Passepartout joins Batulcar’s troupe

Passepartout joins William Batulcar’s Acrobatic Troupe while hungry, stranded in Japan, and searching for a practical way to continue toward San Francisco. The episode turns an improvised effort to survive into an unlikely passage west: he accepts a performer’s role, then becomes the foundation of the troupe’s perilous Long Noses spectacle. His resourcefulness keeps him moving, but the work also places his body inside an elaborate performance whose balance can fail in an instant.

Need and Improvisation

The episode begins with Passepartout exhausted and famished. He considers selling his watch, but would rather go hungry than part with it; instead, he decides to use his strong voice and try singing for money. Because he thinks the Japanese audience may appreciate European music, he plans to perform songs in French and English. He postpones the concert until a more suitable hour, however, and turns to another practical problem: his clothes seem too fine for a wandering entertainer. He seeks a dealer in old clothes, hoping an exchange might both suit his proposed work and bring in money for food.

A more promising possibility appears when he heads toward the docks. He wonders whether an American steamer would have any use for a cook or servant, and recognizes that his appearance and lack of references could make such employment difficult to secure. Then he sees an immense English-language placard carried through the streets by a clown. It advertises a Japanese acrobatic troupe under the proprietorship of William Batulcar, offering a new opening where his search for conventional shipboard work had offered no assurance.

The Engagement

Batulcar’s company is not simply a group of acrobats. Its director presides over a varied troupe of mountebanks, jugglers, clowns, equilibrists, and gymnasts, and the placard announces performances before the company leaves Japan for the United States. Passepartout enters the establishment and asks for Batulcar. The proprietor initially takes him for a native, but Passepartout directly asks whether he needs a servant. The conversation shifts from service to performance, and Batulcar tests whether the applicant can manage an unusually demanding combination of skills.

The proposed feat requires singing while standing on his head, spinning a top on his left foot, and balancing a sabre on his right. Passepartout recalls exercises from his younger days and answers that he thinks he can do it. Batulcar accepts that as sufficient, and the engagement is concluded immediately. The work is not dignified by Passepartout’s standards, but it is concrete employment and, more importantly, brings the prospect of reaching San Francisco within a week. The bargain converts a street encounter into a route onward: instead of waiting for an uncertain place as a ship’s cook or servant, he can travel with a company already preparing to cross to the United States.

The Long Noses Performance

The troupe’s principal attraction is the Long Noses, a company presented under the patronage of the god Tingou. The performers wear medieval-style costumes and wings, while long bamboo noses, some straight and others curved, are fastened over their own faces. These props are not merely decorative. The performers lie on their backs and use the artificial noses as supports for gymnastic exercises, as other members leap and turn above them. The show makes an absurd-looking object into working equipment, and its novelty depends on the contrast between the fragile human body and the spectacular feats arranged upon it.

For the final scene, fifty Long Noses are to form the Car of Juggernaut in a human pyramid. The original performer who formed its base has left the troupe, and Passepartout is selected as his replacement because the role requires strength and agility. He puts on a costume with multicoloured wings and fastens a false nose six feet long to his own. The costume recalls his younger days and makes him feel sad, but the immediate prospect of earning food cheers him. Necessity has carried him from the possibility of singing in the street to a conspicuous part in a complicated theatrical set piece.

Collapse and Significance

Passepartout lies on the floor with the other performers forming the base, their noses pointing upward. Further groups arrange themselves above them, one tier after another, until the human structure reaches the theatre’s cornices. The audience applauds while the orchestra strikes up a deafening air. Then one of the lower noses disappears from the pyramid; the balance fails, and the assembled monument breaks apart like a castle of cards. The scene’s climax is therefore also the failure of the act’s central mechanism: the performers have made their bodies into supports, and the loss of one support brings down the whole construction.

The episode makes Passepartout’s practical ingenuity visible through successive changes of plan. He first considers singing, then seeks an exchange of clothes, then looks toward work aboard a steamer, and finally accepts an acrobatic engagement. Each attempt answers an immediate material difficulty, especially hunger, while the troupe’s planned departure gives the job a larger consequence for his journey. His place at the base of the Long Noses pyramid sharpens that pattern: the man who has found a way to keep moving becomes, for the performance, the structure on which everyone else depends. Yet the collapse resists any easy image of control. The spectacle is assembled with care and receives loud applause, but its elaborate height remains vulnerable to the disappearance of a single lower support.