William Batulcar’s Acrobatic Troupe

William Batulcar’s Acrobatic Troupe is a traveling Japanese entertainment company whose Yokohama engagement briefly employs the stranded Passepartout and unexpectedly reunites him with Phileas Fogg. Its elaborate performance, culminating in a precarious human pyramid, becomes more than spectacle: when Passepartout recognizes his master, his abrupt departure from the formation collapses the act and brings the missing servant back into the journey.

Ownership and Recruitment

The troupe is presented to the public as an Acrobatic Japanese Troupe under the proprietorship of William Batulcar. A placard carried through Yokohama announces its performances and identifies Batulcar as its proprietor; it also advertises the company’s imminent departure from Japan for the United States. The notice gives the troupe a practical importance to Passepartout: with no money in his pocket and no immediate means of joining a ship’s crew, he is looking for any route onward.

Passepartout first considers seeking work aboard an American steamer, but doubts that anyone would hire him as a cook or servant without references and while he is dressed as he is. The placard changes the possibilities before him. He follows the clown carrying it to Batulcar’s establishment, a large cabin decorated with streamers and painted figures of performers. The company is thus encountered not as an abstract attraction but as a visible workplace, one whose public advertising connects a local performance to the troupe’s coming passage across the Pacific.

Batulcar directs a varied company of mountebanks, jugglers, clowns, acrobats, equilibrists, and gymnasts. When he cannot take Passepartout as a servant, he proposes employing him as a clown, reasoning that French clowns can be exhibited abroad just as foreign clowns are exhibited in France. Passepartout’s nationality, which had seemed a possible disadvantage in finding ordinary shipboard work, becomes a selling point in the troupe’s business. Batulcar also asks whether he is strong; Passepartout recalls exercises from his younger days, and the engagement is concluded on the spot.

Repertoire and Stagecraft

The troupe’s program builds from numerous feats of balance and manipulation. Performers spin objects on sabres, wires, and hairs, turn on large glasses, cross bamboo ladders, and make musical effects from the different pitches produced by their movements. Jugglers throw the spinning objects into the air with wooden battledores, yet the objects continue whirling. The acrobats and gymnasts add precision routines on ladders, poles, balls, and barrels. The account emphasizes not only the range of acts but the exactness with which the performers execute them.

The principal attraction is a company of performers distinguished by very long artificial noses. The noses are made of bamboo, attached over the performers’ natural features, and vary in length from five to ten feet; some are straight, others curved, and some are decorated with ribbons or imitation warts. Wearing costumes modeled on the Middle Ages and splendid wings, the performers use the appendages as supports for gymnastic feats. A dozen lie on their backs while others, dressed as lightning-rods, leap from one nose to another and perform somersaults. The staging turns an exaggerated bodily accessory into both a visual joke and a working part of the act.

For the finale, fifty of these performers are meant to represent the Car of Juggernaut in a human pyramid. Rather than climbing onto one another’s shoulders, the upper tiers are to balance on the bamboo noses. The usual base performer has left the company, so Passepartout is selected to fill the vacancy because strength and agility are what the part requires. He feels melancholy at putting on a costume with multicolored wings and fastening a six-foot false nose to his own, but the thought that the performance will earn him food steadies him. His employment is immediately practical: it gives him a meal and a prospect of reaching San Francisco within a week.

Passepartout’s Performance and the Reunion

The engagement is arranged shortly before the performance begins at three o’clock. Although Passepartout has not had time to study or rehearse a part, he is assigned to the pyramid’s base. The performers lie on the floor with their noses pointing upward; successive groups climb onto the noses until the human structure rises almost to the theater’s cornices. The audience applauds, and the orchestra begins a deafening air as the formation wavers. One of the lower noses disappears from the structure, the balance fails, and the pyramid breaks apart like a house of cards.

Passepartout has caused the collapse. During the performance he sees Phileas Fogg in the gallery, abandons his position, clears the footlights without the help of his wings, and falls at Fogg’s feet, crying out to his master. His sudden movement shifts the nose supporting the formation and brings the entire act down onto the stage. The accident makes the troupe’s most carefully arranged attraction the occasion for an unplanned reunion. Fogg, who had been searching Yokohama for his missing servant and had entered Batulcar’s theater by chance, finds Passepartout there at the very moment the performance disintegrates.

Function in the Journey

The troupe’s place in the narrative is brief but consequential. After being separated from Fogg and Aouda, Passepartout reaches Yokohama without money, uncertain what to do next, though his passage has already been paid and he has several days in which to decide his future. Batulcar’s company supplies a temporary livelihood and a route toward San Francisco, turning a period of apparent abandonment into an improvised solution. The arrangement is not a return to his former position as a servant: he accepts a comic stage role because it answers an immediate need for food and onward travel.

The company’s advertised departure gives Passepartout a possible way forward, while its performance provides the chance encounter that restores him to Fogg. Its spectacle is therefore bound to the mechanics of the travelers’ separation and reunion. The troupe is not shown continuing with its planned finale after the collapse; the decisive consequence for the story is that Passepartout is found before the San Francisco steamer is due to leave that evening. For a short interval, a traveling company becomes his employer, shelter from hunger, and the unlikely bridge back to his companions.