Читать книгу Silk - Alessandro Baricco - Страница 7

1.

ALTHOUGH his father had imagined for him a brilliant future in the army, Hervé Joncour ended up earning his living in an unusual profession that, with singular irony, had a feature so sweet as to betray a vaguely feminine intonation.

For a living, Hervé Joncour bought and sold silkworms.

It was 1861. Flaubert was writing Salammbô, electric light was still a hypothesis and Abraham Lincoln, on the other side of the ocean, was fighting a war whose end he would not see.

Hervé Joncour was thirty-two years old.

He bought and sold.

Silkworms.