One of the most eccentric characters you will ever meet, Eugène Pertuiset, the nineteenth-century strongman, adventurer and lion hunter, never lacked imagination or audacity.

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Lurching from one madcap venture to another, Pertuiset moved from the deserts of North Africa, the squalid silver boom towns of South America and the Patagonian wilderness to the drawing rooms of high society, the demi-monde and the bohemian circles of Paris.
A close friend of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, Pertuiset was a teller of tall tales and a media darling in Belle Époque Paris. He also inspired Édouard Manet’s Monsieur Pertuiset, le chasseur de lions. Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1881, the controversial painting reflected the unlikely relationship between two men who could hardly have been more different.
 

Manet and the Lion Hunter  brings a forgotten celebrity back to life and offers a snapshot of a century fascinated by exploration, celebrity, artistic ambition and the promise of distant lands. There are lions, lost treasure, political intrigue, a disastrous love affair and more than a few improbable schemes. But beneath the adventures lies a more intimate story about ambition, friendship, vanity and the sometimes painful difference between how we see ourselves and how others see us.

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The story behind the story

My first encounter with Eugène Pertuiset was half a century ago, in a beginner's art history class at McGill University. Suddenly, on the auditorium screen appeared a curious painting by Édouard Manet: Monsieur Pertuiset, chasseur de lions. The name caught my attention. Pertuiset is not a common surname, so I asked my father whether the lion hunter might be a relative.

He confirmed that Eugène was an ancestor, remembered in the family as something of an eccentric, perhaps even a little mad. A family tree drawn during Eugène's lifetime dismissed him with a rather unflattering annotation: "Lutteur, que l'on appelle le chasseur de lions" — wrestler, known as the lion hunter.

 

For years, I thought little more about him. Eventually, with the internet, curiosity got the better of me. I tracked down Eugène's own nineteenth-century accounts of his travels and adventures, explored newspaper archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and even acquired a painting by the man himself (a lion, of course!).

 

The more I discovered, the more extraordinary he became. What began as a family curiosity grew into a fascination with an adventurer whose improbable exploits, boundless ambition and larger-than-life personality seemed made for a novel.