"Tahiti est bien loin, mon cher Emile, Brest aussi ; tout est loin, reculé encore par la grisaille Nouméenne...L'attente...l'incertitude."

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.

A mechanical problem prevents the Durance from leaving Nouméa; Segalen finds himself there after attending the annual health council that brings together each year the doctors from ships of the French Pacific division to decide on convalescences, leaves and transfers: "Tahiti est bien loin, mon cher Emile, Brest aussi ; tout est loin, reculé encore par la grisaille Nouméenne...L'attente...l'incertitude. Voici quinze jours de jeu de balançoire : retournerons-nous à Tahiti ? Nos chaudières sont agonisantes, les répartitions se compliquent... Désarmement à Saïgon ? ? Cap-Horn à la voile (!!)...Mystère..." ["Tahiti is very far, my dear Emile, Brest too; everything is far, pushed back further by Nouméan greyness...The wait...the uncertainty. Here are fifteen days of seesaw game: will we return to Tahiti? Our boilers are dying, the distributions are getting complicated... Decommissioning in Saigon?? Cape Horn under sail (!!)...Mystery..."] He languishes for Tahiti: "Cela me ferait une vraie peine de manquer ce retour à Tahiti. Ce faux départ, cet adieu hémiplégique me navrerait. J'ai quitté mon île avec la certitude du retour, et néanmoins en faisant matériellement comme si je ne devais jamais y revenir. L'adieu à ce pays a ceci de spécial que c'est un adieu définitif, irrémédiable, non pas au pays peut-être (bien que les chances d'y repasser soient bien minimes), mais aux être aimés, que l'on retrouvera plus tard vieillis, déformés." ["It would cause me real pain to miss this return to Tahiti. This false departure, this hemiplegic farewell would grieve me. I left my island with the certainty of return, and nevertheless acting materially as if I should never return. The farewell to this country has this special quality that it is a final, irremediable farewell, not to the country perhaps (although the chances of passing through again are very slim), but to loved ones, whom one will find later aged, deformed."] This forced stop allows him to devote himself to 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: "Je profite de cet interminable séjour en une ville insipide pour rédiger, rédiger à outrance toutes les notes vécues intensément à Tahiti." ["I take advantage of this interminable stay in an insipid city to write, write excessively all the notes intensely lived in Tahiti."] These notes are found for the most part in the manuscript of Immémoriaux and in the Journal des Îles.