Pseudonym of Eugène-Léon-Edouard-Joseph Torquet, John Antoine Nau is a French writer born in San-Francisco (1860) and died in Tréboul in Finistère (1918). The taste for adventure pegged to the body, he was hired as a helmsman at 21 years old. Aboard a sailboat, he sails in the Caribbean and the West Indies, which have always been a forgotten paradise for him. He never stopped hiking along the Mediterranean shores. He began in literature in 1897 with a collection of poems, "on the threshold of hope". In 1903 he was noticed with "enemy force", which allowed him to win the 1st Goncourt prize. But the price is still unknown and Nau remains in oblivion. However, he is a great writer. He reconciles the delicacies of vocabulary and rhetoric with the faithful evocation of natural realities, his narrative technique is effective, he has an obvious passion for language and naively refined discourse. Nau is also shown to be a short and light storyteller. Sometimes evoking Daudet, he shows an obvious sympathy for moral freedoms. The beautiful mulattoes, the pot-bellied adventurers, the vigorous blacks, the Corsican bandits with big hearts form a gallery of "puppets" with unclasped morals. Bibliography Enemy force (1903), Blue yesterdays (1904), The lender of love (1905), La gennia (1906), Towards the fairy Viviane (1908), Cristobal the poet (1912), Thérèse Donati (1920), Les Anthime budin's gallantries (1923), Following the gulls (1924).