author
Henry Daguerches
1876–1939
A French army officer turned novelist, he drew on years in Asia to write vivid adventure stories shaped by colonial Indochina. Best known for Le Kilomètre 83, he brings engineering camps, jungle landscapes, and uneasy encounters between worlds to life.
1 Audiobook
Le kilomètre 83
by Henry Daguerches
About the author
Born in Toulon in 1876, Henry Daguerches was the pen name of Charles Valat. He studied at the École polytechnique from 1895, then chose a military path in the artillery instead of engineering. Sources describe him as both a soldier and a writer, and his career took him into the French colonial world that would later feed much of his fiction.
His years in Asia seem to have been especially important to his writing. University and reference sources note his service in China around the Boxer period and later links with Indochina, where he wrote about travel, distance, labor, and empire with the eye of someone who had seen that world up close. He published novels, poems, and dramatic works, building a body of writing strongly associated with French colonial literature.
His best-known book is Le Kilomètre 83, first published in 1913 and reissued several times afterward, a sign that it continued to find readers well beyond its original moment. Daguerches died in 1939, but his work still attracts attention today for its atmosphere, its historical setting, and the window it offers into a complicated literary past.