I never really ventured to tell Émile Nolly what I thought of those books, so I said nothing about them--a language which he perfectly understood and accepted with that grim, not untender smile of his. No one better than he knew the charm of art and romance. And I imagine he felt a certain fierce pleasure in flinging all that to the winds, in order, as he thought, to be more useful, reach a wider public, and influence it with the directness of a popular sermon. What use, after all, was there in his two stories of Indo-China, or in _Gens de Guerre au Maroc_? They were inclined, if anything, to inspire a morbid pessimism. On the whole, it is the first of his novels which I shall most often re-read--_Hiên le Maboul_, a book so poignant, clear and mild in its sadness, that it haunts our imagination for years after the last page is closed. No one, perhaps, has so well expressed the peculiar beauty of Tonquin.... When, after Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, the Frenchman reaches the Delta, his first instinctive expectation is of something stranger still; are we not here at the end of the world? ‘χθονὸς μεν ἐς τηλoυρὸν ἠκoμεν πέδoν, Σκύθην ἔς oῖμoν, ἂβατον εἰς ἒρημίαν.’ But what is this gray land where the silvery winter sunshine floats veiled by an imperceptible haze? Is it Brittany? Or a misty March day in the _Landes_, when the sun shines? And see, that ruined tower set on the round breast of a hill, with the far-off scaurs and peaks in the background--is it Auvergne? Nor, in the character of the conquered people, does there appear at first the difference that separates the Frenchman from the solemn Arab or the barbarous Kanak; the Annamite, with his wide intelligence, his keen and quizzical wit, his love of hearth and home, his respect for tradition and his religious indifference, appears at once a man and a brother. A certain aloofness adds to his charm.... Such was the new and yet half-familiar world with which Émile Nolly made us acquainted. _Hiên le Maboul_ is a yellow brother of Loti’s _Mon frère Yves_. And yet, on reopening the charming book (so appealing in its tender hopelessness, its elegant sobriety), I find, even here, the Pragmatist apostle who wrote Nolly’s later works! For what is the nexus of the novel? It is surely the despair of the young French lieutenant when he finds himself impotent to save the native _tirailleur_ who, in an hour of moral anguish, comes to ask his infallible superior ‘les paroles qui guérissent.’ Alas, with all his science, the ‘Ancestor with the two stripes’ does not know the words that save; his philosophy affords him nothing but idle formulas void of faith and healing. And thenceforth his whole system of civilisation seems to him wanting and inefficacious. For Hiên goes out in silence and hangs himself to a banyan-tree.