Beachcomber Magazine 04

MAURITIUS THE ART OF DISCOVERY 52 LA MAISON EURÊKA T his is the jewel of the Le Clézio Family. The crowning place for the rather poor family from Brittany who landed on what was then known as the Isle de France. They were the first of a line that would produce some flamboyant sugar barons and a Nobel prize for literature, J.-M. G. Le Clézio. Eurêka and its wild valleys, studded with cinnamon, allspice and elephant apple trees, are omnipresent in J.-M. G. Le Clézio’s allegorical books about an island that he visited for the first time in 1981 at the age of forty- one! He had grown up surrounded by “ the despair of this lost house, ” immersed since his childhood in the nostalgic stories constantly told by the branch of the Le Clézio Family that had been exiled after a quarrel between two brothers. “ It’s a shrine to sugar and miscellany, ” says its current owner, Jacques de Maroussem, the son-in-law of a Le Clézio daughter. When he La Maison Eurêka, one of the biggest houses on the island, stayed into the Le Clézio Family at the eleventh hour, when Jacques de Maroussem, whose mother- in-law is a Le Clézio, bought it just before it was scheduled to be demolished. La Maison Eurêka est restée dans la famille Le Clézio in extremis, quand Jacques de Maroussem, gendre d’une Le Clézio, racheta le domaine et empêcha ainsi sa démolition.