"Manga Reva, aux Gambier, ce fut la honte de la mission catholique."

Double autograph letter signed by Victor Segalen addressed to Emile Mignard. Four pages written in black ink on a double sheet. Transverse folds inherent to mailing, a tiny tear without loss of text at the fold of the first sheet.
Emile Mignard (1878-1966), also a doctor from Brest, was one of Segalen's closest childhood friends whom he met at the Jesuit college Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours in Brest. The writer maintained with this comrade an abundant and very regular correspondence 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.
Letter written at sea while Dr. Segalen was preparing to undertake a new medical tour of the Pomotou Islands and was returning from the Gambier archipelago: "We have just spent, my dear Emile, five days in the Gambiers; a more temperate climate, due to the lower latitude and the immutable trade winds. I am, on these tours, the great independent of the ship, cherished by the land-dwellers who need me as there is no doctor, and free from the boat, my twenty minutes of visits over. Every morning a horse awaits me on land; a strange and sturdy knock-kneed horse, short muzzle, small and round, with a gait unknown in Tahiti, and which takes me with incredible courage and sure-footedness through the mountains. Amazed, I ask about its ancestry: it is a beast from Easter Island, formerly from Chile, a true prairie 'mustang.'"
Segalen evokes in this letter the evangelization of the Gambiers in the middle of the 19^th century: "Manga Reva, in the Gambiers, was the shame of the Catholic mission. And the inquisitorial despotism of the first missionaries, Fathers Laval and Caret, Picpucians (sic), left deep marks there. Even now the religious element there is dubious." The Picpucians were sent by the Vatican to rid the Polynesians of Protestant pastor influence. In Mangareva, they established a despotic theocracy whose last flames still burned during Segalen's visit: "And I had to, warned by the resident, proceed to remove aboard the Durance, under medical cover, a nun who was bullied, starved, exhausted by her superior."
Apart from his medical tours, Dr. Segalen continues to devote himself to composing his Immémoriaux: "I have finished with my Polynesian incubation period. Sometimes I practice thinking in Tahitian. Then I verify the degree of probability on the natives. I am going to have two months of tranquility and will give it a serious push. Upon my departure for Nouméa I will have completed 1/3 of my book, the festive, warlike, truly Maori part of ancient Tahiti. I will send you, as a preview, a few chapters." Segalen is also about to send the article requested by Saint-Pol-Roux in his letter of October 15, 1903 ("Oh tell us something about this unfortunate of Destiny who was often a great artist, and in his way a Master. How is it that you have not sent some account of this death to the Mercure de France which would have welcomed it with enthusiasm?..."): "From now until tomorrow, not a moment; I am obliged to manage simultaneously: a little article to send to the Mercure on Gauguin, my correspondence and an interminable delivery that steals my nights." An apologetic article entitled "Gauguin dans son dernier décor" would indeed appear in June 1904 in the Mercure de France. Segalen describes the painter's last days in his Maison du Jouir.