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Chapters 1-3

• Herve Joncour buys and sells silkworms.

• Joncour is a little feminine and his father wanted him in the army.

• The year is 1861.

• Flaubert is writing Salammbo.

• Abraham Lincoln is fighting the Civil War.

• Joncour is 32-years-old.
• Silkworm eggs are bought when tiny and are either yellow or gray.

• A person can hold 1000 silkworm eggs in their hand.

• Silkworm eggs hatch at the beginning of May and the larva are set free to eat through the mulberry leaves to a cocoon.

• Two weeks later the eggs produce a fortune in silk -- 1000 meters of raw thread.

• Joncour lives in southern France in a village called Lauilledieu with his wife Helene and no children.

• In 1861, there are epidemics in the hatcheries and Joncour goes beyond the Mediterranean to Syria and Egypt to find eggs.

• In January, he travels 1600 miles by sea and 800 miles overland to negotiate and buy...

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