Still on the subject of salt caravans, last night I reopened Le Sel du Désert by Odette Du Puigaudeau, a fantastic traveller, less well known than Isabelle Eberhart, Alexandra David-Neel or Ella Maillart, but just as adventurous.
A little Breton woman who lived the Saharan adventure to the fullest, admired by other great ‘deserters’ such as Théodore Monod, she was less talked about than her sisters. Perhaps because she had a happy life and died peacefully in 1991 in Morocco, her adopted country, 15 years after her partner, Marion Sénones?
And yet what an adventurer she was… the daughter of artists, raised in the family home in Brittany, she dreamed of adventure from an early age, while her parents protected her. She eventually escaped and took courses in oceanography… She could have left for Carthage. But her plan failed, and she joined Lanvin as a stylist, before setting off again, this time for the open sea.
It was the early 1930s, and she got a job as a journalist, nothing very original, except that she signed up on a tuna boat to take part in a fishing expedition! It was a tough job that put off many strong men.
With no more barriers standing in her way, she finally realised her dream of travelling to Africa and exploring the deserts with her partner Marion Sénones, who illustrated their travels (photos and drawings).
The two women won over the Tuaregs, who would call the year of their first trip to the desert ‘the year of the two women’. They would return often, becoming ethnologists.
And so they follow one of the great salt caravans. At the time, several thousand camels set off for Timbuktu, and the caravan was much larger, much richer, and a much more dangerous expedition than it is today.
What I liked about this book was the richness of the narrative, the truthfulness without romanticism, the sense of humour, the rhythm… and the extraordinary personality, in the true sense of the word, of the narrator!
Long after reading it, I discovered that her partner, Marion Sénones, also had an extraordinary life and personality, and that the couple were ultimately only separated by death, after so many years of adventures. While Odette du Puigaudeau is now relatively well known, Marion Senones had a real talent as an illustrator, of which very few examples can be found today, apart from the illustrations in the books written by Odette.
So, for your viewing pleasure, here is a portrait of a man and a family in a tent.
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