Japan Corea by Pierre Loti

Author:Pierre Loti [Loti, Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138973534
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

February.

MADAME ICHIHARA, the monkey seller and Mademoiselle Matsumoto, her daughter, came back to-day from a day in the country, in dresses of clear coloured silk, carrying long branches all white with flowers; they were of the wild aloe type, such as at home we call “black thorn,” whose flowering, in our hedges and woods, always precedes spring. (I have been flirting, this last fortnight, with Madame Ichihara.)

These ladies had been to pick their gracious harbingers in a sheltered nook known only to themselves. At their friendly persuasion, I accepted from them a few of these first-fruits of the season, which I installed on board ship in bronze vases, setting myself to give Japanese grace to the frail bouquet.

Nowhere are the flowers of the earlier trees awaited with more impatience than in Japan, cherry blossom, peach blossom, or the apricot, which everyone plucis by branches, careless of fruit to come if they may plunge them into vases and rejoice their eyes for but a day.

Madame Ichihara, my new acquaintance, has a trade in tame baboons, the big baboons from the island of Kiu-Siu, whose fur is always worn away, revealing the bare flesh on that part of their bodies on which they sit. The lady, who must be a contemporary of Madame Renoncule, is still in her maturity one of the prettiest people in Nagasaki; it is regrettable that her particular commerce impregnates her clothes with a painful aroma: Madame Ichihara smells of monkeys.

Every time that caprice impels me to the great pagoda of the Jade Horse, I stop on my way at her house, to flirt for a few moments with her. The whole lower floor of the house is full of her pensioners, some in cages, others merely chained, and frisking about right and left; as one passes one is always exposed to some outrage; a tiny nimble cold paw shoots out between two bars and pinches your ear, or some young frolic wag, perched on a high cross-bar, flings his drinking water in your face. But when one has succeeded in reaching the staircase and so the first floor, one is safe in a kind of very attractive little boudoir where the ladies are “at home.”

Madame Ichihara, who has grown rich upon the monkeys, has just added to tkis trade an interesting side line in antiquities. She keeps old ivories in especial, daring or comic, and whilst she is busied, in all seeming innocence, in preparing your tea, her daughter never fails to make you admire some: elaborate distorted ivories, groups of people no bigger than the end joint of one’s finger, which move and of ten indulge themselves, alas! in most deplorable commerce! This Mademoiselle Matsumoto, a mousmé of sixteen, who smells of monkeys like her mother, but is candour itself, handles such subjects without discomfort, since she misses their suggestion; with her lowered, half-closed eyes and a modest smile on her lips, she sets in motion the subtle mechanisms, which are more delicate than the works

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