Voyages en mots troubles

This summer, I didn't travel the Mediterranean or any other country, but I did have the luxury of traveling in the company of Joseph Kessel and Alessandro Baricco. Two nostalgic journeys.

During my first journey, I set off for Lithuania aboard a train gliding through the autumn rains and chilly nights, as the early 20th century flew by at breakneck speed—amid the turmoil of revolutions and internal uprisings. And while the second half of this short novel plunges us into the heavy, strange atmosphere of a family of Russian exiles in Kosnov, it was the pages written to the mechanical sound of the train’s wheels on the tracks that particularly charmed me. Those in which, in the timid silence of his hushed compartment, Estienne, the narrator, lets himself drift into daydreams that evaporate to the rhythm of footsteps in corridors that seem far away. And which foreshadow