Chapter One Uncle Jacques and the Chocolate Cream Puffs Every family in Brittany has a son who is a sailor. And every good family in Brittany has a son in the Royal Navy--preferably, an officer. Maybe this would have been me, if I hadn't been born a girl. I doubt I could have conformed to military discipline, but I dreamed about it briefly when I was ten years old. It was all Uncle Jacques's fault--Uncle Jacques with his uniforms, his love of bicycles, and his generous way of buying me little pastries. I was born in Paris only by happenstance. From Dunkerque on my father's side and Brest on my mother's, I came into this world imbued with the love of the sea. My parents fueled this passion to fiery heights on vacations, when they carried us off--my two older brothers, my younger sister, and me--to the beaches of Alderney and the Crozon Peninsula. Whenever I recall these trips to Brittany, I still can hear my mother crying: "Anne! Get out of the water right now! You're completely blue!" From morning to night, I paddled and splashed, then splashed and paddled some more. I went swimming when the tide came in and followed it when it went out, collecting crabs from water holes, capturing shrimp, prying off limpets stuck to the rocks. I used these poor mollusks as green crab bait, threading them on a safety pin at the end of a piece of string, and made necklaces from their shells. The crabs I hung up on the children's beach house to dry in the sun. This was how I spent my phase of childhood cruelty; it was my way of pulling the wings off flies. We waded in shores of abundance. In half an hour, my sister and I would fill a basket with five quarts of praires and palourdes , two kinds of local clams, which we traded for delicious carambars --ten of them, at five centimes apiece. A similar harvest today would take two adults an entire morning. I also adored hunting for tough old mollusks called couteaux . We sprinkled a little salt over their holes, and waited for them to come out. It was magic. Of course, no one ate them, not even the dogs; their flesh was much too rubbery. Now they are served up in restaurants as a "typical" regional dish. I loved the water that chapped my skin, the waves that rolled the soft-sounding shingle, the wind that tangled my hair, and the sea spray that stuck it together. I even loved the bottom slime that penetrated, cold and viscous, through a hole in my boot. Some people found the smell of it nauseating, but not me. To me it smelled like the sea. Later, I loved the ocean because it could be such a wonderful playground. The sea is never so beautiful as when it is full of bristling white sails. When my brother Antoine started sixth grade, our parents offered him a little dinghy equipped with a scull. I stole off with it as often as possible. A boat! A boat is freedom, and what pride I felt at eight years old as the only master on board! But seafaring adventures were only for boys, not girls, everyone explained to me. And, of course, freedom was for them too. I quickly understood that the "weaker" sex had to battle for its own. Paris was school and restrictions, tiredness, dissension, gloomy winter mornings going down the metro steps beneath the drizzling rain. My mother worked a lot, much too much. An ophthalmologist, she rushed from one clinic to the next from morning till night, day in and day out. We were handed over to a succession of au pairs, first in Montmartre where we lived for a long time, then in the Latin Quarter. I was ten when we moved there in the middle of the 1960s. In my heart, I rebelled against Paris. I would dream of the coast of Brittany, of sailboats tacking between the tip of Saint-Mathieu and Ushant Island. I drew pictures of my dreams, and did it well, it seems--I was even said to have talent--and felt bored. Except at my Uncle Jacques's house. Uncle Jacques was the glory of our family. My mother's older brother, Jacques Vichot was a Breton living in Paris, an officer in the Royal Navy, and a founder of the Marine Museum. His wife, Régine, was my godmother, and they both adored me. They invited me to their house--all by myself! It was the height of luxury, a delight! I was the center of all their attention: no brothers, no sister. For the space of an afternoon, I was their darling, and it pleased me more than anything else in the world. Régine and Jacques had a fabulous apartment on the top floor of the Chaillot Palace, which houses the Musée de la Marine in Paris, and an immense terrace with a view of the Trocadero gardens. On Sundays when I went to visit them, they pampered me and let me do whatever I pleased. More than anything else, I loved to see my uncle dressed in his formal uniform. He was superb--tall, elegantly slender, strong, a beautiful figure of a man. He also had good taste. A bit of an artist himself, he had taken up painting in his leisure time, and he evaluated my drawings like a connoisseur. I remember one of his designs, used today as an emblem in marine museums all over France: a motif with two "sea horses," one on either side of a cannon. Rather than the usual equipage, his horses had mermaids' tails. Everyone thinks the emblem was taken from an eighteenth-century ship, but it's actually a legacy from Uncle Jacques. With my aunt and uncle I was happy. I forgot Paris--the school, the walls, the pavement. Especially when we visited the museum when it was closed. At those times, the dream was mine alone--all I had to do was look around me. I admired the paintings depicting battles at sea and ports devoted to commerce and piracy. I ran my fingers over ancient cast-iron cannons, wooden dinghies, and slender hempen cords. I circled the models of corvettes and sloops, cutters and seventy-four-gun ships; and I especially loved to imagine them casting off, unfurling their sails, and heading out to sea with their crews. I saw straight-backed men in blue and red uniforms standing on the forecastles of sailing ships, and agile, brawling sailors with scarves around their heads, climbing barefoot up the rigging. I heard the snapping of the sails, the whistling of the southern wind, the violent roaring of the waves. I escaped reality. And when I emerged from my daydream, Uncle Jacques would take me over to the rope display and explain the use of each one, or else he would show me the instruments explorers used--sextants, octants, theodolites, and chronometers. It was sheer happiness. One of these trips to the vast museum rooms remains firmly engraved on my memory. Uncle Jacques had been ill and was having trouble walking, so he decided to tour the museum by bicycle! As he didn't want me running after him, he gave me permission to follow him on roller skates--a unique honor due to my age and our special relationship. What a show it must have been: Jacques Vichot on a bicycle, flanked by little Anne on her skates, sailing past all those glass display cases filled with the vestiges of the most prestigious ships in history. The museum guards were speechless. But Uncle Jacques was not content simply to show me his museum, his life's work. He taught me how to look at the ocean with curiosity. Even more, he inspired me to regard it with a passion that was both physical and intellectual. Not only was the ocean a playground and a source of pleasure, it was a whole new universe, which, at the time, was no more understood than Jupiter or Mars. He spoke to me of mysterious tides, of incongruous examples, of microscopic marine organisms, of bottomless pits, of tricky currents, of trade winds and flying fish, of strange animals whose names I didn't know: killer whales, pilot whales, humpback whales, belugas. Uncle Jacques was for me another Captain Ahab, another legendary sailor like Bernard Moitessier, with the all-important difference that I could see him every week, pester him, and wear him out with my questions. The first map of the ocean floor published by National Geographic hung on his wall. At the point when he felt I was truly interested, he took it down and gave it to me as a present. Today I realize this was only one of the many times that he paid me special attention, but the day he gave me that map--which I have piously preserved--Uncle Jacques did something extraordinary: he gave me confidence in myself. He showed me an adult could care about a child's interests, could support and even encourage them. Uncle Jacques was an example, a point of reference, an accomplice. It also turned out that he liked to shake things up. I remember one Sunday morning in Brittany when I was about ten years old. We were on vacation, and Uncle Jacques and Aunt Régine had come to pay us a visit. My uncle took me with him to Camaret to do some shopping, and we walked into the pastry shop. In and of itself, this was enough to surprise me. My mother did not like sweets, and we were permitted only one cake a year: a big mocha birthday cake, covered with crushed almonds. Four children, four cakes a year--no more. That Sunday morning, without the least pretext of a birthday, Uncle Jacques announced his intention to buy everyone a chocolate cream puff! Not one big, collective, "reasonable" cake, but gourmand delicacies--individual, personal, egotistical. These were the kind of choux à la crème locally known as religieuses --literally translated, "nuns." A sin in all its splendor, and just when people were coming out of church! While the girl counted out ten chocolate cream puffs, my uncle looked on with a little disappointed pout. "What do you say, Anne?" he asked. "Don't you think they look a little skimpy?" To my wondering eyes, it looked like she'd erected an entire mountain of cream. Of course, I didn't dare reply. My uncle continued in this same vein: "We'll need at least two per person. Please, miss, make that twenty cream puffs." For a split second, I thought that the walls of the pastry shop would crumble, that the heavens would open, that a flash of lightning would destroy the whole town of Camaret. Twenty chocolate cream puffs! It was more than audacious, it was begging for trouble. I still had not recovered from my stupefaction when Uncle Jacques added: "To wrap things up, I'd like one more, but don't put it in with the others. I think my niece would enjoy eating it on the way home." I left the pastry shop holding my gift like a choirboy carrying the Holy Communion. And then I bit into it, right there on the sidewalk, shivering with pleasure and delight. It was the best cream puff I have ever eaten! I remember the way Uncle Jacques looked at me, delighted and tender at the same time. And worried, too, because he probably thought I didn't dare rock the boat enough. He felt the dawning of an interest deep inside of me, which he still was at odds to understand, but that sometimes managed to express itself, especially when the subject of the ocean came up. He sensed that I was working against myself, getting through school by sheer discipline, with no goal in sight. That was the day that I think he leaned toward me and whispered in my ear: "You shouldn't always do the reasonable thing. You've got to learn to do what you want, sometimes. Follow your heart, Anne" I'm not really sure that he actually pronounced these words. But every time I remember the scene, I think I see him lean toward me, put his hand on my shoulder, and say these words in my ear, as if they were the key to the meaning of life. In any case, his gesture had the same significance. Before vacation was over, I had decided to become an oceanographer. Today, this term makes me smile. It is possible to become a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, a statistician, or a mathematician, or to choose a certain specialty in marine or earth sciences, but it is no more possible to become an "oceanographer" than to become an "earthographer." Why not a "planetologer"? Today, no one can seriously pretend to comprehend all the aspects of a subject as vast as the ocean. But in the 1960s, for a ten-year-old kid, it was still permissible. This was especially true because I still didn't know exactly what it was I wanted to do, except to follow Uncle Jacques's advice and never, ever again let anyone else decide for me how I should follow my heart. When the films of Jacques Cousteau came out, they anchored me more deeply in my love of the sea and marine life, with its different kinds of flora and fauna. We didn't have a television set, so I racked my imagination figuring out how to show up at my friends' homes exactly in time to catch the episodes of his documentary. I didn't miss a single program. In my dreams, I was already a researcher. I paced the deck of my personal Calypso and dived down to tweak the fin of Jojo the grouper. I floated among the flotsam and jetsam of mysterious sea wrecks, or was the first to observe a giant deep-sea creature with a bristling jawful of razor-sharp teeth. Naturally, I escaped with a stroke of my flipper and named the beast straightaway, shamelessly calling it Giganticus colletus . A few years later, I was going to high school at the Lycée Victor Duruy. This was another story altogether. Physics and chemistry bored me to tears, I was zero in French, and doing about average in biology, geography, and history. The only things that really interested me were art and math. Because I was quite undisciplined, the vice principal thought he would punish me by automatically assigning me to a branch of courses designed for humanities students. I probably would have accepted this decision, which would have opened the doors to art school, if I hadn't been possessed by a passion for the ocean. The chance to be rid of certain annoying subjects was quite tempting, but the very idea that a university science department could refuse my application sent cold chills running down my spine. At the beginning of the seventies, it still was inconceivable in France that anyone could become a researcher without first studying math. To follow the humanities at the lycée was to be barred entrance to the halls of science forever. For me, such a refusal meant being cut off from the sea--and this was out of the question. "Follow your heart," Uncle Jacques had told me. And so I came to understand that skipping school was not necessarily the easiest route to satisfying those blasted desires of mine. I was going to have to work hard! I changed schools, enrolled in science courses, and plunged into my physics and chemistry books. I slogged away, keeping my blinders on in order to avoid distraction. And three years later, in June 1973, I graduated with the "right" diploma. Pocketing my pink acceptance form, I soon set off by train to Brest to enroll at the university in the department of marine biology. The euphoria I felt about my new life didn't last long. During those first few months of study, I often cursed Uncle Jacques. Consult my own desires ... follow my heart. First I had to know what I wanted to do, discover what I really loved. In general, my professors were intelligent, qualified, and interesting, but dredging up their students' hidden vocations was not part of their job. My fellow students were fairly friendly, but most of them didn't know what they wanted to do in life any more than I did. Only the ocean, so close at hand, attracted me, fulfilled me, and filled me with wonder. I followed the coastline more assiduously than I ever attended classes. My minor subject was bird-watching, but I acted like an attentive amateur, nothing more. I majored in weekend parties at our house near Camaret. Since my family lived in Paris, I was the only student with a house all to herself. I covered hundreds of miles in sailboat races, and my friends and I founded the Crocodiles de l'Élorn, one of the first windsurfing groups in France. I also had to repeat my first year of college, just like Eric Hussenot, one of my oldest friends, who today is the co-director of Océanopolis in Brest. I might well have repeated the year a third time and finally left the university disappointed, frustrated, and still undecided, but something happened to upset this round of fruitless study and perpetual extracurricular activity. One morning, on a beach near Cape Raz, a friend equipped me from head to toe: wet suit, weight belt, mask, flippers, and snorkel. He went into the water and invited me to follow. For days he had been promising me a surprise, all the while refusing to tell me anything about it. "Now are you going to tell me what we're doing here?" "Come and see. I'm sure you're going to like it." It was impossible to get another word out of him. I either had to dump the equipment and leave him there, or follow him. I don't like guessing games, but I am a curious person. And so I took the plunge. We were in a little bay, at high tide, where fishing boats were tied to moorings about thirty meters from shore. We swam out to the farthest boat, where my friend signaled me to stop. He took out his diving knife underwater and started striking the anchor chain. Had he gone completely nuts? As he still seemed to be in possession of his faculties, I thought he had arranged to meet other divers and was signaling our arrival by the noise. Was this all a joke he had concocted with our friends at school? I was expecting his accomplices to arrive at any moment when a shadow appeared to my right. Surprised, I put my hand on my friend's shoulder to attract his attention. He looked in the direction of the shadow and signaled me up to the surface. "It's him!" he cried. "Him who?" "Jean-Louis. Take a big breath. You're going to need it." There was no way to get anything else out of him. He had already stuck his snorkel in his mouth and was taking a deep breath. Then he dived again. I followed him as before, keeping my guard up. The shadow I had glimpsed seemed shaped like a fish and looked about the size of a man. We descended four or five meters with my friend leading the way, then remained at this depth thanks to the lead on our weight belts. Suddenly, the shadow reappeared. This time it was right in front of me. A simple spot at first, it rapidly grew larger. The water was not clear enough for me to distinguish what it was, but I immediately thought of a shark. For decades, any creature resembling a shark had been baptized "Jean-Louis" by the local fishermen. They considered them dangerous predators, if not to humans, then to fish. Before I had a chance to move, the shadow was upon us. It was not a shark but a dolphin, and a big one-- Tursiops truncatus , almost three meters long! Never before had I had the chance to see a bottlenose dolphin, alive and so close. He made straight for my friend, then stopped abruptly, with the point of his snout less than fifty centimeters from the mask. I don't know what I would have done if he had come toward me, but I don't think I would have fled. No doubt I would have braved it out, simply because I couldn't have been more surprised if an ostrich had passed through my garden at Camaret. On the other hand, the worry I had when I thought about sharks completely disappeared as soon as I knew we were dealing with a dolphin. Instinctively I felt I had nothing to fear. At the time, little was known about cetaceans. If anyone had done a survey of the students in the marine biology department, the majority would have said that dolphins were found only in tropical waters. Certainly nobody thought they lived off one of the chilliest points of the coast of Brittany. I was frightened as I watched the dolphin make a pirouette. Passing beneath us with a little dive, he followed it with a tailspin, then came up behind us, turned around, and stopped again. My friend and I were running out of air and had to go back to the surface. I was sure the dolphin was going to disappear, but instead he followed us up and began to swim around us in circles. Jean-Louis was obviously less surprised by me than I was by him, but his familiarity with people had not lessened his curiosity. He showed no sign of fear but nevertheless remained beyond our reach--even if we had wanted to, we would not have been able to touch him. I don't know what kind of game he was playing in approaching, pulling back, then returning. Whenever he stopped moving, I could sense him looking through my mask in search of eye contact. Illustrators tend to represent dolphins with doelike eyes, but seen close-up, their eyes, encircled with wrinkled eyelids, look more like those of a puffy old drunk. Jean-Louis's back was the color of gray-blue satin, and his lighter-colored belly had the look of the softest silk. Thanks to their skin, dolphins can swim quickly, in bursts as fast as thirty-five to forty kilometers an hour. According to the laws of thermodynamics, a dolphin's size, weight, shape, and muscular mass should not allow it to swim faster than twenty kilometers an hour, for water has a resistance eight times greater than air, but a dolphin has speed in its very skin. If you look at it under a microscope, it has a very particular structure: a smooth surface layer, both thin and elastic, and a supple second layer, formed of papilla and canals, which adapts itself to differing conditions. Much like a mattress with springs, this underlayer gives way or resists, varying according to the water pressure. Highly endowed with nerves, the dolphin's skin transmits sensations to the brain, which analyzes them and sends its orders back again to the millions of cells in the skin. This adapts itself in turn, as the dolphin slightly modifies the surface of its body, absorbing the turbulence that would otherwise slow it down. I like trying to imagine what animals might feel when they're faced with a human being. I think about this when I feed my cat and he looks at me with those eyes of his, full of gratitude and round as the eyes of a fried fish. As he purrs and rubs so gratifyingly against my calves, I think he must see me as a great hunter. Every day, I offer him a delectable sampling of prey. So from time to time, if he proudly brings home a lizard more dead than alive to show me that he, too, knows how to hunt, I am always careful never to look sad or disgusted, for these are reactions he could never understand. I don't know what Jean-Louis was hoping for when he came to bid us hello--some amusement, perhaps. He seemed particularly interested in my diving watch, or maybe it was the noise it made. He stuck his lower jaw up against it and emitted a series of clicking noises. I think the gears inside it intrigued him. As my watch was also going tick-tock, maybe he thought it was my echolocation transmitter. And then he suddenly got tired of passively contemplating his visitors and left. With six or seven flicks of his tail, he again became a far-off shadow and finally disappeared. Those of us in the human world swam back to the nearest boat and climbed in. I needed to recover from my emotions. My friend was wearing a satisfied little smile. He asked me if the surprise was worth the trip, and I merely said yes. I don't think I ever revealed to him how thoroughly the encounter had shaken me. As soon as I felt a bit like myself again, I bombarded him with questions. "How did you discover him?" "Oh, I didn't find him, he found me. I was diving about a thousand meters from here, gathering samples of algae, when he came barreling toward me. At first I thought he was a shark." "Is that why you called him Jean-Louis?" "The local fishermen named him. I told them I'd seen a dolphin, and they said he was a regular in the area, that he'd been paying them visits for months. In fact, all any of them has to do is get in his boat and the dolphin shows up and starts swimming around in circles." "Have you come back to see him often?" "Five or six times over the past three months." "And has he shown up every time?" "Always. If he isn't here immediately, I just make a noise that carries underwater and he's here in a few minutes. He must never go too far away." "Are you sure he's the same one?" "Certain. You saw him: he has a lighter patch beneath his flipper, on the left. I always know him by that scar." "Is he always alone?" "I think so. No one has ever seen him with a pod of other dolphins. So tell me, did you like it?" The word was too mild. I was in seventh heaven. My heart was still beating hard, and at the same time I felt as if the pieces of a puzzle were magically falling into place. Although I still felt confused, it was beginning to dawn on me why I had really' come to Brest, and why I had begun a course of study that in many respects annoyed me to no end. What attracted me was the tremendous energy Jean-Louis gave off; to put it simply, it was the life force. My understanding of biology was etymological--literally, the study of life. Today, it still has the same meaning for me. The road to Brest was an obligatory route, one I had to travel to finally arrive on the path my heart wished me to follow. It was not until much later that I understood this "Jean-Louis" who had moved me so deeply. To begin with, Jean-Louis should have been called Jeanne-Louise, because "he" was a she. Second, my encounter had been with one of the solitary dolphins that are wrongly nicknamed "ambassadors" because they seem to appreciate the company of human beings. Far from acting as the "spokesmen" of their species, or the carriers of an obscure message, such individuals live excluded from their group. Whether this comes about through choice or rejection remains unknown. Jean-Louis was amused by human incursions, as long as they remained rare and episodic, curious but respectful. As for me, I visited her fairly regularly for seven years, before some tactless person made the stupid and possibly money-grubbing move of advertising the presence of this exceptional creature. The success was astounding. Throngs of divers crowded Cape Raz. They came from everywhere--from all four corners of France, from Germany, Holland, and Spain. We saw as many as fifty at a time swimming in every direction, banging on pots and pans in the hope of attracting Jean-Louis for snapshots they would no doubt frame and deposit on their mantelpieces. Jean-Louis let them have their way. And then, one day, she simply disappeared. Maybe she hid away in calmer waters or rejoined a group of other bottlenose dolphins. At least I hope so. Or maybe she died. When curious people mass together, others with weapons follow in their wake. On land and sea, life is menaced by trigger-happy people. Oh, the pleasure of shooting to score, of adding a new animal to the prize list! Too bad! This one's not on the list of endangered species! It's not even protected yet! The dolphin wanted nothing except to be left in peace--or at the least, to be left to decide on her own whether she wished to amuse herself in the company of two-footed creatures. In my mind, this dolphin will always be a symbol of my future. It is not that this so-called ambassador transmitted a mission to me, but that she belongs to the experiences that helped me better to define what really matters in my life. "Follow your heart," as Uncle Jacques used to say. Whenever I listen to it, I always find the way to satisfy my needs. And if the wavelength is free of static, if I am sure I am on the path that's right for me, the obstacles disappear and everything becomes simple. But if I mistake my calling or lose my inner voice, I know I am in for a very rocky road. Copyright © 1998 Librairie Plon.
