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“le smoking” — a white dinner jacket cut away at the waist — while the women wore dresses from shops in the Rue Catinat fashionable enough to allow them to forget that the Rue de Ia Paix was a twelve-thousand-mile sea journey away. The governor himself stood waiting to greet them beneath a large, gilt-framed portrait of the Emperor Napoleon. A tall, haughty man with luxuriant black whiskers and beard, he wore a formal uniform of horizon blue trimmed elaborately with gold. On the left breast of his tunic the insignia of the Legion d’Honneur glimmered among a broad cluster of medals, and his plumed tricorne had been placed ostentatiously on a table at his side. He didn’t smile as the Shermans approached but waited with his left hand resting on the hilt of his ceremonial sword, his aloof expression suggesting that he estimated the dignity of his person to be at least equal to that of the fabled hero of France looking down from the wall behind him. 
    “Bienvenu a Ia palais belle colonie de Ia France!” The governor offered a formal, white-gloved hand to each member of the Sherman family in turn, but when the affably smiling senator began to say how pleased they were to be there, the aide-dc-camp immediately cut him short and motioned the family aside so that the governor could begin a formal speech. 
    “Senator and Madame Sherman, I am highly honored to welcome such a distinguished family as yours to French Indochina,” he said, speaking sonorously in his own language. “You have come here chiefly to hunt the rare wild animals in our jungles so that the people of America will be able to see them on display in the Sherman Museum in Washington. We wish you good fortune and good hunting while you are in our colony — but of course that is not all.” He lifted his head and gazed unseeing towards the ceiling while his aide read a translation of his remarks from a sheet of paper. Then he resumed in the same imperious tone. “We are all very proud of the progress that has been made by France in Cochin-China and the other lands of the French Indochinese Union in recent years. Here I hope you will see some evidence of the high moral purpose with which the government of France is endeavoring to fulfill its civilizing mission.” He slowed his delivery to linger emphatically on each syllable of the French expression “mission civilisatrice,” gazing proudly around at the assembled gathering as he did so. “We have brought new roads, railways and the telegraph to this backward corner of the globe that would otherwise have continued to languish in the toils of an unprogressive past. We have developed rubber plantations, coal mines and other modern industrial amenities in cooperation with the hardworking Annamese, and all these ventures serve the best interests of both the French and the Annamese peoples. We hope our American visitors will have an opportunity to appreciate some of these achievements during their journeys here. We wish them all a pleasant and successful stay.” 
    While the aide translated these remarks Joseph Sherman took the opportunity to glance around the room and noticed for the first time that groups of diminutive Annamese were standing quietly with their wives among the taller European men and women. Some wore brightly colored Chinese long gowns and black mandarin bonnets, others, shorter black silk coats and white trousers. Only a few were dressed in European suits, but each of them cultivated a whispy goatee, the mark of the Annamite man of consequence. All, in differing degrees, Joseph noticed, appeared ill-at-ease, looking neither at the governor nor at each other hut directing their eyes most frequently towards the floor. 
    “If the lovely boulevards of Saigon are anything to judge by, Monsieur le Gouverneur, you have already brought great civilizing benefits to this tropical colony of yours,” Nathaniel Sherman was saying. His public voice was richer in its Southern tones than normal and