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outside, and set them on the ground, beside the tracks. Then he closed the door and waited. When the train was ready to leave they shouted to him to hurry and get on. He responded by shaking his head, and making a gesture of farewell. He saw the train grow distant, and then disappear. He waited until he no longer heard it. Then he bent over one of the wooden boxes, removed the seals, and opened it. He did the same with the three others. Slowly, with care.
    Millions of larvae. Dead.
    It was May 6, 1865.

51.
    H ERVÈ Joncour entered Lavilledieu nine days later. From a distance, his wife, Hélène, saw the carriage coming along the tree-lined drive of the villa. She said to herself that she mustn’t weep and that she mustn’t flee.
    She went to the front door, opened it, and stopped on the threshold.
    When Hervé Joncour came close to her, she smiled. He, embracing her, said softly
    ‘Stay with me, please.’
    They were awake late into the night, sitting beside each other on the lawn in front of the house. Hélène told him about Lavilledieu, and all those months spent waiting, and of the past days, terrible.
    ‘You were dead.’
    She said.
    ‘And there was nothing good left, in the world.’

52.
    A ROUND the farmhouses, in Lavilledieu, people looked at the mulberries, thick with leaves, and saw their own ruin. Baldabiou had found some shipments of eggs, but the larvae died as soon as they emerged. The rough silk that was obtained from the few that survived was barely enough to provide work for two of the seven silk mills in the town.
    ‘Do you have any ideas?’ asked Baldabiou.
    ‘One,’ answered Hervé Joncour.
    The next day he let it be known that, in the summer months, he would build the park for his villa. He engaged men and women, in the town, by the dozens. They deforested the hill and rounded its contours, making the slope that led to the valley gentler. With trees and hedges they designed delicate, transparent labyrinths on the earth. With flowers of every kind they built gardens that appeared by surprise, like clearings, in the heart of small birch woods. They diverted water from the river, so that it would descend, from fountain to fountain, to the western edge of the park, where it pooled in a small lake, surrounded by meadows. To the south, amid lemon and olive trees, they built a large aviary, of wood and iron: it looked like a piece of embroidery suspended in the air.
    They worked for four months. At the end of September the park was ready. No one, in Lavilledieu, had ever seen anything like it. They said that Hervé Joncour had spent all his capital. They said, too, that he had returned from Japan changed, perhaps ill. They said that he had sold the eggs to the Italians and now had a patrimony in gold that was waiting for him in the banks of Paris. They said that if it were not for the park they would have died of hunger, that year. They said that he was a swindler. They said that he was a saint. Someone said: something is troubling him, some kind of unhappiness.

53.
    A LL that Hervé Joncour said about his journey was that the eggs had hatched in a town near Cologne, and that the town was called Eberfeld.
    Four months and thirteen days after his return, Baldabiou sat before him, on the shore of the lake, on the western edge of the park, and said
    ‘After all, sooner or later, you’ll have to tell someone the truth.’
    He said it softly, because he didn’t believe, ever, that the truth was good for anything.
    It was autumn and the light, around them, was unnatural.
    ‘The first time I saw Hara Kei he was wearing a dark tunic, and he was sitting motionless, with his legs crossed, in the corner of a room. Lying beside him, her head resting on his lap, was a woman. Her eyes didn’t have an Oriental shape, and her face was the face of a girl.’
    Baldabiou listened in silence, until the end, until the train at Eberfeld.
    He didn’t think anything.
    He listened.
    It hurt him to hear, finally, Hervé