On an unremarkable street in the unremarkable town, the Loti house museum — two attached bourgeois houses, really — is an alternate world where wildly divergent cultures and epochs are thrown together. Loti was an eccentric of his era, and would be considered eccentric even today. He collected sperm whale teeth, Senegalese bracelets, Egyptian cat mummies, Japanese mobiles, and even bought the house next door for his overflow of objects. He posed nude except for a small genital covering to disprove rumors that his sculptured, small-waisted body was corseted. His house is the gateway to this world, with rooms that unfold as if each were a layer of his personality.
