They were of faultless colour, shape and lustre. They caused a furore. The next year Japanese pearls went to France.James’s colleagues on the rue du Bac were spitting with venom. They offered their views, in the coffee shops along the street, and on the pavement.‘Does this man Miki – what is it? – Mikimo – think he can domesticate the oysters, discipline the spat and ask them to make pearls at fixed hours, according to his will?’ one of them asked. ‘He hasn’t got a hope.’‘If you saw the women who do the domesticating, you might think again,’ James said.‘So he has succeeded in provoking the oyster by inserting an irritant into its belly. Is it a pearl the oyster produces? No, it is a little ball of pearly matter that looks like a pearl, but it is not a pearl.’‘The pearl is the victim of science.’Connoisseurs ventured that the lustre was ‘false’, that it was ‘anti-natural’ and that it ‘deceived’ the eye. All of this James Lowinger enjoyed; he only wished he could come upon dear Mikimoto himself balancing his umbrella upright on the tip of his chin, to have a chat about it.
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