibiscus flowers behind her ears, can neither fathom it nor reciprocate it. These little sweethearts, brown and yellow and black, fierce and real as their own passions may be, serve him but as pathetic go-betweens in his affair with "the soul of the land." When dark blood burns hot in the swift tropical spring, when tomtoms beat in the village and mad shouts rise, kinky-haired Fatou-Gaye may fancy it is she that he comes to meet under the baobab tree by the edge of the swamp at the red moonrise; but the mind of the lover wanders in that strange embrace—he has a rendezvous with Africa.
Loti is no simple-hearted sensualist. The specific "carnal sting" is sharply indicated where it is patently present, as in the vernal orgies of the "Roman d'un Spahi"; but it is the least of his preoccupations. Loti is a romanticist and an imperfect lover. He doesn't keep his mind on the object or the subject; it wanders into the moonlight and among flowers and plays with the amulets and the ancestors and the gods of his mistress. The merely fleshly relation between him and Mme. Chrysanthème he does not present as even interesting. That relation, he declares outright, was detestable. He tolerates her only when he regards her as a bit of art in amber-colored flesh, as a translation from a painted fan or a piece of porcelain. Emotionally, they have less in common than a child and a doll. She has not even the heart to be heartbroken
