Henry de Monfreid - Life

Life

In 1911, following the tracks of Arthur Rimbaud, Monfreid went to Djibouti, then a French colony, in order to trade coffee. He built a dhow for himself and used it to traverse the Red Sea. He lived many adventures, eventually prospered, bought a house near the shore in Obock cove (very useful to have signal lights hung on the terrace to warn him if the French coast-guard's cutter was waiting for him...), and had a big dhow, the Altair ( "Soaring Eagle ), built up by a local shipyard. Between 1912 and 1940 he ran guns through the area, dove for pearls & sea slugs, and smuggled hashish ( and even morphine he bought in a German famous laboratory) into Egypt, earning several stays in prison in the process. Monfreid always denied having taken part in the slave trade from Africa to Arabia.

He converted to Islam during this period, which included undergoing a circumcision and taking a Muslim name: "Abd-el-Haï" ("Slave of The Living One").

During the 1930s, Monfreid was persuaded by Joseph Kessel to write about his adventures, and the stories became bestsellers.

During World War II, Monfreid, who was now more than sixty years old, was captured by the British and deported to Kenya as he had served the Italians and his wife, born Armgart Freudenfeld, was daughter to the former German governor of Alsace-Lorraine.

After the war Monfreid retired to a mansion in a small village of "la France profonde", in Ingrandes ("département" of the Indre), France. There he played piano, wrote, painted, and quietly raised in his garden a plantation of opium poppies, and took the habit of using the local grocer's scales to wheigh his crop and divide it into daily portions. The grocer's did not heed, since Monfreid's household were good customers, and Monfreid himself bought huge amounts of honey, which he took to drive off the costive effects of opium. Eventually Monfreid was given away to the local "gendarmerie" (field-police station), but he escaped prosecution : at that time opium was used only by unconventional artists (like his friend Jean Cocteau) - and besides, Monfreid boasts in his books about his ability to manipulate and dispirit by words of mouth prying law enforcers... .

Monfreid settled down to a life of writing, turning out around 70 books over the next 30 years—an astonishing number, to rival any of the great writers. Only a handful of his books have been translated into English and are difficult to find. An interesting side-light to that somewhat narcissistic huge work is the book written by his daughter Gisèle de Monfreid: her book "Mes secrets de la Mer Rouge" describes what life could be near such an egotistic and overpowering personality, addicted to action, in such an hostile world as the Horn of Africa .

During barren periods, when writing was not bringing in enough money, Monfreid relied upon mortgaging the family collection of Gauguin paintings. Only after his death were these discovered to be fake.