In 1911, following in the footsteps of
Arthur Rimbaud, Monfreid went to
Djibouti, then a French
colony, in order to trade
coffee. He built a
dhow for himself and used it to cross the
Red Sea. He had many adventures, eventually prospered, bought a house near the shore in
Obock cove, and had a big dhow, the
Altair ("Soaring Eagle"), built by a local shipyard. Towards the end of the war, he settled with his family in
Obock, away from prying eyes and other colonial governors of
Djibouti. His house was near the shore, which allowed his wife to have lights on the terrace if the coastguard spotlight was on the lookout. Completely absorbed in his projects, Monfreid was almost always absent and his wife suffered from his long absences and the overpowering heat of the place. She and the children often took refuge in the
Mabla Mountains in the hinterland of
Obock Region, which offered a little coolness. In the early twenties, he built a small house Araoué near
Harar in
Ethiopia, and spent the hot season there with his family. He made enough profit through trafficking (the sale of hashish in Egypt in particular) to buy a flour mill and build a power plant in
Dire Dawa, a
boomtown that had emerged at the foot of
Harar during the construction of the first section of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa road. Between 1912 and 1940 he ran guns through the area, dived for
pearls and
sea cucumbers, and smuggled
hashish and
morphine, which he bought from a famous German laboratory, into Egypt, earning several stays in prison. Monfreid always denied having taken part in the
slave trade from Africa to Arabia. He converted to
Islam during this period, which included undergoing a
circumcision and taking a Muslim name:
Abd-el-Haï ("Slave of The Living One"). During the 1930s, Monfreid was persuaded by
Joseph Kessel to write about his adventures, and the stories became bestsellers. now used for beach-promenade. Monfreid wrote that he was glad once to have Muslim ladies en route for the
hajj crouching on his deck, on the
Red Sea between
Obock and
Jeddah: the officers of the
Aden Royal Navy cutter did not dare to offend against
haram, and gave up stopping and examining his boat, which was loaded with contraband. During World War II, Monfreid, who was now more than sixty years old, was captured by the British and deported to
Kenya as he had served the
Italians and his wife, born Armgart Freudenfeld, was daughter to the former German governor of Alsace-Lorraine. After the war Monfreid retired to a mansion in a small village of
la France profonde, in
Ingrandes (
département of the Indre), France. There he played piano, wrote, painted, and quietly raised in his garden a plantation of
opium poppies, and adopted the habit of using the local grocer's scales to weigh his crop and divide it into daily portions. The grocer paid no heed, since Monfreid's household were good customers, and Monfreid himself bought huge amounts of
honey, which he took to counter the
costive effects of opium. Eventually Monfreid was betrayed to the local
gendarmerie, but he escaped prosecution; at that time opium was used only by unconventional artists, like his friend
Jean Cocteau. Monfreid boasted in his books about his ability to manipulate and divert prying law enforcers through clever speech. Monfreid settled down to a life of writing, turning out around 70 books over the next 30 years. Only a handful of his books have been translated into English and they are difficult to find. His daughter Gisèle de Monfreid wrote
Mes secrets de la Mer Rouge, describing what life was like with her father and the dangerous life he led. During barren periods, when writing was not bringing in enough money, Monfreid relied upon
mortgaging the family collection of
Gauguin paintings. Only after his death were these discovered to be fake. "I have lived a rich, restless, magnificent life", Monfreid declared a few days before dying in 1974 at the age of 95. ==Beliefs==