Tour and Talk: Pierre Loti’s Oceanic Room

By Claude Stefani, Chief Curator of the City of Rochefort’s municipal museums.

In his house in Rochefort, the Polynesian artefacts brought back by Pierre Loti from the 1872 expedition aboard the Flore are, for the most part, on display in Gustave’s former study, which has been transformed into the ‘Oceanian Room’ – a recreation of the cabin decorated by the young midshipman on the frigate Flore. The Rapanui artefacts it contains are among the only ones the writer mentions in his last will and testament, *Recommandations suprêmes*: ‘There are some very curious objects from Easter Island which I am rather fond of. ’ The majority of the Oceanic collection was sold off on 29 January 1929 at Drouot at the end of an auction devoted primarily to the contents of the Chinese room, and acquired by Surrealists such as André Breton, Tristan Tzara and Paul Chadourne, promoters of the ‘primitive arts’. The Musée Hèbre is presenting a new permanent exhibition space dedicated to this voyage across the Pacific and to the objects brought back by Pierre Loti, centred around a reconstruction of his cabin on the Flore.

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