Renée Hamon, the first woman to travel around Polynesia by cargo ship, spent twenty months in Tahiti, the Tuamotou and the Marquesas, following in Paul Gauguin’s footsteps. In these pages, she gives a picturesque account of her time there, with a lucid, sometimes mocking, view of the perverse effects of the French presence—decaying mores and customs, carelessness on the part of the health authorities. Aux îles de lumière was published in 1940 with the support of Colette, who took a liking to this adventuress. It was she who presented to the public these “sketches of islanders who are not girdled and crowned, night and day, with irremovable tiare”.
D’îles en atolls, Amants de l’aventure, the only work of fiction by the “reporter-vagabond”, features a gallery of originals “whose consciousness is not absolutely clear”, but who have “something to tell”. It has, Colette once said, “the taste, the color, the inimitable sound of true things”, and was published in 1943, shortly before the death of the “little privateer”.