son.’
‘Look harder.’
The mayor sank back in his leather chair, beginning to sweat.
‘My son Hervé, who in two days will return to Paris, where a brilliant career awaits him in our army, God and St Agnes willing.’
‘Exactly. Only, God is busy elsewhere and St Agnes detests soldiers.’
A month later Hervé Joncour left for Egypt. He travelled on a ship called the Adel. In the cabins you could smell the odour of cooking, there was an Englishman who said he had fought at Waterloo, on the evening of the third day they saw dolphins sparkling on the horizon like drunken waves, at roulette it was always the sixteen.
He returned six months later – the first Sunday in April, in time for High Mass – with thousands of eggs packed in cotton wool in two big wooden boxes. He had a lot of things to tell. But what Baldabiou said to him when they were alone was
‘Tell me about the dolphins.’
‘The dolphins?’
‘About when you saw them.’
That was Baldabiou.
No one knew how old he was.
‘ALMOST the entire world,’ said Baldabiou softly. ‘Almost’, pouring a little water into his Pernod.
An August night, past twelve. Normally at that hour, Verdun had already been closed for a while. The chairs were turned upside down, neatly, on the tables. He had cleaned the bar, and all the rest. He had only to turn off the lights and lock up. But Verdun was waiting: Baldabiou was talking.
Sitting across from him, Hervé Joncour, with a spent cigarette between his lips, listened, unmoving. As he had eight years before, he was letting this man methodically rewrite his destiny. His voice came out thin and clear, punctuated by swallows of Pernod. He didn’t stop for many minutes. The last thing he said was
‘There is no choice. If we want to survive, we have to get there.’
Silence.
Verdun, leaning on the bar, looked over at the two of them.
Baldabiou was busy trying to find another drop of Pernod in the bottom of the glass.
Hervé Joncour placed the cigarette on the edge of the table before saying
‘And where, exactly, might it be, this Japan?’
Baldabiou raised his walking stick and pointed it beyond the roofs of Saint-August.
‘Straight that way.’
He said.
‘At the end of the world.’
IN those days Japan was, in effect, on the other side of the world. It was an island made up of islands, and for two hundred years had existed in complete isolation from the rest of humanity, rejecting any contact with the continent and prohibiting any foreigner from entering. The Chinese coast was almost two hundred miles distant, but an imperial decree had taken care to make it even farther, by forbidding throughout the island the construction of boats with more than one mast. Following a logic in its way enlightened, the law did not, however, prohibit emigration: but it condemned to death those who attempted to return. Chinese, Dutch and English traders had tried repeatedly to break through that absurd isolation, but they had been able only to set up a fragile and dangerous smuggling network. They had got little money, many troubles and some legends, good for selling in the ports, in the evening. Where they had failed, the Americans, thanks to the force of arms, succeeded. In July of 1853 Commodore Matthew C. Perry entered the bay of Yokohama with a fleet of modern steamships, and delivered to the Japanese an ultimatum in which he ‘hoped for’ the opening of the island to foreigners.
The Japanese had never before seen a ship capable of crossing the sea against the wind.
When, seven months later, Perry returned to receive the answer to his ultimatum, the military governor of the island yielded, signing an agreement in which he sanctioned the opening of two ports in the north of the island to foreigners, and the start of some modest commercial relations. From now on – the commodore declared with a certain solemnity – the sea around this island is not so deep.
BALDABIOU knew all these stories. In particular he knew a legend that turned up repeatedly in the accounts of those who had been there. They said that that island produced the most beautiful silk in the world. It had been doing so for more than a thousand years, following rites and secrets that had achieved a mystic precision. What Baldabiou thought was that it was not a legend but the pure and simple truth. Once, he had held between his fingers a veil woven of Japanese silk thread. It was like holding between his fingers nothingness. So when everything seemed to be going to hell because of the pebrine and the infected eggs, what he thought was:
‘That island is full of silkworms. And an island that no Chinese merchant or English insurer has managed to get to for two hundred years is an island that no infection will ever reach.’
He didn’t confine himself to thinking this: he said it to all the silk producers of Lavilledieu, after calling them together at Verdun’s café. None of them had ever heard talk of Japan.
‘We should cross the whole world to buy healthy eggs in a place where when they see a foreigner they hang him?’
‘Hanged him,’ Baldabiou clarified.
They didn’t know what to think. An objection occurred to some.
‘There must be a reason that no one in the world has thought of going there to buy eggs.’
Baldabiou could bluff by reminding them that in the rest of the world there was no Baldabiou. But he preferred to say things as they were.
‘The Japanese are resigned to selling their silk. But the eggs, no. They hold on to them tightly. And if you try to carry them off that island, what you do is a crime.’
The silk producers of Lavilledieu were – some more, some less – gentlemen, and would never have thought of breaking the law in their own country. The theory of doing so on the other side of the world, however, seemed to them eminently sensible.
IT was 1861. Flaubert was finishing Salammbô, electric light was still a hypothesis and Abraham Lincoln, on the other side of the ocean, was fighting a war whose end he would not see. The silkworm breeders of Lavilledieu joined together in a consortium and collected the considerable sum necessary for the expedition. To them all it seemed logical to entrust it to Hervé Joncour. When Baldabiou asked him to accept, he answered with a question.
‘And where, exactly, might it be, this Japan?’
Straight that way. At the end of the world.
He left on October 6th. Alone.
At the gates of Lavilledieu he embraced his wife, Hélène, and said to her simply
‘You mustn’t be afraid of anything.’
She was a tall woman, she moved slowly, she had long black hair that she never gathered on to her head. She had a beautiful voice.
HERVÉ Joncour left with eighty thousand francs in gold and the names