A childhood recalled exactly: a house in Rochefort, a garden, a museum of shells, an older brother who went to sea and did not come back, and the moment a boy decides he will leave. Loti was Julien Viaud, a naval officer who rose to captain and wrote from every port the service sent him to; this 1890 memoir is the key to all of it — everything he chased for forty years is already here, in one garden.