Pierre Loti is the pseudonym of Louis Marie-Julien Viaud (1850-1923), a French naval officer and author known for his exotic novels and short stories. Born into a Protestant family, he entered the naval school in Brest at 17 and gradually rose in his profession, attaining the rank of captain in 1906. In 1876 his fellow naval officers persuaded him to turn into a novel passages from his diary dealing with some curious experiences in Constantinople, the result being the anonymously published Aziyade (1879), part romance and part autobiography. Loti had been sent to the South Seas as part of his naval training, living in Papeete, Tahiti, for two months in 1872 where he "went native," and in 1880 published the Polynesain idyll Rarahu (later reprinted as Le Mariage de Loti) and this work introduced him to a wider audience. Further works in his semi-autobiographical style followed, some, like Madame Chrysantheme (1887), taking the form of part narrative, part travelogue, and in 1891 he was elected to the Academie francaise. This work was first published in the original French as Le Desert in 1895 and is reprinted in English translation from the Brentano's, New York, edition of 1921.