Voyage à Rodrigues
Presentation copy inscribed by Le Clézio to François Mitterrand: “Pour Monsieur François Mitterrand, en signe d'admiration, de respect, de proximité. J.-M. Le Clézio,” enriched with a small drawing.
Inspired by the life of his grandfather, Léon, and drawing on both biblical and literary myths, this first-person journal follows on from Le Chercheur d’or. Descended from a Breton family who emigrated to Mauritius in the eighteenth century, Le Clézio had traced in that earlier book the quest for a treasure buried on the island of Rodrigues, northeast of Mauritius.
A year later, Le Clézio recounts his own investigation, following his grandfather’s footsteps and, by extension, the places on this speck of land in the Indian Ocean where the famous hoard might lie hidden. Once deserted, Rodrigues was gradually settled through the ambitions, hopes and dreams of Breton sailors, African slaves, Indian traders and Chinese merchants. All of them are, in their own way, descendants of gold-seekers, or of something else: “There is the emptiness of the sky, the call of the sea, the birds, the blades of the vacoas, this intoxication of scorched stone, of sea and wind that make up Rodrigues.”
Le Clézio unveiled a plaque in April 2018, having had the following extract from Voyage à Rodrigues engraved in the marble: “There is a timelessness here, in Rodrigues, that both frightens and tempts, and it seems to me that this is truly the only place in the world where I can think of my grandfather as someone still alive. Still visible, as if made only yesterday, are the pickaxe blows he struck on the wall of the ravine, at the end of the cul-de-sac, to the right and to the left.”
Among all the authors strictly contemporary with the late twentieth century, Le Clézio, with eight titles, most of them inscribed, was the most represented in François Mitterrand’s library.
A fine copy.