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“After Windsor, Loti, I’m sure, would have spared his sarcasm. ‘There is one thing left now,’ he once declared. ‘We must appeal to H.M. Edward VII. He only can do what he likes in France!’ The French Admiralty had just refused him permission to carry away from one of their ships the table on which he had written the ‘Désenchantées.’”

The captain, it seemed, was ready to waive this point.

“But I do not consider,” he resumed, “that Loti’s books are a true picture of Turkey as she is.”

“They would not, indeed, suit his arch-enemy Messrs. Cook,” I replied; “as Turner painted, he wrote, for those who have eyes to see. Tell him you never saw his Turkey, and he would reply: ‘Don’t you wish you could?’...

“Had Loti himself been English, he would, naturally, have reached a larger public among us. The warmth of his colouring is too often lost in translation. As a schoolgirl I learnt by heart the wonderful Preface to his “Ispahan”: ‘Qui vent venir avec moi voir les roses d’Ispahan,’ and I have dreamt of those roses ever since.”