MIRROR SCALES :
Well, it could be a story for a novel to such point that it is difficult for me to tell in a few lines my necessary adventures to encounter this very ancient and almost dying technique, that I have been searching with obsession during all of my stays in India since the very first. A careful visitor roaming through the poetic and worn-out charms of Indian palaces cannot miss being touched by the habit of covering the bedrooms walls, often quite obscur, with small convex mirror scales, where the least light plays. As far as I am concerned, I immediately experienced a total facination. As if it were the fossilized skin of a mermaid, as if it were the skin of the Beast from the novel « The Beauty and the Beast» written in the 17th century, I perfectly recalled this fairy tale universe that I drag with me everywhere. But, far from the ancient sites, the few traces of a recent exploitation of mirror scales are very frustrating, just enough to keep me obsessed. Until I found at last, in a remote village of Gujurat, the very last craftsman in that matter : the scales are produced out of large hand made glass bubbles in which zinc in fusion is poured before they are broken. But remained to be done the work of cutting the broken pieces and apparently the last cutters, that I finally discovered in an other place, could just roughly cut rounds to be sewn on embroildered fabrics. So I had to find people able to cut the mirror scales and export for me. Many travels, many people to meet so far away from us in space and time, the confrontation with the death of such a poetic craft, have left traces in my mind. I would like, but I know I won’t be able to write a novel depicting such a story, to share with those who will discover these fragile pieces of glass the feeling that they are much more than the exquisite wall tiling that one sees at first sight.
