"J'aurais été fort triste de ne plus revoir Tahiti. Le départ de cette île a cela de spécial qu'il est définitif et qu'il n'y a guère, pour les sympathies qu'on laisse là-bas, derrière soi, de valable Au Revoir."

Autograph letter signed by Victor Segalen addressed to Emile Mignard. Four pages written in black ink and blue colored pencil on a double sheet. Cross fold inherent to the sending.
Emile Mignard (1878-1966), also a doctor from Brest, was one of Segalen's closest childhood friends whom he met at the Jesuit college of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours in Brest. The writer maintained an abundant and regular correspondence with this friend in which he described with humor and intimacy his daily life in the four corners of the globe. It was at Mignard's wedding, on February 15, 1905, that Segalen met his wife, Yvonne Hébert.
Segalen has been in Nouméa, a city he abhors, since early April 1904. He attended the health council that annually brings together doctors from ships of the French Pacific division to decide on convalescences, leaves and transfers. For more than two weeks, a mechanical problem has prevented the Durance from leaving Nouméa. It had even been considered, as Segalen relates in a letter written to Mignard on May 10, 1904, to decommission the aging ship in Saigon, without stops in Tahiti. However, he has just learned that he will be able to return to his island for a few months before his return to France: "Anxiety. Joy. Re-anxiety. Mixed hopes of returning to Tahiti, and subconscious fear of decommissioning in Nouméa, of my transfer to the Meurthe, stationed in the country. Eight months in Caledonia!!! My assessment of the last 15 days. Nevertheless everything seems to be working out, especially our old boilers which were at issue. I would have been very sad not to see Tahiti again." For a reason that remains unknown, a very beautiful passage concerning Tahiti was crossed out in blue colored pencil: "I would have been very sad not to see Tahiti again. The departure from this island has this special quality that it is final and that there is hardly, for the sympathies one leaves behind there, a valid farewell."
This Nouméan exile allows Segalen to continue writing his Immémoriaux, which would finally appear in 1907 at Mercure de France under the pseudonym Max-Anély (Max in homage to Max Prat and Anély, one of his wife's first names), Segalen not being authorized, in his capacity as a military doctor, to sign a fictional work with his own name: "The crossed-out pages accumulate; I hope to return with 2/3 'composed' [...] I would like to have submitted the proofs before my next campaign; so as to close at the same time a large piece of intense life, to be prepared for new spectacles, re-sensitized for new races and new suns."