Double autograph letter signed by Victor Segalen to Emile Mignard. Nine pages and a few lines written in black ink on two bifolia and one single leaf. Horizontal folds from mailing.
Emile Mignard (1878-1966), also a physician 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 companion a prolific and steady correspondence in which he described with humor and intimacy his daily life across the globe. It was at Mignard’s wedding, on 15 February 1905, that Segalen first met his future wife, Yvonne Hébert.
Lengthy letter discussing the progress of Les Immémoriaux and a woodcut by Paul Gauguin.

Segalen was continuing the writing of his great fiction, Les Immémoriaux, which would be published in 1907 by Mercure de France under the pseudonym Max-Anély (Max in homage to Max Prat and Anély, one of his wife’s given names), as Segalen, a military doctor, was not permitted to sign a fictional work under his own name. "I have now decidedly set myself to the active part of my work. Here again, though the sources abound, I lack the sympathetic and discerning listener to whom I might submit, page by page, my copy. If I bring it to a successful end, I shall have every reason to be pleased with my campaign, having resisted the predicted intellectual bogging down. \[...] At last, will I manage to complete something, to draw from myself something more than a wild desire to create? I am beginning to believe so. I am leaving on a three-week tour, quiet, in lands already known, with a formidable Polynesian library; I may perhaps return with a quarter materially finished. I have less than before the obsession with the word, and I write with greater calm."

But it was not only the writing of Les Immémoriaux that occupied Segalen. In October 1903, he had also acquired works and objects belonging to Paul Gauguin, who had just died in the Marquesas. In a letter of 2 October 1903, he wrote to Emile Mignard: « Je viens de gagner 450f dont 250 pour un accouchement assez ennuyeux. Sur ces 450 j'en ai consacré 200f à l'achat de toiles, bois sculptés, croquis, album, du peintre Paul Gauguin, l'un des meilleurs Impressionnistes, qui, réfugié aux Marquises, vient d'y mourir. J'ai acquis à bas prix, à la vente publique, d'admirables choses : deux portraits de lui, une grande toile où défilent des Tahitiens, des bois sculptés dont je ferai tirer des épreuves, des croquis, des notes... Je m'étais fait son champion, ici, car très ingrat, très isolé, haineux même, il était généralement détesté dans la colonie. » The auction of Gauguin’s possessions and works, left behind in his Maison du Jouir after his death, took place in the autumn of 1903. One of the rare buyers present at this liquidation was Victor Segalen, who thereby rescued several of the painter’s key works that might otherwise have been destroyed in general indifference. Segalen, who had hoped to arrive in time to meet Gauguin, honored his memory by attempting—despite his modest salary—to acquire as many works of his late mentor as possible. He even mentions here a woodcut by the painter: "I am sending you, in connection with Gauguin’s death, simply a woodcut of his, in duplicate, one of them for our friend Max \[Prat] \[...] It is a monstrous and replete idol, set against a storm-tossed sky above the break of a great Tahitian valley. The word "Maruru" (pronounced: Maoorooroo) means: thank you, I am content."
 egalen indeed owned several proofs of this woodcut representing the goddess Hina; a fragment of one of them was affixed to the flyleaf of his travel journal, and the same silhouette of the idol appears on the cover of the manuscript of Les Immémoriaux.
This reverence for Gauguin is also evident in another project, the drafting of an article paying him homage: "I am writing to Morache. I was wrong not to have sent anything to the Mercure about Gauguin’s death."

Indeed, an apologetic article entitled « Gauguin dans son dernier décor » would appear in June 1904 in the Mercure de France, in which Segalen describes the painter’s final days in his Maison du Jouir. As our letter shows, this article may have been written under the encouragement of Saint-Pol-Roux: "I received from Saint-Pol-Roux a nice and encouraging letter" In this letter, dated 15 October 1903, the Symbolist poet asked him: "What has become of you, my very dear friend? Despite the silence—which, after all, is silence only for fools—you are among those who inhabit my daily thoughts. [...] Your image has been especially present to me of late, owing to the death of Paul Gauguin in Papeete. Were you with him? Surely you were, were you not? For you must have known him. Oh, tell us something of this unfortunate figure of Destiny, who was often a great artist, and in his own way a Master. How is it that you did not send some account of this death to the Mercure de France, which would have welcomed it with enthusiasm?"

 This omission was thus doubly rectified: in addition to the eventual publication of the much-requested article, Segalen also donated the pediment and panels of the Maison du Jouir to his poet friend for his Breton manor. These superb decorations are today preserved at the Musée d'Orsay.