PAULDU CHAILLU: "A PERFECTLY FREE AND AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUAL"

Monte Reel, Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took The Victorian World by Storm (New York: Doubleday, 2013) ("This is where Paul chose to reside: safe within a mythology of his own making..." "He could have owned up to his past.... For his entire life, he would keep afloat all the fictions that had made his identity impossible to pin down. He didn't want to be African, or French, or American, or British, or a naturalist, or a showman, or a big-game hunter, or an anthropologist, or a geographical explorer. He clearly wanted to dance between all of them without getting trapped under any one label." "He did not, by any stretch of the imagination, conform to the twenty-first-century ideal of a man who embraces his background and refuses to surrender to the unjust biases against his people; instead, he chose to live in a self-created universe where racial boundaries simply didn't apply to him. Within that mythology, the ultimate objective--the golden ring--was to become a perfectly free and autonomous individual. Freedom of that kind allowed a person to belong everywhere, which is another way of saying that he belonged nowhere in particular." Id. at 257.).