On her return to Europe, she was celebrated as an adventuress and lived another 45 years as a lecturer and writer. Niel did not understand his wife’s interest in Buddhism and the East, but in 1910 he offered her a “long voyage”-he meant something like a year-to “get it out of her system.” She was gone for fourteen years, traveling and living in India, Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan, China, Japan, making forays into the forbidden kingdom of Tibet. It was not until middle age that she married Philippe Néel, the French engineer who supported her through her subsequent adventures, but with whom she almost never lived. Her early adulthood was taken up by a career as an opera singer-ample accomplishment for an ordinary life, but almost overlooked in hers. At the age of 16 she was already running away from home for jaunts across Europe, and she traveled to India at 21. It is tempting to think that she was born too soon, but so free and bold a female spirit would have encountered obstacles anywhere, at any time.
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