12th February 1849 My dear friend, What a turmoil ! Last night Lucie told me that you have sent me a letter I am yet to receive. You were dealing in it about your unrealistic project, the very same that had you rush towards the antipodes, a deed you concealed from us (or say, from me), knowing perfectly that we would have prevented you from the undertaking. Where on Earth have you sent this letter ? A letter I so wished for. Since fall indeed I am no longer in Livry, and it is a wonder my mail could not get through although. Unless, of course, some malicious person has misappropriated it. Who could do that ? The truth must be sillier : you will have mispelt my name. At all events, here lies a conundrum, adding to the one included, I am sure, in your lost letter. Why did you choose to share your secret with Lucie instead of me ? I reckon you have done this in order to make me jealous of my sister. You will never change. (Oh ! Here I am, addressing you as though you were an old friend...) She was indeed the one you chose to spend the night with. But we were all wearing masks - perhaps your judgment faculties erred ? Again, Mother broke a vessel when Lucie mentioned your name at dinner last night. Obviously, the reparation of your favour, at least in the bosom of our family, seems to be put off indefinitely. Father, true to form, does not give a trifle and hardly gets out of his study anyway. Shall I have to join you at the Cape or at the Isle of France to tell you that I am not cross with you ? Please do not answer that last query. Have I told you about my dreams of travel ? Indeed every girl has them. Or is it under your influence that my nights are now haunted with deserted islands and eternal heat ? My memories go astray in a alfred 3 - 1

maze made up of your words, to such extent that I do not know anymore if they stem from our own desires or if I am the one drawing them from your very lips pretending to speak of meaningless things. Oh no, pray, you are not meaningless. I miss your folly. It is all so solemn here that boredom turns me to stone, so much so that I will soon be set in the garden near the fountainhead. There, I will send you this letter at the Isle of France. Who knows when (and if) it will ever reach you ? Good bye, Estelle

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20th June 1849 My dear friend When I absent-mindedly wrote you six months ago, I did not know that you had already left the Isle of France. Lucie knew, of course, but just would not tell me. I learned this information then by breaking into her writing-desk and reading your one and only letter. Alas ! I had but the time to glimpse at your present address as my sister caught me redhanded. What a cruel lack of fortune, don't you think ? The row that followed will remain in the all-time records of the Manor. Which one of us would you have supported, I wonder. None, probably, for you are but a man. When, in my former letter, I told you not to answer my silly queries, it was just a matter of speaking, not an invitation to remain quiet. Anyway, Lucie and I were at loggerheads for a complete fortnight, which is our most lasting divorce since the Controversy of the Blue-eyed Doll, when we were eight years-old. It takes more to tear twin sisters apart, sir, as you are about to learn. Thus I do not know whether you have received my letter. At all events, that makes no difference, as it was but a young girl's whinings. Now, I have something important to announce : I am about to get married. Well, I believe I am. Last week we were visited by a charming young man of your acquaintance (or so I think, at least, he knows about you). He is now studying medicine in Montpellier (as did his grand-father, he deemed to inform us with a rather touching snobbishness) and, I do not know how, happened to get invited by our parents to spend a night at the Manor. The occasion being not a masked ball, he saw at once that we were not different, I and Lucie. We were very much pleased with his alfred 3 - 3

stutterings. My sister and I have struggled over seduction, but ended up with nothing more promising than a possible visit next month. I am, therefore, busy now convincing myself to marry him, so as to get away from my life, that is, from my sister. As well as from the memory of you, who are but a lout. Estelle PS : Lucie has weirdly swollen up of late, but she's well. Are you responsible for this ?

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6th March 1850 My dear friend, Now I have heard about your last move, thanks to my mother. The Isle of Whales ? Where is that ? What is hidden on such a lost place ? Pirates, corsairs, freebooters, mermaids ? True to form, I do not know whether you have received my former letter. My only solace is that Lucie has received nothing either in the last several months and is thus in the same boat I'm in - so to speak. Henceforth, whenever the conversation broaches on you, she simply adopts a closed face and retires to her room. I end up with a very bitter feeling of superiority. I did not marry after all. My pursuant showed no... resilience of any sort. He blundered in mistaking us, me with Lucie ! Of course, she led him into it, thanks to some trap he couldn't possibly avoid. His mistake is none the less unforgivable, is it ? You yourself never made such a faux-pas - it is thus possible not to. And as they say on the stage : exit Badelaine . Oddly enough, I am no longer looking forward to his being replaced by yet another contender. Young men are so vapid nowadays. (Or else they go to Paris as soon as their chin grows a beard and play there some revolutionary part - sorry : Rrrevolootionarrry !) I would speak about it with Lucie but she keeps shunning me and even overtly makes fun of me in social occasions. We are now going through our longest period of frost. Worst of all, I feel no regret whatsoever. True to tell, life at the manor is more and more of a burden. I have dreams of endless horizons. Are you the one sending them to me ? I sometimes see myself as a freebootress, a sword (it is a cutlass, I believe ?) tight between my teeth, pistol at the ready, my hair all ablaze. What nonsense ! I, who have never ever smelt the smell of sea. Needless alfred 3 - 5

to say, I wake up from such dreams in utter dismay. Will I ever be bold enough ? And are you worth it, sir ? Estelle PS : by the way, Lucie's long illness was over in October - I'll let you guess its name.

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7th November 1851 My dear friend, The incredible has happened. Not only the incredible - the impossible ! You will never guess where I am as I write to you. Before I tell you, know that I have learned your whereabouts thanks to an unexpected ally : our mother. Oh, she certainly did not disclose your new address on purpose. I even had to wait before I had a chance to look up in an atlas the location of New-Caledonia. I was fretting in the meantime, my mind echoing with that meaningless name dropped at dinner time by our mother, who thought I could not overhear her. She was speaking with her confessor, Father d'Aubignon, whom you had met at the masked ball under the species of a gas lamppost. Because of the din she must have thought I would not hear her ; but, first, she's going deaf with ageing and speaks louder than she reckons, and second, I was under the non-influence of a slim awkward-voiced vicar, so devoid of wits that he failed to notice mine gone astray. I only had to grasp a couple of words to understand that you were the center of her conversation with the [fabricant de grenouilles de bénitier / churchies-monger], and more precisely, that she was discussing your current situation. Seizing this name which had no meaning yet, I went the next day to a library in town and was quickly provided with the answer. As a consequence, this is where I am sending this letter, in care of the Gouverneur's, whose duty it is to deliver your mail in due course. However this is not the best of news. The best is that... Ah ! I do not dare write it so soon. What shall I tell you while I am mustering the necessary boldness ? That your child is born and fine ? You must know it already, I am sure, through Lucie's letters, which were luckier than mine (or so she says). In your absence, your paternity is kept pending, as alfred 3 - 7

is customary with sailors. Will you recognize it, when you are back ? I have just realised that the last question bears an awful double meaning. But then, do you ever intend to come back ? Having no news from you, I can only entrust whatever Lucie deigns to tell me, often with a hardly disguised reluctance. Since she is a mother, the gap between her and me has only grown wider, wider even that you might figure. For... I am no longer at the manor. There ! I've said it. I am no longer living there, I am not eating there, I am not sleeping there. I do not cry there anymore at nights, I do not sigh there anymore all day long. I am no longer slowly dying there. I am gone. Mother and sister will surely tell you that I ran away and might even make up some mysterious adventurer who eloped with me. But I am telling you : I have liberated myself. What would you tell me, were you to talk to me at last ? I just do not know. Your voice and face are receding from my memory. I must see you again before I forget you, body and soul. The truth is crazy enough to be believed : under the guise of a man and with the help of an accomplice, I embarked on a coasting-lugger, crossed the Atlantic north to south, then half the Indian ocean. I am presently writing to you in a tavern, on the Isle of France, facing the East where you are hiding. This very day I have met a Dutch navigator who was acquainted with you not so long ago and knows where you have gone. Unless, of course, he is trying to get something from me. I am coming now. Estelle

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23rd June 1853 My dear friend, Will I dare say it ? Of course I will. You are but a coward. Or is it that fate be more facetious than any Greek deity giving away his childish curses from his Olympic vantage point ? We missed by a trifle ! Hardly a season. When one is aware of seas' enormous size, a season is almost nothing. Today I have heard that you set sail in March aboard an Irish cutter, the Dubliner. I arrived here myself the first week of June aboard the frigate Révoltante . I tried to learn, from a young clerk at the Gouverneur's house, whether you had received my mail. But he was not in the capacity to tell me, as mail is too high a responsibility for poor little him. He told me anyway that the Dubliner's assignment had been planned long ago and was therefore not rushed. I did not know what to make of that. It took me a whole week of hard-working research to find out the Dubliner's destination. That piece of information was acquired at great cost. For not only do I have to pay for every moment of my dressing as a man, but I can't either require the arguments bestowed on me by the very nature of my womanhood. I am sure that, along with your peers, you take me for a nobody. If anything, the present journey helped me gain a better understanding of men's thoughts. From now on, I will lose no time in grilling a male specimen to know what is going in that mind of his. For the answer is quick as a thunderbolt and alas ! far less enlightening : nothing. My, I forgot ! Sometimes, it goes : "Yohoho ! A flask of rum, quicky !" My memory of you is that of a genial and refined man ; although in the two years since I left my country, I find myself wondering : when you mingle with these people, do you remain your very own self ? Or do alfred 3 - 9

you take to speaking as they do ? This, I could not stand. Maybe I am wandering off the point. You have to know now that I no longer have the habit of writing several drafts of my letters ; a single one is enough. Not for want of paper and ink, but because I feel not as often sorry for what I have written on the spur of the moment. I was about to tell you how I found out your next stopover. You may not care about that, since you are on your way to Nomedia (yes, you see, I have heard about it, too - what does she have that I do not ?) and these words will not reach you before you arrive. Know then that to achieve my purpose, I had to seduce a sailorman. I, shy Estelle, I seduced a sailor to get from him what I needed to know. I am turning venal, you say ? Who's to blame ? As a consequence, tomorrow morning, I am setting sail, as a male sailor, on the Smasher, heading to Tahiti through Espiritu Santo, while your ship went through Tonga. I have been told that at this time of the year, it is indeed a difficult journey. It does not matter. I know I am getting closer to you. Yet last night, I was awakened by a heartrending nightmare. As I was lighting a candle tremulously, I wondered if my letters might be what is putting you to flight. A nightmare indeed, for if such is the case, what is in me that frightens you so much ? Estelle

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5th January 1855 My dear friend, Where will I write you now ? Nobody will know where you are. Maybe not even yourself. I am sitting at a table on the quiet deck of a gorgeous house, overlooking a white sand beach, so white it dazzles me. Between each sentence, almost between each word, I raise my eyes up to the ocean. I am facing North. In front of me, according to official maps and geography teachers who lecture far from here in Europe where winter is numbing their brains more efficiently than rum does for sailors, in front of me sits the ocean, a void for some, a nothingness. And yet it is where you have gone. I have been told so, here in Nuku Hiva. The very man who sold you your outrigger has told me, and I did not have to pay him or even threaten him. He told me with an open simle, adding that you have called your ship the Shooting Star. Overjoyed with himself he did not notice how sad I was. He confirmed as well that nothing stands where you went. That where you went is a cemetery for winds. They die there like whales on a beach. That you went alone, which would prevent your rowing back here, for you'd be exhausted to death, as undercurrents will never bring you back here, no more than they would take you to distant Hawaï, thousands of leagues to the north-west. He looked so confident, that little old man. I had but an ancient dream to object. That is why I could not hate him, even if he shattered my last hopes to pieces. I have made my home in the only house on the northern part of the island, a boarding-house of sorts, run by a tetchy old woman of untraceable origins. She lets her only room to me for next to nothing, which is a good thing for I have next to nothing left. The journey cost me whatever wealth I had brought with me. And my name is no longer alfred 3 - 11

good for credit, even though I have regained my rights to use it by dressing as a woman again. What am I left to hope for in this life ? Shall I become a sentinel on the brim of the world, looking out towards the abyss where all the brave go and vanish ? Or are they the coward ones, the ones who refuse to struggle against the world as it is ? If such is the case, then I am their keeper, and the less brave of them. I am such a coward that I could very well sit here and wait for the old lady to give up her place to me, were she to omit waking up one of these mornings. She must be a hundred years-old, as turtles are. There is but one last serious business I have to do now ; afterwards lies nothing but routine. I must write to Lucie to tell her what has become of you : a dot on the horizon, a dot that, in my foolishness, I thought I could swim up to. This dot I imagined seeing might have been your sail. Your sail, my mirage. As there is only one boat a year stopping here, the last being the one I arrived on, it will take two, maybe three years for my letter to reach my sister. If she ever answers, it will take as long to know what she has to say. Before then, you may be back. You or anyone else. Estelle

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5th April 1858 My dear friend, My sister died of grief after hearing you had vanished. My leaving her had already worn her down so much. Who could be so villainous as to put the blame on me ? It's been five years now that you took to sea, and I have inherited Madame Baré's boarding-house. With time, I had taken to liking her. We have shared more or less the same fate, and I do not wish to struggle against mine anymore. Our present time... I mean, your time has destroyed so many women, hasn't it ? So many women tired themselves to death, exhausted themselves, shattered their souls to pieces by following men like you, men who had no need of these women. For that is what I have understood in the end : it was I you were fleeing from. It was that love of mine you were rejecting, while seeking refuge on the other side of the world. Did you grant it so little appeal ? Was it worth so low compared to your drive for adventure ? Have you lived so many adventures that the one called love seemed so unworthy to you, so insignificant, doomed to oblivion before it even hatched ? Have you ever considered that there will come a time when every land is known ? And where shall they go then, these children of yours who will inherit nothing, nothing but a fully mapped Earth, laced with borders, with not a single free space, with no void to get lost into when the time is ripe ? Where shall she go, your daughter Eloïse - whose face you don't even know, can't even dream of ? Will she have to get lost at sea, as you did, to intertwine her corpse to yours in an obscene and last embrace ? Do you care to know that all these letters I have signed in the name of Estelle might as well have been written by Lucie, that I might as well be the mother of your daughter, a daughter you never wanted in the alfred 3 - 13

first place. There is a thing you are unaware of, tucked as you are in your little heaven : your soul is cursed, which probably accounts for your never trying to find one for your self.

These seven letters were found, as drafts, in a trunk belonging to the furniture of Madame Baré's boarding-house, auctioned in 1939 before the house was torn down. The name of the addressee is not mentioned anywhere. It is not known whether the final versions of the letters had been sent away. The signature has been identified as Mlle Estelle Vailhan d'Oural's, who was cured by Dr JeanJoseph Badelaine-Montesquieu in his clinic in Quissac from 1850 to 1851. She was an only child.

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