In the bazaars every evening our mousmes make endless purchases; like spoiled children they buy everything they fancy:  toys, pins, ribbons, flowers.  And then they prettily offer one another presents, with childish little smiles.  For instance, Campanule buys for Chrysantheme an ingeniously contrived lantern on which, set in motion by some invisible machinery, Chinese shadows dance in a ring round the flame.  In return, Chrysantheme gives Campanule a magic fan, with paintings that change at will from butterflies fluttering around cherry-blossoms to outlandish monsters pursuing each other across black clouds.  Touki offers Sikou a cardboard mask representing the bloated countenance of Dai-Cok, god of wealth; and Sikou replies with a present of a long crystal trumpet, by means of which are produced the most extraordinary sounds, like a turkey gobbling.  Everything is uncouth, fantastical to excess, grotesquely lugubrious; everywhere we are surprised by incomprehensible conceptions, which seem the work of distorted imaginations.

In the fashionable tea-houses, where we finish our evenings, the little serving-maids now bow to us, on our arrival, with an air of respectful recognition, as belonging to the fast set of Nagasaki.  There we carry on desultory conversations, full of misunderstandings and endless ’quid pro quo’ of uncouth words, in little gardens lighted up with lanterns, near ponds full of goldfish, with little bridges, little islets, and little ruined towers.  They hand us tea and white and pink-colored sweetmeats flavored with pepper that taste strange and unfamiliar, and beverages mixed with snow tasting of flowers or perfumes.

To give a faithful account of those evenings would require a more affected style than our own; and some kind of graphic sign would have also to be expressly invented and scattered at haphazard among the words, indicating the moment when the reader should laugh—­rather a forced laugh, perhaps, but amiable and gracious.  The evening at an end, it is time to return up there.

Oh! that street, that road, that we must clamber up every evening, under the starlit sky or the heavy thunder-clouds, dragging by the hands our drowsy mousmes in order to regain our homes perched on high halfway up the hill, where our bed of matting awaits us.

CHAPTER XIII

Our “Very tall friend”

The cleverest among us has been Louis de S-------.  Having formerly
inhabited Japan, and made a marriage Japanese fashion there, he is now
satisfied to remain the friend of our wives, of whom he has become the
‘Komodachi taksan takai’ ("the very tall friend,” as they say, on account
of his excessive height and slenderness).  Speaking Japanese more readily
than we, he is their confidential adviser, disturbs or reconciles our
households at will, and has infinite amusement at our expense.

This “very tall friend” of our wives enjoys all the fun that these little creatures can give him, without any of the worries of domestic life.  With brother Yves, and little Oyouki (the daughter of Madame Prune, my landlady), he makes up our incongruous party.