The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1912-10-19
SAILOR AND POET. TOO.
Pierre Lott. the Novelist. Is Modest
and as Shy as Woman.

Pierre Lott, the literary master of
the French navy, who has just arrived
in New York to superintend the pro-
duction of one of his plays, is a short.
slender man, plus whatever added
flesh his SO years may have latterly
brought him by mere reason of elder
illness. He is very quick, lively, in his
movements This must be harmonized
with the silent air of melancholy
which envelopes his face and charac-
terizes his personality. His look, his
aura, are the expression of a pro-
found and hopeless sadness as radical
and ineradicable as that of any Ger
man philosopher of pesSmlsm.
He has the delicate, quite graceful
manners of a woman, as is habitual
with Frenchmen as they appear to
our masculine race. He occupies lit
tie space with his motions and NOV
ings about. He has a quiet, frail
voice. And then there is his famous
shyness. He is extremely retiring. He
is naturally in state of hesitation,
genuinely more or less abashed. This
personal modesty, it will be remem-
bered, explains how he comes by his
ment of his career in his nations navy
the energetic young Julien Viaud was
so exceedingly tiInid that his com
rades scornfully called him Loti-the
name of a little flower in India which
discreetly Rides itself. He braVely
adopted the name when he published
his first book in 1888 years ago
at the age of %.
The writer we'll remembers his eX-
IRENE illness at ease in the first three
or four years whenever he appeared
at the French AGA enly. 1t is true he
rarely ATTENDED, living far from Paris,
and being usual kept wide of the
civilized world By is naval duties H
was then Il stranger in TIE French
capital, knowing none of me great lit
erary Gauls with WHOM ne had been,
almost without notice. called upon to
associate among the FOXY Immortals.
He was not little affri, Nted by those
solemn austere scenes in that somber
little temple where the u ench belle
tristic gods are wont to Ssemble as
on Parnassus. With his hair worn,
in revenge. most fiercely IL the pom
padour style in those days, he would
sit solitary and alone in one OF the
empty rows of consecrated seats, high
UP and at the back in the assembly
He would look alarmed, M ch as
small squirrel suddenly imp ,-soned IN
a cage.
were indeed created in Paris when
Pierre Lott was received there at the
academy in 1891 and delivered the
customary address on the departed
member whose seat he w5s taking.
of southwest France. He had dWeu
on the ocean and not 81 the Paris
boulevards. He had sprung quite
spontaneously and by himself alone
from the sec could we so appropri-
ately say soil in his caSe?) of French
literature. He was not q creature of
salons, or pred on critics books, or
learned in the pedantic ways of the
banks of the Seine.
Accordingly, he approached, at the
academy, the whole difficult heights
and ''finicky'' f1nisho f it all at one
most appalling swoop, to speak loosely.
And Paris laughed politely in its lace
sleeves at this soaring novice in its
very midst. For Lott, in his recep-
ton address, showed that he was
quite innocently unaware of many un-
written conventional things and open
secrets OF the literary existence in
Lutetia; and, with a perverse con-
trariety, he emphasized somewhat
deliberately some things that every one
there had known ever since the cradle.
Paris had thus refreshingly caught up
to its bias bleu and always perfumed
bosom a rare, exotic species, and it
was diversion for a time.-StuartI
Henry, in the Bookman.