Voyage à Rodrigues

Inspired by the life of his grandfather, Léon, and drawing on both biblical and literary myth, this first-person journal follows Le Chercheur d’or. Le Clézio — descended from a Breton family who emigrated to Mauritius in the eighteenth century — had traced in that book the search for 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, in doing so, the places where the famous treasure might lie hidden on this remote spot in the Indian Ocean.

Once deserted, Rodrigues was gradually settled through the hopes and dreams of Breton sailors, African slaves, Indian merchants and Chinese traders… All, in their own way, are 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, sea and wind that make up Rodrigues.”

The writer unveiled a plaque on the island in April 2018, engraved with this passage from Voyage à Rodrigues: “There is a timelessness here, in Rodrigues, that is both frightening and tempting, and it seems to me that this is truly the only place in the world where I can think of my grandfather as someone alive. Still visible, as though made only yesterday, are the pickaxe blows he struck against the wall of the ravine, at the bottom of the dead end, left and right.”

Mysteries of a land born of a volcano whose crater no one can precisely locate.
What if Léon was right? Rodrigues may still be hiding something from us.