Segalen, Victor (1878–1919)

Physician, musician, archaeologist and sinologist, essayist, novelist, poet, librettist, and world traveller whose works were largely published after his death, Victor Segalen has achieved largely belated and fragmentary recognition. Although his life was almost exactly contemporaneous with that of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), for example, he was in most respects remote from the Parisian avant-garde, his intellectual touchstones sooner recalling the French fin-de-siècle (Joris-Karl Huysmans, Claude Debussy, Paul Gauguin, Rémy de Gourmont, and above all Jules de Gaultier). A native of Brittany, Segalen never spent a great deal of time in Paris and after leaving Europe for the first time in 1902, at the age of twenty-four, he would return only for relatively brief periods during his remaining seventeen years.