Īt the age of 18, David-Néel had already visited England, Switzerland and Spain on her own, and she was studying in Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society. Īt the age of 15, spending her holidays with her parents at Ostend, she ran away and reached the port of Vlissingen in the Netherlands to try and embark for England.
Since before the age of 15, she had been exercising austerities such as fasting and corporal torments drawn from biographies of ascetic saints found in the library of one of her female relatives, to which she refers to in Sous des nuées d'orage, published in 1940. Two years later, the Davids emigrated to Belgium. In 1871, when David-Néel was two years old, her father Louis David, appalled by the execution of the last Communards, took her to see the Communards' Wall at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris she never forgot this early encounter with the face of death, from which she first learned of the ferocity of humans.
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