In a mood of growing annoyance and frustration, Garnier fired his first broadside. In a series of articles for the influential Revue Maritime et Coloniale, beginning in April 1869, he traced the ironic contrast faced by a man who returned to France from “distant countries” only to find “the profound indifference of opinion towards all that is associated with national grandeur.” It was a general problem, but he would testify to a particular example. Virtually nobody, or so it seemed to him, cared about the results of the Mekong expedition:
A recent voyage of exploration finally made it possible to pull together the few scattered facts that we possessed on this region in a certain fashion. This journey, which has brought a lively response in England, which has had its initial findings published in Germany, is scarcely known in France despite the fact that it was led by a French-man, Commander Doudart de Lagrée, who unhappily died near the end of his glorious undertaking.
There was good and immediate reason for Garnier's annoyance and anger, even if he did not choose to detail it in his articles. On top of all the other instances of slight and personal antagonism, there seemed only the most limited interest within the government itself about what the explorers had found in their travels. In January 1869, Garnier's own ministry, Navy and the Colonies, had sent a circular inquiry to the other major government departments. Would they, the circular asked, subscribe to the important publication that was now being prepared on the Mekong expedition s journey from Saigon into China? The replies were an extraordinary mixture of hesitation, shortsightedness, and, rarely, enthusiasm. Within a day, the Ministry of Justice sent its reply: no funds were available. The Quai d'Orsay, conscious that de Carné had been its representative on the expedition, was ready to take five sets of the projected two volumes. But the Ministry of Fine Arts, apparently dubious about “art” outside a European setting, was unready to make any decision before seeing the finished product.
So it went. The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works seemed to show more interest than most of the other ministries. With their orders for thirty and fifteen sets respectively, they certainly eclipsed the Ministry of War. Two and a half months after the inquiry was originally circulated a reply came back from War to the Navy; the ministry would purchase one copy! A century later, the publication that the ministries treated in such a cavalier fashion is a prized bibliographic rarity.
Worst of all for Garnier's personal peace of mind, the suggestion was bruited about that he was deliberately seeking to diminish the importance of his dead leader, Doudart de Lagrée. This was an essentially unfair charge, but to some extent Garnier was to blame for its being leveled. In the atmosphere of petty backbiting and official parsimony that now existed he set out to publicize the expedition and, unwisely, to emphasize his own role as leader in the final months. On one public occasion he failed to mention the duties carried out by de Carné; in a later discussion of the French party's journey he failed to mention de Carné at all. Then, in addressing the Paris Geographical Society, he allowed himself to be described as “leader” of the Mekong expedition. This decision should probably be viewed as nothing more than a young man's folly, a case of enthusiasm and pride overcoming good sense. Perhaps, too, his readiness to use the title of leader was Garnier's calculated effort to make clear his major part in bringing the mission's journey to some kind of successful conclusion. Whatever was the case, Garnier found that he had ended by bringing the disputes of the past clearly into the open.
De Carné led the charge, but he spoke for those who resented Garnier s thirst for glory. Whether, his claims notwithstanding, he acted for any other members of the expedition, seems, at best, doubtful. We know, however, that Lagrée's relatives and close friends resented the way the living Garnier was eclipsing the memory of his dead leader. And one needs little imagination to see a gleeful La Grandière reading the accusatory letter de Carné now published in the Paris press. Lieutenant Garnier, de Carné asserted, was willfully misleading the public, though whether he was entirely to blame or was influenced by an ambitious relative was not clear. Whatever the case, the picture being presented to the world was wrong. In de Carné's eyes, Garnier was seeking to create the impression that he had led the Mekong expedition for nearly twelve months rather than merely for the final three. And through all this, de Carné's bitter complaint continued, Garnier denigrated the role of his companions:
Believe me, Monsieur, it has cost me dearly to alert the public to our disputes. I might not have done so if there were only personal differences between us. But as I have already had the honor to say to you, I am only a spokesman for my traveling companions.
I summarize, Monsieur, by protesting against the omission of my name from the document I have indicated, against the newspaper articles you have written from time to time to draw attention to yourself to the detriment of your traveling companions, and finally against the claims you have made concerning the command of the expedition.
The complaints had a paranoid air. Even if there was some small factual basis for de Carné's attack, there seemed much more direct connection with his now unstable personality and rapidly deteriorating physical health. Of all the personal disputes and antagonisms to emerge in the course of the expedition, none seem to have been sharper than those involving de Carné. Ambitious for success, he had not been able to disguise his intellectual arrogance, which saw little value in opinions other than his own. Yet this arrogance went hand in hand with the ambiguous relationship he had with those he admired. Doudart de Lagrée was such a person, though possibly de Carné's admiration for the expedition's leader was greater after than it was before Lagrée's death. This admiration, however, had to contend with the resentment the young diplomat felt for the treatment Lagrée had accorded him. De Carné had been aware of Lagrée's critical judgments. He seems, nonetheless, to have forgiven them. No such forgiveness was accorded Garnier, the man who had never hidden his view that de Carné was a “parasite.”
In the nature of things, de Carné's attack did not have widespread importance, partly because, in the final analysis, only a limited few were interested in the accusations and counter accusations. When he wrote his attack on Garnier, de Carné had little more than a year to live. He had returned to France gravely ill with dysentery. For a brief period there was a remission, but he was dead before the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Although the intensely bitter flavor of de Carné's attacks on Garnier was not matched in the more restrained arguments during the next few years, the expedition's leadership remained an issue. And the argument goes on today.
For Garnier, meanwhile, thoughts for the future became as important as the difficulties of the past and the demands of the present. He worked on his official report of the expedition under irritatingly adverse conditions. His earlier protests about the lack of governmental interest seemed only too justified. By October 1869 his precarious financial position forced him to raise the question of expenses with his superiors. In view of the costs he had met personally for photography, internal travel in France, and translation, could he not, he asked, receive some financial assistance? The dry, dusty tones of the functionary's response echo hollowly more than one hundred years later. A month after Garnier made his request the chief financial inspector at the Ministry of the Navy was still studying the matter and pointing to the problems involved. It was all very well to note that only one hundred francs each month were under discussion, he chided, on November 15, 1869. “Here the question of expenditure is nothing. The danger of precedent is all.” A month later Garnier was pursuing another tack. Could the ministry not, at least, deal with another of the explorers' financial claims? None of the naval members of the expedition had yet received their promised compensation for personal equipment lost along the way.
In trying and ungrateful circumstances that persisted throughout 1869, Garnier dreamed of new adventures. He considered resigning from the navy and traveling to China once more. Thoughts of commercial success f
loated through his mind. If only the Chinese middlemen could be bypassed there was a fortune to be made by purchasing tea and silk in southwestern China and shipping it to Europe. But more than all these things he dreamed of marriage.
His plans and hopes for marriage are revealed in two frank letters from early 1869. Read in a later age, Garnier's discussion and assessment of himself and his need for a wife have a calculating, even cold air. Considered in the context of the late 1860s and in terms of Garnier's personal background, such a judgment must be modified, if not entirely dismissed. Writing to an old school friend, Joseph Perre, Garnier concluded that “I have, for too long, acted contrary to my nature in refusing to give my heart the place it demands in my personality.” In terms of a career, he went on, it was difficult indeed to think of embracing a profession in France itself that would require him to act in a dry and purely self-directed fashion. For this reason he still thought of challenges overseas. But to embark on fresh adventures required some new and vital cause for action. Without stating the matter directly in this letter, Garnier had in mind a wife. For, as he now admitted, “there is an affectionate and tender side to my character that I have never entirely succeeded in subduing.”
By the end of January 1869, he was able to commit his ideas to paper without hesitation; he wrote as a weary thirty-year-old:
… these days when I return home, my brain tired out from writing and reading tiresome scribbles, I find the house empty indeed. … I must have, I feel, another self, a young confidant who will be my mirror, my reflection, who will encourage me to live, lead me to the battle by suggesting to me that her well-being and happiness are my goal. This is the source of energy I must have. I sense it. Without it I find life so terribly lacking and I feel deeply indifferent to everything.
Within six months Garnier had found his mirror. In twelve months he was married. Joseph Perre had summoned him to Avignon to meet Claire Knight. If he had rightly judged that Claire would touch Garnier's heart, Perre may not have properly gauged the difficulties that lay ahead of a proposal of marriage. Claire was the daughter of a Scottish merchant, long resident in Avignon and married to a Frenchwoman. It was she, narrow-mindedly provincial, who raised the obstacles. Claire was the youngest of three daughters and should wait till her sisters were married. Garnier was a Catholic, nominally at least, and Claire was Protestant. And, of course, despite the naval regulation requiring an officer to marry only when a dowry was provided, Claire could not on any account furnish the dot.
One by one the difficulties were overcome. A way was found to circumvent the problem of a dowry. A clause allowing for any children to be educated as Protestants were inserted in the marriage contract. Claire's father looked in a kindly fashion on the marriage, even if his fearsomely bourgeois wife did not. The enraptured Garnier married his adoring Claire on January 19, 1870.
Garnier's marriage, despite the calculation and planning involved, was a love match. In the still difficult months ahead, the marriage sustained his spirit. Only twelve days before the wedding, he wrote to Joseph Perre to complain bitterly about the whispering campaign that continued to criticize his readiness to claim credit for the achievements of the Mekong expedition. In terms of personal politics, he wrote, if he was making any progress forward it was with a cripple's gait. His decision to accept the award presented by the Royal Geographical society in London was, in his detractors' eyes, an affront to Lagrée's memory; it did not seem to matter that he had asked for the award to be shared with the dead leader. It was “the same old story: Monsieur Lagrée's name is evoked to bring me down.”
Yet when he wrote this chagrined comment, in June 1870, a new dawn did not seem too far distant. He was truly happy with Claire and, just as importantly, he looked forward to leaving France for a journey to China that would combine further exploration with his plans for commercial enterprise. As for publishing the results of the Mekong mission, this enterprise too was now reaching a satisfactory conclusion. He was to bring out a “popular” account of the expedition's journey in the well-known travel magazine Tour de Monde, starting in July. The official version, in two volumes, with Delaporte, Joubert, and Thorel each providing contributions, would go to press in November.
The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War on July 15, 1870, changed everything. Garnier's rapid transfers from post to post in the early months of the war reflected the disorganization reigning in the French ranks. Called back to active duty, he first assumed command of a gunboat on the Rhine. Within a month he had been called away from that post to be aide-de-camp to an admiral commanding a reserve naval squadron at Brest. Only a few weeks later, still before the end of August, his duties changed once more; he was given the command of an armed launch on the Seine. Barely had he assumed this post when he was ordered to another staff position, as aide-de-camp to Admiral Méquet who, as the Prussian siege closed about Paris, commanded one of the defense sectors on the southern perimeter of the city. Soon, temporarily promoted to commander, Garnier became Méquet's chief of staff.
There was little chance of glory for Garnier in the course of the Prussian siege of Paris. He behaved, as might be expected, with courage, but with an increasingly heavy heart. Separated from the now pregnant Claire, even Garnier was forced to realize that the weakness and ineptitude of France's leaders offered little hope for a successful end to the war. He recorded his views in a journal that he subsequently published anonymously, bitterly noting the incompetence of his superiors and scornfully deriding the military pretensions of the hastily raised Paris militia.
Night camp beside the Mekong.
Ethnic groups from South Yunnan province. The explorers were struck by the diversity of races in southwestern China.
View of P'uerh, one of the towns on the explorers' route through southwestern China. See pages 137–40.
Traveling through a ravine near Sop Yong. See page 121.
Panoramic views of two of the important Chinese cities the explorers passed through after leaving the Mekong; Yiian-chiang on the Red River (see page 145) and 1-pin on the Yangtze (see pages 180–81).
Ethnic groups of the Ta-li region. See pages 176–80.
The lake at Ta-li, the westernmost point in China reached by the explorers.
The surviving explorers and their escort at Hankow in June 1868, two years after the expedition left Saigon. It was here that Garnier had his fateful meeting with Jean Dupis. See page 181.
When the end came and Paris surrendered to the Germans, Garnier was outraged by the terms of the armistice—so much so that he took his case to the press, protesting against the terms permitting Prussian forces to seize the remaining French war material intact. He quickly paid for this zeal. Due for promotion to the permanent rank of commander, his name was now removed from the list of officers eligible for advancement. This setback was the beginning of a new series of disappointments. He agreed to stand for election to the National Assembly but did not gain the seat. More importantly, in his own eyes, he failed in his candidature for election to the Institut de France; the honor of membership in that famous body's geographical section was not forthcoming, largely because the feeling still existed that he sought prestige more correctly belonging to Lagrée. Even his property had suffered in the course of the war; the small house he had bought years before in the country was almost destroyed in the battles that had taken place outside Paris. There was only one clear cause for happiness. On the day Paris surrendered, Claire gave birth to a daughter.
Garnier's own description of his position, once the war had come to an end and he had retreated to quarters away from central Paris, made his official position and his state of mind clear. “Whatever happens,” he wrote to Perre, “I have withdrawn like Achilles into my tent.” Separating himself from the bitter confrontation and then open conflict of the Commune period, he buried himself in his books and in writing. The depth of his disillusion emerges in a comment made in April 1871. With Joseph Perre as his only confidant, apart from Claire, he admitted hi
s readiness to forget the present in favor of studying the history of Asia. “I forget France and Germany and everything else to live in the middle of the unknown past.”
Such a retreat scarcely suited the deeper forces of Garnier's personality. His scholarly instincts had to be relieved by action. Of the surviving members of the Mekong party, only he and Delaporte now thought of travel back to Asia. Joubert had left the navy in 1869, and Thorel in 1871. For Garnier and Delaporte, however, there was little continuing attraction to be found in living in France. Once preparations for publishing the official report of the Mekong expedition were in hand again—the war had put an end to all work of this sort—decisions could be made for the future.
Garnier's first concern was to travel back to China. Despite his interest in the Red River, the old question of the Mekong's source remained demandingly in his mind. At the same time, he was conscious of his need for money. The journey he now planned to make through China would have a dual purpose. He would seek geographical information and his fortune. If he could find the commercial source of silk and tea in western China, then wealth would be his. With these plans in mind, Garnier was ready to cede to Delaporte the opportunity to make a scientific survey of the Red River.
River Road to China Page 20