But even though they bravely exposed themselves to all the hazards of their adventure, one gets the impression that they were traveling in a kind of hermetic cocoon isolated from the humanity around them. The fact that there were two of them — two very close friends speaking the same language, sharing the same passion for literature (Voisins was a novelist then enjoying a certain vogue; his works, mercifully, have since fallen into oblivion) — eventually transformed their bivouacs into a kind of countrified version of a Parisian salon.
Once back in Peking, where his wife soon joined him, with their older boy — a daughter and a second son would be born in China in the following years — Segalen turned to his study of Chinese. He seems to have focused on the classical language, which would serve him well in his archaeological and epigraphic researches. As for spoken Chinese, it is hard to know what level of competence he achieved, but the contempt he evinced for the study of it is hardly a good sign. Soon, sad to say, material considerations obliged him to abandon Sinology temporarily and resume medical practice, which had come to be an abomination for him, and, what was worse, he found himself forced to leave Peking, which he loved, and go and work in Tientsin, a sinister town where he rediscovered everything that he had fled: a hateful atmosphere of “Swiss or Belgian provincial mediocrity.”
In 1914, just after he had at last succeeded, with his two friends Voisins and Lartigue, in mounting another expedition, more systematically archaeological this time, he was recalled to France by the First World War. But in 1917 he was sent back to China, in an official capacity, for a few months. This would be his last visit, and the occasion for him to make a rather bitter summary: writing to his wife, he concluded that “China, for me, is over, sucked dry. .. I am detaching myself from it, withdrawing, going away. There are other countries in the world. Above all, there are other worlds.”
* * *
A few years previously, he had witnessed the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty. He had not taken the establishment of the Republic seriously — he viewed it as a deplorable lapse of good taste. “Sun Yat-sen is a perfect cretin,” he had promptly averred at the sight of the president’s frock-coat and detachable collar, which he considered too ordinary. As for the Revolution, it seemed to him no more than “one of those uprisings that China absorbs, digests and eructs from time to time like wind from some great flatulent gut.”
The overthrow of the Empire appalled him and filled him with despair — not that he had had any illusions about the Manchu regime, whose corruption, negligence and obscurantism were only too obvious; it was just that “the sublime fiction of the Emperor as the son of a Pure Sovereign Heaven was too admirable to be allowed to disappear. .. I hate the rebels for their conformist attitudes, their humanitarianism, their Protestant obsession with cleanliness, and above all because they help diminish the difference between China and us; and you know how exoticism alone is truly dear to my heart.”
In conclusion, Segalen said that his only hope was “soon to see a new despot arise who will spur his little yellow citizens on — I would welcome such a man with the deepest gratitude!” In the meantime, however, “the whole of the so-called modern, new and Republican China must be deliberately eliminated. .. This is sheer apery, pitiful Bovarysm, small-mindedness, cowardice of every sort, and boredom — boredom most of all.”
Well before the Revolution, however, Segalen had been disillusioned by the China of the present; as compared with his Polynesian experience, he wrote, “it is true, this country is devoid of all sensual gratification.” Even Peking had only the mythical prestige of its “imperiality” with which to offset “the bleak sadness of its filthy orgies with their croaking chanteuses.” As for the people, “the Chinese character is not to my liking… It inspires in me neither admiration nor any sense of grandeur or strength. Its every manifestation in my vicinity is tainted by infantilism or senility. [The Chinese] cry like little girls, fight like pug dogs, grimace like clowns, and are an irredeemably ugly people.”
So why was Segalen over there at all? “At bottom it was not China that I came here to find, but a vision of China. That vision is now mine, and I have sunk my teeth into it.” This is a key statement, and one that solves a mystery: this subtle poet had absolutely no knowledge of the sublime poetry of the Chinese; this fine connoisseur of art seems never to have looked at a single Chinese painting.[7] (In his whole correspondence he makes but one reference to that incomparable art, and then only in abstract terms, and accompanied by a foolish remark: “I am working on Chinese painting. Ancient, naturally. Contemporary does not exist.”)
What is even more bewildering is that this passionate music lover was ignorant of the very existence of classical Chinese music — the music of scholars, a music of the soul and of silence, as played on a seven-string zither, the guqin. And he dared complain of living in “a country without musicality” which knew nothing but noise! He never sought to meet Chinese masters who could have initiated him into the varied disciplines of their culture; he had no social contact with either scholars or artists; indeed he seems never to have had a single conversation with any educated Chinese person.
So it was not China that was finished—“over, sucked dry”—for him, a China that he had never bitten into, but solely his “vision.” And what was that vision? He described it in what he conceived as his magnum opus, Le Fils du Ciel (The Son of Heaven). Unfortunately, Segalen’s Son of Heaven resembles the Emperor of China much as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado resembles the Emperor of Japan — except for the fact that the former is not very amusing.
Yet, for all that, Victor Segalen left us the miraculous accident of his René Leys,[8] a novel of failure and derision — and one faithful, this time, to the author’s actual experience: the narrator, striving desperately to penetrate an impenetrable China, eventually succeeds only in getting himself led down the garden path by a seductive if pathetic trickster. This masterpiece escaped Segalen almost involuntarily, and in retrospect left him perplexed: a month before his death, after having his great friend Hélène Hilpert read the manuscript, he wrote her: “I find it amusing that René Leys amused you a little. But how far away it seems, how youthful…”
As a rule, conventional critics and commentators do not linger long over this book, for it makes them a little uneasy. After all, it’s a kind of joke, surely? And yet it is by virtue of this “joke” that Segalen is guaranteed a passage to posterity. It is not I who make this claim, but Claudel and Rilke — hardly casual readers.
Back in France, exhausted by his prodigious efforts as physician, traveller, Sinologist, archaeologist and writer, Segalen fell into a profound depression exacerbated by a condition that medicine could not diagnose.[9] He simply felt life slipping away from him. At this juncture his wife Yvonne, frightened by the gravity of his affliction, had to call for support upon Hélène Hilpert, a very old and intimate childhood friend. Hilpert herself was in a tragic situation: she had four little children, but her husband had gone missing at the front a year earlier and she did not know whether he was dead or a prisoner. (As it turned out, his remains were found only ten years later.)