DAVID-NEEL Alexandra (EN)

Biographical Article

The study and practice of Buddhism (resulting from intense youthful reflections on religions and ancient philosophy) and an early taste for the theatre and the performing arts are two personal interests that intersected in multiple ways throughout the life of Alexandra David-Neel. Without always being the explicit theme, these two interests formed the fabric of this author’s life and work. While Buddhism was inseparable from her public persona, the theatre played a more subtle role.

Her early practice of writing was associated with these two major interests: first in a private capacity (as evidenced by the notebooks and diaries kept since 1882 [MADN, Archives, ADN-G2-AG1-6 and CADN 18], and a diary covering the years 1889-1892 [MADN, Archives, CADN, s.n., reproduced in David-Neel A., 1986], kept in her house in Digne, the oldest of which however she destroyed at different times [notably in 1910 when it was necessary for her to "destroy all the material vestiges of ties and to leave, having buried the past", David-Neel, 2000, p. 266]) then, from 1893, occasional publications in reviews [Le Lotus bleu, L’Étoile socialiste]. Without any real break in the trajectory, we can distinguish three successive phases, of about 33 years each, in the author’s long existence: the phase of childhood and early activity (1868-1900); that of the orientalist woman of letters (1901-1936); and finally, that of the accomplished author (1937-1969). Each of these three periods corresponds to a journey in Asia: the first with two first trips to India and Indochina in 1894 and 1895-1896; the second to the long stay which lasted from 1911 to 1925 and during which she lived mainly in Sri Lanka, India, Sikkim, Nepal, Japan, China, and Tibet; the third to the last of her great Asian crossings, from 1937 to 1946: from Paris to Beijing (Beijing) by the Trans-Siberian and, from there, to the Tibetan border by the Wutaishan, Hankeou, Chengdu, and Dartsedo (Kangding), then repatriated by plane after visiting Kunming and seeing Darjeeling and Calcutta again.

The Student and the Lyrical Actress (1868-1900)

For the first period, biographical criticism has long been dependent on David-Neel's retrospective presentations of her own youth and family, on rare occasions her published work, and more abundantly her rich and fascinating correspondence with her husband, revealed to the public posthumously (David-Neel A., 2000). Recent archival research (see the permanent exhibition of the museum of the writer's house, MADN; Mascolo de Filippis J., 2018; Éprendre N., 2019) has revealed new data illuminating David-Neel's childhood, youth, and operatic career, mostly under the pseudonym Alexandra Myrial (David-Neel A., 2018). The author would continue to be drawn to pseudonyms and multiple identities throughout her trajectory. Declared in the civil registry under the first names Louise Eugénie Alexandrine Marie (MADN, Archives, CODN 1578), she was called Louise by her godfather, but Nini (presumed diminutive of Eugénie) by her father and Alexandrine by her mother (MADN, Archives, CODN 364); this last name was probably the most frequently used, as evidenced by piano scores and annotated works in her library. Louis Pierre David (1815-1904), a teacher in Touraine and journalist for the republican daily Progrès d'Indre-et-Loire, a political, agricultural, commercial and literary newspaper, was anticlerical. Proscribed in December 1851, he went into exile in Belgium where in 1853 he met and married Alexandrine Panquin, née Borgmans (1832-1917), who ran a fashion boutique, came from a Catholic background, and had been adopted by an Assize worker in Louvain (Van Grasdorff G., 2011, p. 53). Together, they ran a textile shop that seems to have flourished. After 1865, this somewhat disparate couple moved to France, to Saint-Mandé, where Alexandra was born. In 1874, the David family moved to Brussels. It was undoubtedly Alexandra herself who chose the first name by which she would be called all her life, perhaps when she came of age, likely because in this way she subtly distinguished herself from her mother and her name at birth. Perhaps she also modelled her first name on that of a close friend, Alexandra de Kozoubsky (1868-n.c) whose Russian origin and place of birth (Jerusalem) sparked her imagination. Barely a month older than her, the latter entered the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles at the same time as her (CRB, Archives, Demandes d’admission). At the very least, we can assume that through this onomastic game she endorsed the exotic imagination, both rebellious and noble, which her first name then carried. In 1895, she indeed claimed imaginary Russian origins in a portrait published in Le Courrier d’Haiphong (December 24, 1895, p. 23). We do not have any more certainty about the choice of surname she took that same year, when leaving for the lyric opera season of the troupe of a certain Madame Debry in Tonkin (Thévoz S., 2019). Her companion at the time, the musician and composer Jean Hautstont, appears as the double bass player of the troupe under the same name (ANOM, GGI, R.62, 1896).

In 1886, having just left her second boarding school (the first Protestant, the second Catholic), Alexandra David, who was prevented by her mother from studying medicine (the same year, Augusta Dejerine-Kumpke [1859-1927] was the first woman admitted to the Paris hospital boarding school), enrolled in Italian language, declamation, music theory, singing, deportment, and mimicry classes at the Conservatoire, which she left after winning a first prize in singing in 1889. This was the year she came of age: as evidenced by a note in her personal notebook, she directly associated this moment with emancipation (David-Neel A., 1986, p. 28). Thus began an intense search to give meaning to her life. Undoubtedly still financially supported by her parents, with whom she still lived, she earned a little money from a few concerts given irregularly in Belgium and in northern France. At the same time, she frequented Protestant circles linked with the Baptist movement and oriented towards charitable works, such as the Salvation Army, then groups with a syncretist tendency, such as liberal Protestantism and unitarianism, in Brussels and during brief trips to Switzerland. (David-Neel A., 1986 and MADN, Archives, CADN 18). Willingly solitary, even misanthropic, she sharpened her critical mind by extensively reading ancient philosophers, religious literature, and the major works of Eastern religions, in the broad sense that term had at the time. Through a friend, she first heard about the Theosophical Society in 1892. She went to London that same year, stayed at the Society's headquarters, met its most important leaders, George R. S. Mead (1863-1933) and Annie Besant (1847-1933) and, no doubt, some of the members of the French and Belgian-Dutch branches present during the Society's European Annual Convention held that summer in London. Having become a member herself, she briefly broke off relations with her parents and officially took up residence at 3 Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris, the headquarters of the French branch. The Theosophical Society opened the doors of Asia to Alexandra David and offered her a local and international breeding ground for her intellect (David-Neel A., 1986 and MADN, Archives, CADN 18).

While accepting singing contracts at short notice and essentially living by her wits, Alexandra David, dissatisfied with the theosophical approach to the religions of Asia and Buddhism in particular, enrolled in the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. She attended, to the extent of her availability, Japanese courses, Far Eastern religions and lessons on Buddhism given by Léon de Rosny (1837-1914) who was an eclectic scholar and a pioneer of Asian and ethnographic studies in France. Through Jacques Tasset (18??-19??), whom she met at the Society, she established a tumultuous but lasting relationship with Léon de Rosny (MADN, Archives, n.c.). She also took the course of Philippe-Édouard Foucaux (1811-1894) at the Collège de France on the Lalitavistarara Sūtra, the first extended account of the life of the Buddha to have caught the attention of European scholars. Alexandra David's trip to India in 1894 is thus explained by her desire to compare the reality on the ground with her personal ideas and with the knowledge and representations circulating in Europe. The year before her trip, leaving Paris for Brussels, she met Jean Hautstont (1867-between 1939 and 1941) through his contacts with the Belgian branch of the Theosophical Society. Their artistic affinities were first associated with a common interest in esotericism, before Jean introduced Alexandra to anarchism. They lived in a free union, even if she would later introduce him as her first husband (MDH, SAP, 2/AM/1/K30e). They took up residence in Passy under their chosen surname, but they both lived between Paris and Brussels and Jean introduced Alexandra into the artistic, esoteric and libertarian circles of Brussels, bohemian as well as bourgeois. This is how she frequented the salon of Élise Soyer and Raymond Nyst (1864-1948) and became close friends with Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) and her family. The few articles that Alexandra David published during this period under the names of Mitra and Myrial testify to her evolution: from an "internal" debate of ideas on the values ​​and beliefs of theosophists, she turned, following her trip to Asia, towards socialist and anarchist circles for which she composed a libertarian version of the Buddha and his teaching (Mitra, 1895). The Indochina tour did not open the doors of the Opéra-Comique in Paris to her, as the support of personalities such as Jules Massenet (1842-1912) led her to hope; but this experience assured her of engagements as the first singer of lyrical drama in the seasons of provincial theatres; in Belgium, Athens, and finally Tunis in 1900. Alexandra Myrial, who was now discussed in the local and musical press, thus took her first steps in the public space on stage (Thévoz S. in David-Neel A., 2018, pp. 342-345).

From Woman of Letters to Writer (1901-1936)

Her arrival in Tunis represented a period of significant rupture, as there Alexandra David put a definitive end to her lyrical career (while not literally a farewell to the theatre) and settled with Philippe Néel (1861-1941) with whom she had an affair following a performance. After living with him in a common-law union, she married him in 1904. This period of crisis, characterised by a change in lifestyle, apparently antithetical to her youthful ideals, crossed by neurasthenic tendencies and complicated for several reasons on the affective level (her relationship with Philippe, the death of her father, then of her spiritual father, Élisée Reclus), was simultaneously a period of intense literary activity. The actress who became a woman of letters continued to sign her writings Alexandra Myrial until 1906. From 1907 to 1924, her pen name was Alexandra David. She considered her Arab house, the Mousmé, bought by Philippe at La Goulette, as her matham: maṭha is the name given to Hindu monasteries; it is also the title of one of her short stories in 1903 (Neel-David A., 1903). The work she produced in this house took many forms and unfolded in various directions: debates, militant pamphlets, short stories, novels, popular science. The budding author wrote several studies on Asia focusing on Japan, Korea, India, China, and Tibet. While the subjects are very diverse, many of her contributions share a link between religion and politics. At the time of the law on the separation of Church and State, they sought to make a contribution by presenting models from Asia to the debate around the "solidarism" of Léon Bourgeois (1851-1925), for example. Concurrently, she militated in favour of a "rational feminism” and was committed to the defence of secular education and morals, the management of orphanages by the State, marriage reform, and a reflection on the education of girls or natives in the colonies; all these causes explain her entry into Freemasonry in the same years. She also became a member of several learned societies, mainly in the fields of anthropology and geography. Published in the major Parisian, Belgian and Tunisian press, in newspapers such as La Fronde and in magazines such as the Mercure de France, her publications reflect less the writer isolated in her distant retirement, devoting herself to water sports and excursions in the Sahara (which was however of first order importance for the writer), than a woman constantly in correspondence and traveling between Tunis and Paris, London, Rome, working hard to consolidate her network of relations, and frequenting worldly and literary salons (notably that of Rachilde (1860-1953) and intellectual and academic circles (MADN, Archives, ADN-G2-AG3-16).

On the intellectual level, the intersection of her interest in Asia, her fight for secularism, and her international ambitions culminated in the 1910s with her collaboration with Documents du progress, a journal distributed in several languages ​​and directed by the pacifist sociologist and internationalist Rudolf Broda (1880-1932), and several related journals. This was the moment that she restores Buddhism to a prominent place in her life (she presents her Tunisian matham as the seat of a Buddhist "Propaganda Committee" [TThe Maha-Bodhi and the United Buddhist World, 1910, p . 448] and actively developing her relationships with global Buddhist networks) as well as in her work (her Bouddhisme du Bouddha et le Modernisme bouddhiste published in 1911 can be considered her first author's book). It was also the moment when her plan of a great trip to Asia took shape, encouraged by her husband. With the support of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stephen Pichon (1857-1933), and also, to a lesser extent, of the archaeologist and sinologist Édouard Chavannes (1865-1918), she obtained a modest subsidy from the Ministry for a scientific mission of one year to “study, on the spot, the modern manifestations of the great philosophical and religious schools of Hindu origin: reformist or modernist Buddhism and neo-Vedantism.” (AN, F/17/17281) Such a mission would interest Orientalist philologists less than the ethnographers and anthropologists who were close to Alexandra David. Supplemented by "some studies of modern yoguism [sic]" and "a survey of native teaching, especially with regard to the education of girls", the trip planned mainly to India would take her next to Burma, Indochina, and Japan. Nothing suggested that Alexandra David would become an authority on Tibet, much less on Tibetan Tantric Buddhism. This specialisation was entirely the result of an encounter in the field. Intrigued by Bengali neo-tantrism during her stay in Calcutta, notably with John Woodroffe (1865-1936), she learned of the flight of the Dalai Lama to Kalimpong, on the border of India and Sikkim, where she went without delay (David-Neel A., 2000, p. 108-140).

Alexandra David discovered tantric practices in Sikkim, into which she was initiated by the third sgom chen ("great yogi") of Lachen, Kunzang Ngawang Rinchen (1867-1947), in a cave on the borders of Tibet which she baptised "De-chen Ashram" (the hermitage of the "Great Peace", according to its own translation). The Tibetan religious universe that she observed and whose texts she studied appeared to her as a hitherto unexplored field of investigation, on the margins of the ritualistic and ecclesial forms of what was then called "Lamaism" and to which the Tibetan religious fact was reduced. In 1913, in her interim mission report (AN, F/17/17281), she stated: “Tibetan Buddhism is understood very little, or rather, very poorly. The writers who have published books about it have spoken only of the external practices of popular worship, for lack of having been able to penetrate beyond them, the reserve of the learned lamas being extreme towards foreigners.” From this was born a writing program, feeding into future work and extended by a long stay at the monastery of Kumbum (sKu 'bum byams pa gling) in the province of Qinghai in 1920: “I bring something new, something completely new in which there is something for everyone: history, legends, philosophy, mysticism, occultism, geography, even ribald literature.” (David-Neel A., 2000, p. 753) This list encapsulates exactly the different genres and literary registers that would mingle in the writer’s work in the making and indicates the narrative reservoir, added to the sacramental experience, from which she drew to feed it.

The adventures of this phase, in the company of her adopted son Aphur "Albert" Yongden (1899-1955), outside the initial parameters that she had set for herself, are well known by the stories that she published upon her return and the numerous biographies devoted to her (among these, see Désiré-Marchand J., 1996). The feat of her trip to Lhasa in 1924 was, in the words of the Indianist scholar Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935), a "magnificent record of energy, will, endurance" (AN, F/17/17281). Above all, by braving obstacles and prohibitions, the "Parisienne" showed the world by example the tenacity of her libertarian aspirations and her individualistic philosophy. From that time on, the experience of the trip and the important collection of texts almost exclusively fed the double literary production of the writer: popular works on the one hand and works of an orientalist nature on the other, thus responding to the encouragement of Désirée Lévi who added as a postscript to a letter from Sylvain Lévi in ​​1911 (MADN, archives, CODN 441): “Come back to us […] with a fine harvest of impressions and documents, the first for me, the second for my husband. It is certainly in the free zone between these two directions that we must seek the original voice of the writer.” Her publications, often produced with the help and sometimes even with the complicit pen of Aphur Yongden, were divided between travelogues or adventure novels intended for the general public and more specialised works on subjects of orientalism, but always oriented towards an audience at the edges of specialised readership (for reference see the author's work on the chronological bibliography available on the MADN website: www.alexandra-david-neel.fr/bibliographie).

Simultaneously, the woman of letters had become, through a formidable media campaign, a heroic woman-adventurer and figure of authority: Alexandra David-Neel was now fully recognized in the public space. From Lhasa, she proclaimed to her husband: “I believe that at the present time, among all the white travellers, I know Tibet best” (David-Neel, 2000, p. 736). Quickly acquainting herself with the latest publications on Buddhism and Tibet, the explorer realised on the way back how much the territories that seemed deserted and unknown to her during the 14 years that she surveyed them were now the subject of fierce competition in the realm of bookstores. Alexandra David-Neel positioned her work within the parameters of adventure and the discovery of a hitherto unsuspected world. Willingly open to the marvellous, dreams, magic, and enchantment, her books have a unique dramaturgical and spectacular dimension. Through the enchantment of writing, the author nourished the positive ambition of bringing a new spiritual breath to her contemporaries who were bruised by war: in her eyes, the mission of literature was to help them find themselves and rise up (see Thévoz S., 2016). The preferred subject of many of her works, at least the one that has most lastingly retained the attention of is readership, is the tantric initiate, the lama-yogi who, "sportsman of the spirit", was among other things capable of produce "inner fire" (tumo, tib. gtun mo). Attracting a public familiar with the occult Asia of the theosophists, in line with some still recent popularising and fictive works on Indian and Tibetan tantrism, this heroic figure was considered somewhat romantic by orientalists such as Sylvain Lévi who would have preferred a version meeting academic standards. This conflict should not hide the fact that it was through contact with other scholarly circles, which provided her with support and scientific legitimacy, that the writer developed the character of the tantrika recurring in her work: she frequented Jacques Arsène d'Arsonval (1851-1940), physicist, inventor of medical electrotherapy, and president of the Paris Psychological Institute, whose several associate researchers were interested in the phenomenon of animal thermogenesis. The Tibetans became keepers of a knowledge that was ignored by European scholars and that was fantisised about by Western occultists.

In 1928, after an intense campaign of public and university lectures, David-Neel ended up acquiring a property in Digne (MADN, Archives, Notarial act, CODN 1580 and n.c.). In 1929, she planned to make it a retreat centre for meditaion (Buddhist Annual of Ceylon, 1929, p. 252). She gave it a Sanskrit name, "Dhyāna Vihāra" (Monastery of Meditation), whose Tibetan equivalent, "Samten Dzong" (bsam gtan rdzong, Fort of Concentration), would become the identity of the writer’s house. It was from this new and definitive matham (after the Mousmé in Tunis and the hermitage of Dechen-Ashram in Sikkim) that she dispatched her most important work, surrounded by her Tibetan manuscripts and the many objects that had followed her throughout her travels. As in the past in Tunis, she frequently left her solitary retreat to travel across Europe, notably for conference tours, and continued to develop the vast network of relations already established in France and abroad to which she remained remarkably faithful during her lifetime. She reluctantly returned to Europe, and the desire to go back to Asia never left her. In 1929, she conceived an ambitious new mission concerning the "psychic and religious sciences", motivated by an unprecedented ethnographic, photographic, cinematographic and book collection (AN, F/17/17281). This second mission, for which the Psychological Institute of Paris and its illustrious president, Arsène d'Arsonval, stand as guarantors (Lévi, for his part, took it "neither for an orientalist nor for a Sanskritist" and adopted the same ambiguous posture as Chavannes previously), led her to Siberia, Mongolia, North-West China, and the borders of Tibet. She went in search of the mythical city of Shambhala and information about the doctrines and practices relating to what she calls "an energy without causes perceptible and perpetually active in all things" (David-Neel A., 1994, p. 552).

The Accomplished Writer (1937-1969)

The Sino-Soviet conflict forced her to postpone her departure. She boarded the Trans-Siberian in 1937 to return nine years later, at the age of 78. Thus she spent the two World Wars in Asia. The situation was hardly peaceful there: the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945) then the long Chinese civil war (1927-1950) hampered her initial projects and confined them mainly to the province of Sichuan. These widespread conflicts ("war is the normal state of beings, the universe is a battlefield," she wrote in her 1956 diary [David-Neel A., 1986, p. 229] directly affected her production of literature, as well as the tone of her many letters present in the archives of the house of Digne (MADN, archives, CODN, varia). If the previous period brought to the feeling of philosophical and existential disillusion a kind of cheerful and voluntarist momentum (“Buddhists are pessimists of the calmly cheerful kind”, David-Neel A., 2000, p. 761), resignation and nostalgia, amplified by the death of Philippe Néel in 1941 and that of Aphur Yongden in 1955, characterise the writings of her last period, progressively marked by feelings of “vanity, the uselessness of any literary activity” (BDG, CH/BGE/Ms. fr./7088/79). Previously, Tibet had been the heart of her literary project; during this third period, her work extended to other geographical areas (India, China), echoing her first years as a woman of letters, and focused more strongly on the contemporary world. More precisely, by way of Asia, the author sought to bring an authoritative point of view on the contemporary world, centred on her individual experience and her acquired knowledge: after her last voyage, the memory of the explorer became the preferred reservoir from which her literary production drew. While the work published and pursued until her death sometimes realised projects conceived long before (sometimes even from her stay in India in 1911, such as her translation of the Aṣṭāvakragītā in 1951 (others would never be completed), the newer material displayed a clear tendency towards autobiographical retrospection and the evocation of resuscitated memories of the past, without concern for chronology, recounted by an omnipresent narrator, simultaneously demiurge and main actor. As if by symmetry, David-Neel increases her reflections on death (or its converse: the quest for immortality). The principles of her writing did not fundamentally change, but the poles that ensured its balance reversed: comedy turned into tragedy.

One of David-Neel's late, unfinished writing projects bears the title Rencontre de Désincarné (MADN, Archives, Autograph Manuscripts, Envelopes 92-94): in the manner of sotie, the author humorously imagines talking with great figures of the past, including Mao Zedong. From then on, David-Neel's literary universe referred to a finite world, a world frozen within its borders, the time of real travel being irrevocably over, even a world adrift, like the "ship of fools", a literary and artistic reference to which she returned frequently in her writing, a world moreover threatened by a third World War. After her return from Asia, the writer only had her house, whose Tibetan name she now translated as "residence of reflection", with increasingly rare exceptions. In a letter to Ella Maillart (1903-1997), a travel writer of the next generation whom she deeply esteemed, David-Neel mischievously conceived the project of founding, on the model of the Société des explorateurs, a "club […] that would bring together the Himalayians: those who have lived in the Himalayas, those who have gone there and, like deputies, have approached the spiritual Himalayas, the thought of the Rishis [sic], who thought up the Upanishads and Buddhist philosophy.” (BDG, CH/BGE/Ms. fr./7088/80) A few months earlier, the explorer had given her protégé the perfect image of the state of mind (here we can note a belated manifestation of the anarchism professed in her youth) and the disillusioned vision of the world that marked the twilight of her existence in Samten Dzong: "I miss my Himalayan hermitage, but Asia has changed so much that I would no longer find anything that once held me there, the India of the Oupanishads [sic], of the richis [sic] of the forest, the India of the Buddha. Politicians now have the floor and politicians can be found in abundance in Europe. You have to remake Himalayas and hermitages in yourself. That's the wisdom... Have you fully achieved it?” (BDG, CH/BGE/Ms. fr./7088/79).

The Collection

The work published during the author's lifetime includes some 30 books and countless articles published throughout the world in the press and in journals; a large number of them are kept in the archives of the writer's house, including the only known copy of her Souvenirs d'une Parisienne au Thibet, which appeared in a confidential edition in Beijing in 1925. However, in the absence of an exhaustive bibliography, as yet impossible to establish, research has not yet probed the full extent of Alexandra David-Neel's written production. It should be noted, however, that this rich set of contributions offers multiple variations around the recurring themes described above, revealing the approach of a writer concerned with the choice of subject, tone and literary form, aiming to adapt her speech as close as possible to the multiple and varied audiences for which it was intended. In this, David-Neel applied the Buddhist concept of upāya (method, effective means) that had characterised the teachings of the Buddha himself, as she points out in her first article published in 1893 (Mitra, 1893).

In addition, the writer left a significant heritage consisting first of all of her house in Digne, whose expansions and redevelopments she handled herself, assuming the role of architect (Gomez N., 2019 and Tugas J., 2018). The house, with several borrowings from Tibetan architecture, houses the author's personal archives, her autograph manuscripts, her travel effects, and her photographic collection (Gascuel G., 2018), as well as numerous manuscripts and Asian objects (more than 300 pieces: everyday and ritual objects, statues of deities, thangka, sculptures, prints, calligraphy, protection charms and "talisman boxes"). A large number of mainly Tibetan pieces were bequeathed posthumously to the Musée de l'Homme (now kept at the Musée du Quai Branly), at the writer’s request (MADN, Archives, Annexe testament March 20, 1963, n.c.): these consist of some 200 objects of mainly ethnographic interest and 25 musical instruments. Others were bequeathed to the Musée Guimet: eight thangka (including a series of three 18th century canvases depicting the Buddha surrounded by narrative scenes; MA 3316), two Tibetan Cham dance masks (MA 3307-3308) (Bazin N., 2018), and more than 400 Tibetan manuscripts (Cramerotti C., 2018).

The archives of her house still preserve a good part of her Western library (her orientalist and philosophical library of more than 400 books and journals was bequeathed to the Musée de l'Homme, Gascuel G., 2018, p. 3), her musical scores (200 pieces, MADN, Archives, n.c.), and many of her theatrical costumes (about 30 items). In the wardrobe of Alexandra Myrial, put together between 1893 and 1901 in Brussels and probably also in Paris, we can mention the highly recognisable elements of the almost complete outfit of Lakmé (MADN, Archives, FADN 105, 729, 739 and PHDN 12b), a key role in the 1895-1896 tour to Haiphong and Hanoi (David-Neel A., 2018). It was during this same period, as shown by some photographs taken in her apartment in Passy and in Tunis (DNA, Archives, PHDN 19 and PHDN 23), that the orientalist actress gathered the first pieces of her Asian collection. Thus, some objects from India that she was able to bring back from her first trips and several everyday objects from China (e.g. a "fire clock", Chinese incense clock, DN 194) and Japan (several kakemono), a standing statuette of Amida Nyorai (Amitābha) (19th century, DN 150), objects probably partly donated by his friend Jacques Tasset on his return from his study trip to the Far East (1893-1896). David-Neel was particularly fond of a large statue of the seated Buddha Amida (Amitābha) (DN 149), which can be found as early as 1902 in photographs taken in Tunis (MADN, Archives, PHDN 2065a) and reappeared at the centre of most of the scenographies to come.

For the most part, the collection consisted of Tibetan objects and books, of varying quality and condition, and was assembled during the long stay of 1911-1925. In 1924, David-Neel wrote from Lhasa to her husband: "I am going to find myself in India and all my collections, my books, my luggage of all kinds are in China... [...] There are a good sixty of them without counting heavy luggage. All this represents a considerable sum of money and a still greater sum of effort and trouble to collect books, ancient manuscripts and various objects of interest from the Orientalist point of view. (David-Neel A., 2000, p. 734) For Sylvain Lévi, she draws up a list of his 400 Tibetan manuscripts (ACF, 41/CDF, archives of Sylvain Lévi, box 18), while first pointing out to her that she "brings nothing back for sale" (unpublished letter, MADN, Archives, CODN 441). However, she also confided to her husband that she had some "beautiful manuscripts for sale at very high prices to museums or universities in America." (David-Neel A., 2000, p. 769). It was then discussed, through the intermediary of Sylvain Lévi and Joseph Hackin (1886-1941), that the Musée Guimet should acquire David-Neel's Tibetan library; to the relief of David-Neel, who despite immediate financial needs had placed in it one of the main sources of her long-term work, the museum declined this transaction for lack of budget (AN, F/17/17281). The most remarkable manuscripts – housed in the Musée Guimet – are undoubtedly the dGongs gcig 'grel chen snang mdzad ye shes sgron me or Mirror of Wisdom (Sobisch J.-U., 2015, BG 54596) and versions of the epic de Gesar (Blondeau A.-M. And Chayet A., 2014, BG 54805). In Digne, the most valuable piece was the statuette of Kannon (Avalokiteśvara) in lacquered and gilded wood (DN 148), prior to the 17th century, perhaps given by Ekai Kawaguchi (1866-1945) in 1917 in Tokyo. Among the most noteworthy objects in this part of the collection are ritual rings and a tantric rosary (mālā) offered by several sgom chen of Sikkim in 1914 and 1915 (DN 73, 100 and 101), an 18th century thangka (DN 1), representing 'Od dpag med (Amitābha) seated surrounded by Tsong khapa and the deities Kubera and Mahākāla, and a pre-16th century engraved wooden book board (DN 16) depicting Sangs rgyas sMan bla, the Medicine Buddha (Bhaiṣajyaguru).

Less concerned with the material value and aspect of her collection than sensitive to the power exuded by the objects and the prestige they inspired, it was above all for private and semi-private use that Alexandra David-Neel intended the objects she received, most of the time, as a gift or that occasionally an acquisition. This explains why apart from a few donations (Musée du Quai Branly, Archives, 71.1935.94.1.1-2) and isolated loans, for example photographs during the exhibition "Le Tibet ethnographique" by Jacques Bacot (1877-1965) at the Palais du Trocadéro in 1933 (Musée du Quai Branly, Archives, 2 AM 1 C1), no exhibition of the collection was organised during the author's lifetime. The history of the acquisition of the objects of the bequest remains quite difficult to document. In 1928, the collector first emphasised to her husband, the emotional value of her Asian objects: "There are some that I have had since my youth, even before having been in Asia for the first time, and I dreamed of India, of China, with the desire to go there. Others were acquired during my first travels ... In short, it's my entire past life that is in them, all my life as a traveller” (MADN, Archives, CODN 361, unpublished quoted in Gascuel G., 2018, p. 7). In Tunis, she enjoyed being photographed at her office surrounded by mainly Chinese and Japanese objects (MADN, archives, PHDN 19). In Samten Dzong, in the landscape of the Alpes de Haute-Provence (a "Himalaya for Lilliputians" she replied to journalists [Marie-Madeleine Peyronnet, oral communication]), she conceived of her house as a kind of transcultural Buddhist temple or still like a "little museum", a miniature Guimet whose objects were the support of a journey through the mind. To tell the truth, the affective dimension is inseparably coupled with a theatrical dimension: "I don't need to tell you that our time demands publicity, external appearance, the mania for photographing authors in their interior, interviewing them at home and even describing their bathroom. Everything I own in oriental objects: statues, embroideries, kakemonos, etc. will not be too much to form a small presentable collection” (David-Neel A., 2000, p. 811). In 1925, Joseph Hackin, whom she met in Bombay, also asked her to create a Tibetan oratory to be exhibited at the Musée Guimet (David-Neel A., 2000, p. 780). The arrangements of objects that she would later make at her house and then photograph testify to the development of this idea (Gomez N., 2018, p. 59). The current scenography of her house, inaugurated in 2019, reconstructs the state in which the writer's visitors discovered it, as evidenced by several photographs (e.g. MADN, Archives, PHDN 4c, PHDN 204f [reproduced here], Provence Magazine, January 20, 1969): intimidating vestibule and small reception room ("bedroom of a Tibetan lama", Gomez N., 2018, p. 59) overloaded with Tibetan objects and books form the semi-private spaces of which David-Neel had completed the staging of a show in which she held the role of unique and demiurgic actress. Today, the voice of the writer and the atmosphere she sought to create continue to haunt this singular matham.