On January 30 the party heading for Ta-li left Lagrée at Hui-tse. Shaking the leader's hand for the last time were Garnier, Thorel, Delaporte, and de Carné. They were to be accompanied by five men from the escort. This time Garnier was not traveling with Tei, whose own illness forced him to remain at the base camp. Left behind with Lagrée were Joubert, the French sailor Mouëllo, and three members of the Vietnamese escort.
CHAPTER X
LAGRÉE COMES HOME
Doudart de Lagrée, the handsome naval officer who could trace his ancestry back to a manor in fifteenth-century Brittany, was a gaunt, dying man when Garnier and his companions left Hui-tse and headed west for Ta-li. The wonder is that he should have survived so long. Why his companions should have thought that the leader they left behind them was likely to recover is uncertain, yet this was the general opinion. Partly this hope seems to have been irrational, a feeling that, having survived so long, Lagrée would not die now; somehow he would overcome disease and be able to reach the Yangtze and travel with the rest of the party down to the sea. More rationally there were other straws of hope to grasp. There could be no doubt that Lagrée was a desperately ill man, but to have triumphed over the illnesses he had already suffered suggested a remarkable constitution. The explorers were well used to sudden death in both Europe and Asia. The fact that Lagrée had survived to this point seemed, therefore, to offer hope. Then, too, there was hope born of medical ignorance. However able they might be, Joubert and Thorel practiced medicine in an age that still knew little about the cause and effective treatment of tropical diseases. They knew the results, all too well, but decades had yet to pass before a thorough knowledge of amoebic dysentery would emerge, and nearly eighty years before a sure remedy would be found.
For it is now certain that Lagrée, lying stricken in Hui-tse, was a victim of advanced amoebic dysentery, racked not only by uncontrollable diarrhoea but suffering also from abscesses on his liver. The disease was in its terminal stages when Lagrée was left in the care of Joubert and Mouëllo. Even before Garnier's group departed, the old problem of his infected throat had come to plague Lagrée again. Adding further to the stricken man's discomfort were undiagnosed pains in his side and shoulder. Joubert, himself seriously weakened as the result of fever, had to treat his patient under severe conditions. In bitter winter weather, Lagrée was lodged in an unheated room. During February and March the temperature in the room never rose above forty-one degrees Fahrenheit; at its coldest, the temperature inside dropped several degrees below freezing. These were trying circumstances even for a healthy man; for someone in Lagrée's condition they were a terrible further drain on his failing strength. Even worse, racked as he was by dysentery, Lagrée's infected throat made normal eating impossible. For a period Joubert had to feed him artificially.
Mentally, too, Lagrée was exhausted. Until the final stages of the expedition's journey he had felt that his role a leader required him to make all decisions of importance without consulting his companions. Once in China, and lacking an interpreter, Lagrée had assumed most of the responsibility for conducting the uncertain exchanges the party had with officialdom along the way. The strain of attempting to make himself understood, and the worry that he might not have been successful in interpreting what was said in return, weighed heavily on his mind. The brief, even deliberately laconic descriptions that remain of the final weeks of Lagrée's life say little of the result of this mental strain, other than noting his exhaustion. But in the reports of his conversations with Joubert, which continually returned to the same subjects, a picture of the dying man's fevered and obsessive thoughts emerges. Tortured by physical pain, Lagrée wondered if he had been right in permitting Garnier and his companions to depart. He repeatedly reviewed the failure of the party to find a navigable route along the Mekong. Turning anxiously to Joubert for reassurance, he expressed conviction that the Red River was navigable, saying again and again, “Should we have no other triumph to bear back to France, our time and our suffering will not have been wasted.”
He worried, too, about his family in France. Never having married himself, Lagrée idolized his elder brother's wife and her children. To her he sent his long personal letters, full of brotherly affection and requests for news of the children. Unknown to Lagrée, while he was dying in Hui-tse, news came to Joubert that this woman and one of her sons had died. How the letter reached Hui-tse from the authorities in Saigon who sent on this news is unclear, another minor mystery in the expedition's history. Lagrée, however, was never to learn of the loss. Joubert, fearing for the effect the report might have on his weakening patient, kept the news from him.
As February drew to an end Joubert was faced with a terrible dilemma. Temporarily at least, Lagrée's infected throat had recovered and he was able to take nourishment. But the pain and distress caused by the liver abscesses continued. Joubert decided to operate. This was a decision of last recourse. In barely imaginable conditions, Joubert opened an abscess on Lagrée's liver and drained it, drawing off half a liter of pus mixed with blood. He did not know that there was another abscess, which remained untouched by this desperate surgical intervention. For a brief period the operation appeared to promise success, though pus continued to drain from the opened abscess. If nothing else, Lagrée's pain was eased, and at this point too he was diverted by the presence of another familiar face. Father Fenouil, learning of Lagrée's condition, had traveled from his base at Ch'ü-ching to join the group lodged at Hui-tse. Joubert hoped Fenouil might have communion wine with him that he could use to comfort Lagrée, but the missionary had none. Only after messengers had been sent nearly two hundred miles north to the residence of the French Apostolic Vicar for the region was it possible to obtain a little port wine for Lagrée.
As March began, Joubert allowed himself to hope that his patient might recover. Lagrée was even able to walk about a little. He talked with Joubert and Fenouil, and accepted the devoted assistance of Mouëllo. But Joubert's hopes were false and Lagrée's apparent recovery illusory. On March 6 his condition suddenly deteriorated. The weather changed for the worse, and with the return of chilling cold and fierce winds Lagrée's infected throat once more made eating impossible. At the same time his more serious illness entered its final phase. Lagrée knew that this was the end, and he waited for it with the courage he had shown throughout his life. One final concern weighed on his mind. He was determined that his private papers should be destroyed. When Joubert tried to dissuade him, Lagrée insisted. “A man's work,” he maintained repeatedly, “can only be completed by himself.” Reluctantly, with inner reservations, Joubert gave his assurance to Lagrée; should the leader die, his private papers, his notes on the expedition, would all be burned. Even in the setting of Lagrée's dying days, his insistence on such destruction appears strange, an almost atavistic embrace of the view that a man's possessions should perish with him.
The end came on March 12. Expected as it was, Lagrée's death was no less moving for the little group that stood about his corpse. In the chill of winter, with his fellow officers an uncertain distance away to the west, Joubert sadly started to arrange for Lagrée's burial. Believing that the body would remain forever in Chinese soil, Joubert removed the dead man's heart and fashioned a leaden box in which to place the organ for return to France. Local craftsmen found the idea repugnant and would not spare Joubert this labor. Mindful of his medical status, he made a post-mortem examination and found the second abscess. Unchecked, the amoebic dysentery had ravaged Lagrée's liver. We can only speculate on the effects of Joubert's operation, performed as it was before men understood the importance of asepsis.
Placing Lagrée's body in a heavy Chinese coffin, Joubert supervised the burial in a corner of the gardens surrounding a pagoda outside Hui-tse's walls. Above the grave he built a small monument, modeled on the one the explorers had raised above Henri Mouhot's grave near Luang Prabang.
There was nothing more to do but wait. Joubert had written to his companions to alert t
hem to Lagrée's increasingly serious illness, and then finally to tell them of his death. He could not know how long it would be before the letters reached Garnier. One thing Joubert could not bring himself to do: burn Lagrée's papers as the dead man had insisted. No less a man of the nineteenth century than his fellow explorers, Joubert was conscious of the sacred character accorded to a dying man's orders. Yet he hesitated. To burn the leader's notebooks would be to destroy vital records. He could not do it, and he waited for the others to return so that the question could be debated. Three weeks passed before Joubert was able to share his account of Lagrée's last days with the other explorers. It was a grim period of waiting in the isolated administrative center whose only active commerce seemed to be in wooden coffins.
It was not until April 3 that Garnier, the first of the party to arrive, returned to Hui-tse. Only on April 2 had he received certain news of Lagrée's death.
On leaving Hui-tse on January 30, Garnier and his companions had struck west; lacking detailed geographical knowledge of the route to Ta-li, and beyond, and with continuing uncertainty about the political situation, they were determined to move as swiftly as possible towards their goal. On their first day they were rewarded by a distant glimpse of the great valley of the Yangtze. The explorers could follow its course as it ran like a deep furrow through the towering mountains. They still could not see the river itself, but that sight came a day later. On the last day of January, standing nineteen hundred feet above the river's banks, they saw the Yangtze for the first time. From this height its waters seemed clear and deep, and the explorers reflected on the fact that they were the first travelers to have seen and charted the Yangtze so far from the sea since the time of Marco Polo.
They could afford little time for reflection, and the party hurried down the steep zigzag path that brought them to a settlement beside the river. Here they returned, briefly, to a subtropical world. After a near-freezing start to their day, the temperature in the river valley was in the middle sixties, and surrounding them was the vegetation of a warmer clime, clumps of banana trees and stands of sugar cane. This was a brief respite. They purchased enough horses to have one for every two men in the party, then crossed the Yangtze and headed west towards Hui-li. This settlement did not lie on the direct route to Ta-li, but their plan was to travel so as to put off a confrontation with the Muslim forces until the last possible moment.
Four hours of hard climbing brought the explorers back to the plateau above the river and, once more, into a winter world. The road they followed lay across a series of ravines and valleys and took them to even higher altitudes. On February 3 and 4 the party moved through heavy snow; at one stage their route brought them to a height of nearly ten thousand feet above sea level. These were worse conditions than any they had encountered to date, and men and horses suffered as they slipped and stumbled on the icy paths. By February 5 conditions had improved. The route they followed took them down to a well-cultivated valley, and in the evening the party halted at Hui-li, a major market town.
Because of its size and importance, Garnier had hoped to find useful intelligence in Hui-li. But he was disappointed. The local officials were courteous, but there was no way that they and Garnier could exchange information. All that could be done was to wait until the party reached a point even farther west where the presence of a Chinese Catholic priest would permit exchanges in Latin. Two days after their arrival in Hui-li, the party was traveling west again. For the next two days Garnier was in constant pain. A sudden lung infection caused him acute discomfort as the party continued across the high plateau. At times he could scarcely breathe, and he could only move forward with constant assistance. Two men of the escort were needed to hold him on his horse when he rode.
When, late on February 8, the party dropped down rapidly to a settlement at a mere two thousand feet, and not far from the Yangtze, Garnier found immediate relief. In less than ten days and under frequently severe conditions the explorers had covered some one hundred miles as the crow flies — substantially more along the winding and precipitous routes they had followed. They had been as high as ten thousand feet at one stage and down to a little more than two thousand feet at another. Back at this more comfortable altitude, with Garnier in need of rest to recover from his illness and the rest of the party close to exhaustion, a halt of three days was decided.
The hoped-for meeting with Father Lu, the Chinese priest, took place on February 11. This Chinese Catholic had been trained for his vocation at the French missionary college on the island of Penang. He spoke Latin, and the party was able through their conversations with him to learn something of the situation that lay ahead. Trade, the explorers quickly learned, was brisk between the regions of western Yunnan controlled by the Islamic rebels and those parts lying under the authority of the imperial government. In a classically practical Chinese fashion, this was seen as beneficial to all concerned, not least the officials of each side who might have had to look elsewhere for income if the standard arrangements for bribes and gifts were interrupted. But apart from traders, the Muslims were strict in their refusal to allow any other traveler to pass through their lines. Father Lu held little hope for their success. One thing he could, however, tell them. The tiny French missionary post near Ta-li, of which they had previously heard mention, was still in existence. Located only a few days' march from the heart of the Muslim rebel state, a lone French priest, Father Leguilcher, was, in defiance of all logic, allowed by the insurgents to tend his tiny flock. Given Father Fenouil's close identification with the imperial cause, it was strange indeed to-think of a missionary left unmolested near the rebel base.
In the face of continuing uncertainty, Garnier decided to push directly towards Ta-li. If there were major difficulties to be overcome, then the sooner these were encountered the better. After three days of further travel, the party crossed the Yangtze on February 16 and headed south and west. They still had not come to a Muslim post and their route now took them again to an altitude of about six thousand feet. As darkness fell about them the party reached a straggling mountain hamlet. The inhabitants fled at their approach, fearing that the explorers were yet another armed band come to loot and pillage. Slowly, however, they were persuaded to return by the Chinese servant who was now attached to the party. Recommended to the explorers by Father Lu, this former employee of a French missionary bishop provided urbane and knowledgeable assistance.
No sooner had calm returned to the tiny settlement than it was shattered by an outburst of shouting and anger. De Carné was the cause. At the end of the day it was his job to feed the party's horses. Having searched unsuccessfully for mangers in which to place feed, he decided on an improvisation. A large Chinese coffin lay in one corner of a shed; what could be better as a substitute into which to pour the feed? He started to move the coffin's heavy lid, only to be disturbed by an angry woman who shouted and wept at the offense being committed. Coffins here, as elsewhere in China, were revered objects, often the proud possession of a person for many years before death. To contemplate using a coffin as a feeding trough for horses was at best an offense against good manners. But worse was involved here, for the coffin's owner was asleep inside.
This was a rare occasion of humorous relief, an event to be laughed about, to de Carné's embarrassment, after the distressed woman had been pacified and her husband allowed to lie unmolested. There was little that was jovial ahead of them, yet the next few days were pleasant enough.
The explorers found that Father Lu had been right when he spoke of a brisk trade between the Muslim and imperial areas. They passed countless caravans moving east and west along their route, the commercial traffic contrasting with the barely inhabited region they now traversed. The path rose and fell, then rose and fell again. Seldom were the Frenchmen able to see more than three hundred yards in front of them. Despite the cold and their fatigue they could still respond to the natural beauty that lay within view. In apparent defiance of the season the wooded hills domin
ating the landscape were covered with red and white rhododendron bushes in full flower, while along the fast-running streams there were clusters of camellia trees, their blooms a delicate pink.
On the evening of February 19 they encountered the first Muslim post. The meeting was chilly. With the missionary bishop's former servant acting as his interpreter, Garnier matched his firmness and hauteur to that of the Muslim officer he now met. It was the type of situation that delighted Garnier:
He told me that there were … at Pin-ch'uan, where we would arrive in four days' time, leaders more important than he, and whose decision I would have to accept. “It is to them,” I replied, “that I will show my passports.” He now more forcefully demanded that I show them to him. I declared that I was too important an official and he too negligible for me to agree to such a show of deference. He threatened to prevent my departure. I laughed in his face and amused myself by showing him our weapons, particularly our revolvers. He was greatly surprised and told me that even in Ta-li there was nothing to match them.
Once again, after long debate, Garnier triumphed. The party left, unimpeded, next morning. Convinced of his own superiority and genuinely unafraid, Garnier, like so many other nineteenth-century Europeans, saw himself as living proof of the capacity of white men to dominate the world.
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