On an April evening in 1865, Louis Marie Julien Viaud, then 15 years old, found some newspaper reproductions of "the temples of mysterious Angkor," just then being "discovered" by the French. The effect upon the adolescent was extreme. "I saw myself becoming a kind of legendary hero . . . fascinating thousands of people, worshipped by many."
It is quite in accord with his character that the boy later to become famous under the pen name of "Pierre Loti" saw himself first and only then the ostensible object of his inspiration. No matter whether he sets a tale in the South Sea, Turkey or Japan, it is first the heroic figure of the author one notices, sometimes all but obscuring his exotic background.
So when he finally made the journey (called a "pilgrimage" because of his boyhood resolve) in 1901, 35 years later, it is himself he saw silhouetted against the towers of Angkor. "I raise my eyes to look at the towers which overhang me, drowned in verdure, and I shudder suddenly with an indefinable fear as I perceive, falling upon me from above, a huge fixed smile."