Excerpt from The Indian Scout: A Story of the Aztec City
"Gustave Aimard," whose baptismal name, Olivier Gloux, is almost forgotten, can claim to have been in his heyday the favourite Indian romancer of the French schoolboy. Translated into English, his stories and novels of wild life held their own in other countries too, by the side of Fenimore Cooper's and Captain Mayne Reid's. They dealt boldly and freely in the sensations of the camp and backwoods; and they had, like the best works of the other romance-writers just mentioned, the advantage of being based upon the real experience of their author.
Born at Paris in 1818, young Olivier Gloux sailed to America as a midshipmite when he was still a boy; and there began his adventures in foreign lands. An air of mystery is cast over some of the succeeding years when he lived "among the Indians" as the phrase goes. In a Page of My Life, prefixed to El Dorado and Le Guaranis, he gives us a personal clue to his method in treating the realities which he afterwards cast into a romantic form. He speaks there of the comparatively slight modifications which he made in his crude material; and he shows us the impulse that prompted him in his wanderings. "What did I go there to do?" he asks (it is to Brazil that he refers in this case); and he replies, "I did not know myself: I obeyed a need of emotions, a desire for the unforeseen which I could not have explained, but which pushed me on with irresistible force. During twenty years this desire led me, without serious motives or reasons that would have seemed logical in the eyes of men used to the pleasures and easy comforts of European life, to leave the print of my feet in the depths of the most unexplored deserts, where it procured me ineffable happiness, strange and nameless ecstasies, and in the outcome, cruel suffering."
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