Peste & Choléra by Patrick Deville (review)

Reviews 269 Deville, Patrick. Peste & Choléra. Paris: Seuil, 2012. ISBN 978-2-02-107720-9. Pp. 224. 18 a. Fresh from his globe-circling trilogy, Pura vida (2004), Equatoria (2009), and Kampuchéa (2011), Deville this time proposes a book more closely focused on an individual than on a place. That individual is Alexandre Yersin (1863–1943), who was the first to identify the plague bacillus that now bears his name, and to vaccinate against it. Yersin studied medicine in Paris when that city was arguably the capital of medical science; he apprenticed with Louis Pasteur when the Institut Pasteur was the very model of progress. He was a man who wished to know everything, and apart from microbiology,he applied himself to cartography,architecture,physics,mechanics, electricity, and agronomy. He was a chercheur in the broad sense: not content to remain in his laboratory, he saw himself as a kind of Livingstone, and he explored the Indochinese territory where he chose to make his life with a single-minded sense of purpose. Livingstone is not the only eminent figure who strides through these pages. Pasteur himself looms large, of course, and so do his two closest acolytes, Albert Calmette and Émile Roux. One also catches glimpses of Jules Verne, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Conrad, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and (especially) Arthur Rimbaud.All of those men are now famous, of course. That is, we have not forgotten them. Such is not the case of Alexandre Yersin, however, and one of Patrick Deville’s purposes is to meditate upon the question of forgetting. He mentions that Verne had sketched a portrait of Livingstone, and wonders why he had not accorded the same favor to Yersin, whose life was so full of “aventures trépidantes et rocambolesques ” (127). Deville is well aware that most lives are forgotten forever once they come to an end, but that notion clearly bothers him. Remarking that roughly eighty billion humans have lived and died since the species first came to be, and that roughly seven billion currently inhabit our planet, he comes up with a modest proposal: “Le calcul est simple: si chacun d’entre nous écrivait ne serait-ce que dix Vies au cours de la sienne aucune ne serait oubliée. Aucune ne serait effacée. Chacune atteindrait à la postérité, et ce serait justice” (91). The idea of the life fascinates Patrick Deville, whether it be a question of the life of a place or the life of a person. Having written the “biographies”of a variety of different places—Central America, Congo, Cambodia— he undertakes his Life of Alexandre Yersin in a similar spirit.What interests him is how his subject functions as a piece of the intricate puzzle of his time. He is convinced that any existence, closely examined, will necessarily put in evidence“la vie romanesque et ridicule des hommes” (92). Such conviction is crucial, moreover, in light of his own quest. For like his subject, Deville is also an explorer, and the territory that he seeks to traverse is the horizon of possibility of the novel, today. University of Colorado Warren Motte ...