"Let us watch them go away!" said Yves, leaning out. At the door of the
garden is a renewal of the same salutations and curtseys, and then the
two groups of women separate, their bedaubed paper lanterns fade away
trembling in the distance, balanced at the extremity of flexible canes
which they hold in their fingertips as one would hold a fishing-rod in
the dark to catch night-birds. The procession of the unfortunate
Mademoiselle Jasmin mounts upward toward the mountain, while that of
Mademoiselle Chrysantheme winds downward by a narrow old street, half-
stairway, half-goat-path, which leads to the town.

Then we also depart. The night is fresh, silent, exquisite, the eternal
song of the cicalas fills the air. We can still see the red lanterns of
my new family, dwindling away in the distance, as they descend and
gradually become lost in that yawning abyss, at the bottom of which lies
Nagasaki.

Our way, too, lies downward, but on an opposite slope by steep paths
leading to the sea.

And when I find myself once more on board, when the scene enacted on the
hill above recurs to my mind, it seems to me that my betrothal is a joke,
and my new family a set of puppets.




CHAPTER V

A FANTASTIC MARRIAGE