Noël Lathuille
The Breton guide who attaches himself to Moravagine and the narrator in Wyoming — cook, horse-minder, confidence man, and the only person in the book who is fond of either of them.
To marry Dorothée and keep a bar. He tells the whole story of meeting her over a plate of turtle in New Orleans, and says that a man who has been everywhere still wants a white house, a garden and someone who can cook.
The book
At a glance
- A French guide and factotum, picked up at a station near Cheyenne, Wyoming
- Brittany — born in Morbihan, the narrator believes
- The Common Eagle gold mine, and a diamond field two days beyond it
- Ten thousand dollars by Moravagine, and spent all of it getting the three of them out
- The American chapters — Arizona, the cliff village of the Vallataons, San Antonio, New Orleans and the Orinoco
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeLathuille picks the two men up on a station platform near Cheyenne, wearing an interpreter's hat and offering himself as a guide to Yellowstone. He works out within days that they are avoiding cities, crowds and any train with police on it, and steers them instead towards the Indian country of the south-west. Within a week they cannot do without him: he makes camp, minds the horses, hunts, cooks, and talks without stopping. He claims to have worked every trade and crossed every country, and to know houses by their numbers, boats by their names, women by their lovers and men by their vices.
What he is selling is a gold mine in a canyon held by an old Spanish priest. He has had a hundred thousand shares in it engraved in Denver, and lights the campfire with them every night. What he is actually doing turns out to be a good deal worse, and he confesses it himself, unprompted, over whisky in San Antonio.
How the book draws them
- The talkAll day on horseback and half the night by the fire, and the gold mine is always somewhere in it: the honey ants, the cliff village reached by a path cut in the rock, the mummies inside painted urns, the plaques of pure gold.
- The trades he claimsWhaler out of New Orleans and harpooner on the Gueld under Captain Owen, guide to scientific expeditions, track-layer on the little railway at Guaymas, and, by his own account, a resident of every great city in the world.
- What he was really hired forThe newspapers are full of Russian grand dukes on the run with stolen crown jewels and a price on their heads, and his fiancée's father is working for the police. Lathuille was sent out to find some, and he decided these two would do.
- The double crossAt his own wedding party he fires two revolvers over the crowd, shouts the pair down the wharf to a waiting motorboat, and turns out to have bought their passage out days earlier with the money Moravagine gave him.
- Still talking at the endDying in the bottom of the boat on the flooded upper Orinoco, he is giving instructions: ship the oars, drift, watch for the old tree trunk hung with little flags by the river villages, follow it, and never touch it.
An arrow takes him in the throat on an island in the flooded upper Orinoco, while the narrator is kneeling over him with a potion of boiled herbs. The Indians who fired it are Jivaros, and they do to him what they do to their enemies: a framework of tree roots substituted for the skeleton, an adult body reduced to the size of a doll with its posture intact. The narrator is made to watch the whole operation, and reports that Lathuille ended up in the Trocadéro museum in Paris, the finest specimen in its collection.