Veiled Encounters: Representing the Orient in 17th-Century French Travel Literature. (Faux Titre)

Veiled Encounters

FAUX TITRE 321 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

Veiled Encounters Representing the Orient in 17th-Century French Travel Literature

Michael Harrigan

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2008

Cover illustration: detail from L’Asie, engraving by Louis Colet (1660). From Les Quatre Parties du Monde. Collection Hennin t. 44, no 4002, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Maquette couverture / Cover design: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-2476-2 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents Acknowledgements

7

List of Illustrations

9

Introduction Récits and Relations de Voyage The Orient and Otherness Corpus of Texts Geographical Span Selection of Texts Ecclesiastical Voyagers Voyages d’aventure Bourgeois or Parfaits Travellers Methodological Questions Cultural Relativism

11 14 15 18 18 21 24 27 29 32 37

Chapter 1. Capturing Cultural Encounter Acculturation and Representation La Curiosité Categorization The Familiar Reference to the Familiar Religious Practices Classical Imagery and Language Conjecture Depicting the Other The Symmetry of the Other Comme estans un mesme peuple… Exchange The Economics of Encounter Cultural Clash Lesdits Sauvages n’ont cessé de rire…

47 53 58 60 63 63 67 73 77 80 80 86 88 88 91 94

Chapter 2. The Literature of Encounter Narrative Convention Instruction through the Voyage The Eye of the Traveller Transparency Paratexts and the Functional Voyage

99 100 104 112 117 119

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Chapter 3. Threat and the Near East The Loss of Antiquity The ‘Ottoman Peril’ An Orient of Religion Depicting the Muslim The Holy Land Persians and Turks Assuming an Oriental Identity The Temptation of the Orient: the Oriental Female and the Orient as Female

127 127 131 135 138 146 151 157

Chapter 4. The East Indies: le Jardin de l’Orient The French Colonial Position L’Autre européen European Action A Splendid Isolation: China and Japan Riches and Fertility Promiscuity and Commerce Climate, Spices and an Oriental Essence Violence and Excess Madagascar: entre les deux Indes

175 176 182 187 189 196 204 207 213 219

Chapter 5. Aventures in the Orient Aventures and Digressions The Forms of Histoires Pathos in the Orient Une Complexion extraordinairement amoureuse… Fanaticism and Fortune Transgressions of Nature The Limits of Observation: the Veiled Orient

227 227 232 237 244 249 253 257

Conclusion

267

Bibliography

273

Index

295

161

Acknowledgements The research on which this book is based was partly funded by a one-year Government of Ireland Scholarship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and by a National University of Ireland Travelling Studentship Prize. Among those from whose suggestions or support I have benefited I would like to acknowledge Alain Lanavère, Jane Conroy, Larry Duffy, Dan Carey and Valérie Narayana. I am particularly indebted to my mentors, C.E.J. Caldicott and Síofra Pierse. I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff of UFR d’anglais, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, of École Polytechnique, of UCD School of Languages and Literatures and of the French Department of NUI Maynooth for their flexibility in the combination of teaching hours and the needs of an ongoing research project. For proof-reading, my thanks to Ann-Marie Kilgallon. Among others, I wish to thank Leo Harrigan, Carmel Duffy, David Field, Sébastien Sorgues and Constanza Martínez for their constant technical and moral support throughout. I would especially like to thank my parents, Edie and Leo, to whom this book is dedicated.

Illustrations Figure 1.

François La Boullaye Le Gouz en habit levantin (1653)

172

Figure 2.

Jean Thévenot in oriental dress (1664)

173

Figure 3.

L’Asie, engraving by Louis Colet (1660)

174

All illustrations courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Introduction The Orient, in the 17th century, seemed closer to Europe than it had ever been. Trade ventures and companies exported people and merchandise and brought back spices and luxurious goods to waiting markets throughout the 1600s. Missionaries from the Holy Land to China made scientific observations and attempted to convert the masses of ‘heathens’ or to support besieged Christian communities. Lay travellers to the East brought back Classical artefacts, curiosités, and often stupendous wealth to homelands in which oriental fashions were à la mode and knowledge of the Orient was considered a valuable subject of learning. Texts were also brought back, and this study will argue that the representation within them of the peoples of the Orient is extremely problematic, and will assess to what extent such representation was ever a feasible narrative project for the traveller. For this Orient simultaneously remained, to a great degree, unknown. Much of the verifiable French knowledge about the Orient was restricted to the lands closer to Europe, while in the Far East, those vast expanses of land beyond the reach of seafarers were rarely visited by all but the most persistent of missionaries. To what was essentially ignorance was joined a fascination with the information that did filter through, either orally or in the written accounts of travellers. These narratives were an enormously popular literary genre throughout the 17th century in Europe. The public was intrigued by travellers’ tales of their adventures in strange lands inhabited by people who seemed to live completely unlike Europeans. Many of these travel narratives were republished in numerous editions and were translated into other European languages, to become the main source of information on Orientaux, or Levantins. Born from and in turn nourishing the image of the East and of its inhabitants, travel narratives were much more than simple geographical descriptions. As

12

Veiled Encounters

well as instructing, they were also intended to divert, to entertain, through accounts of dramatic situations encountered by the voyager. From these narratives emerged a picture of the East which had to meet the twin requirements of faithful transcription and the interest of a readership. Contemporaries were very much aware of a vogue for the genre of the travel narrative from the mid-17th century which reflected an increasing degree of movement both to the Americas and to the East, as recounted by the voyager Jean Thévenot: Le desir de voyager a toûjours esté fort naturel aux hommes, il me semble que jamais cette passion ne les a pressez avec tant de force qu’en nos jours: le grand nombre de voyageurs qui se rencontrent en toutes les parties de la terre, prouve assez la proposition que j’avance, & la quantité des beaux voyages imprimez, qui ont paru depuis vingt ans, oste toute raison d’en douter…1

While travel narratives had appeared long before the two decades previous to this assertion, the frequency of accounts of voyages was perceived to have reached a pinnacle. The well-known and nearly contemporaneous quotation of Jean Chapelain illustrates the importance of this wave of popularity for the récit de voyage, in both urban and court circles: Nostre nation a changé de goust pour les lectures et au lieu des romans qui sont tombés avec La Calprenède, les voyages sont venus en crédit et tiennent le haut bout dans la cour et dans la ville.2

This taste for voyages led to a mass of accounts; as many as 1100 volumes according to Richelet in 1680, while Furetière, a decade later, writes that over 1300 Voyages had been printed. 3 Contemporary literary reviews such as the Journal des Sçavans devoted considerable 1

Jean Thévenot [1633-1667], Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant (Paris: Louis Bilaine, 1664), p. 1. 2 Jean Chapelain [1595-1674], Lettres (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1883), II, p. 340. 3 ‘Il y a plus d’onze cens volumes, dont la plupart sont assez mal écrites en notre langue, entre autres la rélation de Mafée par l’Abé de Pure est pitoiable, oui pitoiable, morbleu, & du dernier pitoiable.’ Pierre Richelet [1626-1698], Dictionnaire françois (Geneva: Jean Herman Widerhold, 1680), II, p. 287; ‘Il y a plus de 1300. Relations de voyages imprimées.’ Antoine Furetière [1619-1688], Dictionnaire de Furetière, 3 vols (Rotterdam: Chez Arnout et Reinier Leers, 1690), III, entry Voyage, non-paginated.

Introduction

13

space to the accounts of these voyages, (or indeed to news of the voyagers themselves), testifying to the perceived interest and novelty of the accounts they relayed. Travel was very much a bearer of new information from a world which remained in large part unknown, and which was avidly awaited by a receptive French public. The audience of the travel narrative was increasingly wide, and as Friedrich Wolfzettel writes, was – pilgrimages excepted – intended for a mondain rather than a learned readership.4 However, while this change certainly indicates a shift in readership and greater accessibility to books, it also testifies to a transformation in knowledge itself, and in the kind of learning conveyed by travel narratives among other forms of erudite literature. The mondain public which formed the readership of these accounts saw itself as composed of honnêtes hommes and of curieux. Travellers might claim to have been motivated by la curiosité, this ‘désir de voir, d’apprendre les choses nouvelles, secrettes, rares & curieuses’, and their published accounts were designed to satisfy this same desire. 5 For Baudelot de Dairval, étude is a form of divertissement, and ‘la recherche de l’antiquité’ a balance of l’utile and l’agréable.6 This equilibrium often similarly equated the voyage towards instruction with les belles choses, so that knowledge and aesthetics were bound together: Il n’y a point de personnes qui ayent inclination aux belles choses, qui ne soient touchez de celles dont ils instruisent, & il y en a peu, s’ils n’estoient retenus par des attaches pressantes, qui ne voulussent eux mesmes en estre les témoins & les spectateurs: Ce sont les belles Relations qui m’ont donné la premiere pensée de voyager…7

The conception of learning was also bound up with that of pleasure, so, in the Horatian manner, what would instruct should also be pleasing:

4

Friedrich Wolfzettel, Le Discours du voyageur (Paris: PUF, 1996), p. 129. Furetière, I, entry Curiosité, non-paginated. 6 Charles César Baudelot de Dairval [1648-1722], De l’Utilité des Voyages (Paris: Pierre Auboüin & Pierre Emery, 1686), I, Preface, non-paginated. 7 Thévenot, Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant, p. 1. 5

Veiled Encounters

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Qui sçait mesler le plaisant & l’utile, ne peut manquer de plaire à tout le monde. Un livre agréable & instructif est toûjours bien reçû.8

Récits and Relations de Voyage The terms relation and récit de voyage were used interchangeably by 17th-century writers to describe travel narratives. Furetière defines the relation as a ‘recit de quelque adventure, histoire, bataille’ and adds: Relation, se dit plus particulierement des adventures des Voyageurs, des observations qu’ils font dans leurs voyages. Il y a un tres-grand nombre de livres de Relations.9

For Richelet, relation is also equated with récit, and is a synonym for the particular literary genre which describes particularitez, mœurs and coutumes of the inhabitants of a country:10 Relation. Livre de voiage qui raconte les particularitez les plus remarquables d’un païs, les mœurs, & les coutumes de ses habitans avec l’histoire naturelle & géographique de la contrée.11

So the récit or relation de voyage is a text that recounts the geographical displacement made by the narrator, the culture(s) encountered, the most striking peripeteia or aventures of the voyage, and could also include descriptions of natural history and of geography. As Furetière indicates, as the account of the observations made by a voyager, it is also a text that is claimed to be the account of events that had actually occurred, and which the narrator had personally seen, or believed to have seen, or had been assured of by somebody whose testimony was considered indisputable. A pilgrimage, on the other hand, which displays a considerable level of interest for non-Christian societies encountered en route and in situ, may be 8

Horace, Art poëtique, trad. R. P. Jérome Tarteron [1644-1720], in Traduction nouvelle des Satyres, des Epistres, et de l’Art poëtique d’Horace (Paris: André Pralard, 1685), p. 497. 9 Furetière, III, entry Relation, non-paginated. 10 ‘Relation, s. f. Récit qu’on fait de quelque chose. Une relation fort fidelle’, Richelet, II, p. 287. 11 Ibid., p. 287.

Introduction

15

classified as a récit de voyage if it conforms to the aforementioned criteria. The récit de voyage is nearly always recounted in the chronological order of events, although substantial variations in the amount of space devoted to the voyage compared to time spent among societies occur.

The Orient and Otherness While the term Orient, or its synonym Levant, was used regularly by 17th-century French travel writers, either alone or in adjectives such as oriental, what exactly constituted the Orient is a question that continues to have considerable potential for discussion. It was clearly east, but this could encompass a vast geographical area made up of a multitude of territories, peoples, and cultures. Some idea of the range of this term is given by Antoine Galland in 1694: Sous le nom des Orientaux, je ne comprens pas seulement les Arabes & les Persans; mais encore les Turcs & les Tartares, & presque tous les peuples de l’Asie jusques à la Chine, Mahometans & Païens ou Idolatres.12

For Galland, oriental is both a geographical and an ethnic term, as it covers nearly all the peoples who live within the area of Asia from Turkey as far as China. It also simultaneously encompasses another way to define a people, that of religion. While the most certain way to avoid anachronism and obfuscation when qualifying the 17th-century Orient is to use the criteria furnished by individual travel writers themselves, the term had a wide range of application. While Richelet defines the Orient simply as ‘un des quatre quartiers du monde à l’endroit où le soleil se lève’ the adjective oriental is defined as follows: Qui est à l’Orient, qui vient de l’Orient. Qui est d’Orient. Les Indes Orientales. L’opale Orientale est fort-belle. Langues Orientales.13

12

Antoine Galland [1646-1715], Les Paroles Remarquables, les Bons Mots, et les Maximes des Orientaux. Traduction de leurs Ouvrages en Arabe, en Persan & en Turc, avec des Remarques (Paris: Simon Bernard & Michel Brunet, 1694). 13 Richelet, II, p. 99.

Veiled Encounters

16

The term is clarified by the immediate association of the well-known Indes orientales with an example of its precious stones. In addition, the grouping together of the many, greatly diverse languages of Asia as oriental demonstrates how wide a range of application the adjective had. Furetière defines oriental as: Qui est situé vers l’Orient à nostre esgard. La Syrie, la Palestine sont des pays orientaux. Le Japon est oriental à la Chine, situé plus avant vers l’Orient.14

As with Galland, the term oriental clearly refers to the entirety of the East, from Syria and Palestine to Japan. In essence, Furetière defines the vast space of the Orient by reference to the location of author and readership, in France; what was oriental could be so considered principally because it was elsewhere. In turn, Levant was treated as a synonym for Orient by both Richelet and Furetière:15 Levant, se dit aussi de tous les pays situés à l’Orient à nostre egard. Les Marseillois trafiquent en Levant à Smirne, à Alep. Les beaux maroquins viennent du Levant. Le sené, la casse s’apportent du Levant. La Mer Mediterannée s’appelle la Mer de Levant…16

However, within this Orient were a host of lands and peoples with different traditions, cultures, religions and ultimately, the most diverse of identities. Where the Orient was, which lands or people were oriental, and what made them so, what could unite these oriental peoples within the text, are essential considerations for an analysis of cultural representation such as the present study. Naturally, the increased level of European contact with the East Indies from the late 15th century on was not alone responsible for the image of the Orient. The concept – and the associations it held for the 17th-century voyager – were the product of a lengthy heritage which, according to Edward Said, made it essentially a western construction relying heavily on precedent: The Orient is not an inert fact of nature. […] Such locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made. Therefore as

14

Furetière, entry Oriental, non-paginated. ‘La partie du monde qui est à l’Orient.’ Richelet, I, p. 462. 16 Furetière, entry Levant, non-paginated. 15

Introduction

17

much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.17

From this perspective, the composite of language, images and history that constitutes the Orient is a creation, and those lands or peoples deemed oriental are so considered, in large part, because of tradition itself. The implications of such a conclusion, potentially divorcing representation of oriental cultures from the circumstances of encounter and making of them little more than an ‘idea’, continue to be of considerable actuality.18 The existence, importance and transmission of the ‘tradition’ of the Orient in the 17th century, and the tension between the concept of the Orient and what travellers actually witnessed, are part of an ongoing debate to which the following chapters are intended to contribute. Nonetheless, the existence of the genre of the travel narrative concerning regions which narrators and authors themselves defined as oriental is inextricably linked to the problematic of cultural difference. If Orientaux, for Furetière, were defined by inhabiting the East ‘à nostre égard’, this definition also implies the concept of an Orient situated elsewhere in cultural, as well as geographical, terms. Indeed, such a use of the term Orient is intended for a readership who draw from the same cultural pool, and who have a shared conception of what constituted the nous to which Furetière implicitly refers. With the deliberate location of the East in another space, French observers frequently recounted the existence of behaviours and traditions with which they were unfamiliar, and which greatly interested them. While the peoples of the East obviously seemed different in their appearance or their behaviour, the extent and cause of what separated them from their French observers was a matter of some debate. Travellers encountered Orientals in a variety of circumstances, observing religious and judicial rites, as well as behaviours, which were all noteworthy precisely because of their apparent difference. While the perception of difference could certainly give rise to questions on human diversity and on its legitimacy as a variation on 17

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 4-5. See Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625 (Cambridge University Press: 2000), footnote, p. xiv and pp. 390-391. 18

18

Veiled Encounters

behaviour, condemnation of deviation, or amusement at a cultural curiosity were among other possible responses. Representing the inhabitants of another culture in situations where they are only notable for their difference is clearly one inherent hazard of travel literature. So, a host of questions remain to be answered on the relationship between the reader, the Oriental and the text, and in particular, on the degree to which the Orient functioned as a space onto which other behaviours could be projected. The 17th-century récit de voyage provides excellent raw material for the study of this relationship. In a period of European expansion to the East Indies, and of simultaneous Ottoman advance, the role of political factors and imagination in the creation of otherness must be analyzed. In addition, characterization, drama and other narrative requirements must also be studied in a narrative form which was regularly accused of the charge of fiction, and which often incorporated unverifiable anecdotes into its supposedly factual text.

Corpus of Texts Geographical Span For a study which aims to provide as comprehensive an overall view of the representation of the inhabitants of what was considered to be the Orient in the 17th century, or as complete a vision as is feasible at this remove, a corpus of texts has been selected which is intended to be as representative as possible of the whole of the East. However, French presence in the East did not necessarily correspond to the interest differing regions inspired, for simple geographical, economic and political or religious reasons. Firstly, those regions nearer to Europe were, by simple reason of their proximity, often more likely to be in contact with Europeans than those further East. Secondly, commercial possibilities could dictate the interest a region held as well as the conditions in which a traveller was welcomed. This, in turn, was related to the type of political relationship maintained between a given society and French or European subjects, which often conditioned the frequency of their presence and the interest a place was perceived to hold. For example, few first-hand accounts of Japan exist in French, precisely because of its policy of

Introduction

19

exclusion of foreigners. The religious interest of a land could be generated by factors such as pilgrimages, as in the Holy Land, or by the missions undertaken by ecclesiastics. In other words, different regions of the East generated varying amounts of information, depending on the level of contact French travellers maintained with them. Of course, despite the existence of the concept of an Orient in the 17th century, the lands of Asia and the Indian Ocean Basin constituted a vast region maintaining different political and economic relationships with various European states or commercial concerns, at different periods in their history. Nonetheless, as the following chapters will make clear, political and conceptual reasons necessitate the analysis of the Orient to be undertaken by a prior division into two distinct areas. The furthest, the Indes orientales, was reached by rounding the Cape of Good Hope by sea and consisted of the Indian sub-continent, South-East Asia and the Far East: Java, Sumatra, Siam, and when Europeans were allowed enter, China and Japan. Given the Portuguese and then Dutch domination of this route des épices, French presence was often restricted for those travellers who did not embark in the service of either of these powers (although several mid- and late-century expeditions ensured texts on Madagascar and on Siam). This vast region surrounding the Indian Ocean Basin, the Indes orientales (or the East Indies, which shall be used in the following chapters as its synonym) was a concept that already existed during the 17th century, and ten of the approximately sixty voyages on which the present study is based are voyages to the same Indes orientales. There were clearly substantial logistical differences between the great voyages around the Cape and the shorter – though still risky – voyages across the Mediterranean to the Holy Land or Turkey and, from there, overland to Persia. By contrast with the East Indies, these have been referred to as the Near East or the Proche Orient. While the reasons for grouping the lands of this region together will become apparent in later chapters – and were most certainly recognized by contemporaries – these latter terms were not used during the 17th century. The regions which were considered to form the Orient, therefore, consisted of the Indes orientales: India, South-East Asia and the Far East (modern day Indonesia, China and Japan) and a Near East composed of the immediate neighbours of the Holy Land, as well as

20

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Turkey and Persia. Some precision is necessary. While the Holy Land itself was never considered to be oriental, its relationship to the Orientals who were perceived to unjustly occupy it is essential to this study, and so it will be discussed later. The present-day Maghreb, la Barbarie, although being composed of Islam-professing lands mainly under the jurisdiction of the Porte, is not oriental either, although Moors shared to some degree in many of the stereotypes attributed to their Near Eastern brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, a difference was established between the two groups by all French 17th-century travel writers, which inevitably reflected negatively on Moors. The mention of Madagascar in discussion of the Indes orientales is due to the great hopes which were placed in it as an essential link in the route des épices to the East. In the Near Eastern texts, the Ottoman Empire, primarily because of trade and diplomatic relations with France (as well as the necessity to pass through its dominion to progress overland) features in the majority of voyages to the Near East. Multiple accounts of voyages and pilgrimages to the Holy Land were readily available, although the interest generated by the inhabitants of the East varied for travellers often more concerned with the observation of sacred sites. Descriptions of Persia, on the other hand, inspired great interest in 17th-century travellers. Of those travel narratives to the Indian Ocean Basin, a steady corpus of voyages to the Indian subcontinent exists, reflecting both its natural position as a port of call as well as its role as the seat of the Portuguese overseas empire. Less prevalent – but present – are accounts of the islands that make up modern-day Indonesia, due to a combination of distance and of Portuguese and then Dutch domination which often excluded those French voyagers who were not employed in the service of these powers. The voyages to Siam, while featuring in the corpus, were mainly written at the time of the mid-1680s expeditions. China remained partly, and Japan was to become totally, inaccessible for European missionaries and traders through the century, but some French accounts filter through, depicting these mysterious monarchies.

Introduction

21

Selection of Texts A range of auxiliary texts were fundamental to an understanding both of the development of the genre of the récit de voyage itself and of its place among 17th-century narrative texts. The importance of a founding text in the history of the travel narrative such as Jean de Léry’s 16th-century account of the Brazilian Cannibales among which he lived, is testified to by its numerous reprints.19 Two other 16th-century voyages, this time to the East, are indispensable to the context in which later narratives were written. The scholar Guillaume Postel visited the East on the orders of François I to collect manuscripts for the royal collection, and his De la République des Turcs is notable for a relatively positive depiction of a civilized society.20 No study of the travel narrative could neglect the influence of Jan Van Linschoten, whose voyage to the East Indies appeared in Dutch in 1596 and in French in 1610.21 Reprinted in numerous editions and translations throughout the early 17th century, this account of the Portuguese sea-empire at the height of its power, filled with dramatic anecdotes, was to be a direct model for the later French accounts of Goa and the Far East. Other 17th-century narratives which did not have the East as their principal focus have been referred to, so as to permit comparison of the representation of Orientals with other depictions. Several early 18th-century travel narratives such as Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s Relation d’un Voyage du Levant, or the account of François Leguat’s sojourn on eastern desert islands, were useful in analyzing the heritage and importance of the imagery typical of the 1600s.22 19 Jean de Léry [1536?-1613?], Histoire d’un voyage faict en terre de Brésil, ed. by Frank Lestringant (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1994); reprint of 2nd edn: Histoire d’un Voyage… (Geneva: Antoine Chuppin, 1580). 20 Guillaume Postel [1510-1581], De la Republique des Turcs, & là ou l’occasion s’offrera, des meurs & loy de tous Muhamedistes, par Guillaume Postel Cosmopolite (Poitiers: Enguilbert de Marnef, 1560). 21 Jan Hughen Van Linschoten [1563-1611], Histoire de la navigation de Jean Hugues de Linschot Hollandois, aux Indes Orientales, 2nd edn with additions (Amsterdam: Chez Jean Evertsz Cloppenburch, 1619). 22 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort [1656-1708], Relation d’un Voyage du Levant, 2 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1717); François Leguat [1638-1735], Voyage et Aventures de Francois Leguat et de ses Compagnons en deux îles désertes des Indes Orientales, 2 vols (Amsterdam: Jean Louis de Lorme, 1708).

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Other related texts which demonstrate the perception of the East included pamphlets supporting projects of colonization, of conversion, or accounts of eastern history or philosophy. Publications such as the Journal des Sçavans were useful for assessing the reception of travel narratives and the perceived importance of the information they relayed, while correspondence such as that of Chapelain or Peiresc provided insights on the reception of the genre, as well as practical information on the ‘re-writing’ of accounts. Where relevant, a tragi-comédie such as L’Estoille’s La Belle Esclave, or a roman like Lisdam’s Les Saintes Inconstances served to verify the presence or utilization of imagery in other literary forms.23 Texts representing cultural encounter such as the list of aphorisms contrasting Turks and Europeans in Antoine Galland’s Voyage à Smyrne also enter into the corpus.24 However, the core corpus consists primarily of sixty original 17th-century travel narratives to the East, the classification of which is often far from straightforward.25 A jeweller like Tavernier, for example, could also act as an ambassador to Persia in the absence of a dedicated French diplomat, and the line between ecclesiastics and adventurers was sometimes blurred, as in the Abbé Carré’s Voyage des Indes Orientales.26 Classifying by geographical area would certainly coincide with the division of this study into the ‘Near’ East and the Indian Ocean Basin, though Tavernier, Philippe, Thévenot and others were present in both. The following division of the texts below into ecclesiastical voyages, voyages d’aventure and voyages de curiosité, while also necessitating some inevitable crossover of genres, has at least the advantage of taking into account the declared motives of travellers themselves. Those voyages which were actually published in the 17th century have been further separated in the following

23

Claude de L’Estoille [1602-1652], La Belle Esclave, Tragicomedie (Paris: Pierre Moreau, 1643); Henry de Lisdam [15??-16??], Les Sainctes Inconstances de Leopolde & de Lindarache, où l’on voit une quantité de belles choses, dans la diversité de plusieurs fortunes arrivées dans la Turquie (Paris: Henry le Gras, 1632). 24 Antoine Galland, Le Voyage à Smyrne, un manuscrit d’Antoine Galland (1678), ed. by F. Bauden (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, 2000). 25 For the purposes of classification, when more than one edition of the same voyage exists, these have been simply counted as one travel narrative. 26 L’Abbé Barthélemy Carré [1639?-1699?], Voyage des Indes Orientales, mêlé de plusieurs histoires curieuses, 2 vols (Paris: Veuve Claude Barbin, 1699).

Introduction

23

table into their respective formats, which will be analyzed in greater detail in Chapter 2. Voyages to the Near East/East Indies published in the 17th century: In-2° Beaulieu Chardin

27

In-4° Avril Cauche Choisy Coppin Daulier-Deslandes Deshayes De Vergoncey Doubdan Du Chastelet des Boys Du Loir Flacourt Gervaise Goujon Grelot Le Blanc La Boullaye Monconys Rhodes (Divers Voyages) Roger Souchu Surius Tavernier [x 2]27 Jean Thévenot [x 3]28

In-8° Anonymous (1645) Bénard Besson Bourges Chaumont Dellon [x 2]29 Feynes Jouvin La Loubère La Magdeleine Le Comte Le Favre Martin (1604) Mocquet Philippe Poullet Pyrard Tissanier Villamont

In-12° Beauvau Bernier Carré Chinon Dellon30 L’Estra Martin (1609) Nau [x 2]31 Saint-Germain Spon Tachard

In-16° Boucher

Six Voyages and Recueil de plusieurs Relations. Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant, Suite du Voyage and Troisième Voyage. 29 Charles Dellon [1649?-1709?], Relation d’un Voyage fait aux Indes Orientales, 2 vols (Paris: Veuve Biestkins, 1685); Nouvelle Relation d’un Voyage fait aux Indes Orientales (Amsterdam: Paul Masset, 1699). 30 Charles Dellon, Relation d’un Voyage fait aux Indes Orientales, 2 vols (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1685). 31 Père Michel Nau [1631-1683], Le Voyage de Galilée (Paris: F. Lambert, 1670); Voyage Nouveau de la Terre Sainte, Enrichi de plusieurs remarques particulières qui servent à l'intelligence de la Sainte Ecriture, et de diverses réflexions chrétiennes... (Paris: A. Pralard, 1679). 28

24

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Ecclesiastical Voyagers Given the popular piety and great missionary impetus of the French 17th century, the large number of ecclesiastical accounts among the corpus is not surprising.32 Of the entire core corpus, twenty-one voyagers were ecclesiastics, while others were members of religious congregations. Most of these recount a journey to the Near East, of which the most significant focus was generally the Holy Land. The Holy Land had been an insistent presence in French literary tradition long before the 17th century. A wide variety of texts of piety, of pilgrimage and devotion make reference to it directly or, by the reference to sacred sites, invite the reader to reflect on its occupation. But can texts of pilgrimage be classed as travel narratives? Certainly some, such as Hélène Chéron’s voyage, are little more than an itinerary of the sites of the Holy Land with minimal reference to the 17th-century inhabitants who were considered as superfluous, even if this absence is itself significant.33 Other accounts intend to both edify and inform about the East, as in the Traicte de l’Abominable loy de Mahommet divisée és parties Orientales en trois sectes, c’est à sçavoir celle des Turcs, des Arabes, & des Mores in Jean Boucher’s Le Bouquet Sacré.34 Among the authors are members of various religious orders such as Recollects, Cordeliers (Boucher was Gardien des Cordeliers du Mans), Franciscans, and Jesuits such as Michel Nau.35 Of the ordres and congrégations, Bénard was a Chevalier de l’Ordre du St. Sepulchre de Nre Seigneur Jesus Christ, and the author of the pilgrim Hélène Chéron’s account, SaintGermain, was a member of a congrégation which encouraged

32

See Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism: an Essay, 2nd edn (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), pp. 167-194. 33 Charles de Saint-Germain, Conferences spirituelles ou l’Eloge & la Relation du Voyage de Jerusalem fait en l’an 1660 (Paris: Chez l’Autheur, 1670). 34 Père Jean Boucher [1560?-1631?], Le Bouquet Sacré (Caen: Jacques Mangeant, 1620), p. 629. 35 Père Jaques Goujon [1621-1693], Histoire et Voyage de la Terre-Sainte, où tout ce qu’il y a de plus remarquable dans les saints lieux, est tres-exactement descrit. Par le R.P.Jaques Goujon, Religieux de l’Observance de S. François Lecteur jubilé de la Famille de Terre-Sainte (Lyon: Pierre Compagnon & Robert Taillandier, 1671).

Introduction

25

pilgrimage to the Holy Land.36 The travellers to the East were overwhelmingly male, and so Chéron is as notable for being a female traveller as for her reputed eighty years of age upon departure. However, the ecclesiastical voyages to the Near East were not restricted to the Holy Land, and another Jesuit, Joseph Besson, furnished an account of Syrian Christianity, while Perses, Armeniens, and Gaures form the subject matter of the Capuchin Gabriel de Chinon’s Relations Nouvelles du Levant.37 The voyage of Philippe de la Tres-Saincte Trinité – an unusual mission for a Carme Dechaussez, an order normally devoted to contemplation – recounts the ‘divers succez’ of his voyage to Persia, from 1629 and further east to the Portuguese Empire.38 Of the ecclesiastical travellers further East, the Jesuits were most prolific in their production of travel narratives. Perhaps the most famous of the 17th-century Jesuit missionaries to Asia was Alexandre de Rhodes, whose Divers Voyages et Missions is an edifying account of years of conversions in South-East Asia in the 1620s and 1630s before his eventual expulsion. 39 Rhodes’s call inspired numerous vocations, among them the large group of Jesuits who left France between 1654-1655 for China, and of which Joseph Tissanier left a Relation du Voyage published in 1663.40 Rhodes’s example was the basis for the foundation of the Missions Étrangères, which sent a trio of bishops in partibus to Asia in the early 1660s. Among them was 36 Nicolas Bénard [1596?-16??], Le Voyage de Hierusalem et autres lieux de la Terre Sainte, faict par le Sr. Bénard Parisien Chevalier de l’Ordre du St.Sepulchre de Nre Seigneur Jesus Christ (Paris: Denis Moreau, 1621). 37 Père Joseph Besson [1610-1691], La Syrie Sainte: ou la Mission de Jésus et des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus en Syrie, 2 parts (Paris: Jean Henault, 1660); Père Gabriel de Chinon [1610-1668], Relations nouvelles du Levant: ou, Traités de la religion, du gouvernement, et des coûtumes des Perses, des Armeniens, & des Gaures, compozés par le P.G.D.C. & donnés au public par le Sieur L.M.P.D.E.T. (Lyon: Jean Thioly, 1671). 38 Père Philippe de la Tres-Saincte Trinité [1603-1674], Voyage d’Orient du R.P. Philippe de la Tres-Saincte Trinité Carme Deschaussé (Lyon: Antoine Jullieron, 1669). Henceforth, Philippe de la Tres-Saincte Trinité will be referred to as ‘Philippe’. 39 Père Alexandre de Rhodes [1591-1660], Divers Voyages et missions du P. Alexandre de Rhodes en la Chine, & autres royaumes de l’Orient, avec son retour en Europe par la Perse & l’Armenie (Paris: Samuel & Gabriel Cramoisy, 1653). 40 Père Joseph Tissanier [1618-1688], Relation du Voyage du P. Joseph Tissanier de la Compagnie de Jesus, depuis la France, jusqu’au Royaume de Tunquin (Paris: Edme Martin, 1663).

26

Veiled Encounters

Pierre Lambert, évêque de Béryte, with a suite which included Jacques de Bourges, whose account of the voyage first appeared in 1666.41 Other members of the Society of Jesus responded: Philippe Avril, seemingly, was inspired by the widely-circulated letter sent from Ferdinand Verbiest, Jesuit astronomer at the Chinese court, which arrived in Europe in 1681 and which called upon the Jesuit colleges to urgently send evangelical workers to the missions. While his attempt to find a new route into China through Russia and Siberia was blocked, Avril left a Voyage en divers Etats d’Europe & d’Asie, entrepris pour découvrir un nouveau chemin à la Chine published in 1693.42 Another Jesuit, Louis Le Comte, arrived in Peking in 1688 as one of the Mathématiciens du Roi. His account of Chinese chronology in the Nouveaux Mémoires sur l’Etat présent de la Chine was directly responsible for the Querelle des rites chinois and was condemned by the Sorbonne in 1700.43 Nicolas Gervaise S.J. bequeathed a large volume describing the culture and religion of Siam in the 1680s, the Histoire Naturelle et Politique du Royaume de Siam, the fruit of his years spent as a missionary in the kingdom. 44 Another Jesuit, Gui Tachard, accompanied the French mission to Siam as a member of the Académie des Sciences on the first of his five voyages to the Far East, and was originally to have accompanied Le Comte to China. While in large part an account of his diplomatic mission to the court (Tachard seems to have believed, according to his Voyage de Siam des Pères Jesuites, in the conversion of the kingdom of Siam to Christianity) his Voyage also contains an interesting description of Siamese religious belief. 45 The Abbé de Choisy, who was a member of this same mission, left a journal de voyage addressed to his friend Dangeau, 41

Père Jacques de Bourges [1630-1714], Relation du Voyage de Mgr l’Évêque de Bérythe au Royaume de la Cochine, par la Turquie etc. (Paris: Denys Béchet, 1666). The edition used in the present study is the 2nd edition (Paris: Denys Béchet, 1668). Bourges’s voyage has also been reprinted (Paris: Gérard Monfort, 2000). 42 Père Philippe Avril [1654-1698], Voyage en divers Etats d’Europe & d’Asie, entrepris pour découvrir un nouveau chemin à la Chine (Paris: Jean Boudot, 1693). 43 Père Louis Le Comte [1655-1728], Nouveaux Mémoires sur l’Etat présent de la Chine, 2 vols (Paris: Jean Anisson, Directeur de l’Imprimerie Royale, 1696). 44 Père Nicolas Gervaise [1662-1729], Histoire Naturelle et Politique du Royaume de Siam (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1688). 45 Père Gui Tachard [1648-1712], Voyage de Siam des Pères Jesuites, 2 vols (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1689).

Introduction

27

published in 1687, which differs as considerably in tone as did the character of its author from that of the other ecclesiastics who travelled to the Far East.46 Voyages d’aventure While the dramatic peripeteia of travel were certainly not absent from the journeys of these ecclesiastics to the East, other voyages deliberately accentuate their aventures by their choice of subject matter and by titles such as: Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval contenant sa navigation aux Indes orientales, Maldives, Moluques, Bresil: les divers accidens, adventures, et dangers qui luy sont arrivez en ce voyage, tant en allant et retournant, que pendant son sejour de dix ans en ce païs là. 47

Pyrard’s Voyage recounts the narrator’s ten years of voyages to the Maldives, along the Malabar coast, Goa, the Far East and Brazil from 1601-1611. Furnishing the most thorough of the 17th-century descriptions of the previously little-known Maldives (in which the narrator spent five years) as well as insights, of varying documentary value, on other peoples, the Voyage is also a dramatic narrative of shipwrecks, extraordinary animals and adventures. It was published nearly contemporaneously with Jean Mocquet’s Voyages en Afrique, Asie, Indes orientales et occidentales which contains an account of Mocquet’s travels as member of a Portuguese expedition to the Indies, and which contains even more tales of revenge and cruelty. 48 Both 46

L’Abbé François-Timoléon de Choisy [1644-1724], Journal du Voyage de Siam, fait en MDCLXXXV et MDCLXXXVI par M. L’ (Paris: Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1687); repr. as Journal du voyage de Siam, ed. by Dirk Van der Cruysse (Paris: Fayard, 1995). 47 François Pyrard [1570-1621], Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval contenant sa navigation aux Indes orientales, Maldives, Moluques, Bresil (Paris: Chez Samuel Thiboust, 1619); repr. ed. by Xavier de Castro, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, 1998). 48 Jean Mocquet [1575-1616?], Voyages en Afrique, Asie, Indes orientales et occidentales faits par Jean Mocquet, Garde du Cabinet des Singularités du Roy, aux Tuileries (Paris: Chez Jean de Heuqueville, 1617). The fourth book, Voyage en Éthiopie, Mozambique, Goa & autres lieux d’Afrique & des Indes orientales, reprinted as Voyage à Mozambique & Goa, ed. by Xavier de Castro & Dejanirah Couto (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, 1996).

28

Veiled Encounters

accounts were edited by the erudite Pierre Bergeron who was also to attempt editing Vincent Le Blanc’s travels, but who died before this considerable task could be completed. Le Blanc’s Voyages Fameux eventually appeared, assembled by le Sieur Coulon, but his Histoires estranges of hermaphrodites, cannibals and cruelty are among the factors which call into question the veracity of much of his account.49 In fact, it was the route to the East Indies that especially lent itself to these voyages d’aventure. Another member of Pyrard’s expedition, who did not, unlike Pyrard, suffer shipwreck, left a Description du Premier Voyage which contains many of the same themes.50 Augustin de Beaulieu’s Memoires du voyage aux Indes Orientales, the journal of a pioneering French expedition to the Far East, and François Cauche’s Relation de Voyage à Madagascar (1651) are voyages which, if comparatively sober in comparison with Le Blanc, still testify to a great sense of potential in the East Indies.51 Most of the Far Eastern voyages enthusiastically recount these aventures, often justified by the flimsiest of testimony. François de L’Estra’s Relation ou Journal d’un Voyage nouvellement fait aux Indes Orientales is the account of a nobleman at the service of the Compagnie who is taken prisoner by a Dutch fleet, and is interspersed with shipwrecks and a long Histoire d’un Breton relating the tribulations of a couple separated in the Indies by the hazards of

49

Vincent Le Blanc [1554-1640?], Les Voyages Fameux du sieur Vincent Le Blanc marseillois qu’il a faits depuis l’âge de douze ans jusqu’à soixante, sur quatre parties du monde (Paris: Gervais Clousier, 1648). In 1979 an article by Robert O. Lindsay described the long-drawn out process of their editing by Pierre Bergeron, complicated by difficulties in securing the manuscripts and sifting through Le Blanc’s account. Robert O. Lindsay, ‘Les Voyages Fameux: a Seventeenth-Century Travel Account’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 16 (1979), 323-338. 50 François Martin de Vitré [15??-16??], Description du Premier Voyage faict aux Indes Orientales par les François (Paris: L. Sonnius, 1604, repr. 1609); reprinted in annex of Pyrard, 1998, II, pp. 905-928. 51 Augustin de Beaulieu [1589-1637], Memoires du Voyage aux Indes Orientales du General Beaulieu dressés par luy-mesme in Melchisédech Thévenot, ed., Relations de divers voyages curieux…, part 2 (Paris: Cramoisy, 1664-1666); repr. as Mémoires d’un voyage aux Indes orientales, ed. by Denys Lombard (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1996); François Cauche [1615?-?], Relation de Voyage que François Cauche de Rouen a fait à Madagascar, Isles adjacentes & Coste d’Afrique: recueilly par le Sieur Morisot (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1651); Cf. the cannibals of Sumatra, in Beaulieu, 1996, p. 194.

Introduction

29

fortune. 52 The Far East under Dutch domination is depicted by two other Frenchmen enrolled in the Dutch VOC (the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company), whose accounts, like that of L’Estra, have recently been republished by Dirk Van der Cruysse.53 Another manuscript rescued by a modern editor is the autobiographical account of the peregrinations of a French-Swiss pirate, Élie Ripon, which combines descriptions of events of extreme brutality with numerous colourful tales of the wonders of the Far East.54 While more famous for being a prisoner of the Inquisition in Goa, Charles Dellon’s Relation d’un Voyage fait aux Indes Orientales is also resolutely aimed at the market for aventures, though the Journal des Sçavans saw in this nothing but an abrégé of previous accounts, excepting the description of Malabar.55 Even at the end of the century, the potential to recount aventures was still vaunted by titles, as in the histoires curieuses of the Abbé Carré, engaged by Colbert in the Compagnie des Indes orientales. Not content with recounting the considerable events of his own voyage, Carré devotes a substantial part of his first volume to various unverifiable histoires of cruelty and romantic intrigue, including those of a valiant Persian princess, and even two Georgiennes ‘nées avec du penchant à l’amour’.56 Bourgeois or Parfaits Travellers Other voyages – while certainly not devoid of adventure – are notable for the wealth of detail they contain, their insistence on 52

François de L’Estra, Sieur de [1650-1697], Relation ou Journal d’un Voyage nouvellement fait aux Indes Orientales (Paris: Chez Estienne Michalet, 1677); repr. ed. by Dirk Van der Cruysse as Le Voyage de François de L’Estra aux Indes orientales (Paris: Chandeigne, 2007). 53 Dirk Van der Cruysse, ed., Mercenaires français de la VOC: Le récit de Jean Guidon de Chambelle (1644-1651) & autres documents (Paris: Chandeigne, 2003). 54 Élie Ripon, Voyages et aventures du Capitaine Ripon aux Grandes Indes, ed. by Yves Giraud (Thonon-les-Bains: Éditions de l’Albaron, 1990); repr. as Voyages et aventures aux Grandes Indes 1617-1627 (Paris: Les Éditions de Paris, 1997). 55 The edition of Dellon used in the present study is the Nouvelle Relation d’un Voyage fait aux Indes Orientales (Amsterdam: Paul Marret, 1699); See Journal des Sçavans (Paris: Jean Cusson, 1685), p. 85. 56 Carré, I, p. 169.

30

Veiled Encounters

observation and measurement, and the commercial and practical nature of the information they often contain. The title of the journal de voyage left by Balthasar de Monconys is representative of these works: Où les Sçavants trouveront un nombre infini de nouveautez, en Machines de Mathematiques, Experiences Physiques, Raisonnemens de la belle Philosophie, curiosités de Chymie, & conversations des Illustres de ce Siecle; Outre la Description de divers Animaux & Plantes rares, plusieurs Secrets inconnus pour le Plaisir & la Santé, les Ouvrages des Peintres fameux, les Coûtumes & Mœurs des Nations, & ce qu’il y a de plus digne de la connoissance d’un honeste Homme dans les trois Parties du Monde. 57

The particular nature of the nouveautez makes them worthy of the attentions of the honnêtes hommes for whom Monconys, possessor of an important cabinet de curiosités, intended his text. Similarly, François La Boullaye Le Gouz, later to be ambassador to the Mughal of the Compagnie des Indes orientales, was apparently motivated to travel because of unsatisfied curiosité.58 Among these voyages are accounts which were to gain considerable authority and would be consistently reprinted and/or translated. The ‘parfait voyageur’, Jean Thévenot, was to leave three volumes of travels, of which only one was published during his short lifetime, on his peregrinations studying the languages, cultures, religions, politics and antiquities across Turkey, the Holy Land, Persia and India.59 The Huguenot jeweller, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, roamed the East over many years amassing a vast fortune and leaving a

57

Balthasar de Monconys [1611-1665], Journal des Voyages de Monsieur de Monconys, 2 vols (Lyon: Horace Boissat, & George Remeus, 1661). 58 François La Boullaye Le Gouz [1623-1668], Les Voyages et Observations du Sieur La Boullaye Le Gouz (Paris: Gervais Clousier, 1653), p. 2. 59 Jean Thévenot, Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant (Paris: Louis Bilaine, 1664) attributed to François Pétis de la Croix; the posthumous Suite du Voyage du Levant (Paris: Charles Angot, 1674) attributed to Pétis de la Croix and le Sieur de Luisandre; Troisieme partie des Voyages de Mr de Thevenot, contenant la relation de l’Indostan, des nouveaux Mogols et des autres peuples et pays des Indes (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1684), ed. by Pétis de la Croix. An inscription under Thévenot’s portrait in the Relation reads: ‘Amy tu connoistras l’Autheur par ce portrait/ Tu ne Sçaurois trouver Voyageur plus parfait.’ Non-paginated.

Introduction

31

considerable wealth of information in his Six Voyages.60 Even more complete was the portrait of Persia left by another Huguenot, Jean Chardin, and which would be a source for Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes in the following century. 61 François Bernier spent many years as doctor to the emperor Aurangzeb, gaining an unrivalled knowledge of the Mughal Empire. A disciple of Pierre Gassendi, whose works he translated and edited, and member of the libertin circle, Bernier also produced perhaps the most complete Francophone account of Mughal-era India, and certainly the description closest to the court.62 André Daulier-Deslandes accompanied Tavernier on his sixth voyage to Persia, seemingly with a commercial role, and for a short period accompanied Thévenot to Persepolis. His Les Beautez de la Perse (including the unrelated account of the adventures of Louis Marot) is notable for furnishing precise distances and geographical detail, as well as numerous illustrations and maps, designed to complement the text and lead the reader on a virtual voyage to Persia.63 Albert Jouvin de Rochefort’s Le Voyageur d’Europe (accompanied, in its second edition, by a seventh volume dedicated to the voyage in the Near East and the Holy Land) is similarly practical, dispensing advice on the obtention of currency and supplies as much as recounting the itinerary of familiar sites and pilgrimage. 64 Many of the above voyages were in turn accompanied by rich illustrations accompanying their geographical detail. Henry de 60 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier [1605-1689], Les Six Voyages…en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes, pendant l’espace de quarante ans, 2 vols (Paris: Gervais Clouzier & Claude Barbin, 1676). 61 Jean Chardin [1643-1713], Voyage du Chevalier Chardin en Perse et aux Indes Orientales par la Mer Noire & par la Colchide (London: Moses Pitt, 1686). On travel narratives as sources for Montesquieu, see Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 115. 62 François Bernier [1620-1668], Histoire de la derniere Revolution des Estats du Grand Mogol (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1671) and Suite des Memoires du Sieur Bernier sur l’Empire du Grand Mogol (The Hague: Chez Arnout Leers, 1671). 63 André Daulier-Deslandes [16??-1719], Les Beautez de la Perse…, avec une relation de quelques avantures maritimes de L. M. P. R. D. G. D. F. (Paris: Gervais Clouzier, 1673). ‘Pour mieux conduire mon Lecteur dans ce voyage, j’y ay adjoûté une Carte, ou plûtost un Itineraire…’ Epistre, non-paginated. 64 Albert Jouvin de Rochefort, Le Voyageur d’Europe; où sont les voyages, 6 vols (Paris: D. Thierry, 1672); repr. as Le Voyageur d’Europe, où est le Voyage de Turquie, qui comprend la Terre Sainte et l’Egypte, 7 vols (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1676).

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Beauvau’s Relation journaliere du Voyage du Levant, and the illustrator of Chardin’s Voyages, Guillaume-Joseph Grelot’s Relation Nouvelle d’un Voyage de Constantinople contain dozens of illustrations of islands, towns and ports as well as numerous painstaking design plans of church architecture. 65 Finally, voyages exist from dedicated diplomatic or political initiatives, bearing in mind that some travellers (such as Tavernier or Poullet in Persia) doubled as unofficial ambassadors. The voyages to Siam gave rise to Simon de la Loubère’s Du Royaume de Siam or to Alexandre de Chaumont’s Relation de l’Ambassade, texts which lack the detailed knowledge and experience of voyagers like Bernier and Thévenot, but which still attempt to furnish information on the East, and a perspective of sorts on the peoples and societies encountered there.66

Methodological Questions Now-classic studies by Tzvetan Todorov or Edward Said demonstrate the perennity of the debate on cultural encounter, especially between East and West. 67 Two other, more recent, studies, Joan-Pau Rubiés’s Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, and Kate Teltscher’s India Inscribed, have engaged directly with Said’s findings in the case of European travel accounts in the particular case of India.68 While Rubiés is primarily concerned with Medieval and Renaissance texts, and Teltscher’s principal focus is on late-1700s British texts, their analyses incorporate some French descriptions of 65

Henry de Beauvau [15??-16??], Relation journaliere du Voyage du Levant (Toul: François du Bois, 1608); Guillaume-Joseph Grelot [1630?-16??], Relation Nouvelle d’un Voyage de Constantinople (Paris: Pierre Rocolet & la Veuve de Damien Foucault, 1680). 66 Simon de la Loubère [1643-1729], Du Royaume de Siam, 2 vols (Paris: Veuve de J.-B. Coignard & J.-B. Coignard, 1691); Alexandre de Chaumont [1640?-?], Relation de l’Ambassade de Mr le Chevalier de Chaumont à la Cour du Roy de Siam, avec ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable durant son voyage (Paris: Seneuze & Horthemels, 1686). 67 Tzvetan Todorov, La Conquête de l’Amérique: la question de l’autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982); Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres: la réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989). 68 Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Introduction

33

the subcontinent.69 The implications of such rich studies, nuancing the othering of Indians by situating primary texts, to differing degrees, in their historical context, render much of the classic scholarship on either the Orient (Martino) or the travel narrative (Atkinson) to some degree outdated. 70 While the latter texts, as well as parts of Hazard’s La Crise de la conscience européenne or Turbet-Delof’s vast study of Barbary, remain essential background reading, they do not, unlike the present study, analyze the central problematic of the representation of the Orient itself in the 17th century in the first-hand genre of the travel narrative.71 More recent valuable studies include Bonnerot’s analysis of the 18th-century image of Persia, Carnoy’s Représentations de l’Islam dans la France du XVIIe siècle and Sophie Linon-Chipon’s historically rich Gallia orientalis, which is devoted to the relations of sea-voyages, particularly on the route des épices to the East Indies, and the birth of the literary genre ‘aux marges de l’imaginaire’ that is the récit de voyage.72 These and other studies testify to the increasing interest accorded to travel literature in recent years by researchers, and demonstrated by the substantial activity, since 1984, of the Centre de Recherche sur la Littérature des Voyages in Université Paris IVSorbonne. Numerous re-editions of original travel narratives prove the importance of the current wave of interest in the genre. These include the Voyages of Pyrard and Mocquet, and of those travellers rescued 69

See in particular Teltscher’s chapter analyzing the role of fantasy in representations of Indian women, pp. 37-73. 70 Pierre Martino, L’Orient dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle, nd 2 edn (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970); Geoffroy Atkinson, Les Relations de voyages du XVIIe siècle et l’évolution des idées, 2nd edn (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1972). 71 Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne 1680-1715 (Paris: Fayard, 1961); Guy Turbet-Delof, L’Afrique barbaresque dans la littérature française aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris-Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1973). 72 Olivier Bonnerot, ‘La Perse dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIe siècle. De l’image au mythe’ (doctoral thesis, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1984). Published as La Perse dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1988); Dominique Carnoy, Représentations de l’Islam dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris-Montréal: L’Harmattan, 1998); Sophie-Jenny Linon, Le Genre de la relation de voyage française sur la route maritime des épices (doctoral thesis, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1993). Re-edited and published as Sophie Linon-Chipon, Gallia orientalis: voyages aux Indes Orientales (1529-1722). Poétique et imaginaire d’un genre littéraire en formation, Collection Imago Mundi n° 5 (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003).

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from obscurity by Van der Cruysse, or the 2008 edition of Bernier’s travels edited by Tinguely, Paschoud and Chamay.73 The present study also follows on several recent theses and publications which focus on the predominantly narrative or rhetorical aspects of the récit de voyage: its classical models (Doiron’s L’Art de voyager), its links with theatre and the novel (Requemora), or in the overland route to the Orient, with particular emphasis on the récits de voyage to Persia (Rachel Lauthelier).74 For Friedrich Wolfzettel, an aesthetic, evolutionary appreciation of the travel narrative has the merit of avoiding the pitfalls of a documentary approach: Il s’agissait de ne pas tomber, une fois de plus, dans le piège de la fonction documentaire de la littérature des voyages, mais de suivre l’évolution de ce genre mal défini en fonction de l’histoire littéraire de la France.75

Nevertheless, a purely aesthetic approach is a trap which risks ignoring the cultural encounter on which the littérature des voyages is based, and much of the interest of travel narratives actually lies precisely in their claim to be documentary. The concept of the Orient, as has been seen, did exist in the 17th century, but this ‘idea’, as Said calls it, was nonetheless perpetuated through the representation of numerous encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples, which may originally have been of some diversity. The study of the representation of the Orient within the 17th-century récit de voyage thus demands analysis of the relationships between textual strategies of cultural representation, political or economic factors, and individual or group encounters in creating such a vast concept. Aesthetic and documentary functions also interact in a form which simultaneously refutes its ‘literary’ status and demand that one seek to evaluate the possibility of objective, neutral, representation by tracing the origins 73

François Bernier, Un Libertin dans l’Inde moghole: le Voyage de François Bernier, 1656-1669, ed. by Frédéric Tinguely, Adrien Paschoud and Charles-Antoine Chamay (Paris: Chandeigne, 2008). 74 Normand Doiron, ‘L’Art de voyager depuis la Renaissance jusqu’à l’époque classique’ (doctoral thesis, l’Université de Montréal, 1987). Re-edited and published as L’Art de voyager: Le déplacement à l’époque classique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995); Sylvie Requemora, Littérature et voyage au XVIIe siècle: Récit, roman, théatre (doctoral thesis, Université Aix-Marseille, 2000); Rachel Lauthelier, ‘Géographie et rhétorique dans les récits de voyage en Orient à l’époque classique’ (doctoral thesis, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2002). 75 Wolfzettel, p. 5.

Introduction

35

of, influences on, and models for textual depictions. This study will also particularly focus on the relationship between ‘factual’ observation and the dramatic digressions and unverifiable tales which are essential to the travel narrative, and which have received comparatively little attention. 76 The principal originality of this book lies in its combination of the analysis of cultural encounter and the tradition of the Orient, with the reading of a large corpus of primary sources. The most common, by far, of these first-hand sources are travel narratives themselves, although supporting contemporary textual representations of the Orient, such as drama, romans, or dictionaries are extensively referred to. In the ‘genre of genres’ that was early modern travel literature, as Rubiés writes, travel could act as the ‘essential condition of production’ for diverse forms of literature with diverse functions. 77 As such, a certain amount of separation of sources was necessary to establish the corpus of récits de voyage, which, as has been seen, were considered in 17th-century dictionaries as texts recounting a geographical displacement by the narrator. For example, Tavernier’s Nouvelle Relation de l’intérieur du Serrail is clearly a relation, written by a traveller to the East, but it has not been included in the corpus of récits de voyage, while Souchu de Rennefort’s Histoire des Indes Orientales has.78 The principal reason for this choice was that Tavernier both ignores the events of the voyage and had to rely on third party testimony of the inaccessible seraglio, in contrast with his and other voyages to the East. On the other hand, while Souchu’s Histoire is in large part an account of the French colonization of Madagascar, it includes the geographical displacement of the journey, and is based – or it is claimed to have been based – on first-hand testimony, or what was believed to be first-hand testimony. For just such a reason, Flacourt’s Histoire – recounting the voyage with first-hand testimony 76

Notably in Jacques Chupeau, ‘Les Récits de voyages aux lisières du roman’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, mai-août 1977, 536-553. 77 Rubiés, ‘Travel Writing as a Genre: Facts, Fictions and the Invention of a Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe’, in Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Modern Travel and Ethnology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), I, p. 6. 78 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Nouvelle Relation de l’intérieur du Serrail du Grand Seigneur, contenant plusieurs singularitez qui jusqu’icy n’ont point été mises en lumière (Paris: Olivier de Varennes, 1675); Urbain Souchu de Rennefort [1630?1690?], Histoire des Indes Orientales (Paris: Arnoul Seneuze & Daniel Hortemels, 1688).

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– is classed as a récit de voyage while De L’Isle’s Relation Historique du Royaume de Siam, composed of unwitnessed testimony collected in France, is obviously not.79 Among the associated texts which have been referred to in assessing the prevalence of a particular representation, those texts which present information on the Orient which is supposed to be eyewitness testimony – such as the previously mentioned relations of both Tavernier and De L’Isle – feature regularly. Associated texts allow valuable insight into the meanings attributed by contemporaries (or immediate predecessors) to concepts such as knowledge, tradition, or visual testimony, with which the travel narrative is constantly engaged. Among these sources also feature studies which attempt to reconstruct the history of cultural representations. These explore the history of human diversity both in French thought (Todorov), and on a European level (Anthony Pagden and Margaret T. Hodgen), as well as its most vivid, and most influential, manifestations (Frank Lestringant).80 In line with these, the present study assumes that the representation of cultures in texts is to varying degrees inseparable from the historical (and by definition, religious) circumstances in which they were composed. Among the most striking examples are the depictions of the Holy Land by ecclesiastics, or of the Far East by missionaries, which will be discussed separately in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively. However, travellers with no direct association with a religious organization could still be caught up in the bitter religious struggles of the 17th century: this was the case with Dellon, a victim of the Inquisition in Goa, or of Chardin and Tavernier, Huguenot travellers. Religious and political circumstances constantly overlapped, complicating a deeply competitive colonial situation in which the French traveller was rarely in an unaccompanied relationship with the peoples of the East. To gain as accurate a picture as possible of these factors, a range of texts were consulted to assess such concrete

79

Le Sieur de L’Isle, Relation Historique du Royaume de Siam (Paris: Guillaume de Luynes, 1684). 80 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964); Frank Lestringant, Le Cannibale, grandeur et décadence (Paris: Perrin, 1994).

Introduction

37

historical realities as the circumstances of travel, or the position of France within early modern colonialism.81 The early modern travel narrative, as Chapter 2 will demonstrate, was situated in an idiosyncratic relationship with both the traditional and the new, from which the study of narrative structure is certainly inseparable. Studies of narrative such as those of Gérard Genette, Paul Ricoeur or Northrop Frye helped identify the structures and procedures of synthesis behind the récit (and by extension the récit de voyage).82 However, the principal resources used for the present study are first-hand sources – travel narratives and contemporary documentation – rather than analyses of critical theory. Most critical studies of narrative are based on texts postdating the 17th century, which are furthermore often fictional. As such, there is a risk of anachronism that simply would not take into consideration the unique status of the travel narrative as a text which actively and repeatedly claims to be factual. Another important objection to an approach from one narrow angle of modern literary criticism is its potential to neglect the circumstances of literary creation, that is, the fact that each author was conscious that the Orient was the site of political, economic and religious preoccupations for France – and Europe as a whole – for long before the 17th century. To ignore this, and to consider the texts which pertain to an area of such immense non-literary interest as abstract, ahistoric structures, would in many cases be to neglect what is claimed by their authors to be the very reasons for their creation. The return to the texts themselves, for close analysis, is the only approach which could hope to furnish a satisfactory overall picture of such diverse sources.

Cultural Relativism The concept of cultural relativism is fundamental to a study which analyzes the nature of the representation of peoples as seen and 81

Antoni Maczak, Travel in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Charles de la Roncière, Histoire de la Marine française, IV (Paris: Plon, 1910). 82 Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes, coll. Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1982); Figures III, coll. Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1972); Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, I, coll. L’Ordre philosophique (Paris: Seuil, 1983); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).

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interpreted through the eyes of a foreign travel writer. For long a central tenet of the relatively recent discipline of anthropology, the concept is highly relevant to any discussion of previous attempts – such as those of the early modern travel narrative – to study and describe other cultures. The idea that the values, customs, and traditions of a culture might only make sense within that culture alone, and that they cannot be understood using the standards of, or in the context of another culture, is clearly of immediate relevance to the study of early modern travel. Attempting to analyze, for example, a religious rite in one culture without understanding its place within the totality of relations of this rite to other parts of the culture – its significance in a religion, the importance of religion to a society and so on – would thus necessarily render the analysis redundant, from a relativist perspective. A cultural trait would only take on its full significance within the context of the culture which created it, so that the only observer who could fully understand it must be him/herself a member of that same culture. While both the origins of cultural relativism (ascribed by anthropologists to the German Enlightenment) and its emergence as a reaction to 19th-century evolutionary and ‘Social Darwinist’ theorists postdate the 17th-century travel narrative, its place in the present study is by no means anachronistic. The knowledge that unfamiliar cultures had values differing from those of Europe had, at various times in history, already led earlier authors such as Montaigne to question the universality of their own culture’s values.83 The debate on relativism and language, and the question of ‘universal’ values, recur in classic and more recent studies of culture. The role of language in culture found its most radical expression in the work of the American anthropologists Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin L. Whorf, who postulated that the effect of language on individual subjectivity is so strong as to condition one’s thought, creating a conceptual framework so powerful as to limit the thoughts one can entertain. As Sapir writes:

83

As Montaigne says in Des Cannibales: ‘Chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage; comme de vray il semble que nous n’avons autre mire de la verité et de la raison que l’exemple et idée des opinions et usances du païs où nous sommes.’ Michel de Montaigne [1533-1592], Les Essais, 3 vols, ed. by Pierre Villey, 2nd edn (Paris: Quandrige/PUF, 1992), I, XXXI, p. 205.

Introduction

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The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered to represent the same social reality.84

While aspects of Sapir and Whorf’s methodology have been criticized, the principles of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis are immediately relevant to the present study. 85 The problematic area of lost meanings through differing conceptual or interpretational frameworks recurs in numerous accounts of 17th-century French voyagers who attempt to describe eastern societies. Travellers claim to be able to translate individual terms, within lexicons and dictionaries, by using corresponding terms in French, as if the linguistic structure of one language could be superimposed on that of another. What this entailed is evidenced by the many misunderstandings and cultural clashes discussed in Chapter 1. While ethnocentrism, despite the awareness of its frequency, (and even, according to some authors, its necessity for the cohesion of cultures), has largely been relegated from academic discourse of cultural encounter, certain anthropologists continue to argue in favour of the existence of ideas, traditions or values which are commonly defined by humankind as being, as Clifford Geertz says, ‘right, real, just or attractive’. 86 For Bronislaw Malinowski, the fact that a culture ‘gives its members a definite vision of the world, a definite zest of life’, does not prevent the existence of ‘laws and regularities of all cultural phenomena’ to be separated from their ‘irrelevances.’87 Clyde Kluckhohn argues against the total disparity of human cultures by postulating the existence of a ‘generalized framework’ underlying 84

Edward Sapir, ‘The Status of Linguistics as a Science’, Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. by David G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley; L.A.; London: University of California Press, 1949; repr. 1985), pp. 160-166 (p. 162). 85 See Augusto Ponio and Maria Solimini, ‘Sui rapporti fra scienze del linguaggio e scienze della cultura’, Linguistica e Antropologia: Atti del XV Congresso internazionale di studi, Lecce 23-25 maggio 1980 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1983), pp. 41-51 (p. 49). 86 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire (Paris: Denoël, 1987), p. 20; On ethnocentrism and the cohension of cultures, see Pierre-Jean Simon, ‘Ethnocentrisme’, Pluriels Recherches, 1 (1993), pp. 57-63 (p. 61); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (NY: Basic Books, 1973), p. 39. 87 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1984), p. 517; pp. 10-11.

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cultural relativism which deals with the ‘universal circumstances’ of ‘the facts of human biology and human gregariousness.’88 So, certain values would have a broad ‘universal’ value, which does not, according to Kluckhohn, give them an ‘absolute’ unalterable value. 89 Indeed, for Claude Lévi-Strauss, as Todorov points out, it is the ultimate aim of ethnology to locate the universal forms of thought and of morality which lie behind what he considers as the eternal question of the universality of human nature.90 Each empiricallyobserved manifestation of culture permits the construction of modèles, which in turn allow the anthropologist to analyze the social structure of a culture.91 Such consideration of societies as cohesive, internally coherent structures naturally precludes the judgement of their isolated manifestations, and it is this which, for Lévi-Strauss, makes it impossible to judge one culture as superior to another.92 LéviStrauss’s structuralism would give each manifestation – customs, rites, traditions and so on – its own value as one element in an overall totality. For Clifford Geertz, perhaps the most vocal recent advocate of cultural relativism, universalist approaches, especially that of Kluckhohn, must be criticized for ‘splitting man’s cultural life in two’: dividing aspects of culture into those which ‘take their specific forms solely as a result of historical accidents’ and those ‘tailored by forces which can properly be designated as universal.’93 Geertz’s retort, Anti 88

Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture and Behavior: Collected Essays of Clyde Kluckhohn, ed. by Richard Kluckhohn (NY: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), p. 294. 89 Ibid, pp. 294-296. Kluckhohn lists the prohibition of ‘indiscriminate lying, stealing, or violence within the in-group’ as one of several examples of such ‘universal’ values. 90 ‘Formes universelles de pensée et de la moralité’, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurelle deux (Paris: Plon, 1973), p. 36. See Todorov, Nous et les Autres, p. 81. Lévi-Strauss writes: ‘Ce problème de l’invariance que l’anthropologie sociale cherche à résoudre de pair avec d’autres sciences, mais qui, chez elle, apparaît comme la forme moderne d’une question qu’elle s’est toujours posée: celle de l’universalité de la nature humaine.’ Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurelle deux, p. 35. 91 ‘Les relations sociales sont la matière première employée pour la construction des modèles qui rendent manifeste la structure sociale elle-même.’ Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurelle (Paris: Plon, 1958), pp. 305-306. 92 ‘L’absurdité qu’il y a à déclarer une culture supérieure à une autre.’ Ibid., p. 413. On the ‘relativisme éthique radical’ of Lévi-Strauss, see Todorov, Nous et les autres, pp. 83-84; on his problematic ‘éloge des sociétés primitives.’ Ibid., p. 85. 93 A.L. Kroeber, ed., Anthropology Today (Chicago: 1953), p. 516. See Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 39.

Introduction

41

Anti-Relativism, is a defense against the ‘heat death of the mind, in which everything is as significant, thus as insignificant, as everything else’, or so he terms the mindset which cultural relativism is feared in some quarters to inspire.94 While Geertz dismisses this possibility in realist terms (what he characterizes as ‘what actually goes on in the world’), the implicit consequence of this absolute privilege of culture is epitomized in another of his texts:95 The image of a constant human nature independent of time, place and circumstance, of studies and professions, transient fashions and temporary opinions, may be an illusion, […] what man is may be so entangled with where he is, who he is, and what he believes that it is inseparable from them.96

Geertz’s claim that human beings are so rooted in their surroundings and origins that the concept of a universal human nature is impossible, clearly demonstrates the auto-critical potential of cultural relativism. If no one belief or opinion is absolute, then the judgement of a writer or observer must, implicitly, be itself devoid of any absolute value – though the critic would have to ‘disentangle’ him/herself first to make such a judgement. Yet the tendency to separate human cultures into internally cohesive units in which any manifestation is only completely understood by its constituent members could reasonably be assumed to lead to the radical division of peoples into mutually incomprehensible groups. Ironically, the cultural relativism which attempted to re-evaluate cultures previously seen as primitive or inferior, to give new status to what had been perceived as underdeveloped – or worse – also has the paradoxical potential to divide cultures and societies from each other. Being other through a level of evolutionary development, or through acculturation born from an otherwise-unattainable right of birth are both, to different degrees, identities which may ultimately be considered exclusive. While the principle of cultural relativism postdates the era with which the present study is concerned, the issues arising from this debate inform the analysis undertaken in this study on the attempts of 94

Clifford Geertz, ‘Anti Anti-Relativism’, American Anthropologist, vol. 86, no. 2, June 1984, pp. 263-278 (p. 265). 95 Ibid., p. 265. 96 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 35.

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17th-century travellers to describe and convey the essence of entire peoples. It was for long believed that cultures evolve in linear patterns, and therefore that some (one’s own among them, if a western observer) were more evolved than others, and cultural relativism clearly challenges this. The comparison of cultural manifestations in one society with those of another – a hallmark of comparative anthropology and a consequence of the evolutionist approach – will be demonstrated to have been a frequent phenomenon long before the 19th century. How often travellers attempted to place a cultural phenomenon within the overall context of the culture which gave rise to it, a central principle of cultural relativism, is another issue which is necessary to understanding the particular nature of 17th-century cultural representation. The terms of this complex, ongoing, and ultimately still-unresolved, debate are immediately pertinent to the central argument of this study. This study also depends on two further important assumptions: firstly, that the representation of the Orient has at least as much to do with the preoccupations of the French writers who describe it as with the historical reality of the various lands considered to be ‘oriental’. This will be proved by an examination of the nature of cultural representation in Chapter 1, and by its concrete textual manifestations in further chapters. For this reason, an assessment of the extent to which the depictions of the various peoples of the East who are described actually corresponded with some objective representation – if this in itself were possible – has not been attempted. What Rubiés calls the ‘context of production’ of each encounter is of fundamental importance, and has been approached through European historical sources, and more particularly, the voyages themselves.97 Nonetheless, the present study is an analysis of European perceptions, and its primary materials are so limited. Secondly, the analysis of the Orient has been divided into the Near East (Proche Orient) and the East Indies and Far East (Indes orientales), notably because of the particular history of contacts between Europe and the former region, which distinguishes it from the Indian Ocean Basin in which Europeans had a substantially greater presence in the 17th century. The vastly increased amount of first-hand information this growing European presence in the Indes generated 97

Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, p. xiv.

Introduction

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led to representations which, while most certainly ‘oriental’, contrast noticeably with many 17th-century and pre-17th-century representations of the lands of the Near East. Acknowledging this difference, attempting to understand the reasons for it and analyzing its manifestations will be the particular focus of Chapters 3 and 4. The precise division of subject and focus in this study, chapter by chapter, is given below. * This study begins with an Introductory Chapter that defines the récit de voyage to the Orient and its significance in the 17th century, identifying its different trends and proposing a classification according to three different types of voyagers. Chapter 1 explores the mechanism of encounter from a cultural perspective, rooting representations of the Orient in one event: the encounter of two cultures. It questions the formulation of human difference, the possibility of accurately representing another culture, and the place of la curiosité in the creation of the 17th-century Oriental. The apprehension of cultural difference is separated into the familiarity of recognizable religious and cultural phenomena, or of the attribution of complete otherness to Orientals. The various manifestations of cultural exchange are analyzed both in the economics of encounter, and in the seemingly contrasting reactions of cultural clash or laughter in the meeting of the representatives of two cultures, all of which underline the unpredictability of encounter itself, and the problematic issues of representation. Chapter 2 studies the role that literary heritage and a preexisting literary model of the voyage had in further shaping the forms of representation of the peoples of the East. 17th-century conceptions of knowledge and the authority of tradition are examined alongside the issue of transparency and the importance of visual evidence. The oft-repeated claim of the functionality of récits de voyage and their intention for future travellers, a claim reinforced by paratexts, is thus, ultimately, questioned. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the distinct representations of the two vast geographical entities that are the Near East (Proche Orient) and the East Indies/Far East (Indes orientales). Chapter 3 examines the role of a historical precedent of conflict in prefiguring the

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encounter of 17th-century French voyagers with the cultures of the Near East. The perception of the Ottoman threat, the associations of the Near East with Islam, and the problematic representation of Islam generate considerable commentary which reaches a textual paroxysm in the privileged site of the Holy Land. This encounter is also reflected in the representative relationship between Persians and Turks, and in the supposed risk of the French traveller adopting the guise of – and even becoming – the Muslim Other. Implicated in this risk are the Near Eastern women who fascinate male voyagers and who are implicitly linked to the gendering of the East, the focus which concludes this chapter. Chapter 4 explores the vision that French travellers had of the much less familiar Indes orientales and begins by situating early French commercial ventures to the East Indies within the wider European establishment of colonies and companies. The interrelationship of European powers in this era of great competition is frequently reflected in travel literature, and its analysis is essential to understanding French representations of the East Indies. This chapter will further assess how feasible the attempt to represent the widely diverse cultures of this vast area could be, (given the essentially peripheral French presence in the East Indies and limited familiarity with its cultures) in the production of texts deriving authority from observation. The causes and consequences of attributions of wealth and great fertility to the East, a religious vocabulary rich in metaphor and the consequences of mercantilism are all related to the representation of Orientals. Repeated assertions of the consequences of climate, the obsession with spices and drugs, with fatalism and fantasies, will all be found to represent conceptions of the oriental mind. Many oriental traits are perceived as being widely distributed through diverse eastern populations, and curiously transmissible to their descendants, or even to Europeans. Worthy of focus is the case of Madagascar, which lies on the spice trade route, yet is an African island subject to numerous ‘oriental’ attributions in the mid-17thcentury flurry of colonial activity. Chapter 5 analyzes manifestations of the histoires and anecdotes which were repeatedly inserted into récits de voyage which supposedly represented fact on both the Near East and the East Indies. The relationship of these anecdotes with the roman, and the role of pathos in shorter anecdotes are explored, as are the sources and forms

Introduction

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of their narrative models. The coincidence of character traits in the numerous fictional anecdotes of fortune, fanaticism, and transgressions of nature is compared to those traits factually attributed to Orientals elsewhere. This chapter will then conclude with a study of the relationship of these tales to what is either, due to distance, time or seclusion, unseen or veiled. The questionable feasibility of such representation underlies each attempt, whether literal or interpretational, to convey that which remains out of reach of the traveller. The conclusion will address the question as to what extent it is feasible to attempt to convey, interpret and represent such a variety of peoples, cultures and societies in the 17th-century récit de voyage. The problematic nature of their textual manifestations within 17th-century depictions of the Orient will be analyzed and assessed. This will be followed by a look towards future research and exploration in the field.

Chapter 1 Capturing Cultural Encounter The genre of the récit de voyage was born from the occurrence of encounter, the meeting of a member of one culture – the traveller, who is also normally the narrator – with a member, or members of another culture. The influence of the cultural heritage of voyagers on determining their response to encounter and its depiction in the text was clearly by no means an unproblematic procedure. This chapter will examine how the procedures and cultural references brought by French travellers to the moment of encounter constitute an attempt to understand, to explain and to make sense of what they saw, or thought they saw. It will also examine the extent to which such attempts could result in misrepresentation. The nature of encounter between individuals or groups depended in large part on the nature of the expeditions which brought French travellers to the East. The wide range of missionary, ambassadorial or trade journeys (as well as voyages of curiosité) must surely indicate the potential for representation to be variously coloured by the dynamics of encounter. In addition, voyagers often came to an encounter with advance expectations drawn from narrative and oral tradition. First encounters with entire cultures (as in the narratives of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas) had become rare by the time of the 17th-century récits de voyage. Naturally, precedent was also conditioned by geographical proximity to Europe; there was, for example, a much more fertile tradition of French encounter with Turkey or with Morocco than with Siam. So how must such a potentially vast discussion be formulated? For Tzvetan Todorov, there are two different perspectives from which cultural difference has traditionally been observed, that of espèce and that of valeurs:

48

Veiled Encounters Dans la première, la diversité est celle des êtres humains mêmes; on veut savoir alors si nous formons une seule espèce ou plusieurs (au XVIIIe siècle, le débat se formulait en termes de « monogenèse » et de « polygenèse »); et, à supposer que l’espèce soit une, quelle est la portée des différences entre groupes humains. C’est, en d’autres termes, le problème de l’unité et de la diversité humaines. Quant à la seconde perspective, elle déplace le centre d’attention sur la question des valeurs: existe-t-il des valeurs universelles et donc une possibilité de porter des jugements par delà les frontières, ou bien toutes les valeurs sont-elles relatives (à un lieu, à un moment de l’histoire, voire à l’identité des individus)? Et, dans le cas où l’on admettrait l’existence d’une échelle de valeurs universelle, quelle en est l’extension, qu’englobe-t-elle, qu’exclut-elle? Le problème de l’unité et de la diversité devient dans ce cas celui de l’universal et du relatif…1

While the first of these perspectives, that of espèce, refers particularly to post-17th-century theories supposedly backed by science, the term had been used by Bernier as a synonym for race in his Nouvelle Division de la Terre, par les différentes Espèces ou Races d’hommes qui l’habitent.2 Struggling to identify the cause of the observable physical difference of African and European peoples, he advances: Il en faut donc chercher la cause dans la contexture particulière de leur corps, ou dans la semence, ou dans le sang qui sont néanmoins de la même couleur que par tout ailleurs.3

Nevertheless, in 1684, Bernier was aware of the novelty and subjectivity of his use of race to classify human beings, which, as Robert Bernasconi points out, indicates that the term was still imprecise. 4 As a way of grouping human beings together, terms like peuple, or nation were used by 17th-century French travellers rather than race, or espèce.5 Nation is defined as follows by Furetière:

1

Todorov, Nous et les autres, p. 19. Bernier, Nouvelle Division de la Terre, par les différentes Espèces ou Races d’hommes qui l’habitent, Journal des Sçavans, vol. 12 (lundi 24 avril 1684), 148-155. 3 Ibid., p. 150. 4 ‘Ce que j’ay remarqué dans les hommes en tous mes longs & frequens Voyages, m’a donné la pensée de diviser [la Terre] autrement.’ Ibid., p. 148. Robert Bernasconi, Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, ‘Bernier, Linnaeus and Maupertuis’ (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001), vii; Bernasconi, ed., Race (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 13. 5 See Martin de Vitré, in Pyrard, 1998, p. 907; Besson, part 2, p. 268. 2

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Nom collectif, qui se dit d’un grand peuple habitant une certaine estenduë de terre, renfermée en certaines limites ou sous une même domination. Alexandre a conquis, a dompté plusieurs nations, plusieurs peuples. Ce Voyageur a couru par toutes les nations de l’Orient & du Midy. Les François, les Romains, sont des nations fort belliqueuses. Les Cannibales sont des nations farouches & barbares. Les Espagnols ont exterminé presque toute la nation des Indiens. Chaque nation a son caractere particulier.6

While the concept of the nation is linked to the place inhabited, and also in part to political rule, it is more particularly associated with the (grand) peoples which occupy a particular geographical region. The nations that Alexander conquered and dominated are synonymous, for Furetière, with the peoples inhabiting them; in other words, the nation refers primarily to the link between people, rather than the link between people and the geographical area they inhabit. The individuals who make up the nation, as the examples which Furetière uses show, are defined principally by their character. The French, Roman and even so-called Cannibale nations of South America are all defined by the character traits which supposedly predominate in each. For Léry, in 1580, the Cannibales form a nation, despite the apparent absence of laws, or police, or any recognizable state-apparatus.7 This concept of the nation is interpreted by the Dictionnaire historique de la langue française as follows: Avec un autre sens du latin, nation renvoie à un ensemble d’êtres humains caractérisés par une communauté d’origine, de langue, de culture (1175), en concurrence avec race, gent.8

This grouping together of individuals into one nation still implied a priori their difference from French observers, and made encounter with them particularly valuable, precisely because of this difference, as Chambelle writes: J’ai été porté [par] curiosité de voyager, et pour apprendre, connaître et savoir quelle distinction il y a entre une nation et une autre nation.9

6

Furetière, II, entry Nation, non-paginated. Léry, 1994, p. 310; p. 439. 8 Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, p. 1405. 9 Chambelle, p. 72. 7

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Chambelle not only separates human beings according to their nation, but also assumes that differences already exist between them that, he claims, were important enough to justify his voyage to the East Indies. However, the division of human beings into ordained groups such as races, (and to a lesser extent, that of nations) might make empathy – or sympathy – with the Other extremely difficult. Such divisions could create an insurmountable gap between such groups, attributing total immovability to the diversity which Todorov describes, or even creating or reinforcing hierarchies between human beings. In the period of 16th-century Spanish colonization, Sepulveda, for example, justifies the domination of the ‘barbarous’ peoples of the Americas by their apparent absence of ‘civil’ society, and by natural law mirrored in a series of other dominations like man over woman, or man over nature.10 López de Gómara, backed up by the precedent of the Church Fathers, justifies the colonial reality of servitude and labour by the division of humanity into two groups: those born free from servitude to the devil, and the ‘gentes de pecados’ that he considers Amerindians to be.11 While this does not split people into espèces, such a division might appear equally inexorable and inescapable, when interpreted as divine will. However, the division of humanity into saved and sinners did not necessarily entail the subjection of non-Christians. Léry’s depiction of the Tupinamba as a race perdue instead showed the impossibility of their salvation from a 16th-century Huguenot perspective and thus the fallacy of Spanish colonial justification, as Frank Lestringant writes. 12 So while the Tupinamba are not a different race – Léry ultimately disagrees with the theory of the race de Chem – they are ‘un peuple maudit et délaissé de Dieu’, that is, they are radically cut off from salvation.13 In the 16th century, the gulf separating Europeans and non-Europeans, whether accredited to the absence 10 Juan Ginés de Sepulveda [1490?-1573], Democrates Segundo o De La Justas Causas de la Guerra contra los Indios, bilingual Spanish/Latin version, trans. by Angel Losada (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas; Instituto Francisco de Vitoria, 1951), pp. 21-22. 11 Francisco López de Gómara, [1511-1566?], La Historia General de las Indias (Zaragoza: Pedro Burnez, 1554; repr. in facsimile Lima: Comision Nacional del V centerario del Descubrimiento de América-Encuentro de Dos Mundos, 1993), fol. 97v. 12 Léry, p. 37. 13 Ibid., p. 420.

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of ‘civilization’ or of religion, could already be as wide, in some contexts, as that between different races would later become. Todorov’s second focus is on valeurs, which suggests looking for the origin of difference in observable behaviour rather than in immutable natural or biblical orders. It has been suggested that such a shift of focus gives the récit de voyage a potentially radical status, as previously unknown values could call into question the core values of the traveller’s own culture: A un humaniste du XVIIe siècle désireux de défendre le scepticisme parmi ses contemporains, rien d’aisé comme de retrouver dans sa mémoire ou dans ses livres les plus familiers de sa bibliothèque une foule de textes anciens susceptibles de l’appuyer. Surtout il s’avisait que nulle part il ne trouverait une mine plus riche de documents sur les contradictions de l’intelligence humaine que dans les descriptions des « pays estranges » et les relations de voyages.14

In René Pintard’s view, it is precisely the récit de voyage which provided the raw material for the most radical form of French scepticism in the first part of the 17th century, that of libertinage. Among the libertins, Pintard includes Balthasar de Monconys and Bernier, who themselves wrote travel accounts which form part of this study (although the extent of Bernier’s libertin tendencies has been questioned by Sylvia Murr).15 For Atkinson, such ‘contradictions de

14

Pintard’s enumeration of a series of such 16th- and 17th-century récits de voyage includes those of Mocquet and Pyrard. René Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Geneva; Paris: Slatkine Reprints, 1983), p. 139. 15 Balthasar de Monconys [1611-1665], Journal de Voyage de Monsieur de Monconys, 2 vols (Lyon: Horace Boissat & George Remeus, 1666); François Bernier, Lettre a Monsieur Chapelain. Envoyée de Chiras en Perse le 4 Octobre 1667. Touchant les superstitions, étranges façons de faire, & doctrine des Indous ou Gentils de l’Hindoustan. D’où l’on verra qu’il n’y a opinion si ridicules & si extravagantes dont l’Esprit de l’homme ne soit capable in Bernier, Suite des Memoires du Sieur Bernier sur l’Empire du Grand Mogol (The Hague: Chez Arnout Leers, 1671). Chapelain, the recipient of the letter, was himself a renowned sceptic; On Bernier’s libertinage see Sylvia Murr, ‘Bernier et Gassendi: Filiation déviationniste?’, in Sylvia Murr, ed., Gassendi et l’Europe (1592-1792): Actes du Colloque international de Paris « Gassendi et sa Postérité » (1592-1792) (Sorbonne, 6-10 octobre 1992) (Paris: Vrin, 1997), pp. 71-114, (80, 103-104).

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l’intelligence humaine’ could inspire reflections in the most radical thinkers and were to have an impact long after the 17th century.16 The exposure to new ideas and mœurs certainly had the potential, for some travellers, to result in the questioning of contemporary French beliefs. A polemical author like Léry could compare observed rites with an existing religious practice and ridicule both, as in his comparison of the role of the Caraibes in 16th-century Brazil to that of Catholic priests, or of their Maracas to Parisian relics. 17 In the 17th century in the East, other travellers were still being exposed to new cultures which underscored the relativity of values on occasion in the most banal of ways, as with La Boullaye during his Asian voyage: L’on y mange la chair des chevaux, des asnes, des mulets, & des chameaux, que les Keselbaches trouvent à leur goust, & se mocquoient de moy, m’appellant superstitieux de n’en pas manger, que bien leur face, je suis nay dans un pays où l’on aime les chappons, & ce qui est bon, ils ont autant d’adversion aux grenoüilles, que j’avois à la chair de cheval.18

Pintard writes of Monconys’s (limited) scepticism that such exposure to new beliefs had the potential to force the examination of one’s own culture from a new perspective: De telles recherches, si elles ne mènent pas fatalement au libertinage, risquent néanmoins d’en montrer le chemin.19

Nevertheless, it will become clear in the following chapters that the missionaries, mariners, or even the curieux whose texts constitute the present corpus, may not themselves appear to have been at serious risk of questioning their own cultural standards. The interrogation of 16

See Atkinson, Les Relations de voyages du XVIIe siècle et l’évolution des idées, passim. 17 ‘Si nous autres passans parmi leurs maisons et longues loges, voiyons quelques bonnes viandes presentées à ces Maracas: si nous les prenions et mangions (comme nous avons souvent fait) nos Ameriquains estimans que cela nous causeroit quelque malheur, n’en estoyent pas moins offensez que sont les supersticieux et successeurs des prestres de Baal [=Catholic priests], de voir prendre les offrandes qu’on porte à leurs marmosets, desquelles cependant au deshonneur de Dieu, ils se nourrissent grassement et oysivement avec leurs putains et bastards.’ Léry, pp. 407-408. 18 La Boullaye, pp. 98-99. 19 Pintard, p. 407.

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oneself on the relativity of human values was not necessarily the consequence of exposure to new customs or habits, which often simply led to a variety of negative responses, among them horror, ridicule and other forms of incomprehension. While Todorov’s analysis is a useful summary of two apprehensions of diversity, the present corpus of texts demands additional precision, especially in the light of debates centred, for example, on the ‘incommensurability’ of cultures, or on the feasibility of using ‘language games’ in translating between cultures.20 Firstly, the value of representations of encounter in themselves, having as their raison d’être the assumption of initial difference between observer and observed, will be called into question. Secondly, the significant role of existing knowledge in the attempt to name or to understand new phenomena will be examined. This chapter will particularly analyze the degree to which the mechanism of comprehension could falsify the depiction of other peoples, through the study of the instances of encounter described by narrators. It will thus seek to demonstrate how the representations to be discussed in the following chapters could arise, could function, and be refracted through texts as the image of encounter with the inhabitants of the East, for the 17th-century public.

Acculturation and Representation Long before the textual transcription of encounter, the observations of a traveller were determined by cultural background: trained by European culture to observe, to select among the myriad phenomena encountered in the presence of other cultures, and to operate a process of sifting, in order to make sense of this variety. From the perspective of modern theories of cultural relativism, this must appear immediately problematic, contaminating observations with European preoccupations and what appears significant in European eyes.

20 See Jay M. Smith, ‘No More Language Games: Words, Beliefs, and the Political Culture of Early Modern France’, American Historical Review, 102, no. 5, (1997), 1413-1440.

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Of course, encounter was observed on the individual level in the first instance, and subjective differences of psychology, temperament and personal history could certainly bear on this ‘selection’ of traits, making some images or behaviours more noticeable to one individual than to another. Individual travellers might also differ noticeably in the amount of time spent in the presence of different populations. While some spent extremely short periods in the regions which they wrote about, Rhodes, on the other hand, was to spend decades in Asia, principally in Tonkin, modern-day Vietnam, and Macao, while Bernier spent eight years in India, and Pyrard five years in the Maldives. Those travellers who spent years living amongst eastern peoples should, at the very least, have more detailed observed data with which to interpret phenomena than those who spent shorter lengths of time among them. Although a missionary like Rhodes might declare he was less interested in observing peoples than converting them to Christianity, the masses of data relative to the Maldives collected by Pyrard indisputably contrast with the rather vague assumptions of his own shorter stays in Madagascar or Brazil. 21 Encounters differ depending on factors like their duration or the level of contact with peoples, and greater familiarity might permit an extracultural observer to obtain more data. For those travellers who spent relatively short periods among oriental societies, one would naturally expect that fully grasping all the psychological and cultural connotations of visual and linguistic phenomena would be impossible. Yet even in the case of the most carefully neutral observer, simple observation of a single cultural artefact – a piece of clothing, for example – might be heavily tainted by cultural origin. For Benjamin Whorf, such cultural phenomena could never mean exactly the same thing to members of one culture as they do to another: [A person’s] thinking itself is in a language – in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or

21

Rhodes, Divers Voyages et Missions, 1ère partie, p. 2.

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neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.22

It will be suggested in the following sections of this chapter that even ostensibly simple, ‘objective’ items (such as those of dress) are consistently misrepresented in their totality of meaning by outsiders, precisely because of the links between language and culture. Such phenomena are decontextualized from the ‘pattern-system’ of the observed culture, and with this, they are transformed, into the ‘forms and categories’ of the observer. Potentially, French travellers would have had what they might notice, or neglect to observe, already determined, or ‘culturally ordained’, even before the encounter became text. So how much could travellers who had spent considerable periods among the peoples of which they wrote actually immerse themselves in eastern cultures? Without relinquishing their own belief systems and modes of comprehension, could they, as Feyerabend suggests, instead ‘learn a culture from scratch’, and somehow learn exactly the same concepts of the phenomena of another culture as a ‘native’, inhabiting, as Whorf might put it, two ‘houses of consciousness’ at once?23 Many travellers – especially missionaries – understood the importance of language towards grasping foreign concepts or transmitting a religious message, and might be aware of the complexity or necessity of the translation of religious or cultural phenomena. It was clearly this that led the vicaire apostolique of Siam, Louis Laneau, to write a dialogue which attempted to convey the doctrine of Christianity, not just in Siamese, but, as has been written, ‘la langue religieuse du bouddhisme’. 24 Nonetheless, the attempts of travellers to make religious or cultural phenomena comprehensible, even in the case of those most in a position to learn a culture ‘from scratch’, appear strikingly inadequate. Bernier, for example, attempts to interrogate Indian pandits on the exact meaning of three Hindu deities, ‘trois estres tres-parfaits’: 22

Benjamin L. Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. by John B. Carroll, 21st edn (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 252. 23 Paul Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason (London: Verso, 1987), p. 266. 24 Pierre-Yves Fux, in Louis Laneau [1637-1696], Rencontre avec un sage bouddhiste, intro. and notes by Pierre-Yves Fux (Geneva: Ad Solem-Cerf, 1998), p. 6.

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Pour moy j’ay fait assez discourir les Pendets sur cette matiere, mais ils s’expliquent si pauvrement que je n’ay jamais pû comprendre leur sentiment; j’en ay mesme veu quelques-uns qui disent que ce sont trois veritables Creatures tres-parfaites qu’ils appellent Deütas, sans pourtant bien expliquer ce qu’ils entendent par ce mot de Deüta; […] Que c’estoit l’ame de certains grands Hommes, comme nous pourrions dire des heros qui avoit passé dans ces corps, & que ces Heros estoient ainsi devenus Deütas, ou pour parler comme nos anciens Idolâtres, qui estoient devenus une espece de Divinitez puissantes & considerables, des Numina, des Genii, des Demones, ou si vous voulez des Esprits ou des Fées, car je ne voy point que ce mot de Deüta puisse signifier autre chose.25

Bernier’s admission that he cannot find any adequate, totally accurate meaning for the term Deüta justifies the long lists of possible terms of translation that precede. The inadequacy of his explanation is perhaps not as much due to the insufficiency of these pandits, than to the impossibility of translation into terms familiar to a European, although the text gives the reader the impression that it is the former who are at fault. No single linguistic term in French could permit Bernier to translate what is signified, and thus a fundamental linguistic impasse arises. To resolve this, he assembles a variety of images from Classical mythology, from contact with Near Eastern heritage, and even from what one could call European folklore. These images are intended to translate meaning, but instead only provide a poor approximation which falsifies the fundamental nature of the term, and this in the case of an observer with years of residence in India and possessing excellent linguistic skills. Similarly, of the ‘Arabes du Desert’, La Boullaye writes: Les jeunes filles sont tres-agreables, elles chantent sans cesse, leur chant n’est pas triste comme celuy des Turques, ou Persanes, mais il est bien plus estrange, elles poussent leur haleine tant qu’elles peuvent, puis remuent la langue fort menu, prononçans distinctement la ra, lala ra, il est impossible de satisfaire le Lecteur sur cette matiere.26

Here, an attempt to transcribe a description begins by an approximation with the songs of the Turks or Persians, but these prove inexact. The tristesse of the Arab songs appears to derive from their tone – surely the most ethnocentric of judgements – and the listener 25 26

Bernier, I, pp. 172-73; p. 178. La Boullaye, p. 301.

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then elaborates by simply surmising that such songs are more étranges than those of other peoples of whom he also had an imperfect understanding. La Boullaye follows this with an attempt to describe the physical movement which such songs entail, but is forced to acknowledge that the transcription ‘la ra, lala ra’ is inadequate and would not satisfy the reader. Unlike Bernier’s pandits, La Boullaye’s ‘il est impossible’ is a tacit admission that the impossibility of translation is due not to the fault of the Oriental, but to cultural difference and the limitations of language itself. For these travellers, as for many others, the even limited ‘decoding’ of a cultural system, or a ‘kind of inter-cultural dialogue’, seem remarkably absent.27 Yet perhaps an equally serious obstacle to adequate representation lies in the very act of creation of the text itself. Even before embarking on the diverse strategies of representing encounter which the rest of this chapter will analyze, the travel narrative was already founded on the assumption of at least some level of difference. As a description written for the members of a collectivity of which the narrator claims to be a member, deriving its interest from the ‘distinction il y a entre une nation et une autre nation’ which Chambelle set out to discover, whatever is written about in the genre is assumed from the start to be ‘foreign’, alien, other, as an object of description. The numerous other strategies highlighting the originality or novelty of its content further accentuate this tendency. Even if a French traveller had been able to observe an eastern culture through the eyes of one of its members, what had been seen would still have to be made comprehensible to the reader. Nevertheless, as the following sections will illustrate, the process of making phenomena understood assumed numerous shared cultural referents which would themselves have been meaningless in the cultures being described. So, while a combination of a certain subjectivity and longstanding observation might have the potential to result in superior understanding of the place of phenomena in a foreign culture, the travel narrative would still remain an enumeration of perceived data written for – and often translated for – the culture to which the author belongs. In the delivery of a text to a public through writing, editing and publishing, textual or literary requirements further refined 27

Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, p. 393.

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observation according to culturally-dictated requirements. Even when language was not, for a learned individual traveller, the near-impenetrable barrier that Sapir and Whorf depict, representing encounter still entailed this further act of re-translation. Yet representation was also inextricably linked to, and complicated by, the 17th-century conception of knowledge, of which curiosité was an essential element.

La Curiosité The representation of encounter in the 17th-century récit de voyage was further conditioned by criteria of what constituted the valuable knowledge to be obtained in the East. Voyagers repeatedly claimed to have been driven by la curiosité, the desire to see and learn of ‘les choses nouvelles, secrettes, rares & curieuses.’28 The potential impact of such a claim on the kind of information constituting the representation of other societies may be illustrated by Furetière’s definition of the curieux: Se dit en bonne part de celui qui a désir d’apprendre, de voir les bonnes choses, les merveilles de l’art et de la nature. C’est un curieux qui a voyagé par toute l’Europe, un curieux qui a feuilleté tous les bons livres, tous les livres rares.29

While the quest of the curieux was for learning, it was also inherent in the nature of this search that it would tend towards what was exceptional, rare, or even hidden. The voyage formed a part of the mission of the curieux, and travel was a means to learn, to see bonnes choses and merveilles. The voyage livresque of the curieux would also appear to particularly aim towards difference, through the reading of rare books which no doubt included travel narratives. Furetière further defines a curieux as follows: Se dit aussi de celuy qui a ramassé les choses les plus rares, les plus belles & les plus extraordinaires qu’il a pû trouver, tant dans les arts que dans la nature. C’est un curieux de Livres, de médailles, d’estampes, de tableaux, de fleurs, de coquilles, d’antiquitez, de choses naturelles.30 28

Furetière, I, entry Curiosité, non-paginated. Furetière, I, entry Curieux, non-paginated. 30 Ibid. 29

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Here curiosité is associated with the collection of manifestations of difference: in this case of temporal or natural peculiarities. Clearly, a travel narrative which was either written by or intended for curieux would place significant importance on phenomena which were considered unusual or of aesthetic value, among them the merveilles which Furetière defines as: [Une] chose rare, extraordinaire, surprenante, qu’on ne peut gueres voir ni comprendre. Toutes les œuvres de Dieu & de la nature sont des merveilles inconcevables.31

As such, the rareté of phenomena might derive precisely from the fact that they were incomprehensible to French observers. When such phenomena included non-European societies, as was the case in the travel narrative, it is clear that representation was not simply a question of translating meaning, but might instead constitute an attempt to convey to the readership the extraordinary nature of something, or even people. When a voyage was motivated by la curiosité, it was in fact spurred on by the search for difference, such as that undertaken by François Martin de Vitré: Je croy d’ailleurs que personne ne me pourra justement reprendre si je dis qu’il n’y a point de meilleure escholle pour former nostre vie, que de voir incessamment la diversité de plusieurs autres vies, & apprendre dans la variété des meurs & des coustumes des nations estrangeres, principalement de celles, qui sont les plus esloignées de ceste partie du monde en laquelle nous habitons, le moyen de nous inciter à la vertu et de nous retirer du vice.32

Diversity and variety in manners and customs are themselves the end of the voyage, as well as supposedly being a means to the traveller’s moral betterment. This diversity determines the observation of foreign nations, which becomes a search for what is furthest away from France and French custom, in geographical and cultural terms. As with the objects displayed in the cabinets, customs could be taken from their cultural context, and laid out in the travel narrative before the eyes of the reader, with difference as their only criterion. Nearly a century later, La Loubère, embarking as a member of a royal exped31 32

Furetière, III, entry Merveille, non-paginated. Martin de Vitré, 1604, p. 2.

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ition to Siam, could similarly base the importance of his observations on ‘tout ce qui m’a paru de plus singulier.’33 In Pyrard’s text, the rareté of the adventures which the title promised are followed by claims of an original quest for learning which, along with that for material profit, supposedly inspired his voyage. However, after ten years among diverse peoples, it is ultimately what was most rare among his observations which is filtered to the text as the knowledge worth being shared with his compatriots: Non moins desireux de voir & apprendre que d’acquerir des biens, je m’embarquay dans le Corbin […]. Ayant demeuré par l’espace de dix ans entre plusieurs sortes de peuples, et cogneu par mon long sejour, leurs mœurs, loix et façons de faire, […] j’ay pensé estre obligé de mettre par escrit ce que j’ay observé de rare en une si longue peregrination, pour en faire part à ma patrie.34

In this way, whatever knowledge is to be gained must ultimately be doomed to be restricted in large part to what is considered by one culture as most unfamiliar, and must surely invite caution on affirmations of the ‘quasi-scientific status’ of early modern travel writing. 35 The kind of knowledge of which la curiosité was the emblem was instead bound to create a search for the unfamiliar, accentuating the narrative assumption of difference in the récit de voyage.

Categorization In the travel narrative, the account of the narrator’s geographical advance is regularly interrupted or prolonged by the textual division of observed societies into a variety of aspects or categories. Subdivisions, chapters and sections divide observations of an unfamiliar culture into a format recognizable to the reader. Texts are divided into chapters such as Pyrard’s De la religion des habitans des Maldives or Distinction du peuple, de la Noblesse, des grands offices 33

Epistre to the Marquis de Torcy: ‘J’ai observe en ce Païs-là, le plus exactement qu’il m’a été possible, tout ce qui m’a paru de plus singulier.’ La Loubère, I, Epistre, non-paginated. 34 Pyrard, 1619, I, pp. 3-4. 35 Teltscher, pp. 46-47.

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& dignitez, et leur rang or Bourges’s Des mœurs et des coustumes des Siamois and De la religion de Siam, and these textual divisions correspond to the conceptual divisions imposed by the author onto oriental societies. 36 This procedure of categorization had been long inscribed in the narrative apprehension of encounter by the 17th century. Léry’s chapters Ce qu’on peut appeler religion or Ce qu’on peut appeler loix et police civile thus correspond to categories of Tupinamba society, and also demonstrate the procedure of approximation needed to represent.37 By the caution ‘ce qu’on peut appeler’, the imperfection of representation is unambiguously acknowledged, as well as the inferiority of native religion (from a Huguenot perspective) and of other institutions. Nevertheless, given that there could not be a point-for-point similarity between cultural systems any more than languages (Whorf’s ‘vast pattern-systems’), an approximation is all that such division of behaviour into categories could ever be. For example, in representing religion – a constant in the division of observation into chapters – Léry and his successors approached this concept using the vocabulary of Christianity. The same components that make up Christian rites, such as sacraments or prayer, were actively searched for by European observers so that they could identify a process as being religious. When rites or beliefs which seemed to correspond to these were identified, they nevertheless remained part of a whole, maintaining a relationship with the totality of a culture that the observer could not apprehend. Yet, as Geertz points out, religion is not simply an ‘empirical universal’ which has exactly the same ‘content’ across various cultures.38 Léry categorizes with his subtitle Ce qu’on peut appeler religion, precisely because there were certain elements in Tupinamba religious belief which seemed, to him, to be religious. But others, impossible to reconcile with Christianity, were not, making the representation of Tupinamba religion an approximate system at best. The consequence of categorization in this instance is the representation of the observed system of Amerindian beliefs as being fundamentally incomplete. However, even in the case of a category which was ostensibly less charged than that of religion, French 36

Pyrard, 1619, I, Chapters XI, p. 139, & XV, p. 229; Bourges, 1668, Chapters XII, p. 152, & XIII, p. 164. 37 Léry, Chapters XVI and XVIII. 38 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 39.

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observers were struck by the ways in which other societies, to the East, seemed to blur the boundaries between concepts or orders which seemed clearly distinguishable to them. Gervaise’s attempt to encapsulate the level and nature of Siamese knowledge in his chapter De la Science des Talapoins is a case in point.39 This was undertaken by imposing the late-17th century European concept of science, which consisted, as Furetière defines it, of either knowledge acquired by reading or mental effort, or else by analysis: Science, s.f., Connoissance des choses, acquise par une grande lecture, ou une grande meditation. Science, se dit plus specifiquement d’un art particulier, de l’application qu’on a euë à approfondir la connoissance d’une matiere, de la reduire en regle & en methode pour la perfectionner. La Philosophie comprend toutes les Sciences. On definit la science dans l’Escole, une connoissance certaine & evidente d’une chose par ses causes. Il n’y a que la Geometrie qui soit une veritable science, qui ait des demonstrations. L’Arithmetique est la science des nombres. On appelle les sciences humaines, la connoissance des Langues, de la Grammaire, de la Poësie, de la Rhetorique, & autres choses qu’on apprend dans les Humanitez. La science Heraldique est celle qui traitte du Blason.40

Yet this system of obtaining and structuring knowledge was organized, in France alone, into its own categories which were themselves subject to redefinition, reorganization or debate on where one category of science stopped and another began. Attempting to apprehend Siamese science, that is, the organization of learning, analysis and classification of knowledge, Gervaise himself reveals the problematic nature of this process: C’est sur la foy, & l’authorité de [leurs ‘anciens Docteurs’] qu’ils ont receu un systeme du monde auquel l’imagination seule a donné l’estre, sans le secours du raisonnement, & de l’experience; ils le gardent tel qu’il leur a esté laissé par leurs Ancestres, & quoy que la composition en soit fort bizarre, ils ne gesnent pourtant point leur esprit à chercher la preuve, & la demonstration de ses principes.41

39

Gervaise, p. 204. Furetière, III, entry science, non-paginated. 41 Gervaise, p. 205. 40

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This Siamese system appears imaginary to Gervaise precisely because it seems to lack the criteria of reason, proof and demonstration which was perceived to guarantee science in Europe. In other words, his apprehension of this one, imposed, category of Siamese culture is undertaken using the standards of European knowledge, from which faith and authority were excluded in some contexts, but in which they were considered as a foundation in others. In this, Gervaise was, nevertheless, one of the better-informed sources on Siam. In four years in the country, he appears to have undertaken a detailed study of Buddhism, even translating at least one document from which the account of Siamese science is derived. Nonetheless, this learned traveller considers that imagination is the only conceivable source for the Siamese ‘système du monde’, and that it is ultimately bizarre. In many ways, other than the dismissal of religious systems, the attempt to divide up observations of societies and mould them into European conceptual and textual categories would lead to the conclusion that it was Orientals who were inconsistent, unreasonable or even ridiculous. Such categorization, as with so many narrative procedures in the récit de voyage, carried a great weight of authority as an accepted method of structuring observation. Inevitably, authors, normally very well versed in the tradition of travel literature, reconfigured the categories of societies according to the conventions of this tradition. In short, the apprehension of ‘la diversité humaine’ in the 17th century was already preconditioned to impose some level of categorization, and this was accentuated by its formulation in text. Behaviours which could be assimilated to known categories became variations on French or European standards of behaviour, while those that did not might even be classed as deviant.

The Familiar Reference to the Familiar The reference to familiar phenomena was an inevitable narrative device used by early modern travellers attempting to make the encounter with unfamiliar peoples intelligible to the reader. For Anthony Pagden, such a procedure of substitution in the repres-

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entation of the Americas was the result of the great shock of difference: The process of reducing distance by direct substitution was an enduring feature of most early European efforts to steady the initially vertiginous experience of being in a ‘new’ world.42

From Pagden’s point of view, such a process answers a psychological need in which human beings faced with bewildering difference comprehend this by assimilating this difference to a recognizable Other. It was this that led Christopher Colombus to believe that cynocephali inhabited the Americas, or caused Gaspar de Carvajal to assimilate the female warriors he saw to Amazons.43 However, unlike writers of the early ‘discovery’ texts, 17thcentury French travel writers did have a textual tradition to fall back on. The Orient was not a New World, as La Boullaye, countering an apparently already extant sentiment that the Portuguese had ‘discovered’ the East Indies, makes clear: C’est un abbus de se persuader que les Indes Orientales soient un monde nouveau, descouvert par les Portugais. Il est vray qu’ils y ont trouvé le chemin par mer en tournant le cap de bonne Esperance, mais d’autres l’avoient desja fait devant eux. Herodote au Livre quatriesme, rapporte que Necus Roy d’Egypte envoya des vaisseaux par la mer rouge…44

17th-century French writers on the Orient might thus refer to images from a considerable pool of previous – and very ancient – authors as far back as Herodotus. While Le Blanc also credits the Portuguese with discovering a ‘nouveau chemin’, he specifies that the East of which he writes had always been known by the West – ‘nostre Occident’: 42 Anthony Pagden, ‘Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas’, in New World Encounters, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley; Oxford: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 86-95 (p. 86). 43 Christophe Colomb [1450?-1506], Journal de bord et autres écrits, 1492-1493, trans. by Soledad Estorach & Michel Lequenne (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2002), p. 162; Gaspar de Carvajal [1504-1584], Relación del nuevo descubrimiento del famoso río grande que por el nombre del capitán que le descubrió se llamó el río de Orellana (Caceres: Publicaciones del Departamento de Seminarios de F.E.T. y de las J.O.N.S., 1952), p. 232. 44 La Boullaye, p. 124.

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Les Indes Orientales ont esté connuës de tout temps, depuis les conquestes d’Alexandre & de ses successeurs Rois de Syrie, Asie, Egypte, & par les Romains mesmes: & en ces derniers siècles par le moyen des Mahometans qui trafiquent dans nostre Occident par l’entremise des marchands de Venise, Genes & autres. Mais elles ont esté enfin plus descouvertes & frequentées par les Portugais, depuis le nouveau chemin qu’ils y ont trouvé en tournoiant toute l’Afrique.45

That La Boullaye and Le Blanc refer to written sources either directly (Herodotus) or implicitly (Marco Polo was, of course, a Venetian merchant) in these two extracts should demonstrate the potential weight of the tradition of the Indes orientales. While attempts might be made to describe newly-encountered phenomena in their purely physical contours (often the least ethnocentric of procedures) many of even the most objective of descriptions, to ensure comprehension, refer explicitly to what is familiar to the French reader. This occurs especially in the descriptions of the areas of the Near East with which many hundreds of years of contact had provided a variety of sources to draw on for precedent. However, in other areas of the East with which contact was scarce or nonexistent before the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, assimilation to known phenomena was a very regular ‘steadying’ (in Pagden’s words) process. 46 Yet even in describing visual phenomena like physical appearance or dress, the most objective testimony refers constantly to manifestations assumed to be familiar to an observing culture. For example, Pyrard’s descriptions of the peuples of the Maldives (despite what might seem to be the ideally objective conditions of his stay there) ultimately resort to the cultural understanding of the intended reader: Je trouve que les Maldivois ne ressemblent aucunement aux Cingala, qui sont noirs et assez mal formez. Et ceux-cy sont bien formez et proportionnez, et il y a peu de difference d’avec nous, horsmis la couleur qui est olivastre.47

Clearly, the assertion that one population is ‘assez mal formés’ while another is ‘bien formés’ is based on an ethnocentric aesthetic of 45

Le Blanc, I, p. 60. Pagden, p. 86. 47 Pyrard, 1619, I, 119. 46

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beauty, and the explicit referral to a public, this ‘il y a peu de différence d’avec nous’ assumes a readership without which the precisions in form and in colour on the people of the Maldives would be meaningless. This affiliation, which is the guarantee of a retained cultural link with the traveller who has been absent, elsewhere, for so long, appears in a text written in French, and explicitly addressed to a French readership (as with the vast majority of the texts to which this study relates). More than being a rhetorical device, it highlights the fact that, from the outset, representation, intended for a specific audience, cannot be neutral. This is the case even with Pyrard’s description of dress in the Maldives: Quant à leurs vestemens, voicy comme ils s’habillent. Premierement les hommes attachent autour de leurs parties honteuses une grande bande de toile qui joinct tout autour, de peur qu’allans et venans, ou en faisant quelque ouvrage, ou ne peust les appercevoir descouvertes. Apres ils mettent une petite toile de cotton teinte en bleu ou en rouge, ou autre couleur, qui ne leur va que jusques au genoüil. Dessus ils mettent une grande piece de toile de cotton ou de soye, s’ils sont tant soit peu riches et accommodez, ce qui descend jusques à la cheville des pieds, et ceignent cela d’un beau mouchoir quarré brodé d’or et de soye […]; puis pour plus grand ornement ils adjoustent une petite piece de soye de diverses couleurs, claire comme un crespe ou gase, qui est courte & ne leur va que jusques au milieu des cuisses.48

That the observation of this most simple of visual phenomena is approached from the exterior is emphasized by the repeated use of the pronoun ‘ils’; it is they who are being described for us. The description continues with an enumeration of the materials and arrangement of clothing, with approximation with other materials more familiar to the reader when simple equation would be inexact: ‘claire comme une crespe ou gase’. That observation is intended for French readers and by comparison with French dress might be even more explicit: Quant aux femmes, […] elles mettent une robe de taffetas ou de cotton fort legere […]. Je ne puis mieux comparer cette robe, pour en faire entendre la figure, qu’aux chemises que les femmes portent de deçà.49

48 49

Ibid., pp. 182-183. Ibid., pp. 186-187.

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The deçà refers, of course, to France, and Pyrard’s attempt to make a cultural artefact understood, ‘pour en faire entendre la figure’, is by reference to readers who are themselves French. La Boullaye’s description of Persian footwear also relies on the reference to a public: Leurs souliers sont faits en forme de nos galoches, pointuës par le bout, de chagrin, vert, ou rouge, avec le talon de la hauteur d’un demy pied.50

Such a description depends principally on familiarity with galoches to represent Persian shoes to a readership which is also French, or European, essentially resituating such ostensibly simple items in a different cultural context. In these examples of visual observation, it appears impossible for the narrator to make representation intelligible to a reader without resorting to an assumed common cultural heritage. When more complicated phenomena involving interpretation are involved, the consequences of interpretation by reference to the familiar become even more problematic. Religious Practices The descriptions of societies left by 17th-century travellers inevitably include substantial data on religion, which was regularly depicted through comparison between what were perceived as religious acts or ceremonies, and religious ceremonies or artefacts with which the reader was assumed to be familiar. Yet, how exactly observers could come to the conclusion that a rite or custom was religious in nature depended on perception influenced by the observational criteria supplied by their own religious tradition. Audible chants and/or gestures of submission before a perceived idol, for example, were assimilated to the practices of recognizable Christian or Classical worship by early modern Europeans. In such cases, recognition of religion was, once more, achieved by assimilation of the ‘new’ to the ‘familiar’. Simple observation of religious rites by outsiders could lead to incomplete comprehension of the meanings they held for their practitioners, and this, as Bernier’s attempt to explain the Deütas has demonstrated, was not restricted to Europeans with little linguistic 50

La Boullaye, p. 107.

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knowledge and experience of an unfamiliar culture. Even where a great and detailed amount of data was collected by the narrator, such as in Pyrard’s five years among the people of the Maldives, this remained data which had to be re-presented, essentially deciphered, for a French audience. One is consistently reminded of the narrator’s place as an outsider by reference to European religion, and even apparent paganisme was represented through a vocabulary familiar to Christians, as Pyrard writes of the Ganges: Quant au Gange, les Indiens le tiennent comme saint, et croyent que quand ils s’y sont lavez, ils sont absouz de tous leurs pechez: de sorte que tant les Mahometans que les Gentils en tiennent l’eau fort beniste, et qui lave de toutes offences, comme nous apres la confession. Encores eux, apres s’y estre baignez, se croyent-ils estre du tout sanctifiez, voire saincts. On y vient de fort loing pour s’y laver, comme font les Mahometans au sepulcre de Mahomet à la Mecque.51

Pyrard’s description of the Ganges (as of many other religious rites or artefacts) is achieved by the use of images familiar to his Christian readers, such as the absolution of sin by water, sanctification, sainteté, even the nature of sin itself.52 All of these hold a particular place in European culture and would have conjured up numerous associations for the French reader which would have been absent for those participating in the rite at the Ganges. This coincidence of religious images renders problematic the appearance of this rite in the text, especially given the last sentence in the above citation (from a chapter entitled Du Royaume de Bengale & des remarques d’iceluy). The fact that the above rite was worthy of notice to Pyrard is precisely because of the perceived juncture of Hindu and Christian rites. It is an encounter with a noticeable aspect of a culture that is represented, which invalidates any question of a neutral description. It is also significant that the Hindu rite is made more familiar to the French reader by the introduction of comparison with a Muslim rite: could one conclude that Pyrard assumes his public to be already familiar with Islam?53 51

Pyrard, 1619, I, pp. 357-358. Pyrard writes of the Maldives: ‘C’est ce qu’ils offrent en tous leurs vœus et offrandes, comme nous faisons des chandelles de cire.’ Pyrard, 1619, I, p. 145. 53 Islam is explicitly distinguished from paganism. ‘Les habitans du pais comme tout le reste des Indes professent deux religions, les uns observent celle de Mahomet qu’ilz 52

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The representation of oriental religions through comparison with Christian ceremonies thus risks falsifying their meaning through decontextualization and approximation. Catholic observers like Souchu inaccurately compare Hindu religious communities with those with which they are familiar: Il y a des Convents de Religieux Gentils, & de Religieuses en ce Pays & dans d’autres quartiers des Indes, où l’on reçoit des sujets de toutes les Castes, sans distinction, pourveu qu’ils paroissent avoir l’esprit de la retraite & de la mortification. Ils ont leurs Superieurs, Provinciaux & Generaux.54

The terms religieux and religieuses are used interchangeably to describe Hindu men and women who embrace the typically Christian virtues of mortification and isolation. Supposedly received into religious communities equated with those of Catholicism, their spiritual directors are in turn assimilated to the hierarchy of Catholic missionary organizations: Supérieurs, Provinciaux and Généraux, in a comparison based solely on the order of this hierarchy. In a more ambiguous vein, Bernier’s Lettre à Monsieur Chapelain represents the fakirs of India (after a description of sati and among what are perceived to be other examples of brutality or extravagances in Hindu practice) by a variety of terms: Passons à d’autres sortes d’extravagances. Entre une infinité & diversité tres-grande de Fakires, ou comme on voudra dire, de pauvres, Derüiches, Religieux, ou Santons Gentils des Indes; il y en a grand nombre qui sont comme une espece de Convens, où il y a des Superieurs, où ils font une sorte de vœu de Chasteté, Pauvreté & Obeiassance, & qui menent une vie si etrange que je ne sçay si vous le pourrez croire.55

This description of the role of fakirs in Indian society vacillates uneasily between a series of comparisons with topoi including those of Christianity and Islam. Clearly, the assimilation of the groups of fakirs to European religious fraternities is established because of the apparent resemblance of the communal nature, and adoption of ascetic lifestyles in both. However, the comparison is expressly stated as inaccurate by Bernier himself through terms of mitigation such as ont receue depuis trante ans; les autres perseverent au paganisme.’ See Martin de Vitré, p. 47. 54 Souchu, p. 358. 55 Bernier, Suite, I, pp. 149-150.

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‘comme une espèce de’, or ‘une sorte de’. As the full title of Bernier’s letter to Chapelain, D’où l’on verra qu’il n’y a Opinion si ridicule & si extravagante dont l’Esprit de l’homme ne soit capable, makes clear, the fakirs are described in the context of expressing the perceived strangeness of Hindu religious life, and by extension, to reflect on the practitioners of other religions. However, the strategy of criticizing a practice in one society to reflect on the value of another elsewhere is itself achieved at the expense of accurate representation. To make such parallels understood, both sets of cultural traits have to be made recognizably similar, and therefore both have to be transformed. Such assimilation to the customs of other cultures potentially reveals more about the subjective or cultural background of the observer than about the culture which is observed. The process distorts the place of a practice within a society so that its meanings take on the meanings the Christian observer attributes to it. The links that any such practice maintains within the totality of a society will be broken, associated customs will be disregarded, and its significance to the practitioner misrepresented. At least one 17th-century French voyager, La Loubère, was able to identify this tendency among his contemporaries, and also in passing, to hint on its usefulness: Les Missionnaires ont comparé les Sancrats à nos Evêques, & les simples supérieurs à nos Curez, & ils ont du penchant à croire que ce Païs-là a eu autrefois des Evêques Chrêtiens, auxquels les Sancrats ont succédé. Il n’y a à la vérité que les Sancrats, qui puissent faire des Talapoins, comme il n’y a que les Evêques, qui puissent faire des Prêtres. Mais d’ailleurs les Sancrats n’ont aucune juridiction ny aucune autorité, ny sur le Peuple, ny sur les Talapoins qui ne sont pas de leur Convent.56

La Loubère was aware of the approximation involved in the comparison between the Sancrats and Catholic bishops, which appears to stem from the authority both held to confer religious orders, with a difference in the limitation of temporal authority, of which the Sancrats had considerably less than did bishops. The recourse to analogy in representing cultural encounter has, nevertheless, not been universally dismissed, and Feyerabend has argued for its validity as a means towards making foreign concepts understood, simultaneously changing the language in which a new concept is received. Feyerabend uses the example of the anthropol56

La Loubère, I, pp. 436-437.

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ogist Evans-Pritchard’s translation of the Azande term mbismo as soul, which is cautioned by the precision that ‘it is not soul in our sense, implying life and consciousness, but a collection of public or ‘objective’ events.’57 For Feyerabend, such an explanation is helpful as an analogy which furthers our understanding of ‘what the Azande had in mind’, ‘smoothing the transition from the original to the new sense’.58 Certain 17th-century authors, like Choisy, in being conscious of some differences in translation, acknowledging analogy, and attempting to remedy the approximation by a caution, do make tenuous steps in this direction: Il est vrai que par le mot Siamois ni-rupan, que nous traduisons anéantissement, ils entendent seulement un état permanent, où ils seront comme endormis sans rien souffrir; & c’est en quoi ils mettent leur bonheur éternel.59

While this extract was derived indirectly from Laneau’s years spent observing Siamese religion, it does at least demonstrate an awareness of the inadequacy of French to express this Buddhist concept. In fact, this Buddhist anéantissement recurs in the corpus of texts describing Siamese religion, as a term which authors felt the need to qualify, and even attempt to change the meaning of, as Gervaise, in his definition, writes: Les Docteurs Siamois expriment l’état de leurs Dieux dans le Nyreupan, par ces termes, Prâ châou câai Nyreupan dapsoun pâ-leou, qui signifient Dieu le Seigneur est entré dans le Nyreupan, & est anneanty; ils donnent un sens mystique à ces paroles, & ils disent que par ce mot dapsoun: on ne doit pas entendre un anneantissement physique, & total de l’Estre, mais seulement une exemption de toutes les imperfections ausquelles ils estoient sujets avant que d’estre divinitez, ou bien qu’ils sont anneantis par rapport aux hommes & aux autres creatures, puis qu’ils sont à leur égard comme s’ils n’estoient plus, mais que pour eux ils subsistent éternellement abîmez dans la contemplation, & dans l’amour d’eux-mêmes goutans des plaisirs infinis qui ne se peuvent imaginer que par ceux qui les ressentent.60

57

Feyerabend, p. 267. Ibid, pp. 267-268. 59 Choisy, 1687, p. 346. 60 Gervaise, p. 161. 58

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Here, as with Evans-Pritchard’s modification of the English word soul, Gervaise would appear to conform to Feyerabend’s theory of the modification of the translating language by attempting to change the meaning of anéantissement.61 Nevertheless, the reliance on terms which have themselves a different meaning in both cultures, like Dieux, mysticisme, or divinités, to mention the most obvious, demonstrates the limited nature of this procedure. In addition, those analogies which do appear to most resemble an attempt to introduce a new concept are accompanied by many other descriptions which make flagrant use of heavily charged religious imagery: Ils admettent deux sortes d’Anges, les uns sont des purs Esprits, & sans meslange d’aucune matiere, les autres sont corporels, & ont entre eux diversité de sexe…62

In fact, the analogies employed, rather than bringing the observer closer to understanding, have so often recourse to other untranslated, (and in the case of Siamese culture, unrelated), phenomena such as anges, esprits, matière, that any possible usefulness that could be derived from them is very debatable. Observers elsewhere even supposed, in the inability to identify any religious practice, or create any ‘analogies’, the actual lack of any religion, as in Cauche’s description of Madagascar: [Il n’y a] aucun temple, ny mosquée en toute l’isle, ils ne connoissent point Dieu, sinon qu’ils le craignent sans l’adorer, ny le prier; disant que le Diable, leur envoie des maladies, mais que Dieu les tuë. Ils croient pourtant l’immortalité des ames, et racontent que le Ciel est faict pour les recevoir indifferement, apres qu’elles auront quitté leurs corps.63

A means of apprehension which only considers recognizable cultural phenomena as evidence of culture, leads to the assumption that Malagasy religion is an incomplete system, lacking places of worship, evidence of prayer, or any moral distinction between good and evil. Only the beliefs which the traveller recognizes as religious enter into the account, and in the case of Madagascar, it was ultimately to be used to justify colonization. That texts such as those of Cauche or 61

Feyerabend, p. 267. Gervaise, p. 163. 63 Cauche, p. 5. 62

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Flacourt could promote colonization, facilitated by their incomplete portrayal of Malagasy culture, is perhaps as much due to the inability to ‘read’ culture as it is due to the use to which this inability was put. It was also the inability to read, this time in a more literal sense, which is behind Bernier’s description of the Hindu ‘Livres des Gentils’: J’avois compilé cent choses touchant les gentils que j’ay trouvées dans les Livres de ces Messieurs, & qui m’auroient bien donné de la peine à ranger comme ils ont fait. Ainsi je me contenteray de vous dire quelque chose en general de leurs estudes & sciences, non pas en bel ordre comme vous pourriez peut-estre esperer, mais de la façon que je l’ay appris, & apparement comme il est dans leurs Livres, je veux dire, par morceaux & sans suite.64

Having spent eight years in India, been court physician to the Mughal emperor, and having extensively studied much of the language and science of those Indian peoples he encountered, Bernier cannot be accused of superficial analysis. He attempted to make intelligible to the 17th-century French reader much of the Hindu religious tradition – although not without a sentiment of superiority regarding what seemed to him to be the most extreme tales.65 However, it is precisely in the attempt to make this heritage intelligible that he falters in the above extract. For this ‘bel ordre’ that the reader might have hoped for is a French system of narration, a way of structuring data which would make interpretation possible. Bernier finds such a reordering impossible, and resorts to declaring that the order will remain as he has learnt it, for this is the only way he can hope to communicate the knowledge he has acquired. The grid of narration employed by these ‘savants Gentils’ to select between events and impose order appears fundamentally at odds with that employed by French scholars. The result is a narrative system that appears incoherent to the outside observer, who in turn misinterprets its content for his readers. Classical Imagery and Language Further misrepresentation resulted from the frequent attempt to make eastern phenomena intelligible to Europeans by comparing 64 65

Bernier, Suite, I, p. 180. ‘Contes de ma mere l’Oye’. Bernier, Suite, I, p. 176.

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these phenomena with familiar images from Classical culture or mythology. Such imagery introduces implied – and problematic – links, as in Jean Mocquet’s description of Hindu temples: Les filles qui servent ces Pagodes comme les Vierges vestales y demeurent depuis l’aage de dix ans jusqu’à 20. & dansent toutes les nuicts...66

However, except for the fact that they were female, and attended temples, the female servants of Hindu temples were clearly in no way similar to the vestal virgins. Similarly, Bernier observed and was appalled by the rite of sati, evoking a Classical analogy: J’eus bien de la peine à retenir ma colere, mais il se falut contenter de detester cette horrible Religion, & d’en dire en moy-même ce que le Poëte disoit autrefois d’une semblable, à l’occasion d’Ifigenie, que son propre pere Agamemnon sacrifia à Diane pour l’interest des Grecs, dont il estoit un des principaux Chefs.67

The assimilation of this rite to the sacrifice of Iphigenia simply because of the circumstances of death on a funeral pyre entailed a considerable decontextualization of both ‘sacrifices’ from a myriad of cultural and historical associations. Nevertheless, while neither Mocquet nor Bernier were unaware of the approximation of these comparisons, they – like many of their contemporaries – repeatedly represented visual phenomena by Classical analogy. Through a similar process, newly-encountered oriental languages were assimilated to Greek and Latin: En toutes les Indes, il y a un langaige fort beau & facile à aprendre qu’ilz nomment malaique est comme le latin en l’Europe.68

That this language might be pleasant to the ear or not is ultimately an ethnocentric judgement based on weak familiarity, and its ‘facilité à apprendre’ due to an apparent structural similarity with a language with which the author of Martin de Vitré’s text was familiar.69 The

66

Mocquet, 1617, p. 291. Bernier, Suite, I, p. 147. 68 Martin de Vitré, p. 52. 69 Given the two-year duration of his voyage, one must assume that Martin de Vitré’s familiarity with Malay was somewhat superficial. 67

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comparison with Latin refers only to the widespread use of Malay, as with Rhodes’s comparison of Latin with maraste: [Un prêtre français] avoit si parfaitement appris les deux Langues du païs, la Canarine, qui est vulgaire, & la Maraste, qui est comme chez nous la Latine, qu’il les parloit mieux que ceux-mesmes du païs.70

The comparison of non-European with Classical languages was a strategy that even Montaigne had used, writing of his Cannibales: Leur langage, au demeurant, c’est un doux langage et qui a le son aggreable, retirant aux terminaisons Grecques.71

The judgement of sonority is as ethnocentric as Martin de Vitré’s ‘beau malais’, and the structural comparison, at best, quite inadequate. But comparison with Classical languages could be even more tenuous; Flacourt’s assumption that the language of Madagascar had ‘quelque rapport avec la langue Grecque’ comes after a description of the population’s possible biblical and historical origins, drawing an implied link which misrepresents the history of its settlement. 72 The problem with the recurrent use of comparisons with Latin or Greek is that indigenous languages could not, themselves, be accurately understood in many cases and voyagers thus turned to conjecture. So while this conjecture might be revelatory of the personal assumptions or the cultural heritage of travellers, the objective value of judgements on sonority or comparisons with Classical languages must surely be minimal. Thus, travellers – even in detailed studies like Bernier’s of Hindu philosophy – repeatedly perceive similarities between eastern beliefs and those of antiquity: Les uns tiennent que tout est composé de petits corps qui sont indivisibles, […] & disent plusieurs choses ensuite qui approchent des opinions de

70

Alexandre de Rhodes, Divers Voyages et Missions, p. 24. Gervaise writes of the ‘langue Baly, que est celle de la Religion Siamoise, comme icy la latine l’est de la Religion Chrestienne.’ p. 166-167. 71 Montaigne, I, XXXI, Des Cannibales, p. 213. On Montaigne and ethnocentrism, see Todorov, Nous et les autres, p. 60. 72 Etienne de Flacourt [1607-1660], Histoire de la Grande Isle de Madagascar (Paris: Alexandre Lesellin, 1658), Avant-propos, non-paginated.

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Democrite & d’Epicure, mais c’est avec tant de confusion & en si mauvais ordre, qu’on ne sçait à quoy se tenir.73

While there appear to Bernier to be certain similarities between the theory of these petits corps and the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus, the divergences between Hindu and Greek learning are conceived of as confusion and ‘mauvais ordre’. References to the Classics are widespread throughout his texts – it has been seen how his attempt to explain the Deütas included the possibility that these could be compared to the mythological heroes who became divinities. In general, these references to antiquity are restricted to comparisons, and are attempts to explain by reference to a known, shared, heritage: Sur le Gange, dans un tres beau & riche pays & dans un tres-bel endroit, est l’Ecole generale, & comme l’Athenes de toute la Gentilité des Indes, où les Brahmens & les Religieux, qui sont ceux qui s’appliquent à l’estude se rendent. Ils n’ont point de Colleges & de Classes ordonnés comme chez nous; cela me semble plus tenir de cette façon d’Ecole des Anciens.74 Ils conviennent tous dans une doctrine semblable à celle des Pythagoriciens au regard de la Metampsicose, & en ce qu’ils ne peuvent ny tuer, ny manger aucun animal.75

However, there is a hint that these practices might also be linked directly to the past, as with Bernier’s consideration of the fakirs as ‘comme quelques restes, ou comme les auteurs de cette ancienne & infame Secte Cynique…’76 Such a hint was a clear distortion of the beliefs or practices of both fakirs and Cynics. Other observers, like Pyrard, describing reincarnation a half-century before Bernier, had already concluded from the apparent similarities that a clear link existed: Ils la tirent de l’ancienne tradition des Brachmanes et Gymnosophistes Indiens instruits en la doctrine de Pythagore, qui a esté le premier autheur de cette Metempsychose.77

73

Bernier, Suite, I, p. 185. Ibid., p. 181. 75 Ibid., p. 167. 76 Ibid., p. 154. 77 Pyrard, I, p. 402. 74

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In fact, the attribution of the belief in reincarnation directly to Pythagoras is extremely frequent in French descriptions of Hinduism. 78 Nonetheless, such recourse to Classical images familiar to European readers in descriptions could only mislead, isolating the significations of rites, beliefs or entire philosophies from the contexts and culture which gave them meaning. As another reference to what was known, such procedures of approximation risked falsifying the origins of the oriental rite, or even concluding that it was a deviant of an earlier – European – version. Conjecture The difficulty of interpreting and re-presenting encounter thus led travellers to reveal as much about their own cultural heritage as about what was observed, by assimilating what was seen to what was known. This was particularly the case with new encounter, as in the meeting of Pyrard’s crew with a Malagasy native: Quelque temps apres vint vers nous un homme d’entr’eux qui n’estoit point venu auparavant, monstrant une boucle de ces chaisnons, avec un morceau de bois taillé en rond: nous entendions par là qu’il demandoit des realles de quarante sols, car sa piece de bois estoit de mesme forme, rondeur et espaisseur, mais on ne luy en voulut point monstrer.79

The group of which Pyrard is a member is unable to understand the Malagasy language, as it is the display of a piece of wood which is used to communicate, and the imperfection of such conjectural understanding is demonstrated by the conclusion ‘Nous entendions par là.’ Whatever the truth of the meaning of this display – and the possibility that it might indeed have meant a request for coins cannot be excluded – it is interpreted according to similarity with European cultural artefacts: currency. Meaning is thus inferred by the standards of an outside, visiting culture, an automatic recourse of the voyager upon first encounter. Sometimes this is less problematic, as Pyrard elaborates: 78

Dellon, 1699, p. 61; Robert Challe [1659-1721], Journal d’un voyage aux Indes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1979), p. 291 & footnote. 79 Pyrard, 1619, I, p. 33.

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Mais un jour entr’autres, il arriva que le pilote du navire Hollandois, qui avait au col son sifflet d’argent dont il se servoit, s’advança parmy ces Insulaires lorsqu’on faisoit marché avec eux. Ils considererent tant ce sifflet & en furent si amoureux, que ne se soucians plus de nos broüilleries et marchandises ils ne voulurent plus donner de leurs bestiaux si on ne leur donnoit ce sifflet.80

That the Malagasy were enamoured of the whistle is clear from their unwillingness to exchange their goods for anything else. In the absence of verbal communication, economic trade could at least demonstrate one’s intention. Conjecture could also be founded on the testimony of previous travellers, for Augustin de Beaulieu, who had read Pyrard’s text, makes considerable provision to ensure such an encounter does not recur during his voyage:81 J’appellay le patron Bervile […], luy s’approchant pour parler à moy, un des Sauvages, qui paroissoit estre le principal d’entr’-eux, jetta sa veuë sur le sifflet d’argent de Bervile, qu’il demandoit de voir avec beaucoup d’importunité; Bervile se vouloit retirer, car depuis 5. ou 6. jours que je pensois venir en cette baye, j’avois adverty ledit Bervile & autres qui avoient des sifflets, de les cacher lors que nous serions en ce lieu.82

One might also postulate that the great amount of care Beaulieu had taken in warning his crew not to display these whistles was as much the result of an oral tradition, or other untraceable circumstances, as it was of reading Pyrard’s account. Nevertheless, advance assumptions still prefigure the encounter of Beaulieu, and his crew, with eastern peoples, an assumption in advance of the voyage, to counter the vertigo of unprepared encounter. However, travellers’ observations were further flawed by their tendency to isolate a particularly striking custom from its overall context, and then infer a link with other, existing, cultures or religious groups. As with the assumption of links with antiquity, this process could lead observers to surmise, for example, that a rite was evidence of adherence to a faith in which an apparently similar rite was known to exist. The presence of circumcision in Madagascar was taken by French observers such as Beaulieu to be evidence of Islam:

80

Ibid. Beaulieu, 1996, p. 20. 82 Beaulieu, 1664, p. 15. 81

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de religion, n’en ay pû remarquer en eux, encore qu’ils soient circoncis, du moins ne festent-ils aucune journée de la semaine: Pour la circoncision à mon advis ils la tiennent des Mahometens, qui traffiquent en cette Isle, & me souviens d’avoir leu dans Osorius, que les premiers Portugais qui y mirent pied à terre, y vinrent sous la conduite d’un Tristan d’Acunha qui y trouva des Sarrazins, et encore pour le present annuellement ceux de Melinde, Mombaze & autres Mahometans habitans le long de la coste d’Éthiopie, viennent en cette Isle du costé du Noroest, où ils ont un trafic inconnu; ce qui me fait inferer que les Sauvages de cette baye peuvent avoir eu depuis long-temps la circoncision, & à présent ont oublié l’instruction.83

However, as Denys Lombard points out, this custom most probably has a different cultural origin and predates contact with Islam.84 The association is arrived at by focus on a rite that is particularly striking to the Christian observer who makes an explicit – and potentially false – conjecture on its origin. The historical development of a society is misrepresented by attributing the creation of its traditions to cultures more familiar to the European. In the case of Robert Challe, whose long digression on Madagascar is based entirely on the testimony of others, the inhabitants’ supposed practice of human sacrifice leads to a curious theory: [Ils ne connaissent] pas même l’humanité, se tuant de sang froid pour rien. Leur plus grand plaisir est l’éfusion du sang […]. L’Abbé de Choisi croit que ces Peuples viennent de quelque Vaisseau Turc, qui se sera perdu au Voyage de la Mecque […]. Bien loin que ces Sacrifices de victimes humaines soient établis dans cet Alcoran, ils y sont détestéz; & je ne me souviens pas que jamais Mahomet, dont j’ai lû la Vie, aussi-bien que son Alcoran, ait sacrifié qu’un mouton […]. Ne pouroit-ce pas être un essein de ces Amalecites, qui après avoir été vaincus par le Peuple d’Israël, furent obligés d’accepter la Circoncision […]?85

Once more, circumcision leads the traveller to postulate Islamic or Judaic origins for the Malagasy, but the additional attribution of human sacrifice finds no equivalent in either scripture or the Koran. Challe’s resolution entails bringing both traits together in the only synthesis possible, assuming that this unseen population must have come from another place in which these traits supposedly existed. 83

Beaulieu, 1664, pp. 20-21. See also Cauche, p. 120. Denys Lombard in Beaulieu, 1996, p. 23. 85 Robert Challe, Journal d’un Voyage fait aux Indes Orientales par une Escadre de six Vaisseaux commandez par M. Du Quesne, 3 vols (Published anonymously Rouen: Jean Batiste Machuel le Jeune, 1721), II, pp. 12-16. 84

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The assumption of the similarity of newly-encountered phenomena with already known cultural phenomena, notably those from European religious or Classical heritage, was thus an extremely frequent procedure in these 17th-century encounters. It could lead travellers to a wide range of conjecture, from that of meanings – in circumstances in which communication was difficult – to the origins of population itself. In all cases, the feasibility of actual representation must be called into question, as indigenous people were misrepresented to degrees which vary from simple misunderstanding to the falsification of an entire history.

Depicting the Other The Symmetry of the Other While the narrative, the récit de voyage or the Histoire/ Description were the most popular structures utilized to represent encounter, certain authors also used a problematic process of isolated comparison of French and non-French cultural traits. The chapter entitled L’Antipathie de la Syrie & de l’Europe in the Jesuit Joseph Besson’s La Syrie Sainte of 1660, begins by expressly placing the inhabitants of Syria at opposite poles to Europeans, and particularly, to the French: Ces peuples sont les antipodes de l’Europe, & nommément de la France, aux habits, au manger, aux coustumes, en la conversation, aux sciences, & aux ceremonies: ainsi ce chapitre sera composé d’antitheses qui rendront la narration agreable, & feront une peinture achevée de cette Province. Il y a, ce me semble, une liaison bien estroite, entre la France & la Syrie, qui en a receu de si puissans secours aux siecles d’or des Croisades; mais d’ailleurs il y a une tres-grande opposition en tous les chefs que nous avons touchez.86

Cultural observations presented in a fashion which is agréable, and aiming towards completeness, form a point for point list of oppositions in table manners, food, coquetterie, dress and so on, and are generally accompanied by a reflection on which trait is superior. In the East, a lack of civilité contrasts with French table manners, the 86

Besson, part 2, p. 250.

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supposed laziness of Muslims is opposed to the European work-ethic, and even clothes, striking for their ‘diverses couleurs’, lead to the conclusion that the East is unchanging and stationary:87 En France il est des modes d’habits qui ont leur cours, & changent avec le temps; icy la mode ne change jamais; & l’Arabe d’aujourd’huy est vestu comme au siecle des Sultans & des Caliphes.88

On the other hand, the traits that reflect positively on the Syrian – such as the modesty which would be shocked by French coquetterie – are precisely those which Besson sees lacking in French society, so that they function as auto-criticism. 89 In total, those which reflect negatively on the Other are more numerous, and lead to the following radical conclusion: De ces coustumes & de celles que j’adjousteray, vous pouvez conclure que ces peuples du Levant ont beaucoup de rapport avec les Barbares. En effet un de nos Missionnaires venu du Canada, passant par la Syrie, remarqua cette convenance en plusieurs choses, entre les Syriens Arabes, & les Sauvages de la nouvelle France; ainsi les peuples qui perdent la foy deviennent semblables aux bestes; le Christianisme fait l’homme plus civil & plus humain.90

The rapport between the peuples du Levant and Canadian Sauvages is established in spite of the lack of historical or cultural links; the only parallel between them is simply that they are not Christians. Both groups are compared by the ethnocentric standard of civilité, which is used to prove that each is inferior and beastlike. Christians within Syria, on the other hand, must be assisted, because they retain their faith, as well as a crucial link with the French monarchy: Enfin le Levant n’est pas plus opposé au Couchant, que les mœurs de ces Nations, à celles de nos Europeans, & nommément de la France; à laquelle 87

‘En France, on observe la civilité & la propreté à la table nommément; & icy on n’est jamais moins civil, ny moins propre qu’en mangeant: les doigts servent de fourchettes, & le creux de la main de cuillier.’ Ibid., p. 255; ‘Icy les Mahometans sont des peuples faineans; ils ont chacun leur mestier, & n’en font point; en Europe on travaille.’ p. 258; ‘Il semble que leur habillement est le plumage d’un perroquet’, p. 251. 88 Ibid., p. 251. 89 ‘Combien de coquets & de coquettes? que les Turcs devroient faire rougir.’ p. 257. 90 Ibid., p. 256.

82

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So, rather than the portrayal of a society, Besson’s chapter represents the most striking elements of that society in the eyes of an observer. As each notable custom of the society that features is compared to the corresponding custom in France, such a list would no doubt differ radically if written by an observer from another non-French culture writing about Syria. Inspired by Besson, Antoine Galland’s Smyrne ancienne et moderne abandons a linear narrative structure in favour of a list of characteristics which are supposed to oppose the Turkish and French peoples. The 166 such aphorismes repeat many of Besson’s concerns, juxtaposing lodging or clothing:92 Les Français veulent avoir leurs habits justes, et particulièrement les pourpoints et les justaucorps, de manière que l’on puisse voir qu’ils ont le corps bien fait; les Turcs aiment à avoir leurs vestes amples et larges, en sorte qu’elles se croisent beaucoup, ne se souciant de paraître des tours ambulantes. Les tailleurs ont moins de fatigue à prendre la mesure de leurs habits.93

The contrast of the coquetterie of the French with their more restrained Turkish sisters inspires the following negative reflection on the former: Plusieurs femmes en Turquie se contentent d’un mari; il y en a en France qui, quoiqu’elles soient mariées, veulent avoir encore des galants.94

In spite of this instance of criticism of French sexual mores, Galland employs an ethnocentric procedure which situates Turkish cultural manifestations in relation to the collectivities – Europe, and in particular, France – to which he and the reader belong:

91

Ibid., p. 268. For the respective merits of hôtelleries versus caravansérails, see Galland, p. 202. 93 Galland, p. 189. 94 Ibid., p. 197. 92

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Vous verrez les mœurs et les façons de faire de cette nation opposées aux nôtres, article par article, et vous serez étonnés comment les hommes peuvent avoir si peu de ressemblance les uns aux autres. Je pourrais les opposer à celles de tous les chrétiens qui sont dans l’Europe, mais j’ai trouvé plus à propos d’en user ainsi, étant plus certain de ce qui se pratique en France que dans les autres pays.95

Furthermore, the explicit aim of the text is to amaze, étonner; in other words, the level of difference to European culture, or the measure of how much Turkish customs stand out in a European context, is what determines the presence of these aphorismes in the text. As such, both texts, which seem to postulate two cultures in a relation of equivalence, by promising comparison, can never escape from their cultural context. In the observation by juxtaposition, Besson or Galland appear at first to assume a third position in the text: a neutral position exterior to both cultures. This is entirely illusory, for the text is founded on the assumption of cultural values shared with readers who recognize similarities with their customs, and are struck by the difference of the Other. In each aphorisme the European values with which those of the Syrian or the Turk contrast (that ‘les Français veulent avoir leurs habits justes…’ for example) are not notable in themselves. It is the fact that another system exists which seems to differ from these that enables the list to be compiled; the texts are thus revelatory of French preoccupations. In addition, the essential meaning of each of the cultural rites or artefacts observed is also falsified, by another process of separation, which removes individual cultural processes from their overall context and relates each with what is understood to be the European equivalent. The arbitrary link which is established only allows recognition for the French culture for which the representation exists, dissolving the integrality of Syrian or Turkish culture. For Claude Lévi-Strauss, such procedures of comparison do not necessarily entail the conclusion that one culture is inferior to another, and may even provide a means to apprehend the value of an other culture: La symétrie qu’on reconnaît entre deux cultures les unit en les opposant. Elles apparaissent tout à la fois semblables et différentes, comme l’image symétrique de nous-mêmes, réfléchies par un miroir, qui nous reste 95

Galland, p. 187.

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In Besson’s case, the opposition between two cultures coincides with the above-mentioned ‘liaison bien estroite’ between France and the Syria it attempted to save in the ‘siecles d’or des Croisades’, binding the two by a spiritual and historical link. However, while his and Galland’s texts certainly focus on what Todorov called the ‘question des valeurs’, the creation of the text itself is still based on the sharing – or the assumption of sharing – of values between author and readership. While they may indeed imply that some of one’s own values are relative, they can only, to use Lévi-Strauss’s words, ‘make familiar’ the traits of the Other by isolating, decontextualizing, and ultimately deforming them by relating them to European criteria. The process of opposition, and ultimately, of recognition of otherness that Lévi-Strauss suggests is in striking contrast with the depiction of the sauvage, born in the 16th-century narratives of the voyages to Brazil of Léry and Staden. 97 Apparently engaging in behaviours that repelled, yet fascinated, European travellers, most notably breaking the taboo of cannibalism, the sauvage is consistently depicted by the absence of the very characteristics – such as clothing, possessions or religion – which were so frequently described in the East. The contrast is notable between travellers’ testimonies containing substantial amounts of observed data relating to the East Indies, and the simple recourse to repeating the absence of characteristics when attempting to describe the indigenous inhabitants of Brazil. The inversion of European habits first imputed to its inhabitants by 16thcentury narratives is often repeated in familiar terms by authors who might elsewhere have furnished original descriptions of the East Indies. Pyrard’s portrait of the Brésiliens, the result of a brief stay, is far from the detailed account of life in the Maldives: 96

Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Luis Fróis [1532-1597], Européens & Japonais, Traité sur les contradictions & différences de mœurs (1585) (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, 1998), preface, pp. 9-11. 97 Hans Staden [1525?-1576?], Nus, féroces & anthropophages (1557) (Paris: A. M. Métailié (Seuil), 1979).

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Ils n’ont ni lin, ni soye; Au surplus tout est commun entr’eux, sans avoir aucunes terres patrimoniales: Ils n’ont aucune forme de mariage, mais toute licence de paillardise y est usitée, & sont principalement les femmes outre mesure, addonnees à la luxure. Ils peuvent avoir autant de femmes qu’ils veulent, & se cognoissent indifferément, sans esgard de parenté, & ce publiquement, & sans honte, non plus que si c’estoient bestes brutes. Ce que j’entends de ceux qui vivent dans ce pays là: car ceux qui demeurent pres des Portugais sont plus civilisez.98

This sweeping series of inversions includes the mention of paillardise (which as later chapters will show, was also consistently attributed to Orientals), but pushes cultural difference beyond human limits into the near-equivalence with animals. For Dellon, writing three-quarters of a century later, the line between human and animal is similarly blurred: Les Bresiliens originaires idolâtrent encore […], ils sont superstitieux, ils n’ont point de temples ny de feste particulieres, […] vont nuds […]. Ils n’enterrent point leurs morts, & leur coûtume est de les dévorer, souvent même avant qu’ils soient expirez […]; & il y en a même qui ont épousé des femmes de ce sang barbare, qui pour être blanches & bien faites, ne laissent pas d’avoir toujours quelque chose de sauvage, qui les fait distinguer des autres.99

The natives of Brazil are other, primarily, by the fact that they seem to lack cultural traits such as temples, feasts or burial. Their nakedness, rather than an aspect of their own culture, is considered from this perspective as a lack of an essential feature of civilization. Nonetheless, although Dellon, no more than Pyrard, does not receive the lesson in relativity which Amerindians might provide to others, and is not led to question the form or occurrence of phenomena like temples or feasts, one rite is questioned openly by the Brésilien, that of burial: Lorsque nous les appellons cruels, ils répondent que nous sommes des impies, de laisser manger nos amis & nos parens aux vers, dans le sein de la terre, pendant que nous leur pouvons donner nôtre corps pour sepulture.100

However, given the strength of the taboo of cannibalism, this reflection must surely be intended to reflect negatively on the naturel 98

Pyrard, 1619, II, p. 337. Dellon, 1699, pp. 257-259. 100 Ibid., p. 258. 99

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of this people, rather than question European burial. Instead, ‘quelque chose de sauvage’ characterizes the Brésiliennes, a subjective attribution that taints them irrevocably with the difference of their ‘sang barbare’. Léry’s influence is clearly visible, and there are striking similarities with the portrait of Brazilian society in Montaigne’s Des Cannibales.101 The procedure of inversion here (unlike that of Besson and of Galland) does not place the sauvage at the antipodes of the observer in a relation of near-equivalence. Here, absence places him/her on a scale below a European seemingly untainted by férocité or sauvagerie. Comme estans un mesme peuple… A further problematic process in the transmission of encounter is the assumption by an observer that large, barely encountered groups of populations are essentially similar. This ethnocentric procedure relies on the imperfect understanding of external manifestations of culture (religious rites, mœurs, laws) in one society, and their assimilation to other such imperfectly understood manifestations in another. While variations in the level of contact might make the descriptions of different regions within the same travel narrative contrast notably in the amount of data available, travellers nonetheless continued to see parallels between peoples with whom they had minimal, or even no, actual contact. Pyrard’s description of the inhabitants of the Sundra Islands is a case in point: Les habitants sont semblables en mœurs, façons de vivre, armes & habits avec ceux de Java & Sumatra; car tous ceux de ces quartiers, depuis Malaca, que les Portugais appellent la Sonde, ne different en rien de visage, couleur, habits, langue & façons de faire, comme estans un mesme peuple…102

101

‘Ils n’ont nulle cognoissance du seul et vray Dieu, […] ils ne confessent, ny adorent aucuns dieux celestes ny terrestres: et par consequent n’ayans aucun formulaire, ny lieu deputé pour s’assembler, à fin de faire quelque service ordinaire, ils ne prient par forme de religion, ny en public ny en particulier chose quelle qu’elle soit. Semblablement ignorans la creation du monde, ils ne distinguent point les jours par noms, ny n’ont acception de l’un plus que l’autre […]. Quant à l’escriture, […] ils ne savent ce que c’est.’ Léry, pp. 379-380. 102 Pyrard, 1619, II, p. 178.

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As with the same traveller’s description of bathing in the Ganges, this is the result of, at best, a very short presence among the above peoples, which he explicitly confirms: ‘J’ay esté et sejourné seulement à Ternate: des autres j’en ay passé à la veuë de la pluspart.’103 The brevity of his stay ultimately makes the value of this assertion, attributing common appearance, culture and language to the inhabitants of vast areas of land such as Java or Sumatra, based on a sea-voyage, extremely problematic. Assuming that Pyrard’s passage à la vue also allowed him to view at least some of the features of the inhabitants, one could concede that his description of clothing or appearance could be justified, at least from a Euro-centric perspective. However, given that he also surmises that ‘langues et façons de faire’ resemble one another throughout the whole of the Sundra Islands, purely on the basis of a voyage through these straits, one must assume that his visual testimony alone is not the basis of this information. One is led therefore to turn, for possible sources, to speculation: the interrogation of fellow mariners, even the influence of the author of Pyrard’s voyage, Bergeron, or his own literary influences. Pyrard’s narrative thus gradually loses its coherence as it moves eastward and the previous testimonies of long experience in the Maldives and Goa cede to the account of brief stages in a sea voyage. The narrator’s reliance on personally seen evidence is reduced to fleeting glimpses, facilitating conjecture and the subsequent, and overly swift, attribution of character traits: Je me contente d’en parler en general, pource que ce sont tous mesmes peuples, souz quasi mesme paralele, & climat, avec mesme temperature ou intemperature. […] Les peuples y sont traistres, perfides, coleres, de sorte que pour un rien ils ne font difficulté de tuer.104

Naturally, if this had been the case, and climate, temperature and such parallels were a guarantee of cultural identification, there would not have been any need for Pyrard’s extensive treatment of the Maldives and Goa in the first place. Similarly, the coherence in the descriptions of the religious systems of areas in which the narrator spent most time, disintegrates with his advance, so that in Bali:

103 104

Ibid., p. 178. Ibid.

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Les habitans sont Gentils & Idolatres, mais sans aucune reigle & ceremonie certaine. Car l’un adore une vache l’autre le soleil, une autre une pierre, & chacun adore ce qu’il veut.105

Such creation of a supposed link of similarity between large groups of population is a process which may, as Geneviève Bouchon writes, be a combination of the result of collecting information from other sources, with the wish to aim for totality, une vue d’ensemble, in representation.106 Certainly, reliance on second hand sources is a regular trait of travel literature, and gives rise to blanket assertions such as Challe’s lengthy condemnation of Madagascar – which he never visited.107 In the case of Pyrard, it is in attempting to describe regions on the limits of his travels that he comes to the conclusion that the peoples he has barely (or never?) encountered are all similar. The consequence of this is to once again question and finally lessen the value of actual representation, for whatever the value of the enumeration of data in the Maldives, it was at least accompanied by an awareness of the unique nature of its culture. However, in the furthest geographical reaches of Pyrard’s travels, order is imposed on fleetingly glimpsed peoples by quite simply assuming they are all the same.

Exchange The Economics of Encounter Many of the récits de voyage this book examines are narrated by French travellers acting as part of missionary, commercial, or diplomatic ventures. Those which were maritime voyages entailed differing levels of contact, from individuals trading in the cities and cosmopolitan ports of Asia to the landing of a large expedition among a population with little previous contact with Europeans. Such concrete economic circumstances may colour not only encounter itself, but the image of indigenous peoples transmitted by the travel narrative.

105

Ibid., p. 173. Pyrard, 1998, I, p. 20. 107 Challe, 1721, II, pp. 27-28. 106

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The nature of Augustin de Beaulieu’s contact with the Malagasy population is a case in point, being determined by the conditions of a trade-focused maritime expedition. The French require livestock, which they hope to obtain through exchange with the indigenous people for rassades and further ‘choses de peu de valeur’.108 The collective enterprise, although its members are armed, does not inspire any fear in the natives, according to the somewhat surprised narrator. This bodes well for his purposes: en leur langage & par signes, nous faisoient entendre qu’ils vouloient venir à bord de nos Navires, ce qui me fit esperer quelque chose de bon d’eux, specialement voyant qu’ils n’avoient aucune doute de nous, & qu’ils s’estoient meslez parmy nous, encore qu’ils nous vissent sur nos armes, & en grand nombre.109

Beaulieu succeeds in bringing a small group aboard and in showing them a range of trade goods in which he assumes they will be interested, but this is complicated by the insistence of the natives on chains and whistles, of great value to the French.110 Later, an exchange, un marché, is almost jeopardized by differences in the respective value accorded to objects traded, and Beaulieu must present a chief with a cutlass so that it may continue, assuring him ‘au mieux possible’ of his friendship.111 Acknowledging that this ‘amitié […] se maintenoit par le moyen de la traitte’, Beaulieu reveals the essentially peripheral nature of French presence in Madagascar, and the potential importance of trade, in such encounters, in determining conclusions of character.112 Beaulieu’s knowledge of Malagasy culture is greatly restricted by the limits of his geographical penetration. Nonetheless, despite not having observed either women or the living conditions of the population, he derives conclusions such as the good humeur of the Malagasy, or their lack of brutalité or inhumanité.113 Such conclusions are inseparable from the circumstances of encounter, in which the 108

Beaulieu, 1664, p. 15. Ibid., p. 15. 110 Ibid., p. 16. 111 Ibid., p. 19. 112 Ibid. 113 ‘De leurs femmes non plus que de leurs habitations n’en sçaurois que dire pour ne les avoir veues.’ Ibid., p. 21; on the ‘humeur bien gaye’ of the Malagasy, see p. 20. 109

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native population is introduced to a wide range of European cultural artefacts and customs (ship, jewellery, the Catholic mass) which arrive on their shores, and react to these. Beaulieu’s observations, in turn, are essentially restricted to manifestations of native reaction to these artefacts and rites. Such representation of cultural encounter under the extremely limited circumstances of such an expedition would seem to be most useful as a guide to future trade for Europeans. Other texts must lead one to further question the relationship between such circumstances of encounter and the conclusions travellers drew about indigenous people. One might, for example, ask how Pyrard could be certain that the people of Madagascar were ‘hauts, droicts & dispos, gens d’esprit et bien advisez’ when he did not, any more than Beaulieu, have enough time to surmount the linguistic barrier.114 Such a sweeping generalization would appear, in the absence of language, to have very little first hand information to rely on except for encounter based on economic exchange. Later on during the voyage, in the great port of Cambay, Pyrard describes the population as follows: Ce sont tous gens d’esprit, & qui ne doivent rien à ceux de deçà, ains ont l’esprit beaucoup plus vif d’ordinaire que nous et la main aussi subtile: & ne veulent que voir, ou entendre une fois une chose pour la sçavoir. Gens au reste fins et subtils, mais non trompeurs, ny aisez à tromper.115

Van Linschoten, before Pyrard, had been similarly struck by the ‘ingenieux esprits’ of the ‘subtils Marchands’ inhabiting Cambay, while Feynes writes:116 Il n’est pas à croire combien il fait bon traitter d’affaire avec ces gens-là: car en matiere de commerce ils y procedent avec tant de franchise & d’integrité, qu’ils ne voudroient pas avoir trompé un enfant mesme qui traitteroit avec eux, non plus que si c’estoit le plus habile Marchand qu’on sçauroit trouver.117

In the above cases, substantial conclusions on character result from the consideration of the activity of trading from a European cultural 114

Pyrard, 1619, I, p. 38. Pyrard, 1619, II, p. 263. 116 Van Linschoten, p. 19. 117 Henry de Feynes [1573-1647], Voyage faict par Terre depuis Paris jusques la Chine (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1630), p. 96. 115

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perspective. As Sapir writes, if the expectations of the observer as to how trade is carried out in his/her own culture are combined with the perception of the advantageousness of the result, such assumptions of character are easy to derive. 118 The relationship established with the autochthons is based on economic dialogue – on money and trade – and on the portrayal of a people, which, while once again a generalization, is founded on a commercial vocabulary. The economic interests of the partners of cultural encounter would appear, on the surface, to determine their representation, in an apparent dialogue engaged between Europeans and these inhabitants of early 17thcentury Madagascar or Cambay. Yet, as John Patrick Greene has pointed out in the case of later ‘new’ encounters, the act of exchange was itself relative, and objects that were being traded or exchanged were potentially considered of greatly differing value in the eyes of each set of partners.119 The exchange is not an equal dialogue, and representations derived from such transactions are based on the economic consequences for the European participant alone. Cultural Clash From the first encounter with the East, a wealth of opportunities of interpretation or misinterpretation of cultural symbols and of conjecture thus arose, in which the inability to comprehend indigenous languages or to make oneself understood was a constant. Yet it is precisely this early encounter with peoples (before knowledge of a language, habit or other factors could intervene) that makes the registration of emotion so revelatory of the nature of encounter. Indeed, the authors with whom this study is concerned have left numerous accounts which testify to the generation of considerable confusion, or even conflict, in meetings between indigenous people and French travellers in the Indes. Thévenot has left an example in the reaction of two such travellers to the welcome they receive in India:

118

See Sapir’s distinction between ‘tradesmen’ and ‘bandits’ depending on ‘configuration of behavior’. Edward Sapir, The Psychology of Culture: A Course of Lectures, ed. by Judith T. Irvine (Berlin; NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), p. 105. 119 John Patrick Greene, ‘French Encounters with Material Culture of the South Pacific’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 26:3, Fall 2002, 225-245 (p. 235).

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Ce fut où les sieurs de la Boullaye & Beber envoyez de la Compagnie des Indes, eurent querelle avec des Banians, à qui ils avoient esté recommandez. Lorsqu’ils arriverent à Brampour, ces Banians vinrent au devant d’eux avec des bassins remplis de confitures, & de roupies dans les mains. Ces Messieurs faute de sçavoir la coûtume du païs, qui est d’offrir des presens aux étrangers, pour qui l’on a de l’estime, & pensant qu’on les croyoit pauvres, se mirent en colere, dirent des injures aux Banians, & se mirent en état de les battre.120

The travellers do not unfortunately know the custom of offering gifts to foreigners who are deemed to be particularly worthy of respect, and assume it is a negative reflection on their standing as nobles. From a cultural perspective, the gift is at odds with the aristocratic set of values adhered to by the nobility, and the reaction this inspires testifies to a cultural clash. The indigenous people are welcoming and demonstrate this by a gesture which is interpreted in a completely different manner by the recipients of the hospitality offered. The result is misinterpretation, anger, insults and even potential violence. The expression of emotion with an incomprehensible verbal sign naturally demonstrates a wish to communicate, even in the absence of language. However, in the potentially limitless range of interpretation of this unintelligible other sound, witnesses fall back on their own cultural prefigurations. This often represents cultural clash, as in the following passage in which Mocquet, on a short plantcollecting expedition, has a string of mishaps in the terre ferme of India: ayant demandé à boire au logis d’un de ces gens là, il m’en bailla, mais il s’atendoit que je deusse boire sans toucher des levres au hanap qui est leur coustume, ce que je ne sçavois pas, et beus sans aucune ceremonie à nostre mode, ce que voyant le fils de ce Gentil il se prit à crier à son père […] lequel vint aussi tost & se mit en grand colère […]. Apres cela, nous passasmes devant un pagode ou Temple assez bien basty; et entrant dedans je trouvay un de ces Gentils tout nud qui paroit de fleurs leur Idole qui estoit comme la teste d’un veau, mais comme j’estois encor la dedans, voicy une vieille d’entr’eux qui se met à crier après moy, disant pourquoy j’estois entré la dedans avec mes souliers […]. Au sortir de là nous allasmes passer devant un autre Pagode où il y avoit un Iogue Gentil qui s’encendroit le corps et le visage. Et comme j’y voulois entrer il s’escria fort que je ne le

120

Thévenot, Troisieme Voyage, p. 208.

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fisse pas, en faisant de signes des pieds & des mains. Cet homme estoit si have & desfait que c’estoit chose monstrueuse & horrible à voir.121

In the encounters described here, the narrator registers the verbal reactions to his actions. Placing his lips on the drinking vessel constitutes an infringement of custom, and results in a child emitting a strong verbal protest. Entering a temple while wearing shoes constitutes a second infringement of custom, which once more results in a vigorous verbal reaction. Thirdly, Mocquet’s attempt to enter another temple again induces protest, which, as before, takes an emotional form. To the traveller, the individual verbal components of the yogi’s remonstrance may have been largely incomprehensible (he passed just over seven months in India) and so it is registered in the form of physical gestures.122 While the signs emitted in this alien language cannot be completely identified, their emotional content is well understood by Mocquet. His actions induce a reaction from the native population which constitutes protest against his behaviour, and are expressed in what one assumes was also a reasonably vocal form. The cultural clash of which this is evidence is registered in several encounters of an uncomfortable type. The account of Mocquet’s unfortunate use of a drinking vessel is resolutely addressed to a European audience, as he drinks ‘à notre mode’. Similarly, the indication of emotion in response to phenomena viewed in alien cultures also indicates the failure to apprehend their meaning and is, by implication, also intended for a European audience. Mocquet’s account of the appearance of a yogi relates the effect of his appearance, ‘monstrueuse et horrible à voir’, in just such terms. Bernier, although he passed a much more substantial amount of time in India, displays a similar reaction to the fakirs: Il n’y a Megere d’Enfer si horrible à voir que ces gens-là tout nuds avec leur peau noire, ces grands cheveux, ces fuseaux de bras dans la posture que j’ay dit, & ces longues ongles entortillées. […] Je les considerois passer ainsi tous nuds effrontement au milieu d’une grande Bourgade; J’admirois comme les hommes, les femmes & les filles les regardoient indifferement sans s’émouvoir non plus que quand on voit passer quelques Hermites par nos ruës.123

121

Mocquet, 1617, pp. 290-291. Mocquet resided in Goa from late May 1609 to early January 1610. 123 Bernier, Suite, I, pp. 151-153. 122

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While one can reasonably surmise that the appearance of these fakirs did differ significantly from that of the city dwellers amongst whom they passed, Bernier’s attempt to depict them in text misrepresents their role in Indian society by resorting to typical descriptive strategies. Their analogy with hermits, for example, might illustrate the apparent acceptance either in India or in Europe of one group of ascetics, but as in other instances, it also risks falsifying the role of both. Although registering the appearance (hair, nails and skin), posture (arms held for years in the same position), and nudity of the fakirs, Bernier’s description is also heavily tainted by an emotional reaction seemingly restricted to him alone. While the fakirs appear horribles to him, their compatriots do not, unlike Bernier, seem to consider their presence as brazen, or shameless. The admiration of the indifference and lack of emotion displayed by the population must also be restricted to Bernier alone. The fakirs’ apparent ability, in this physical state, to pass throughout India without inducing any visible manifestation of the astonishment or horror experienced by Bernier must surely testify to the ultimate ethnocentrism of his observation. Lesdits Sauvages n’ont cessé de rire… Despite the frequency of cultural clashes, the signs and emotion which served to represent other cultural interactions were not restricted to hostility or expressions of horror. Laughter might accompany the encounter of French travellers with other peoples, and arise through varying levels of contact, or fulfill different textual requirements. Certainly, observing a rite from the exterior might lead to laughter generated by the traveller’s ridicule, as demonstrated by Tavernier’s account of funeral ceremonies in Baghdad: quand le mary est mort, la femme se décoiffe laissant ses cheveux épars, se va noircir le visage au cul d’un chaudron, apres quoy elle fait des sauts & des gambades plus capables de faire rire les gens que de les faire pleurer.124

This transformation of a funeral rite into a comic spectacle by decontextualizing the gestures of mourning is deliberately accompanied by the appeal to a readership, les gens, with whom Tavernier affirms a cultural link. Chaumont, attending a Comédie in Siam, has 124

Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 211.

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left an equally flagrant example of the generation of ridicule through incomprehension: il y avoit des Siamois, mais je n’entendois point ce qu’ils disoient, leurs postures me paroissoient ridicules & n’approchent point de celles de nos baladins en Europe.125

The same ambassador had, in a similarly unrepentant vein, seemingly caused no less than the King of Siam to laugh at his defiance of court protocol when he attempted to obtain special ceremonial treatment of the letter sent by Louis XIV.126 In other circumstances, far removed from the ceremony of a royal embassy, laughter might appear to arise from some sort of attempt at communication in the absence of language, as in Beaulieu’s expedition: en retournant au navire lesdits Sauvages n’ont cessé de rire & parler leur langage, duquel en avons appris quelques mots.127 ils furent malades du mal de la mer […]: un d’eux ne fut si malade que les autres, qui se mocqua toute la nuit de ses compagnons, & chaque parole que ceux du quart prononçoient, principalement en appellant quelqu’un, il les contrefaisoit s’éclatant de rire: enfin ces Negres sont fort gaillards, et nullement brutaux, & ont quelque chose à mon advis pardessus les autres et comprennent promptement ce qu’on leur veut dire.128

Here at least, it would appear that some limited dialogue is being attempted, with Frenchmen learning certain words of the indigenous language. If the native does not understand the words he is imitating in the second extract, the reason for his amusement, at least, is reasonably clear. Beaulieu’s assertion that the Malagasy understand rapidly what ‘on leur veut dire’ would appear to back up the idea that some level of communication had become possible. Notably, however, the conclusions drawn from this encounter, which was of short duration and of ultimately minimal linguistic exchange, are then extended beyond the immediate – and as been seen, mainly tradebased – encounter to lead to large generalizations. That affirmations 125

Chaumont, p. 78. Ibid., p. 64. 127 Beaulieu, 1664, p. 15. 128 Ibid, p. 16. 126

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about the good humour, or comparative (if unquantifiable) superiority of these over other peoples could be drawn from such limited contact must surely urge caution about the representative value of even goodhumoured situations of encounter. Laughter might even serve to capture and express European ridicule of eastern cultures by those who had resided among them for a considerable time. Bernier, while linguistically fluent, claims to have remained unable to accustom himself to the rhetoric used at the Mughal court and even ‘jusqu’au peuple’: Ce qui m’y a toûjours extremement choqué, c’est une certaine flaterie trop basse & trop fade qui s’y entend ordinairement […]. Je ne sçaurois icy m’empecher de vous faire part de ce petit trait de flaterie, parce que cela vous fera voir jusques où on la pousse. Un Pendet Brahmen ou Docteur Gentil que j’avois fait mettre au service de mon Agah, se voulut mêler en entrant de faire son Panégyrique, & […] concluoit enfin serieusement par celle-cy: Lors que vous mettez le pied dans l’Estrier, Seigneur, & que vous marchez à cheval avec vostre Cavalerie, la Terre tremble sous vos pas, les huit Elefans qui la supportent sur leurs testes ne pouvant soûtenir ce grand effort. Je ne pûs me tenir de rire là dessus, & je tâchay de dire serieusement à mon Agah qui ne pouvoit aussi s’en tenir, qu’il seroit donc fort à propos qu’il ne montât à cheval que fort rarement pour empescher les tremblements de terre.129

By taking the panégyrique on its literal rather than rhetorical level, although he is aware of both registers, and removing it from its cultural context, Bernier is able both to entertain himself and his Agah. This ability to emphathize with the Other must nevertheless be considered alongside his initial claim that he has always been shocked by what he depicts as excessive rhetoric. The reason for Bernier’s digression, and its insertion within the text, is a representation for another, directed unequivocally to the exterior of Mughal society. The attempt to communicate with indigenous people is not restricted to verbal forms, either in initial encounters like those of Beaulieu or Mocquet, or even over years, as in Bernier’s long period of residence in India. The narrator can also display an emotional reaction in response to encounter in which it is assumed that the reader will share in his state of mind, and thus that a common cultural base exists. Nonetheless, while French travellers might have obtained what economic advantage they wished for in response to these attempts at 129

Bernier, Suite, I, pp. 53-55.

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communication, the extension of character judgements beyond the limited circumstances of encounter, or the ridicule generated through misunderstanding, must evidently caution their representative value. While the use of humour can constitute another narrative attempt to further translate the unintelligible encounter, situation or image and render it comprehensible to the reader, it remains one which is, paradoxically, generated by fundamental misunderstanding. * Having examined the notions and conditions of encounter, a conclusion on the value of representation at this stage may seem ultimately rather pessimistic. The transmitted understanding of one culture by members of another, involving so much reliance on cultural preconception and preconfiguration, essentially relies on approximation in order to be understood. The representation of one culture through the literature of another, can at best, so far, be described as a reconfigured approximation, or a procedure which must be incomplete and problematic. Travellers attempt this approximation in a variety of ways, principally by attempting to make what they see resemble that with which they are already familiar. By imposing orders or categories onto societies, behaviours are separated according to European concepts. Resorting to comparisons with objects or customs familiar to the reader, especially from religious or Classical heritage, further misrepresents observed cultures. The consequence might even be the incorrect assumption that a rite or tradition, appearing to be similar to one already familiar to the traveller, has the same origin. Another type of response is to assume that what is seen is an inverted reflection of European behaviour and that the Other is essentially nothing more than the mirror image of the observer. This is also a fundamental alteration of what has been observed, decontextualizing cultural traits so as to form a pattern of values which are the opposite of those of European culture. When, on the other hand, the opposition with French culture seems to result in few identifiable values, the Other is depicted as incomplete and even sauvage or barbare. Alternatively, the depiction itself will be incomplete and, ultimately, an inaccurate representation.

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In the examples of encounter above, the value of French standards is rarely questioned, and then only implicitly, so that the traveller encountering unfamiliar traditions tends to respond with incomprehension or wonder, in the clash of what Whorf termed ‘culturally ordained’ consciousnesses.130 The meeting of cultures is in all cases considered to be valuable, by appearing to furnish information on the unfamiliar, and often to be entertaining, precisely because of the difference of these nations. However, these two functions are essentially irreconcilable, for what made for entertaining reading was the presence of precisely those cultural traits which appeared to differ most from those French observers attributed to themselves. In encounter, the 17th-century traveller was less willing to question French culture than to accentuate the otherness of the Oriental.

130

Whorf, p. 252.

Chapter 2 The Literature of Encounter In the 17th-century récit de voyage, the attempt to represent cultural encounter resulted in the narrative depiction of Orientals as either familiar in their difference, or completely other, as was established in the previous chapter. The cultures of these Orientals, in turn, were organized, instinctively, into textual forms or categories which were familiar, or which even unintentionally mimicked previously known or heard-of phenomena. This implies that the genre had acquired, by the 17th century, a considerable level of authority in cultural representation. If the accounts of voyagers were dismissed as false or exaggerated – and some were – most were, at least in part, considered as the constituents of a corpus of learning which was being continually expanded. The genre of the travel narrative thus became a source of cultural authority, despite the flaws inherent in textual representation. How this was possible, how something seemingly completely new could simultaneously retain authority, was achieved by recourse to a number of literary devices which assured the validity of travel narratives. In this, both precedent and affiliation played a large part, as Edward Said writes of knowledge of the Orient: Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself.1

The analysis of the present corpus of texts must encompass not only the data supplied by previous knowledge, but also the very textual structure chosen to convey that knowledge. The other oriental ‘works’, ‘audiences’ and ‘institutions’ of the French 17th century 1

Said, Orientalism, p. 20.

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certainly helped to determine what constituted this knowledge, and it was also inescapably dependent on the norms and values of the culture shaping it, or those which authors accredited to this culture. Yet the consequences of affiliation with a literary genre, and interaction, to varying degrees, with previous texts rather than with people, were just some of the issues which make the relationship between text and representation potentially so problematic in the 17th-century travel narrative. This chapter proposes to identify the extent to which the influences and motivations, declared or otherwise, which lie behind the depiction of the Orient in the literature of encounter could fundamentally falsify that very representation.

Narrative Convention The most basic form of the travel account was often the journal, which varied in complexity from simple daily notations of observed phenomena to the more self-consciously literary lettres familières which compose Choisy’s Journal.2 Other journaux which were published in this form were those of Challe, Beauvau, Beaulieu and Monconys.3 This journal could in turn be transcribed upon return with the intention of publication, often with the assistance of more experienced writers, as in the case of the text of Chardin’s Journal. However, most voyages were published as récits de voyage, conforming to a narrative form which made them recognizable, as well as introducing – or claiming to introduce – new and interesting elements. Sustaining this tension between dépaysement and déroutement, as Carnoy writes, was the secret of a successful early modern travel narrative, in which ‘le lecteur attend d’être dépaysé, mais non dérouté. Il […] compte s’installer dans un cadre déjà prévu’.4 The récit de voyage would conform to the expectations of a reader who was already familiar with a preordained structure of the text, and the potential influence this might have on representation is immediately obvious.

2

Choisy, 1995, p. 35. Challe is indeed reputed to owe a substantial literary debt to Choisy (Choisy, 1995, p. 21). 4 Carnoy, p. 148. 3

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The events of the voyage would constitute a récit, as Ricoeur conceives it, an imposition of order onto a perceived series of events to create meaning: Avec le récit, l’innovation sémantique consiste dans l’invention d’une intrigue qui […] est une œuvre de synthèse: par la vertu de l’intrigue, des buts, des causes, des hasards sont rassemblés sous l’unité temporelle d’une action totale et complète.5

Recounting the voyage entails just such a synthesis: a process of configuration, of arrangement of these elements of récit to build coherence and unity. One such synthesis is the process of selection of actions and occurrences, ‘facteurs hétérogènes’, so as to develop intrigue.6 The author assembles, synthesizes, from a potentially vast range of data gathered through the voyage; groups of ‘facteurs hétérogènes’ are selected within travel narratives to constitute motives, causes and consequences. A letter from Peiresc to Bergeron, the author of Le Blanc’s text, demonstrates the principles of the synthesis: Que si vous pouviez vous donner assez de patience pour parcourir tout ce fatras, et pour en tirer les extraictz que vous jugerez passables nous verrons par aprez de vous renvoyer vostre homme de par delà, pour essayer si de sa bouche vous pourrez tirer rien de plus qui vous puisse servir à la tissure de ses peregrinations.7

The author’s role is to sort through the voyager’s notes which are conceived of as differing too widely from the standard synthesis to permit publication. The ‘extraictz que vous jugerez passables’ which could be salvaged might have sufficient unity to be somewhat intelligible to a reader, but remain inadequately cohesive. To fully weave these together and create a tissure would necessitate further supplementary interviews with Le Blanc. While the creation of Le Blanc’s text was exceptionally complicated, it is a good illustration of the procedure of selection 5

Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, I, p. 11. Ibid, p. 102. 7 Peiresc, letter to Bergeron in 1629. Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc [1580-1637], Lettres (1602-1637), ed. by Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, vol. 7, in series Documents inédits de l’Histoire de la France, 69 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1888), p. 593. 6

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inherent in all récits de voyage, necessary to make the text conform, consciously or not, to the requirements of a genre.8 Similarly, Pétis de la Croix, in the preface of Thévenot’s posthumous Suite du Voyage de Levant, laments the confusion in which the voyager’s remarques were originally left, ‘dispersées dans ses écrits de côté & d’autre’: Après avoir fait avec assez de travail, tant de differens assemblages, il a falu enfin joindre toutes ces parties differentes, & leur donner quelque liaison, pour en faire un corps.9

Creating the corps must necessarily, as with Le Blanc’s account, have entailed the editor reassembling, choosing and linking the elements of intrigue so as to write the voyage. Even the simplest of travel accounts, those which most reflected the circumstances of their composition, often necessitated adjustment before they were presented to the public. Nevertheless, the synthesis is consistently recognizable, so much so that, according to Thévenot’s original preface, a considerable portion of the public only appreciated accounts which had been composed in a manner exactly similar to those which had previously appeared: Je connois des personnes pour lesquelles il faudroit composer des livres entierement semblables à ceux ausquels ils ont croyance, si on vouloit qu’ils donnassent foy aux nouveaux, & qui veulent faire passer pour mensonge tout ce que ceux-là ne disent pas; & j’en sçay d’autres qui donnent si fort dans la bagatelle, qu’ils ne trouvent de beau que ce qui est à peine croyable…10

Thévenot exposes two problematic consequences of public taste on the creation of the synthesis. The first, that of being worthy of faith, which is seen as something to which the author must aspire, and for which the formula of the voyage must be so rigorously respected that any deviation from it would be treated as falsehood. On the other hand, another type of reader is attracted only by accounts which stretch the limits of credibility (although the subject matter of what 8

For example, the rarity or brevity of the description of the return from the voyage. Rachel Lauthelier, I, p. 28. 9 Thévenot, Suite du Voyage de Levant, Preface, non-paginated. 10 Thévenot, Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant, Preface, non-paginated.

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was ‘à peine croyable’, as later chapters will show, was itself far from arbitrary). As François Moureau writes, the récit de voyage cannot escape from this ‘strict déroulement du protocole viatique’.11 Henry de Feynes, in an attempt to establish some originality in his 1630 text, deliberately contrasts it with what had become the standard discourse of the voyager: Là je ne dis point, ny que les Royaumes que je descris s’appellent autrement qu’on ne les nomme aujourd’huy, ny que les Villes ont des situations toutes contraires à celles où leurs premiers fondateurs les ont basties, ny que la fertilité rend recommendables certaines contrées qui sont d’elle mesmes steriles, ny que les voyageurs peuvent faire cent fois naufrage sans jamais perir; estre dix jours sans manger, & ne mourir pas de faim; & finalement parler, & entendre la langue d’un païs où ils n’ont faict que passer.12

Feynes pokes fun at travellers who attempt to outdo their predecessors by claiming access to superior information, which would be reinforced by their apparent knowledge of languages of which they in fact know little or nothing, and by their praise of the legendary fertility attributed to the East. Other wonders which might at first seem as difficult to believe as those Thévenot wrote of were in fact seen as a necessary component of the genre, as Feynes’s numerical exaggerations prove. So, while the shipwrecks and other adventures which inevitably accompany the voyage were certainly extraordinary hardships, their presence was perceived by contemporaries as so commonplace as to be – in many cases – predictable. The ‘cadre déjà prévu’ of the travel narrative thus had the potential to integrate, to make common, events which were themselves uncommon. Rewriting the notes of voyagers such as Thévenot or Le Blanc was far from rare, and récits de voyage were very regularly written or at least edited by others who, one assumes, were perceived to be of superior literary talent and culture. Those of Pyrard and Mocquet were retranscribed by the same Pierre Bergeron who with some difficulty succeeded in editing those of Le Blanc, and who has all the appearance of a successful travel writer, as Peiresc writes:

11

François Moureau, Le Théâtre des voyages: une scénographie de l’Âge classique (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2005), p. 18. 12 Feynes, Au Lecteur, non-paginated.

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J’ay trouvé icy un fort honneste homme nommé Mr Bergeron qui sera trez aise de prendre la peine à mettre tous voz meilleurs memeoires en bons termes, comme il a desja faict des memoires de voiage du Sr Pyrard et de celuy de Mocquet.13

All three are voyages d’aventure, and the coincidence of themes – especially, in the histoires, as will be demonstrated in Chapter 5 – is striking. Baudelot de Dairval, the writer of a De l’Utilité des Voyages, is credited as co-author of Paul Lucas’s voyages, while Challe, in turn, reproaches Flacourt for having confided the creation of his Histoire to a Le Noir, and names a Des Brosses as the secretary responsible for Chaumont’s Relation.14 Choisy was familiar with various relations, and had read Rhodes and Bourges (the latter on board ship), and Challe had the accounts of both Chaumont and Choisy to hand during his own travels.15 Through the evidence of biographical detail, the criticism of predecessors, or their own admission, the fact that authors were familiar with textual patterns and already existing narratives, or that they adapted existing patterns, is difficult to refute. However, that a large proportion were written by authors familiar with the construction of such a synthesis serves primarily as evidence that a recognizable – and verifiable, in the case of Bergeron – formula exists. While the influence of some precursors appears more obvious thanks to individual literary style, previous reading or even conscious imitation, every author created a récit or synthesis of their (or another traveller’s) encounter with the Orient, which was inseparably related to oriental precedent.

Instruction through the Voyage The vast majority of the récits de voyage which constitute the corpus of this study were printed soon after their composition and there is evidence that those few which were not, were in any case

13

Letter to Vincent Le Blanc in 1619, in Peiresc, Lettres, 7, p. 645. Jacques Popin, ‘Challe contre Choisy’, in Miroirs de textes: récits de voyage et intertextualité, ed. by Linon-Chipon et al. (Nice: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres, Arts et Sciences Humaines de Nice, 1998), 59-72 (p. 60). 15 Choisy, 1687, pp. 231-232; p. 222. On the place of Chaumont and Choisy in Challe see Popin, pp. 60-61. 14

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intended for eventual publication by their authors.16 Even Choisy’s journal, addressed to a friend, l’Abbé Dangeau, and which does not seem to have been originally intended for publication, was still written with the consciousness of a reader in mind, even were the readership only to be Dangeau and Choisy after the latter’s return.17 More often, the text was intended for a wider audience – one which shared the narrator’s cultural heritage. Representation was ultimately intended for the understanding and consumption of this public, conditioning its forms, its images and its references. 18 While the readership of voyages might be composed of pilgrims or indeed, members of religious orders, another section of the public, to whom Daulier-Deslandes dedicates his account of Persia, was perceived to have its own view of what constituted literary perfection: Le discours que j’ay fait, vous expliquera autant qu’il m’a esté possible, ce que les Estampes vous representent; & comme j’ay affaire à d’honnestes gens, j’ay creu qu’ils pardonneroient un style assez libre & point limé, à un Voyageur, qui ne pretend pas recommencer ici de nouvelles fatigues, & qui retourneroit plutost aux Indes que de s’engager à faire un discours poly. 19

The public which Daulier-Deslandes addresses, whether readers or voyageurs de curiosité themselves, conceived of knowledge as founded on the ideals of perfection and agrément.20 The honnête homme, according to Nicolas Faret, was knowledgeable about a wide spectrum of conversational subjects, or sciences: Je l’aime mieux passablement imbu de plusieurs sciences que solidement profond en une seule: puisqu’il est vray que notre vie est trop courte pour

16

Dirk Van der Cruysse writes, for example, of the frequent use of the term ‘ami lecteur’ in Chambelle’s previously unpublished manuscript. Mercenaires français de la VOC, p. 49. 17 Choisy, p. 20; p. 78. 18 See Françoise Weil, ‘La Relation de voyage: Document anthropologique ou texte littéraire?’, Histoires de l'anthropologie: XVIe-XIXe siècles: Colloque la Pratique de l'anthropologie aujourd'hui, 19-21 novembre 1981 Sèvres, ed. by Britta RuppEisenreich (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984), pp. 55-65 (p. 58). 19 Daulier-Deslandes, Epistre, non-paginated. 20 ‘Il n’y a jamais eu de plus honnête Homme dans le monde.’ Thévenot, Troisieme Voyage, p. 338.

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Clearly, the kind of knowledge which was considered to be valuable to such a readership can only have greatly influenced the sort of observations that voyagers either made themselves or transmitted through text, as much as their search for what was curieux. The traveller, as Sophie Linon-Chipon writes, was certainly in the privileged position of being able to convey knowledge to a French readership: Le viateur est à son tour celui qui s’est informé et qui a aussi appris par autrui la connaissance qu’il detient. À ce titre il s’engage à transmettre ce savoir.22

However, this knowledge, supposed to represent peoples and cultures, was instead determined by a set of values – such as honnêteté – which had the effect of substantially misrepresenting them. That the information which the voyager promised to pass on was determined in its form and content by the needs of conversation or the values of the Court could only further heighten the tendency, within cultural encounter, to deformation. The comments of Abraham de Wicquefort, for example, in the preface of Olearius’s Voyage are revealing: Pour ce qui est d’Olearius, il a enrichi cette relation de plusieurs belles remarques, tirées d’Emmanuel Osorio, de Massée, & des principaux voyages des Hollandois, & par ce moyen il a donné exemple au Traducteur de prendre la mesme liberté, d’augmenter le livre de ce qu’il a trouvé de beau dans tous ceux, qui ont le mieux parlé de l’estat des Indes Orientales.23

Supplementary information which the translator vaunts as having ‘enriched’ the book has as such not only been derived from other written sources, in the case of Olearius, but has been added to by the translator himself. The standard which determines its inclusion is that it consists of belles remarques, or is beau. Not only has a potentially 21

Nicolas Faret [1596?-1646], L’Honneste-Homme ou l’Art de plaire à la Court (Paris: T. de Bray, 1630). 22 Linon-Chipon, Gallia Orientalis, p. 201. 23 Abraham de Wicquefort [1598?-1682], in Adam Olearius [1599-1671], Relation du Voyage d’Adam Olearius en Moscovie, Tartarie, et Perse, […] Contenant le Voyage de Jean Albert de Mandelslo aux Indes Orientales. Traduit de l’Allemand par A. de Wicquefort, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Paris: Chez Jean du Puis, 1666), Preface, non-paginated.

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large proportion of the content of the travel narrative been taken directly from others, but this additional information is claimed – with some pride – to have been chosen for its aesthetic value. The means of obtaining knowledge most commonly asserted by travellers was by the exposure to new experience and the meeting of scholars, and the implications of claiming such a strategy are considerable. Voyagers like Le Blanc were depicted as following the precedent of Classical Sages for whom the traveller was the ideal disciple: Les plus Sages de l’antiquité, qui se consideroient les Maistres du monde, & non les simples Bourgeois d’une cité, passaient les plus beaux jours de leur vie à visiter les peuples éloignez, les uns pour se perfectionner dans les veritez de la Morale, les autres dans les maximes de la Politique, & tous pour apprendre à bien vivre. Le plus illustre des Philosophes, n’a point voulu dans ses Escholes d’autres Disciples que des voyageurs. 24

The opportunity for moral perfection, the study of political maxims, or the betterment of the individual, are all worthy motives which resemble those which La Boullaye claims inspired his voyage: Je me suis porté dés ma jeunesse à considerer que deux choses font l’homme, l’ame et le corps, & qu’autant que nous avons de sagesse, d’intelligence & de vertu, à l’esgard de l’ame, ou de beauté, de disposition, et de santé à l’esgard du corps, d’autant sommes nous preferables aux autres hommes, qui n’en ayans que la figure, ont peu d’advantage sur les animaux qui sont parfaits en leurs natures: Cette reflexion eut telle force sur mon esprit, qu’elle m’obligea de quitter ma patrie, pour aller rechercher dans les pays estrangers les plus sçavans, & les plus adroicts hommes du monde.25

How successful Le Blanc, in following the example of the Ancients, or La Boullaye, in his quest for wisdom, actually were, is extremely debatable. Nevertheless, such declarations of the possibility of moral betterment and wisdom through travel are very frequent, particularly in the preface or the avis au lecteur. Indeed, Jacques de Villamont, noting that the Ancients themselves relied on the knowledge of ‘gouvernemens estranges’ to build wise government, concludes with the superiority of the voyager over the erudite:

24 25

Le Blanc, Advis au Lecteur, non-paginated. La Boullaye, p. 422.

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Such assertions of superiority were supported by the example, not only of the philosophers of antiquity, but of the most famous of all mythical voyagers: A juste tiltre & à bonne raison le Prince des Pœtes Homère loüa jadis en son Iliade le sage Ulysse pour avoir beaucoup voyagé, souvent pris l’essor vers les nations estrangeres, & attentivement consideré la diversité des mœurs & des humeurs des Provinces & des villes eslongnées.27

An epic voyage becomes, for this author, Boucher, a quest for knowledge which has distinctly 17th-century motives behind it: the careful consideration of ‘la diversité des mœurs et des humeurs’.28 The association between travel and wisdom through such consideration is a recurrent topos in introductions, even in the most unlikely of circumstances, as in the precocious philosophical insight reportedly displayed by the aforementioned Le Blanc, at thirteen years of age: L’Inclination de voyager est si naturelle à l’homme comme l’image vivante de Dieu, qu’il tasche d’occuper tous les lieux par une presence successive, ne pouvant pas les remplir par une immensité […]. Et à dire le vray, qu’estce que nostre vie, sinon un voyage perpetuel, qui a son entrée & sa sortie aux deux grandes portes de la nature, la naissance & la mort? Ce fut dans ces pensées, que Vincent le Blanc Marseillois sortit dés l’âge de treize ans, pour voyager.29

As well as being a moral quest, the voyage is inspired and justified, according to the author of Le Blanc’s account, by man’s nature as the image of God, as well as by the very nature of life itself as a perpetual 26 Jacques de Villamont [1558-?], Les Voyages du Seigneur de Villamont (Paris: Claude de Montreuil et Jean Richer, 1600), Preface, non-paginated. 27 Boucher, p. 1. 28 Despite the comparison, only one of the titles in the corpus of this study is explicitly equated with an Odyssey: René Du Chastelet des Boys, L’Odyssée ou Diversité d’Avantures, Rencontres et Voyages en Europe, Asie & Affrique (La Flèche: Gervais Laboe, 1665). 29 Le Blanc, Advis au Lecteur.

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voyage. The parallel of terrestrial displacement with the great human voyage from birth to death amplifies its importance and further glorifies the primary motivation of the young traveller. In Mocquet’s preface, travel is also assimilated to a laudable quest for the knowledge of the world: Dieu ayant mis l’Univers sous la cognoissance de l’homme, ce n’est pas de merveille que naturellement nous soyons portez à la curieuse recherche d’iceluy, pour avoir plus de subjet d’admirer & louer la divine sagesse & bonté, & d’appliquer toutes ces choses à nostre usage. Car de quel ravissement d’esprit ne nous sentons nous emportez quand nous venons à considerer la creation de la terre & de la mer.30

The voyage appears to reflect the natural order of a universe which awaits its exploitation to harness its wonders (although the number of those considered to be entitled to do so might actually, at the same time, be quite restricted). Notably, the quest for knowledge itself would be curieuse – with the tendency towards the emphasis on the unusual that this implies – as well as being justified as a simultaneous meditation on divine wisdom. It was to enable travellers to derive the maximum benefit from the voyage – and therefore to obtain for themselves (and their future readers, in turn) the maximum amount of such prescribed knowledge, that the arts de voyager were intended. 31 These texts provide instructions on the order in which observations were to be made and the manner in which they should be recounted, determining in advance the categorization of experience. Baudelot de Dairval’s Memoire de quelques Observations generales qu’on peut faire, pour ne pas voyager inutilement encourages the consultation of the corpus of travel narratives as follows: Rien ne contribuë tant à faire des découvertes curieuses, que la lecture des meilleures relations du lieu où l’on passe.32

The apparent paradox is resolved when one considers that it is the fact of not having appeared in previous relations that makes observations into discoveries (the author also encourages the consultation of 30

Mocquet, 1617, Préface, non-paginated. A bibliography of such arts de voyager is published in Doiron, pp. 233-236. 32 Baudelot de Dairval , II, pp. 697-698. 31

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previous voyages, ‘modèles à étudier’ which must naturally have had the effect of promulgating the synthesis discussed in the previous section). 33 Texts such as Justus Lipsius’s De Ratione cum fructu peregrinandi repeat the necessity of achieving usefulness as the prized fruit of the voyage. 34 But what exactly was useful or valuable again depended, in turn, on the standards of the honnêtes hommes for whom Baudelot’s text was intended. 35 17th-century travellers were as such conscious of the place of their accounts in a rapidly-evolving corpus, which was being continually added to, and with which their own texts were constantly engaged. The possession of knowledge of previous or contemporary travel accounts greatly increased the authority of the traveller, in a culture which still attached significant importance to literary tradition. While Bernier, travelling in India, had been requested to verify several points of information by Melchisédech Thévenot, the learning of the latter – whose travels were far more limited – was still worthy of considerable praise:36 Monsieur Thevenot, cet illustre Curieux, qui nous donne tous les jours plus de découvertes sans sortir de son Cabinet, que nous n’en avons appris de ceux qui ont fait le tour de Monde.37

Even towards the end of the 17th century, by which time French travellers had reached as far as Siam, the ramassage of information by an author who had not undertaken a voyage could still have a certain level of authority: J’oüis debiter des erreurs si grossieres, & avec tant d’assurance, que cela me fit songer à ramasser ce que j’avois appris de ce Royaume dans les Relations de ceux qui en ont parlé.38

33

Ibid., p. 697. Justus Lipsius [1547-1606], De Ratione cum fructu peregrinandi trans. by Anthoine Brun as Il enseigne que l’on doit voyager pour trois sujects, in Le chois des Epistres de Lipse traduites de Latin en François (Lyon: Chez Barthélemy Ancelin, 1619), in Doiron, pp. 205-217. 35 Baudelot de Dairval, I, épistre, non-paginated. 36 Henceforth, Melchisédech Thévenot [1620-1692] will be referred to as ‘M. Thévenot’. 37 Bernier, Suite, II, p. 140. 38 De L’Isle, Avertissement Au Lecteur, non-paginated. 34

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However, the attempt of this author, De L’Isle, to remedy such errors relied on consulting other written sources, so that what exactly constituted error must surely have relied on a great deal of subjectivity. Those who did travel to the East still deliberately underlined their familiarity with the texts of their precursors, because that familiarity accentuated the value of their own accounts. La Boullaye, for example, devoted 5 in-4° pages to the most cursory of critiques of travellers from Belon or Villamont to Le Blanc, which are so sparse in detail – sometimes limited to two adjectives – that they appear justified simply as the accumulation of titles. 39 Other authors vie with one another, disagree and refute testimonies in an attempt to prove the validity of their own testimony, and accusations of plagiarism or of lying were frequent.40 This construction of knowledge had one other extremely important consequence, for travellers claimed that they wished to inform their contemporaries, but not to repeat the information already recounted by their predecessors. So, while repetition did nonetheless occur, narratives also evolved, on the other hand, in relation to previous narratives, based on the information already known. This is evinced by La Boullaye’s appraisal of Michel Baudier’s (by then thirty-year old) account of Constantinople: Baudier a mis au jour une description du Serrail de Constantinople, & autres raretez, avec tant de rapport aux memoires que j’en avois dressez, que je me suis contenté d’inserer en cette Relation le Plan des cours du Serrail, où un chacun peut aller, qui peut beaucoup servir à l’intelligence de son Livre, comme son Histoire peut ayder ceux qui sont amateurs des coustumes des Turqs, pour la Religion il l’a descritte grossierement, & l’essence de la Politique Ottomane, ce qui m’oblige à m’y estendre un peu davantage.41

In fact, La Boullaye’s account of Constantinople was therefore, according to his own admission, deliberately constructed in relation to 39 ‘Belon Medecin de Mans a laissé ses Observations fort succinctes, & fort vrayes.’ La Boullaye, Sentiment du Sieur de la Boullaye-le-Gouz sur les diverses Relations qu’il a leües des pays estrangers, in Les Voyages et Observations, non-paginated. 40 ‘Vincent le Blanc fait une description de cette Isle sur le rapport d’un autre, qui est tout à fait fabuleuse, disant qu’il y a […] un Roy qui se fait tirer en un chariot par quatre bœufs. Jamais dans l’Isle ils n’ont eu aucun usage des chariots.’ Flacourt, Histoire, 1658, Avant-Propos, non-paginated; ‘Le sieur de Villamond […] me semble fort veritable, quoy qu’il passe pour menteur à toute le monde.’ La Boullaye, Sentiment du Sieur…, non-paginated. 41 La Boullaye, p. 27.

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that of another writer. The verb se contenter demonstrates the perception by the most recent author that he was merely supplementing information which he perceived as lacking. Challe’s advance refutation of any doubts about his description of the inhabitants of the island of Madagascar (on which he never landed) demonstrates the great grip of tradition, even if his personal sincerity is ambiguous: C’est dans cette Isle que regne utraque Venus […]: &, pour douter de ceci, il faudroit donner le démenti à tous les Européens, qui ont été dans cette Isle & tous ceux qui en ont écrit, & entr’autres aux Mémoires de Mr. de Flavacourt.42

Similarly, that prior knowledge was actively built on had a direct consequence on the type of information subsequently collected. The uniqueness of the Other, which in encounter, was accentuated by curiosité, could only be further heightened by the attempt to accept and then build on existing knowledge. A traveller who had already acquired information before arrival, in an era in which the authority of written testimony was considerable, repeatedly refers back to this immense debt. However, another source of evidence was crucial in the traveller’s acquisition of knowledge: that of direct visual evidence.

The Eye of the Traveller While literary tradition was the foundation for much of the knowledge of the Orient, the claims to authority of the 17th-century narrator-voyager were based on actual presence in the East itself. Travellers vaunted their own accounts because of the length of time spent in the Orient, and the diversity of experiences they had among its peoples. In this, the travel narrative differed from other works conveying knowledge of the East by being the account of a witness who had personally gone to the Orient, instead of having collected information from other texts. The experience of the traveller lent authority to the text, and the validity of testimony relied principally on the assurance of its having been personally witnessed. Pyrard’s reports, for example, become a témoignage because of apprehension

42

Challe, 1721, II, pp. 27-28.

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by the sight of the narrator himself, of events which occurred during the time of his presence: Ce que est arrivé de mon temps en ces isles, et dont je puis porter bon et suffisant tesmoignage, pour l’avoir veu ou sceu de bonne part. 43

However, although such a claim of observation by the traveller was the principal way to assure veracity, this témoignage might be complemented by that of others. Assurances of the trustworthiness of narrator or witnesses are constantly reiterated in the prefaces and forewords of travel narratives in a formula such as that of Philippe: J’ay vû moy mesme presque toutes celles que je t’y rapporte, & s’il en est quelques unes que j’aye ajoutées à celles là, je les ay apprises de la relation de certaines personnes, de la fidelité desquelles je ne pouvois douter sans temerité.44

Philippe makes a pact with the reader based on his own presence, or the evidence of others who were so indisputably reliable that it would be nothing less than temerity to doubt their testimony. The reliance on sight was in large part a direct consequence of an increase in geographical knowledge – thanks to the discoveries both East and West – which had rendered Classical authority insufficient. Philippe’s 16th-century predecessor, the cosmographer André Thevet, had justified his reliance on sight and experience as follows: Seroit il raison que ce de nouveauté, que de jour en jour elle produit en diverses contrees, qui ha esté aux anciens inconnu, pour n’estre avenu de leur tems, & à la plus part des modernes pour n’en avoir fait la recherche, deust estre supprimé en silence? Que ne s’est teu Pline, puis que Strabo avoit avant lui tant absolument traitté de la Geographie? & apres eux, Ptolomee, Volaterran, Glarean, & infinis autres, desquelz (s’ilz eussent craint telle censure) nous n’aurions les excellens escris?45

While recent and ongoing discoveries had made ancient authority insufficient, the reliance on sight is somewhat paradoxically justified by a series of Classical writers whose contribution to knowledge was 43

Pyrard, 1619, I, p. 281. Philippe, Avant-Propos, non-paginated. 45 André Thevet, Cosmographie du Levant (Lyon: J. de Tournes & G. Gazeau, 1554), p. 4. 44

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without question. For Frédéric Tinguely, such 16th-century processes of referral – and even what appears to be the copying of substantial parts of preceding travel narratives – are typical of narratives to the East which were very often complemented by a réécriture of previous accounts: Contrairement à l’Amérique, les régions du Levant ont toujours été sillonnées ou du moins décrites par d’illustres prédécesseurs, géographes antiques ou pèlerins médiévaux dont les ouvrages sont largement diffusés par l’imprimerie dès les dernières décennies du quinzième siècle. Espaces de mémoire et de tradition, ces contrées se prêtent de manière privilégiée à un long parcours de reconnaissance bientôt doublé d’un subtil processus de réécriture.46

However, in the mid-17th century, La Boullaye contrasted his travel narrative with the cosmographie, cutting short a description of a natural phenomenon so as to distance himself from an outdated form: parce que mon discours tiendroit plus de la Cosmographie, que de la Relation succincte, que je desire faire de ce que j’ay observé, & connu parfaittement dans mes voyages.47

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier similarly deemed his evidence to be superior purely because of the amount of time spent observing in the East: J’ay dit les choses comme elles sont; & je les ay vûës plus souvent & plus longtemps qu’aucun franc qui soit passé en Asie, ayant fait six voyages en Perse pendant l’espace de quarante ans.48

A century after Thevet, Tavernier did not need to justify his reliance on the eye by simultaneous reference to the Ancients – its authority was already acquired. Those Histoires or Relations Historiques which describe eastern lands without the author’s presence had now come to rely principally on ocular evidence, as De L’Isle demonstrates:

46

Frédéric Tinguely, ‘Réforme et réécriture dans le Voyage de Jean Chesneau’, in Miroirs de textes: récits de voyage et intertextualité, ed. by Linon-Chipon et al, pp. 33-45 (p. 34). 47 La Boullaye, p. 256. 48 Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 403.

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Il est vrai que j’y raporte plusieurs choses extraordinaires, mais elles ont presque toutes pour garans des témoins oculaires, ou des gens au moins qui ont été sur les lieux, & je n’y avance rien de moi-même.49

However, if the authority of erudition had been displaced, it continued to play an important role. For Thevet, sight – the most actif of the senses – would enable the observer to supplement and to verify existing knowledge: Mon jugement ha esté tousjours tel, que puisque entre tous les sens de nature, le regard humain est le plus actif: de tant mieux l’homme entend, & peult plus parfaitement, descrire ce qu’il connoissoit par livres, l’ayant songneusement examiné & experimenté à veuë d’œil.50

For a late-17th-century observer like La Loubère, the reading of relations supposedly supplements what could otherwise have been an inadequate presence in Siam: J’ay donc consideré, interrogé, pénétré, autant qu’il m’a été possible; & pour me rendre plus capable de le faire, j’ay lû avec soin avant que d’arriver à Siam, plusieurs Relations anciennes & modernes des diverses Contrées de l’Orient. De sorte qu’il me semble que cette préparation a suppléé au défaut d’un plus long sejour, & m’a fait remarquer & entendre en trois mois que j’ay été à Siam, ce que je n’eusse ny entendu, ny remarqué peut-être en trois ans sans le secours de ces lectures.51

La Loubère’s assertion is of interest for what it reveals about the importance attributed to the role of erudition versus visual evidence. It is clear that the assistance of the ‘relations anciennes et modernes’ was of debatable value to neutral observation. Sight, the evidence of the eye, was not inherently neutral either, as the previous chapter has shown, and supplementing this culturally-conditioned faculty with the accounts of other observers could only amplify the ethnocentricity of the voyager’s judgement. Similarly, the ‘selection’ operated by culture on visual data was subjected to further selection, based on the presence or absence of this data in existing literature. So, while visual testimony was intended to complement, or as Sophie Linon-Chipon writes, to complete literary heritage, its 49

De L’Isle, Relation Historique du Royaume de Siam (1684), Avertissement au Lecteur, non-paginated. 50 André Thevet, Cosmographie du Levant, p. 3. 51 La Loubère, I, p. 4.

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relationship with this tradition results in a tendency to accentuate the novelty of observed phenomena. 52 Thévenot’s observations were thus considered valuable by Pétis de la Croix, because the narrator had seemingly set out, in advance, only to observe what others had not seen or reported: Il semble que nôtre Autheur n’ait affecté de remarquer que ce que les autres n’ont point vû, ou n’ont point rapporté, en sorte que l’on peut dire que tout est neuf dans cette Relation.53

As the Journal des Sçavans reveals, the features that made Thévenot’s relation recommendable were that they were unusual, and also that they had not previously been mentioned by other authors: Cette relation a beaucoup de choses tres curieuses, & peu de communes. Car l’autheur parle pardessus celles qui ont esté publiées par les autres, & s’arreste à descrire celles qui ont esté obmises, ou rapportées d’une maniere peu conforme à la verité. Il y a des choses fort particulieres touchant les coustumes que les Turcs observent dans la conduitte de leurs guerres, dans l’administration de la Justice, & dans l’exercise de leur religion.54

That Thévenot, according to the reviewer, corrects existing knowledge with an account laudable for containing ‘des choses’ which were curieuses and particulières, and few of which were already common knowledge implies that the criterion of observation was simply that of difference from previous European accounts. This synthesis was composed of observations which were supposed to represent a culture, but which were founded in their absence, or their presence – in a different form – in preceding texts. Such observations could only tend to accentuate difference by actively seeking to outdo the evidence of previous accounts, and demonstrate the inherent flaws of the coexistence of literary heritage and visual evidence. The criterion of sight which, as has been seen, was far from neutral, was further conditioned so that what was considered to be most notable by the observer was that which deviated from, or which most strikingly confirmed, existing testimony. As a result of tradition and the restrictions of textual representation, the 52

Linon-Chipon, p. 198. Thévenot, Troisieme Voyage, Preface, non-paginated. 54 Journal des Sçavans, 19 janvier 1665, p. 32. 53

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exact composition of that which the traveller saw could never fully be reconstructed in an adequate narrative.

Transparency Voyagers who claimed that their testimony was worthy of faith because it was observed place several conditions on its transcription to text, which further reinforce its reliability. By denying themselves a status as writers, narrators refute in advance the charge of seeking personal glory, claiming that they write to satisfy the wishes of other parties. Dedicatory epistles, such as that of La Boullaye, very often emphasize the selfless motives for publication: Sa majesté me manda de venir en Cour avec mon équippage Persan, jetta les yeux sur l’Original, en lût quelques pages, & me tesmoigna qu’il le falloit donner au publiq; La force de telles paroles sur un sujet dont l’inclination est égalle au devoir de la naissance, m’a fait imprimer sous la protection de VOSTRE EMINENCE ce que je luy avois deja desdié escript de ma main...55

Chardin claims to have been motivated by his zeal to let the public know of his recognition for royal favour: Je l’ay principalement entrepris, parce que j’ay vu que la matiere Vous en plaisoit. […] Je n’ay pris sur mes occupations ordinaires le loisir de le faire imprimer, que par l’ardeur de rendre plus public le ressentiment de mon cœur pour les graces infinies que j’ay reçues de Vôtre Majesté…56

The desire to publish an account might be either the consequence of an extract having been read by the reigning monarch, in the case of La Boullaye, or reflect monarchical interest in its subject matter, as Chardin writes. A selfless and therefore trustworthy narratorial persona is created while, at the same time, the content of the text that follows benefits from implicit monarchical recommendation. Other authors like La Magdeleine claimed they sought to remedy inaccurate accounts which were founded on information not established by presence, but instead by second-hand reports: 55 56

La Boullaye, A Monseigneur l’Eminentissime Capponi, non-paginated. Chardin, I, Au Roy, non-paginated.

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The intended audience was primarily noble, and the motivation – although this time unsolicited – for the text was an equally selfless éclaircissement. The veracity of an account was further assured by the simplicity of the author’s style, which was designed to transparently pass on the experience described. In this, Thévenot’s preface is typical: J’aurois deu avoir pris plus de temps pour en rendre l’élocution plus polie, mais quelques affaires m’en ont empesché & j’ay creu que la naifveté du langage en feroit mieux concevoir la verité.58

A ‘langage naïf’ enables the transmission of an accurate account. Such equation of naïveté with accuracy or testimony is common in the prefaces to travel accounts such as that of Leguat: J’avoüe le fait. Je ne suis ni Auteur poli, ni Auteur, du tout […]. Il est vrai, & très-vrai, que je suis bien éloigné d’avoir le rare talent de M. l’Abbé de Choisi, sa délicatesse est extrême sans doute: il écrit poliment, & la fine naïveté de son Pâque aproche; de ses, Calme tout plat; Je ne voi que de l’eau; La même chanson; Rien à vous dire; est un ragoût nouveau qui plaît, & qui captive; au lieu que ces sortes d’Assaisonnemens exquis me sont inconnus. La simple VERITÉ, toute nue, & la SINGULARITÉ de nos Avantures font le corps & l’ame de ma Rélation. […] Cette naïveté si naïve a son fard: Et on sait que les Habitans de la République des Lettres, comme ceux de la Friperie, mettent en usage diverses sortes de Lustres.59

The author of this preface, François-Maximilien Misson, explicitly claims the status of non-literature for the text, which contrasts with the ‘rare talent’, politesse and ‘fine naïveté’ of Choisy. The result is to equate the ‘République des Lettres’ – literature – with friperie. Those 57

Le Comte de la Magdeleine, Le Miroir Ottoman, avec un succint Recit de tout ce qui c’est [sic] passé de considerable pendant le Guerre des Turqs en Pologne, jusqu’en 1676 (Basle: Jean Rodolph Genath, 1677), Préface au Lecteur, nonpaginated. 58 Thévenot, Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant, Preface, non-paginated. 59 Leguat, I, IX-X.

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witnesses who are not littéraires are therefore, in their unadorned presentation of their account, worthy of faith, as Chupeau writes: Par ce refus de la rhétorique et des figures de l’éloquence, le récit de voyage se place résolument en marge de la littérature et de ses mensonges.60

One result is the consistent claim that content is more important than form; however, if there had been a total disregard of form, then there would have been no need to re-edit journaux or notes, and even Thévenot’s texts were re-edited before publication. What is more, as the last chapter of the present study will indicate, the récit de voyage typically includes numerous anecdotes which demonstrate, on the contrary, considerable awareness of form. One more consequence is illustrated both by Misson/Leguat, and by the following extract from Chardin’s preface: Je ne diray rien sur le Style: on n’attend pas d’un homme qui a passé tant d’années de son Pays toute la pureté d’un Autheur qui se trouve tous les jours à l’Academie.61

The travel ‘author’ – or narrator – contrasting with professional authors, is a persona who is non-literary precisely because of the reasons which make the account trustworthy and informative. Thévenot, in his first voyage, claims to be so preoccupied by other matters that he does not have the time to perfect his travel narrative and similarly, Chardin’s many years’ absence from his country contrast with the literary excellence of the académicien. Nonetheless, in both cases, by excusing their style, travellers actually reinforce the value of their experience and in turn, the value of their accounts.

Paratexts and the Functional Voyage The authors of travel narratives repeatedly insist on the functional use of these texts and on their having been designed to assist other voyagers who intended to make the journey to the East. This is often made explicit in titles or sub-titles, or even in paratexts 60 61

Chupeau, p. 540. Chardin, Preface, non-paginated.

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such as the Advis pour Ceux qui voudront entreprendre le voyage des Indes Orientales which follows Pyrard’s Voyage. 62 Similarly, a further edition of a Voyage, like La Boullaye’s 1657 edition, could be improved by being ‘augmenté de bons advis, pour ceux qui veulent voyager.’ Transmitting instruction for future travellers to the Indies, they also establish the narrator, as in Tavernier’s case, as a pioneer: Ne pouvant agir par moy-mesme en des climats si eloignez, j’encourageray du moins les autres à y aller; ils trouveront peut-estre dans mes Relations de quoy s’instruire dans leur mestier, & toutes les fois qu’ils viendront me consulter, je ne leur refuseray point les lumieres que le temps & l’experience m’ont données, unique & legitime avantage de la Vieillesse.63

Texts which were so heavily-focused on the value of the narrator’s experience do beg the question as to what degree the récits de voyage actually were used or considered as functional. Their format, for example, has been considered as such an indicator, and Rachel Lauthelier notes the care voyagers took to ensure their books were edited in small format, so that they would therefore be portable.64 Nonetheless, the corpus on which the present study is based tends rather to be composed primarily of editions in-4° format, with slightly fewer in-8°, less in-12°, with only that of Boucher in-16°. If the format used for publication can be taken as an indication of purpose, of portability and so of actually being used in the East, then the tendency for larger formats would seem to make this use difficult for land voyagers at least. While this did not dissuade certain voyagers like La Boullaye who travelled, according to Tavernier, with two chests full of books, he must be considered as an exception. 65

62

Pyrard, 1619, II, p. 413. Tavernier, Recueil de plusieurs Relations et Traitez singuliers et curieux (Paris: Gervais Clouzier, 1679). 64 ‘Les voyageurs contemporains prenaient soin d’être édités en petit format. [Note: géneralement en in-8°, souvent en in-12°, telles les relations de Bernier (1670 et 1724), Chardin (1671), Chinon (1671), Tavernier (1678, 1681), Dellon (1685), Thévenot (1688, 1689) & La Forest de Bourgon (1710); & parfois en in-16°: Tavernier (1680, 1681).’ Lauthelier, p. 42. However, the texts of Tavernier, Chardin or Thévenot, as the bibliography of the present study shows, were just as often printed contemporaneously in-4° or even in-folio. 65 Tavernier, Recueil de plusieurs Relations (1679); Relation de se [sic] qui s’est passé dans la negociation des deputez qui ont esté en Perse et aux Indes, p. 72. 63

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However, as Gérard Genette points out, there was a very definite link between the perceived status of a book in the 17th century and the format in which it was published: A l’âge classique, les « grands formats » in-quarto étaient réservés aux œuvres sérieuses (c’est-à-dire plutôt religieuses ou philosophiques que littéraires), ou aux éditions de prestige et de consécration des œuvres littéraires.66

Judging by the corpus of texts analyzed in this book, the voyages to the Orient seem to have been appreciated predominantly as such ‘éditions de prestige’, though a substantial number were printed in-8°. One can only conclude, therefore, that based on criteria of format, a primarily functional use was unlikely, despite the author’s claims to the contrary. Nevertheless, this supposedly functional purpose is repeatedly signalled by references to what are essentially its paratexts, according to Genette’s definition. 67 Gervaise’s Histoire Naturelle et Politique du Royaume de Siam is preceded by one such paratext, a message from the libraire which, after vaunting the originality of the work, elaborates on the potential benefits of knowledge of Siamese manners and inclinations among those who might wish to settle and serve in the kingdom: S’ils [les voyageurs futurs] y vont dans le dessein de s’y établir, la seconde Partie leur donnera une connoissance parfaite des mœurs & des inclinations de ceux avec qui ils auront à vivre, des Loix & des Coutumes du Royaume, des Charges & des emplois dont ils pourront se rendre dignes par la fidelité de leurs services. 68

Such a declaration is unequivocally intended to enhance the functional value of the text and to attract potential readers, although how many of these actually did intend to settle in Siam remains debatable. In addition, the often exhaustive titles of the texts, placing before the reader the criteria which made voyages attractive, are in large part composed of enumerating these very paratexts. The prefaces, forewords and avertissements, notes and illustrations to 66

Gérard Genette, Seuils, coll. Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1987), p. 21. Genette, Palimpsestes, p. 10. 68 Gervaise, Le Libraire au Lecteur, non-paginated. 67

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which Genette directly refers are accompanied in travel accounts by others such as lexiques and dictionaries, alongside trade and currency guides, maps and associated lists, as well as geographical references – of debatable reliability and relevance – such as latitude and distance. Of all the 17th-century travellers to the East, the most thorough in practical information is undoubtedly Tavernier. His Six Voyages are accompanied by rates of exchange and by distances, and his later Recueil de plusieurs Relations contains a section devoted entirely to commercial information.69 While it is difficult to see how the digression-filled, dramatic accounts elsewhere in the collection could have been of practical use to potential mariners (though in terms of inspiration, the focus on gold, wealth and adventure might certainly have been influential), the third relation, Observations sur le Commerce des Indes Orientales, & sur les fraudes qui s’y peuvent commettre is exceptional. The sections entitled Prix des Toiles, Monnoyes étrangeres tant d’or que d’argent, Prix des especes d’or and De la nature des presens qu’il faut faire aux Princes Mahometans de l’Asie consist of simple tables or lists of these various goods. Shorter interventions in other texts include Chambelle’s provision of a list of the supplies he took with him to the East in the service of the VOC.70 Such observations could have consequences which went beyond commerce, such as Thévenot’s evaluation of rates of exchange of currency and weights, which was vaunted for providing: un detail si exact de ce qui se passe à Sourat entre les Doüanniers & les Estrangers qui y arrivent, que ceux qui à l’avenir feront ce voyage, ne seront point surpris de leurs manieres d’agir, & ils pourront memes prévenir la rigueur des exactions que ces Doüanniers exercent envers les nouveaux venus, s’ils veulent profiter de ses avis.71

This account is functional, in furnishing advice which is seemingly commercial – for it was intended to counter the demands of the customs officials – but must also have had the consequence of prefiguring expectations. After all, if Thévenot had succeeded in removing the element of surprise for future travellers, this was because he had conditioned their encounter in advance. 69

Tavernier, Recueil de plusieurs Relations; Observations que j’ay faites en mes voyages d’Asie sur le Commerce des Indes Orientales, p. 101. 70 Chambelle, pp. 78-79. 71 Thévenot, Troisieme Voyage, Preface, non-paginated.

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‘Commercial’ or ‘functional’ paratexts include others which cannot be accused of prefiguring encounter, such as Beauvau’s fourpage list of Noms des lieux avecque leurs distances mesures par mils.72 Yet perhaps the true place of these paratexts can be established by returning to the concept of knowledge encapsulated in the honnête homme. The sciences which Faret expected the courtier to master were general and intended for conversation – none would be excessive, for this would equate with exclusivity. Similarly, paratexts vaunting use by authentic travellers reinforced the validity of texts and enabled them to become usable and repeatable sources of knowledge primarily – despite the assurances of the narrator – for the non-traveller. Lexiques, dictionnaires or colloques, explaining key terms useful for the potential voyager, are other such paratexts. In manuscript form, these reportedly circulated among the crews of ships (one such colloque was adapted by Léry in his voyage), but as with commercial information or distances, they could also quite simply constitute knowledge for the reader who never travelled.73 Pyrard’s Dictionaire de quelques mots de la langue des Maldives was aimed at such a public: Pour la commune j’en eusse peu faire un Dictionaire complet, d’autant que le long sejour que j’ay fait en ces isles m’en avoit donné une assez grande & exacte cognoissance: mais pour n’ennuyer les Lecteurs, je me contenteray d’en rapporter ici quelques mots principaux & plus necessaires qui pourront satisfaire au desir des plus curieux.74

The aim of the dictionary to satiate the desire for knowledge was nevertheless subject to the limitations of ennui (Faret’s ideal, one recalls, being that the reader be ‘passablement imbu de plusieurs sciences’). Yet Pyrard’s dictionary, a list of equivalences of ‘quelques mots principaux’ – their importance dictated naturally by the author – demonstrates how even the paratexts of the voyage transmit the same flawed representation inherent in cultural encounter. Commencing with the word Dieu and proceeding through the fundamental terms of 72

Beauvau, pp. 243-246. ‘Ce « colloque » n’est probablement pas de Léry, mais d’un truchement normand originaire de Rouen […]. Des documents de cette nature, le plus souvent manuscrits, circulaient parmi les équipages se rendant au Brésil.’ Lestringant, in Léry, pp. 479480. 74 Pyrard, 1619, II, p. 435. 73

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Christianity, it ignores Mohammed (in this Islam-professing archipelago) yet furnishes three terms equated with Lucifer. The terms to which it attributes priority are important according to Christian standards. For Pétis de la Croix, however, the Alphabeth Malabare which Thévenot ‘a pris le soin d’avoir’ was rather a ‘curiosité considérable’, in large part because of the material on which the text was written (palm leaves). So while the purpose of this alphabet was supposedly to act as a means by which ‘on peut entrer dans la connoissance de la Langue Malabare’, its four pages of letters and numerical figures were inserted because ‘Je croy que le Lecteur sera bien aise de voir leurs Caracteres.’75 This contentment would be experienced by the reading of something unusual, rather than the acquisition of a useful tool intended for a future voyage. 76 Similarly, while the ‘Carte du Païs’ with which Daulier-Deslandes’s Description is embellished might conceivably have assisted travellers to locate themselves, or to visualize the distance from one location to another, even this graphic representation is itself loaded with cultural preconception. While economic urban centres are perhaps less ambiguously important for travellers, the significance of ruins is one example of the problematic issues surrounding what could be another form of cultural representation: Belles ruïnes, qui suggerent mille plus belles imaginations; & laissent un chagrin de voir des choses si dignes d’une plus longue durée, perir plustost par la negligence & la malice de ces peuples, que par la suite des milliers d’années qui les avoient beaucoup épargnées.77

The verb suggérer is of course completely subjective, bringing to the narrator’s mind a distant past, predating the arrival of the negligent and malicious peoples who were responsible for letting the edifices of the past fall into ruin. Any spatial representation undertaken by such a commentator must be treated with caution, and as a functional document can only have even less value.

75

Thévenot, Troisieme Voyage, Preface, non-paginated; Troisième Voyage, p. 264. As Chapter 4 will show, the lexique or dictionnaire which furnished the equivalent of vocabulary for the French traveller could become a dialogue which has a function far beyond the simple attribution of equivalents for words. 77 Daulier-Deslandes, p. 61. 76

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The traité des maladies which follows the account of Dellon’s journey in his Relation, is another paratext which must be considered as having the curieux as its primary public. It also seems, in at least one contemporary review, in the Journal des Sçavans, to have been considered useful for further voyagers: Le petit traité des maladies particulieres aux pays Orientaux & sur la route, que l’on a ajouté à la fin de cette Relation, sera tres utile à ceux qui voudront entreprendre de semblables voyages.78

Dellon, as an apothecary, proposes remedies for these ailments, and the Journal also indicates where these could be found in Paris: Ceux qui en voudront user, les trouveront chez le Sieur Ruviere Apotiquaire du Roy, prés S. Roch.79

It is difficult, on this occasion, to deny that the reviewer, at least, considered that the Relation was intended for practical use, and that the voyage to the East was perceived as commonplace enough for it to be worth indicating where items essential to it could be purchased. Such an interesting illustration that the récits de voyage might be depicted by contemporaries as potentially serving future travellers should not detract from the importance of their main literary public. This petit traité des maladies particulières was just one of many paratexts reinforcing the authority of the narrator’s experience. In turn, these ‘functional’ paratexts furnished knowledge about the Orient, while simultaneously appearing to be a mere accessory to the voyage. * The seemingly practical information contained within travel narratives was just one of the means which authors used to integrate their texts into a tradition which claimed functionality as a primary virtue. Synthesis shaped by precedent (literary or otherwise) ‘inscribed’ a textual work within this tradition, subverting cultural representation, if necessary, for the sake of literary cohesiveness. As 78 79

Journal des Sçavans, 1685, p. 87. Ibid., p. 87.

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Lyotard suggests, text itself is already restrictive, even without having to conform to conventional formatting as well, and this tradition of the voyage itself resulted in textual constriction, making reference to previous works inevitable. 80 Furthermore, in the 17th-century récit de voyage, the concept of knowledge on which voyages were based depended on the authority of both Classical and contemporary authors, so that voyages too often became the confirmation of this heritage, or else an active search to accumulate additional testimony. This could only have had the effect of accentuating cultural difference, rather than engaging fully with manifestations of indigenous cultures. Direct visual evidence did gain in authority with the travel narrative, which came to depend increasingly on the testimony of a direct witness. Nonetheless, the concomitant tendency to search for new information, or to create original accounts, simply resulted in fundamentally falsified representation. When this new information was combined with adventure, as Chapter 5 will explore, the relationship between representation and literature, or between the ‘functional’ and ‘factual’ text, will be revealed to be further complicated.

80 ‘Si l’Art était expression ou symptôme, l’œuvre devrait réitérer ces formes « libres » […]. On n’aurait pas l’œuvre, mais le cri.’ Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1985), p. 359.

Chapter 3 Threat and the Near East The great difference between the lands which only become known to French travellers and the literary public after c.1500 (such as the Americas), on one hand, and the Orient, on the other, was the strength of a European tradition concerning the East. This meant that it was impossible for the French traveller to see the Orient as completely ‘new’, or virgin territory due to this inescapable cultural optic. Areas on the fringes of Europe, which had a longer historical tradition of contact and a previous literary and cultural presence in the European imagination, continued to intrigue French travellers during the 17th century. While also ascribed many of the characteristics of the East Indies, this Proche Orient differed in its relationship with Europe. Centuries of contact meant that a greater amount of data was available, and while this did not preclude misunderstanding in cultural encounter, it did mean the Near East was perceived as more familiar to Europeans. This chapter will analyze the role of this familiarity, within the framework of the often problematic relationship of these regions with Europe, in order to assess the representation of the Near Eastern Oriental, a depiction that was indelibly tainted by the perception of a long legacy of conflict.

The Loss of Antiquity The Near East had a long history of contact with Europe by virtue of geographical proximity, of pilgrimages, trade links and ambassadorial contacts. In turn, the much greater literary and cultural heritage of the Classics, the Bible, the era of the Crusades, centuries of pilgrimages and constant links with Europe made representations of the Near East considerably more familiar to the French reader than, for example, those of the cultures of Siam or Sumatra. However, this

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did not prevent travel writers from claiming that their testimony was new and of interest, and of repeatedly elaborating on the origins, history and rites of oriental peoples who already seemed in some way familiar to French readers. 17th-century travellers brought a great wealth of cultural references with them to the East and continued to write about a Near East which was perceived as the birthplace of antiquity: Le voyage de la Terre saincte & des Provinces & Royaumes adjacents, excelle tous les autres que l’on peut faire dans tout le reste de l’Univers, d’autant que là a esté faict & dict tout ce que l’Antiquité tant saincte que prophane nous a laissé par escrit. Car qu’on lize tous les Livres tant divins que humains, nous trouverons qu’ils ont esté tous faits dans ce païs-là…1

In effect, the origins of the entire written culture, whether biblical, or indeed Classical, of the 17th century are attributed by Boucher in this extract to the Near East. The voyage to the Holy Land or the surrounding areas was superior precisely because it promised to bring the traveller into contact with those very sites which formed the backdrop to Christianity or antiquity, to provide what Moureau calls ‘une nouvelle sacralisation de l’écrit’.2 This Orient was avidly sought by French travellers like Jacob Spon: Mes plus grandes recherches ont eu pour but la connoissance des Monumens antiques des pays que j’ay vûs dans ce Voyage.3

For Spon, the knowledge which justifies travel was itself primarily accessible by physical remains, vestiges which had themselves been altered, ruined or even voluntarily degraded.4 Over a geographical grid of towns and sites which so many predecessors had described and which featured in ecclesiastical and secular histories, observations were reduced to mutations on what was expected. While Spon was among the least vitriolic of observers of the early modern Near East, his visit to Chalcedon includes a telling comparison of the town’s 1

Boucher, Avertissement au Lecteur, non-paginated. Moureau, p. 20. 3 Jacob Spon [1647-1685], Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant (Lyon: A. Cellier fils, 1678), I, Preface, non-paginated. 4 The entire third volume of Spon’s Voyage is made up of inscriptions from his travels. 2

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importance with its status at the time of its famous Council, over a millennium previously: Ce n’est maintenant qu’un grand Village, où il y a autour quelques jardins qui servent de lieux de divertissement à ceux de Constantinople.5

Such travellers fundamentally falsify what is seen by ignoring (paradoxically, in a literary form which depends on visual evidence) what presents itself to sight. As this inherited knowledge could only have come from literary sources, an effort of imagination was required for mental reconstruction, although this still succeeds in leaving the observer more impressed by an imagined past than what was actually present. The result is the tableau of an Orient which seemed, to Grelot, to have degenerated considerably, and which appeared a far cry from the greatness of Classical times: Ce seroit icy le lieu de parler d’Achilles & de plusieurs autres Capitaines Grecs qui ont esté inhumez sur ce Promontoire […]: Mais parce que quelques voyageurs l’ont fait devant moy, je me contenteray seulement de dire que […] Troye estoit la plus belle, la plus grande, & la plus riche Ville de son temps.6 Les gens du pays, tant Grecs, que Turcs y sont dans la derniere ignorance, & ainsi il ne faut point luy demander des nouvelles du lieu précis où tomba la malheureuse Hellé […]. Ils n’en sçavent pas davantage de la ville d’Arisbe, & à qui Homere donne l’epithete de divine, non plus que du Promontoire & du Bourg Rastion où estoit le sepulchre du brave Ajax.7

The reader is assumed to be familiar with the above-mentioned names and places, thanks to his/her knowledge of the Classics, knowledge not supposedly shared by the Turks and Greeks who were allegedly unaware of the importance of the sites. However, the peoples who inhabited the region by the time Grelot undertook his voyage shared a substantially different culture or cultures to that from which this French observer had drawn his own knowledge. Nevertheless, already lamenting the disappearance of the vestiges of the Ancients, the narrator simply assumes their cultural (in the sense of education) inferiority. 5

Spon, I, p. 267. Grelot, pp. 6-7. 7 Ibid., p. 20. 6

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The great ignorance into which the population was assumed to have fallen was, in turn, either implicitly or explicitly linked to the state of captivity in which Greece was depicted as existing. Du Loir for example, praises the ‘belles choses’ that Greece might furnish for the well-known cabinet de curiosités of the Duc d’Orléans, to which his dedicatory epistle is addressed.8 But contemporary reality could never equal, according to the author, the remains the past had bequeathed: [La Grèce] n’a plus rien de remarquable que les ruines dont elle est toute déchirée, que la captivité miserable de ses estats & que l’ignorance grossiere de ses habitants […] l’esclavage honteux de ses enfans legitimes qui gemissent sous l’orgueilleuse domination de leurs tyrans, touchera sans doute de pitié vostre generosité…9

The ruins and the ignorance of the population were the result of a state of ‘captivité miserable’, which was an evident critique of the domination of the Ottomans. Others, like Antoine Galland, also considered the degradation of the Orient to be physical. In his Smyrne ancienne et moderne he laments the contemporary state of this previously Greek- and Romanoccupied city, and the destruction of monuments and inscriptions, the remains of which could have served for the enlightenment of scholars of the Classical period.10 This, he assumed, was the result of the Turkish ‘peu d’industrie’.11 The value that these civilizations represented for the scholar Galland testifies both to the preoccupations of post-Renaissance Europe and their apparent incompatibility with the new residents of Izmir.12 8 ‘De tout temps, Monseigneur, elle a esté si recommandable à ceux qui ont aymé les belles choses que je suis asseuré, que comme on ne sçauroit avoir un azile plus sacré que vostre Cabinet…’ Le Sieur du Loir, Les Voyages du Sieur du Loir, contenus en plusieurs lettres écrites du Levant, avec plusieurs particularitez qui n’ont point encore esté remarquées touchant la Grèce, & la domination du Grand Seigneur, la Religion & les Mœurs de ses sujets (Paris: Gervais Clouiser, 1654), Epistre, nonpaginated. 9 Du Loir, Epistre, non-paginated. 10 In Le Voyage à Smyrne, pp. 39-212. 11 Ibid., p. 92. 12 Another text, also unpublished until Bauden’s edition, laments the ‘méchant goût de la peinture grecque moderne.’ Voyage fait en Levant [extraits], also published in Le Voyage à Smyrne, pp. 215-234, p. 226.

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Thus, French travellers contrasted the contemporary Near East with what they considered to have been a past of cultural superiority. However, centuries of historical contact, often linked to religion, also conditioned the representation of the inhabitants of the Near East in many other ways. The remainder of this chapter will analyze the many striking manifestations of their difference, and will focus in particular on the privileged place accorded to the Holy Land, the blurring of identity in the Orient and the repeated gendering of the East-West relationship.

The ‘Ottoman Peril’ The Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power during the period with which this study is concerned, dominating vast territories, with periodic incursions on the European continent reaching, in 1683, as far as Vienna. France, accorded capitulations in the 1580s, maintained a durable commercial and political relationship with the Ottoman Empire throughout the 17th century aided in part by a strategy of weakening the Holy Roman Empire. 13 These strategic decisions did not preclude a deeply rooted European fear of the power of the Ottoman Empire which Postel illustrates: La plus grande puissance soit en Religion soit en Armes, qui onc fut, est l’Ismaelique, & qu’entre les Ismaelites c’est la Turquesque.14

The 17th-century alliance with this puissance turquesque inspired considerable unease in ecclesiastical authors like De Vergoncey: Puisqu’il est tres-certain & que l’experience nous l’apprend, que les Turcs n’ont point de plus grands ennemis que les meilleurs & plus parfaicts Chrestiens, Si les François (dont le Roy est appellé tres-Chrestien) se chargent du paquet, ce qu’ils doivent faire comme à la verité c’est à eux que ces lettres s’addressent par devant tous autres, ils sont doublemet obligez de leur faire la guerre au lieu de traicter allience avec des infidelles qui font esgorger en leur presence leurs propres freres pour regner.15

13

Turbet-Delof, pp. 36-37. Postel, Au Roy dauphin, non-paginated. 15 De Vergoncey [15??-16??], Le Pèlerin Véritable (Paris: L. Féburier, 1615), p. 522. 14

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On the other hand, Frère Jean Coppin, in 1686, saw Europe and the Turks engaged in a holy war and Europe as a bouclier which was under constant threat from Turkish incursion.16 Lamenting French inaction during the Siege of Vienna, Coppin’s regret is representative of what has been characterized by Edward Said as a great ‘trauma’ which hung over European civilization; the ‘Ottoman peril’. 17 Du Loir’s previously-mentioned dedicatory epistle is one of many testifying to the continuous unease of the Ottoman threat, and by stressing its shameful nature, demonstrates how far it is contrary to a legitimate order. Authors such as Grelot prayed that divine assistance would enable the overthrow of this perverted, rebellious, order and the establishment of a ‘culte glorieux’ in its place: Renversez, ô Grand Dieu, sous les pieds de Loüis, L’orgueil des Tyrans de Bysance, Qu’ils tombent à l’éclat des foudres de la France, Aussi-tost frappez qu’ébloüis; Afin qu’ayant réduit ce qui vous est rebelle, Et par vous & pour vous étant victorieux, Il détruise l’erreur de ce peuple infidelle, Et fasse fleurir au lieu d’elle, De vos divines Loix le culte glorieux.18

This was by no means restricted to travel literature or to authors who had actually been to the Ottoman Empire. Other forms of text testify to a shared perception of the absolutism of Ottoman power and the threat it posed to Christendom, as Claude Malingre demonstrates:

16

Frère Jean Coppin, Le Bouclier de l’Europe, ou la Guerre Sainte, contenant des avis politiques et chrétiens qui peuvent servir de lumière aux rois et aux souverains de la chrétienté; pour garantir leurs états des incursions des Turcs et reprendre ceux qu’ils ont usurpé sur eux (Lyon: Antoine Briasson, 1686). 17 ‘La tiedeur que nous avons monstrée’. Coppin, p. 17; Said, Orientalism, pp. 59-60. 18 Grelot, p. 306. The following preface had been addressed to Louis XIII by another author in 1613: ‘vostre Majesté honoree de ces beaux tiltres, peut comme un Mars & Hercule de ce temps envoyer son espee, terreur de ses ennemis & la juste puissance Chrestienne, pour restablir souz l’Eglise les pays usurpez par nos offenses, & mis és mains tyranniques des circoncis.’ D.D.L.B., Tres-Humbles Remonstrances sur l’Estat des Affaires Chrestiennes dans les Mers de Levant, Midy & Ponant... (Paris: Abraham Saugrain, 1613), pp. 3-4.

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[Les] Sultans, qui ne font estat que de l’orgueil de leur superbe Majesté, & estiment que sous la cape du Ciel, personne ne se peut opposer à l’accroissement de leur redoutable croissant...19

This perception, as Furetière’s entry Turc illustrates, seems so deeply ingrained as to have filtered into colloquial speech and proverbs: Sujet de l’Empereur d’Orient qui fait profession de la Secte de Mahomet. […] On appelle generalement Turcs, tous les sujets du Grand Seigneur, que le peuple appelle le Grand Turc. On dit proverbialement, qu’un enfant est fort comme un Turc, quand il est grand & robuste pour son âge. On dit aussi, traitter de Turc à More, pour dire, à la rigueur & en ennemi déclaré. On dit aussi en voulant injurier un homme, le taxer de barbarie, de cruauté, d’irreligion, que c’est un Turc, un homme inexorable, qu’il vaudroit autant avoir à faire à un Turc.20

Such use of the term in proverbial speech, or even insults, demonstrate how strongly rooted was the sense that the character of the Turk was one ‘de barbarie, de cruauté, d’irreligion’. Galland, in his preface to D’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale writes of the following widespread ‘grande calomnie’:21 Mais par leur nom seul, les Turcs sont rellement décriez, qu’il suffit ordinairement de les nommer pour signifier une Nation barbare, grossiere, & d’une ignorance achevée, & sous leur nom, l’on entend parler de ceux qui sont sous la domination de l’Empire Ottoman.22

That certain (generally non-ecclesiastical) writers such as Galland were occasionally driven to comment on the falsehood of such beliefs merely demonstrates how widely shared they were. For Martino, the absence of the Turk in certain artistic genres is evidence of the unease Europe experienced: Pour qu’on se plaise aux choses exotiques, il faut que le sentiment soit calme et désintéressé […]. Plus tard, quand la puissance ottomane aura cessé d’inquiéter l’Europe, alors on se vengera du Turc, on lui fera place dans les romans badins et la comédie-bouffe.23 19

Claude Malingre [1580?-1643?], Histoires Tragiques de Nostre Temps…(Rouen: David Ferrand & Thomas Daré, 1641), p. 117. 20 Furetière, III, non-paginated. 21 D’Herbelot, Bibliothèque Orientale, Preface, non-paginated. 22 Ibid. 23 Martino, p. 37.

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Among the literary forms which were supposed to be pleasing to the reader was the récit de voyage, but among 17th-century travellers, especially ecclesiastics, the Turk had little scope to amuse. Despite featuring regularly in travel literature, and being attributed behaviour which intrigued by its difference, the presence of the Turk was, in general, to continue to inspire great unease. As such, 17th-century travel narratives to the Near East differ greatly from the discourse of classical Orientalism of the 18th century onwards in their representation of power. The supposed passivity of the ‘modern’ Orient which Said describes is unrecognizable in the 17th-century récits de voyage to the Near East, and the ‘Ottoman peril’ very much alive. 24 Tavernier’s account of the arrival of a Venetian ambassador to Persia, provides a revealing insight into the political situation as it was envisaged: Le Grand Seigneur avoit porté ses armes dans la Candie, & il estoit question de porter le Roy de Perse à luy declarer la guerre pour détourner cet orage de dessus la Chrestienté.25

The deep and long-standing phobia of the ‘Ottoman peril’ is encapsulated in this sentence, in which deflection was considered the only possible reaction to the potential Ottoman attack on Christendom. While this is also an illustration that in the latter part of the century in which Tavernier’s voyages were published, Persia was still viewed as a feasible counterweight to Ottoman power, the Venetian act of sending an ambassador there would seem to indicate a fear of real and tangible consequences, rather than something limited to literary discourse. The metaphor of the storm assumes a shape which far exceeds that of a simple collectivity of human beings, summing up the potential force and anticipated power of a threat which hung over the entirety of Christendom, waiting to bring the same ‘tyrannie de la domination’ to which the Greek archipelago was subjected.26

24

Said, Orientalism, pp. 108-109. Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 181. 26 Du Loir, p. 18. 25

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An Orient of Religion The threat which the Ottoman Empire was perceived to hold for Europe was further reinforced by a religious opposition in which Europe was inevitably portrayed as a Christian union. Travellers to the Near East devoted considerable space to describing its religions and rites, and were unanimous in depicting the degraded state of oriental religion. This might, as in the case of Besson, entail compassion for nations who had not voluntarily cut themselves off from Christianity, such as Syria: Il est question d’agir & de prester quelque secours à tant de pauvres nations qui ne refusent pas, & qui le demandent. […] Cette Eglise de l’Orient lassée de ses misères, et aveuglée de ses larmes attend de l’Occident les plus pures lumieres de l’Evangile […]. J’avoue que le moisson n’est pas si abondante dans la Syrie, que dans les provinces de la Chine: […] il importe plus de conserver ou de recouvrer les anciennes conquestes, que d’en faire de nouvelles & que la misericorde vers nos Freres est plus pressante, que vers les Estrangers.27

This ‘Eglise de l’Orient’ is represented as a feminized autre chrétienne: weary, suffering, blinded by her tears, and imploring. Christianity is here assumed to exist in its pure state in the West, and it is the duty of the Christian to bring European enlightenment to a region in which religion was deemed to have degenerated. 28 Yet bringing assistance to these apparently unfortunate nations, while depicted as compassionate, also included a claim; they were former conquests which had to be retrieved. If Syrians were considered as brothers rather than foreigners, then they ‘belonged’ to the Occident. While, for Besson, the oriental church merited compassion and assistance, other 17th-century travellers like Boucher were vitriolic when referring to the Orthodox Christians who they blamed for having split Christianity:29

27

Besson, part 1, pp. 11-12. ‘La Religion a quitté, ce semble, ce pays & s’est retiré en Europe. Celle des Mahometans est au dehors; celle des Juifs, n’est que dans les Livres; & celle des Chrestiens, qui vivent dans l’Empire du Turc, est en plusieurs toute glacée, & presque mourante.’ Besson, part 2, p. 265. 29 Carnoy, p. 243. See for example Grelot, p. 188. 28

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Veiled Encounters Les Schismatiques sont pires que les Soldats de Pilate, car ceux là, ne diviserent que les robes de Jesus, & ceux-cy divisent son corps mystique, qui est l’Eglise.30

Among drunkenness and ignorance, the worst of the multiple vices attributed to them must surely have been their association with the Turk against Catholic Europe: Nous n’avons pas en tout l’Orient de plus grands ennemis que les Grecs, lesquels nous haïssent plus que les Turcs. Ils sont portez d’une telle haine contre nous, qu’ils prient Dieu tous les Dimanches & festes en leurs Liturgies, qu’il luy plaise conserver l’Orient en l’obeïssance du grand Turc, afin qu’ils ayent tousjours la liberté d’exercer leur Religion à leur mode…31

While Orthodox Christians were confined to the Near East or the fringes of Europe, another religious group, the Jews, continued to be vilified in traditional terms in accounts of the Near East: Cette race jadis benicte, aujourd’huy maudite, jadis Saincte, aujourd’huy prophane, jadis honorée de tous les hommes, maintenant detestée des hommes & des Anges, jadis heritiers de la Terre saincte, & maintenant miserablement vagabonde par l’Univers…32

Among the many unverifiable and problematic of vices attributed to Jews was saleté: Cette nation est si sale, & mal propre, que l’on ayme mieux une Turque de trente ans, ou une Grecque de vingt qu’une Juifve de quinze ans.33

Other supposed vices ranged from abandoning their faith for greed, or even murdering their baptized children, to various permutations on the finesse and malice Pierre Belon attributed to Jews in the mid-16th century, such as that of intrigue:34 30

Boucher, p. 567. Ibid., p. 568. 32 Ibid., p. 613. 33 La Boullaye, p. 35. 34 De l’Inconstance des Juifs en leur Religion. Eugène Roger (Recollet), La Terre Sainte ou Description Topographique tres-particuliere des saints Lieux & de la Terre de Promission (Paris: Antoine Bertier, 1664), pp. 375-376; ‘Changeant ce doux & honorable nom de pere avec ce cruel & infame tiltre de bourreau.’ Boucher, p. 625; ‘C’est la nation la plus fine qui soit, & la plus pleine de malice.’; Pierre Belon [151831

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De plus il y a dans Ispahan des Juifs, & des Banians ou Indiens idolatres. Les Juifs ne sont pas un fort grand nombre, & bien qu’ils paroissent assez gueux & miserables, ils ne le sont pas en effet. Ils s’intriguent selon leur coûtume dans plusieurs affaires, & si l’on veut vendre ou acheter quelque joyau de prix il ne faut que leur parler.35

That this intrigue is supposed by Tavernier to conform to a habitual trait of Jewish character indicates the role of a traveller/author’s cultural heritage in depicting a people who had long suffered from negative stereotyping both within and outside Europe. Such representations of Jews in the Near East, as with those of Orthodox Christians, are clearly attributable to long-standing European stereotypes, rather than being the product of encounters. Religious conflict within Christianity or the perception of threat to it might further complicate the depiction of oriental religions. Chardin, for example, writes: Les Chrêtiens apprennent dans l’Orient à conserver la paix entr’eux, & à demeurer en bonne intelligence, malgré la diversité de leurs sentimens. Il y a mille Sectes, et cependant on n’y connoist que deux Creances, la Chrêtienne, & la Mahometane.36

This conclusion was inseparable from Chardin’s position as a Protestant at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and simplifies the complexity of the religious composition of the Proche Orient so as to make it appear a tolerant and peaceful region. Chardin’s assertion is in contradiction with ecclesiastical writers, who depicted religious union in quite another manner. While the religions or sects of the Orient were generally distinguished by observers, the perception of threatened Christianity could lead some to associate non-Christians together in a problematic fashion. Besson, for example, portrays la Syrie Sainte as an assembly point of a wide variety of such non-Christians, rallying under the banner of Mohammed with seemingly no other interest but opposing Christianity:

1564], Les Observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables, trouvées en Grece, Asie, Judée, Egypte, Arabie, & autres pays estranges… (Paris: Chez Hierosme de Marnef, & la veufue Guillaume Cavellar, 1588), p. 400. 35 Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 421. 36 Chardin, p. 2.

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Mahomet triomphe dans le domaine de JESUS CHRIST, & les Mahometans s’y eslevent sur les ruines des Chrestiens. Toutes les Nations ennemies du Sauveur s’y sont assemblées, le Turc, l’Arabe, le Maure, le Juif, le Schismatique, l’Heretique.37

One must clearly regard any of the descriptions of the non-Christian religions, or nations which follow this extract with a great deal of suspicion. United by the text alone, these ‘ennemis du Sauveur’ are assembled by simple fact of their exclusion from a collectivity to which author and reader belong. The histories or cultures of all these peoples, themselves in varying rapports with one another at different periods, are erased by their being situated in relation to Christianity. That such a wide range of sects could be textually united under the image of a triumphant, usurping Mohammed illustrates as powerfully as Chardin’s citation the malleability of the image of the Orient. It must also demonstrate that reciprocity in encounter, at this era, at least between clerics and the people of the Near East, must have been extremely limited, to say the least. Furthermore, despite the fluidity of association between the Christian sects of the Orient and the apparently Christian union of Europe, the presence of Christian, or Jewish nations in the East was ultimately depicted as being under the dominance of the Prophet.

Depicting the Muslim The most prevalent religious presence in the Near East is that of Islam, and a great amount of space was devoted by writers to describing Muslim customs, to the extent of the subject being perceived as having saturated the interest of readers by the later years of the 17th century. 38 Travellers continued to recount their visual testimony, rendered imperfect both by a partial exclusion (as Christians) from access to Muslim ceremonies, and also by an inability to understand the place held by what rites they did observe within Islamic culture. The result was the conclusion that Islam only 37

Besson, part 1, p. 9. ‘Il y a tant de gens qui ont écrit de la Loy de Mahomet, qu’il n’est pas necessaire de rebatre ici cette matiere.’ Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 423. ‘Il y a tant de personnes de qui ont écrit la vie de Mahomet, qu’on n’en peut presque rien dire qui n’ait desja esté dit.’ Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant, p. 72. 38

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consisted in external manifestations of religion with no basis in faith, as Grelot writes of the legendary Muslim netteté: Tous ces peuples en ont fait un principe fondamental, ou pour mieux dire, toute l’essence de leur Religion, qui ne consiste que dans des ceremonies exterieures.39

Grelot’s other accounts of circumcision, prayers, or temples, suffer from the same innate fault; as a non-Muslim, he was incapable of apprehending any of these religious manifestations in the same manner as a Muslim.40 Doomed to consider them from the outside (both culturally and physically speaking), he attributes them the same absence of meaning that he himself experiences. The exclusion of other travellers leads them to a number of responses: for Besson, as has been seen, Muslims were antipathiques to Christians. 41 Other factors, such as the appearance of Mohammed after that of Christ, and the place of the Judeo-Christian tradition within Islam, seem to have made it impossible for the Christian observer to depict Islam in any other way but as an offshoot of Christianity. Ethnocentrism, for the 17th-century Christian, appears to have been greatly compounded by theological certainty. Yet the institution of Islam was also seen as a corruption of extant doctrines, as a deliberate alteration of Judeo-Christian heritage, and was relegated to the status of a degradation of Christianity. The most widely-practised religion in the Near East was thus depicted as nothing more than an inferior modification of ‘complete’ Christianity, as for Baudier in 1625: La nature du Singe est de n’avoir aucune action propre à luy, que la ridicule imitation de celles des autres animaux: & le propre de l’erreur est de contrefaire l’exterieur de la verité, en imiter l’ornement, mesme jusques en tenir le langage. Ce qui se void manifestement aujourd’huy dans la Turquie, où les infideles visitent les saincts lieux que les Chrestiens reverent, & se parans d’un feint exterieur, y font leurs oraisons, & leurs vœux.42

39

Grelot, pp. 231-232. See Carnoy, pp. 244-245. Ibid., p. 212; p. 255; p. 264. 41 As in Besson’s previously quoted L’Antipathie de la Syrie & de l’Europe, La Syrie Sainte, part 2, p. 250. 42 Michel Baudier, Histoire Generale de la Religion des Turcs (Paris: Claude Cramoisy, 1625), p. 312. 40

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The dominant religion of one society, from an ethnocentric perspective, could – or had to, when a writer practised a religion demanding exclusivity from its adherents – thus be reduced to the status of a deliberate travesty of that of another. For other travellers, the perception that Islam was an offshoot of Christianity gave rise to confusion, as in Thévenot’s assertion that it had been purposely created to attract the Jews and Christians of the East: Mahomet, qui estoit Arabe, & homme sans science, (car les Turcs mesmes avoüent qu’il ne sçavoit ny lire ny ecrire) s’estant associé d’un Moine Grec nommé Sergius, lequel avoit abandonné son Convent; ce Moine qui sçavoit quelque chose, luy fit jetter les fondemens de cette grande & damnable secte qui a jusqu’icy infecté une bonne partie du monde. Il se servit de l’ancien & nouveau Testament pour composer l’Alcoran, afin d’attirer tant les Chrestiens que les Juifs, & le tout assez confusément.43

The accounts of the origins of Islam are unanimous in ascribing earthly motives to its practices, and describe the wish of the Prophet to attract worshippers by any means possible, as Nicolas Bénard writes: Et afin d’attirer aussi de son party les Arabes, Mores & Sarrazins nations fort adonnees à la luxure & paillardise, & pour les gratifier en imitant les Nicolaïtes, il leur permit d’avoir & prendre quatre femmes & aussi d’avoir tant de concubines & d’esclaves qu’ils pourront...44

Luxure and paillardise were also considered essential features of Muslim identity, and by attributing these vices to the supposedly original Muslims, Bénard made use of an existing stereotype to question the roots of their religion. Similarly, Jacques de Bourges writes: Les Mahometans sont accoustumez à une vie si voluptueuse, que bien que l’on les convainque de leurs erreurs, il ne s’en montrent souvent que plus opiniastres & plus éloignez de leur conversion, tant il est difficile d’assujettir à la pureté de nostre sainte Religion, ceux qui mettent leur félicité dans les plaisirs de la vie.45

43

Thévenot, Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant, p. 72. Similarly, Philippe writes of the venin of Islam. Philippe, pp. 328-329. 44 Bénard, p. 322. 45 Bourges, 1668, p. 87.

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For Bourges, sensual pleasure is seen as the basis of a faith – an unshakeable faith – in which Muslims persist even after their errors have been exposed. For Chinon, as with Baudier, the prophet had modelled Islam on his personal temperament, and incontinence was seen as the foundation behind the teachings of Mohammed: L’incontinence de Mahomet lui a fait trouver d’étranges moyens pour assouvir sa brutalité, & pour contenter autant qu’il se pouvoit, ces effeminez qui voudroient suivre sa Religion.46 Les lascivitez du Prophete des Turcs, dans lesquelles il a logé les delices de son Paradis, & celles que ses sectateurs pratiquent eshontément, y sont escrites le plus honnestement que j’ay peu.47

This supposed incontinence was a characteristic which, along with the apparent essence of faith in external appearance, must have especially jarred with the Catholicism of the French Counter-Reformation. Extensive elaborations on the ‘Paradise’ of Islam further portrayed it as a place of material, sensual, pleasures: Le paradis imaginaire que Mahomet promet à ses Musulmins & fideles sectateurs de sa loy n’est remply que de delices, gourmandises & voluptez charnelles & mondaines […]. Et ce qui baille encores plus subject de rire, c’est qu’ils seront tous assis dans des belles chaizes d’or & d’argent, […] leur sera presenté à chacun d’eux une belle nimphe & pucelle paree de toutes sortes d’ornemens precieux, avec laquelle ils prendront tous plaisirs charnels qu’ils se pourront adviser durant cinquante ans […]. Il y a encores plusieurs autres folies & resveries que l’on pourroit raconter sur ce subject contenues en l’Alcoran & moins apparentes de la verité que ne sont les fables de bonnes femmes.48

Here, Bénard’s repeated insistence that this Paradise was, in fact, a source of ridicule, justifies the detailed portrayal of earthly ‘voluptez charnelles’, dramatically at odds with the aspirations of CounterReformation piety. As well as appearing to have as their origin the mutation of Christian doctrine, the articles of faith attributed to Islam might, in many respects, clearly be represented as their inversion. For De Vergoncey in 1615, the Turc (a term frequently used in an interc-

46

Chinon, p. 104. Baudier, Histoire Generale de la Religion des Turcs, 1625, Préface, non-paginated. 48 Bénard, pp. 328-330. 47

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hangeable manner to mean a follower of Islam) expressly took Christian norms as a point of reference from which to differ:49 Comme le Turc entre les autres nations hayt plus le Chrestien, aussi s’efforce-il à le contrarier de tout poinct, & rendre ses actions de tout en tout repugnantes aux actions plus civiles & Chrestiennes...50

The chapter from which this quotation is taken, Comme les Turcs sont du tout contraires aux Chrestiens, de leur superstition & grandes incredulitez, & de leur ridicule Caresme, depicts Muslim (equated with Turk) rites as the deliberate perversion of those of Christianity, instigated by a people whose existence was, seemingly, principally devoted to offending another. For others, a comparison of the role of Muslim religieux with that of French clergy is to the detriment of the ‘Dervis turcs’ and ‘Sofis persans’ which Coppin and Chinon (both clerics) attempted to describe: Ces Religieux & tous les Turcs en general sont fort ignorants, ces peuples ne cultivent aucune science, & ils mettent toute leur plus grand capacité à sçavoir lire l’Alcoran.51 Ces Sofis […] sont des Religieux Persans qui vivent en communauté, avec toutes les apparances imaginables de sainteté; mais dans le fonds il sont des hipocrites, & pires que les plus méchans.52

The ignorance or hypocrisy attributed to both groups of Muslim religieux were unreligious characteristics which denigrated the consideration of Islam as a faith, in comparison with the selfperception of Christianity. Even if a process of superposition of the categories of religious office, similar to that by which Bernier compared Indian fakirs to hermits, might be responsible for some of this condemnation, the inexact use of equivalence in terms (like equating priests with Sofis) does little to explain the breadth of such generalizations. The level to which Chinon could establish what these Sofis actually thought or felt ‘dans le fonds’, not to mention the significance of the access Coppin would have had to Muslim learning, 49

‘Quant je di Turque j’enten generallement Muhamedique, de quelque nation que soit.’ Postel, pp. 39-40. 50 De Vergoncey, 1615, p. 515. 51 Coppin, p. 231. 52 Chinon, p. 27.

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are clearly problematic. The effect, at least, is constant: the reiteration that Muslim ‘clergy’ possessed character traits and indulged in behaviours which were no better than those of the practitioners to which they would, in a religious hierarchy equated to Christianity, be assumed to be morally superior. This attribution of vice to Muslims, and to their ‘clergy’ – by ecclesiastical writers, as was most often the case – was capped by the person of Mohammed in whom ‘oriental’ vices such as lustfulness, falsehood, or ignorance were frequently encapsulated.53 The carnal, hypocritical and earthly traits attributed to Mohammed seem to have automatically invited comparison with the purity and truth of the figurehead of Christianity – Christ. In Dominique Carnoy’s view, this is because of a misunderstanding of the place of the former in Islam: Enfermé dans sa propre foi, le chrétien […] ne dispose pas des outils intellectuels nécessaires pour reconnaître que le prophète de l’Islam n’a qu’un rôle de messager et que la vénération dont les musulmans l’entourent est totalement différente de celle que les Chrétiens vouent à la figure de Christ.54

Here too, the apprehension of a religious rite or figure in one culture by allocating to it the place occupied by one from another was bound to lead to a problematic result. Nevertheless, the prophet had also come to symbolize the Orient, as in Besson’s depiction of a triumphant Mohammed leading his followers over the ‘ruines des Chrestiens’, in a manner that cannot simply be ascribed to the misunderstanding generated by the encounter of two cultural systems. Entire populations of peoples were depicted as following a supremely irreligious head of Islam, leading to the attribution to them of a wide variety of negative traits of character: Or je ne me serois tant arresté à escrire toutes les extravagance & actions ridicules de ces nations Orientales, sinon pour te ramentevoir (ô Lecteur) l’obligation singuliere que nous avon toy & moy à la bonté divine, de nous avoir faict naistres non perfides comme Turcs, non inhumains, comme Mores, non sauvages comme Arabes, non obstinez en l’ignorance du Messie comme Juifs, & non retranchez de l’Union de l’Eglise comme ces pauvres Schismatiques.55 53

Carnoy, pp. 213-227. Ibid., pp. 217. 55 Boucher, p. 677. 54

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Here, the Cordelier Boucher places ethnic divisions (Turks, Moors and Arabs) alongside the religious identities of ‘schismatic’ and ‘heretic’. His descriptions of all of these nations attempt to prove the good fortune of Christians not to have been born amongst any of them, and not to have inherited by birth the unenviable traits that characterize each. However, most of his vitriol is dedicated to the followers of Islam, in ‘un epilogue & sommaire des mœurs & humeurs de ces trois sectes Mahommetanes’:56 Les Turcs sont vains, les Mores vilains, les Arabes inhumains. Les Turcs sont glorieux, les Mores envieux, les Arabes seditieux. Les Turcs sont guerriers, Les Mores sont fiers, les Arabes meurtriers. Les Turcs sont subtils, les Mores incivils, les Arabes du tout vils…57

That the traits which are attributed to each group of Muslims are dictated by the rhyming scheme of each line surely highlights the interchangeability, for this author, of their ‘mœurs et humeurs’. Although practising the same religion, considerable cultural differences existed between these three sectes which are essentially disregarded, and they are united by the author through negative character traits which he would not, one assumes, ascribe to Christians. Whatever the circumstances of encounter with Muslims actually were for Boucher, his text evidently confuses, rather than reflects, any observations, however flawed, that might have been made in the first place. Furthermore, even in the most scholarly accounts, such character traits are extended far beyond the level of the individual to reflect on the Muslim state, and especially, on the uneasy coexistence of Islam and Christianity: L’Histoire de la Religion Musulmanne ne sera pas moins particularisée dans la Bibliotheque Orientale, que l’Histoire des Princes qui en ont fait profession. Son accroissement sera inseparable de leurs conquestes, & les mêmes Princes pour mieux faire observer leurs Loix, profiteront de la fausse persuasion de leurs sujets, & n’en établiront que de conformes au texte de l’Alcoran, afin que leur infraction soit regardée comme un attentat à la Religion, maxime principale par laquelle la doctrine perverse de Mahomet qui a causé de si grands dommages au Christianisme, est suivie depuis tant de siecles par ce nombre prodigieux de Sectateurs.58 56

Ibid., p. 673. Ibid., p. 674. 58 D'Herbelot, Preface, non-paginated. 57

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Here, D’Herbelot unequivocally attributes the domination of the subjects by the oriental monarchy to Islam, which he depicts as a tool used by cynical Princes to more efficiently rule the people. Moreover, this ‘doctrine perverse’ is also represented as a direct, long-standing threat to Christendom itself. The multitudes of its followers, as Baudier writes, besiege the Church, and actively continue to encroach on its dominions: Or de toutes les persecutions dont les Infidelles vous ont affligée, celle des Arabes, Sarrasins, & Turcs, dure plus constamment en ses violences, & occupant les meilleures parties de la terre, ravit à vostre domination tant de milliers d’ames que ses erreurs possedent en les perdant: elle s’efforce de déthroner Dieu du Ciel, & ravir à JESUS-CHRIST Roy du monde vostre espoux, la couronne de la Divinité.59

As well as being a territorial domination which occupies ‘les meilleures parties de la terre’, the spiritual domination of Islam possesses its adherents while simultaneously damning them. Significantly, the threat to both the Church and ‘la couronne de la Divinité’ is represented by the double use of the verb ravir. Here, both Christianity and Islam are implicitly gendered into feminine victim and masculine ravisseur/persécuteur, and as De Vergoncey’s account of the fall of Constantinople makes clear, this gendering is often explicit: Ce Mahomet second […] apres avoir exercé toutes les cruautez qui se peuvent imaginer à l’endroict des vaincus qui se rendoient à luy, […] fit un bordeau public aux despens de l’honneur des preude-femmes, & de la virginité des pauvres filles abandonées.60

The exact nature of the threat from the East is described in a manner intended to inspire the maximum of outrage in the reader. The followers of a faith which was supposed to have been inspired by a lascivious masculine figurehead, are blatantly depicted as a direct threat to the female-gendered Church, or to the honour or virginity of Christian women.

59

Baudier, Histoire Generale de la Religion des Turcs, 1625, A l’Eglise de Dieu, nonpaginated. 60 De Vergoncey, p. 505.

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The Holy Land Among those lands perceived to be suffering the ‘captivité misérable’ of the Ottoman Empire, that of the Holy Land inspired most outrage in French observers. Voyages, pilgrimages and descriptions of the Holy Land refer repeatedly to the incursion of the Oriental, and the sense that the Terre du Christ ‘belonged’ to Christianity and had been usurped from it was the most keenly-felt evidence of invasive oriental power.61 As with the French authors who lamented the fallen state of the regions which had once been home to Greek and Roman civilizations, those who described the Holy Land also insisted on its ruined and desolate character (which Père Joseph Besson characterized as the result of an unlikely coalition of nonChristians). However, the occupation of the Holy Land was much more highly charged for Christians. Its history, based on the religious authority of the Bible, unlike the purely secular authority of the Classics, meant that Christian narrators were faced with the occupation of sites inseparably identified with their own religion, and their desecration inspired outrage. While Antoine Galland might deplore the Turkish re-use of Roman ruins, it was quite a different matter to alter Christian sites. Scripture and biblical history furnished constant reminders of the usurpation, and the invasion of the Holy Land appeared inescapably evident to the traveller. This continuity between biblical history and what would now be called ‘secular’ history also had the effect of mixing events of what, to a modern observer, are of terrestrial, political significance, with those cited in Scripture. Eugène Roger’s La Terre Sainte thus places the invasion of the Ottoman into a direct historical chain of events from biblical times through events such as the invasion of the Arabs or the later arrival of Godefroy de Bouillon. 62 The connection between the Holy Land and Christianity even includes the claim Que le Paradis terrestre a esté en la Terre que nous appellons Terre de Promission, backed up by secular historians such as Bede or Theophilus, proving the continuity in history. 63 That earthly Paradise had been located in a region which was now under the control of 61

Even if the Holy Land, as Martino points out, was never itself considered part of the Orient. Martino, pp. 19-20. 62 Roger, p. 41. 63 Ibid., p. 7.

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infidels was an extremely powerful claim. Contained within it was the implication – and no doubt, the unspoken hope – that this infidel occupation of a place which had originally belonged to Christianity must ultimately cease. Many narratives of pilgrimages, even if they are Voyages, consist of nothing more than the insertion of a new narrator in a wellworn route along sites of purely biblical significance. 64 These sites assumed a physical reality that rendered Scripture present, through the evidence of remains which were still visible and tangible to voyagers such as the anonymous Narbonnais who writes: Ce fut là où Esaü se réconcilia avec Jacob son frère, dont ledit Jacob en mémoire de ce y fit batir ledit pont où le Jourdain passe dessous.65

Even Saint-Germain’s account of the eighty-year-old Hélène Chéron’s voyage to the Holy Land is original only in utilizing a chronology which follows that of Scripture as opposed to the order in which she encountered holy sites: Elle visita devotement toutes les places & tous les endroits esquels ont esté operez les sacrez Mysteres de nostre Redemption, que je remarqueray icy non suivant la situation & la proximité des lieux, mais selon les temps de la naissance de la vie, des Predications, des Miracles, de la Mort & Passion, Apparitions, & Ascension de Nostre Seigneur.66

Her subjective input is limited to emotional reactions towards these very sites, and the account of her voyage almost completely ignores any evidence of Muslim presence. 67 This approach was typical of accounts of Christian pilgrimages, which aimed to edify the reader by recounting the visit to biblical sites significant for events long 64

Carnoy, p. 60. J. Tissier, ed., Voyage d’un Narbonnais en Terre Sainte en 1620 (Narbonne: Imprimerie F. Caillard, 1906), p. 13. The editor, however, does identify the author as a certain ‘LeNoir’. ‘Dehore de ladite église se voit une piece de colonne où le coq chanta dessus et le lieu où était le feu où Saint-Pierre se chauffait et où maintenant y a un bel oranger.’ Ibid., p. 18. 66 Saint-Germain, pp. 41-42. Pages 43-72 are almost exclusively limited to enumerating these sites. 67 ‘Son cœur fut transpercé du glaive de douleur & d’amertume au jour & à l’heure qu’elle se transporta au Torrent de Cedron, que est en la Vallée de Iosaphat.’ SaintGermain, pp. 46-47. 65

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predating the birth of Islam. However, the Muslim was noticeably omnipresent in other texts, seemingly converting the churches of powerless Christians into mosques, if financial payment was unforthcoming. 68 Frequently, the current situation of biblical sites assumed a deeply troubling physical reality for the Christian traveller: C’est le même lieu où N.S. Jésus Christ apparut à ses apôtres après sa résurrection, où il mangea le miel et poisson rôti. Ladite église sert maintenant à mettre les vaches des maures et juifs qui y demeurent.69

Neglect was often accompanied by deliberate Turkish desecration such as that observed by Roger in Nazareth: Depuis que le Sultan Soliman se fut emparé de toute la Terre Sainte, Nazareth fut abandonnée des Chrestiens, à cause de la tyrannie des Turcs: dont la malice fut si grande, qu’ils acheverent de ruiner ce sacré lieu, leur rage passa jusques là, qu’ils ne se contenterent pas de démolir l’edifice, mais mesme ils comblerent les ruines d’immondices & de fumier, afin de faire perdre aux Chrestiens la memoire de ce lieu.70

In both extracts, Christian sites which – being sacred – should have been inviolable, are portrayed instead as being profoundly, and constantly, physically debased by the contemporary occupants of the Holy Land. While authors regularly insisted on the other outrages of Turks – the insults, the blows which could not be retaliated against, and even the utimate sacrifice of martyrdom, of which Eugène Roger wrote at length – the occupation of the sites of the Holy Land was consistently represented by images of violation which outraged Christian observers like Coppin:71 Ils ne se contentent pas de luy avoir usurpé les lieux qu’il a consacrez par sa presence, & où il a épanché tout son sang pour le prix du Salut du Monde, ils viennent encore tous les jours à l’opprobre de son Nom empieter sur son Royaume Sacerdotal qui fait le plus cher de son heritage, & par l’abom68 ‘Et bien que tous les Marchands joints avec le Consul de France & de Venise, ayent employé toute leur faveur & celle de leurs amis avec plus de douze mille sequins, ils n’ont jamais pu retirer cette Eglise, laquelle est demeurée Mosquée.’ Roger, p. 443; Furetière refers to the conversion of churches in the entry Mosquée, II, non-paginated; also Coppin, p. 441. 69 Tissier, ed., p. 14. 70 Roger, p. 60. 71 Carnoy, pp. 202-203; Roger, pp. 436-7, p. 442.

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ination dont parloit le Prophete, ériger des Trophées à l’impiété sur les ruines de son Evangile.72

The depictions that Catholic observers have left of this usurped Christian heritage are frequently tainted in such a manner by an intensification of their emotive and dramatic import.73 While the strength of such depictions was partly due to the need of the members of different religious orders to maximize support for their missions’ benefit, this was achieved by a vocabulary which merely crystallized a widespread perception of the nature of this usurpation.74 Powerless to intervene against the Ottoman whose presence was a consistent source of discontent, the narrator could only reply by a virtual response which saw divine intervention justifying the right of Christianity. Roger saw the division of the Arabs as having been divinely permitted for ‘la conservation de l’Asie’, while others recounted mysterious infractions to the natural order:75 Les Turcs qui avoient abattu une belle Eglise bâtie au dessus de la Sainte grotte vouloient aussi la renverser, & avoient commencé de rompre cette colonne, lorsque tout à coup une extrême épouvante les ayant saisis ils se mirent en fuitte & pas un d’eux n’osant plus entreprendre une semblable chose, ils remplirent les deux Chappelles d’immondices...76 De là à une autre petite ville qui s’appelle Veticelle habitée des grecs, d’autant que les Turcs n’y pouvoient habiter: que s’ils y désirent demeurer et habiter, dans trois jours meurent.77

Turkish infractions of the divine order call up a corresponding infraction of the natural order, that of the miracle. While the occurrence of miracles is not surprising in texts which, as well as being accounts of voyages, were also works of popular piety, they also reflect the place of this infidel Oriental in the Terre Sainte. For, while Ottoman ubiquity was an inescapable fact, the occurrence of miracles 72

Coppin, pp. 1-2. Du Loir refers to the ‘orgueilleuse domination’ (Epistre, non-paginated), Besson to Mohammed’s ‘Triomphe dans le domaine de JESUS CHRIST.’ Besson, part 2, p. 9. 74 Saint-Germain, p. 78. 75 ‘Dieu permettant cette division pour la conservation de l’Asie, laquelle ils [les Arabes] ruyneroient & saccageroient infailliblement si leurs forces & leurs armes estoient unies.’ Roger, p. 232. 76 Coppin, p. 438. 77 Tissier, ed., p. 23. 73

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assured the persistence of Scripture, the continual presence – on another, invisible, plane – of Christianity. On the divine level, Christian miracles still occurred and comforted an acute sense of loss. This was further comforted by reports that the very infidels who oppressed Christianity seemed, as Coppin hints in Nazareth, to themselves believe in its miracles: Les deux colomnes qui sont au lieu de l’Annonciation sont assez grosses, […] & celle qui est rompuë fait tous les jours de grandes merveilles, les femmes qui sont enceintes en s’y venant frotter enfantent heureusement, & en y touchant du dos on est délivré de toute sorte de douleurs de reins, en sorte que non seulement les Nations Chretiennes, mais aussi les infidelles y accourent pour recevoir la guerison.78

While the willingness of the infidels to avail of this site seems at odds with contemporary affirmations of the strength of Muslim faith, divine intervention is certainly a continuous narrative convention to which travellers, especially members of religious associations, attributed their escape from the many dangers faced during the voyage. 79 Despite the absence of the guarantees of visual evidence and witness testimony on which other phenomena in travel literature depended, such miracles continued to furnish narrative responses to the knowledge that Christianity was very much in an inferior position. The only recourse of the traveller was the hope that the divine order would one day be re-established – that the Holy Land would return to Christianity, and Tissier’s pilgrim enter, sword in hand, or that Beauvau might surpass his Relation Journalière in a similar manner:80 Ma vacation demanderoit plutost de vous suivre à la conqueste de ces Royaumes avec l’espée, que de vous en faire le rapport avec la plume.81

In fact, for many travellers, it was precisely to France that the duty of removing Islam from the Holy Land – or other areas of the Orient – fell, as in the prophecy recounted by Carré:

78

Coppin, p. 438. Divine intervention was not restricted to the Holy Land; see Rhodes in Tunquin: baptesmes, miracles ordinaires, guerison des malades, in Sommaire des divers Voyages et Missions (Paris: Chez Florentin Lambert, 1653), pp. 44-45. 80 ‘Dieu me fasse la grâce d’y pouvoir entrer un jour l’épée à la main.’ Tissier, p. 29. 81 Beauvau, Relation Journalière…, A Prince Henry de Lorraine, non-paginated. 79

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De tous les Pelerins qui voyagent sur le Liban, ceux que l’on reçoit le mieux sont les Chrétiens François: cela vient d’une tres-ancienne Prophetie, celebre parmi les Chrétiens de Syrie, que porte que leur liberté viendra d’un Roy de France, destiné de Dieu pour soûmettre le Turc, & pour relever l’étandart de la Croix dans tous les endroits où l’on ne voit aujourd’huy que le Croissant.82

This sentiment, according to De Vergoncey, was due in part to the history of the Crusades (hence the outrage of Franco-Turkish alliance): Mais quant aux Chrestiens que les Turcs ont le plus en horreur & redoutent davantage, sont les meilleurs & plus anciens les Chrestiens François, d’autant que ce sont ceux qui les ont mieux espoussetez le temps passé aux guerres de la Terre saincte, comme il se remarque en nos annales & autres histoires sainctes & prophanes.83

However, the fact remained that the reports contained in the annals of French success in the Crusades were limited to a past which long preceded the 17th century, and any horreur and fear that the Turks might in fact have experienced would appear wholly unjustified. French representation of the Holy Land was inevitably though the optic of history, the Bible and the Classics, and it was historical precedent, the evidence of the Bible or antiquity which all condemned its current situation.

Persians and Turks Given so many negative depictions of the Turkish presence in the Orient, most travellers were greatly surprised when they encountered, as they frequently did, an absence of hostility, or were even greeted with hospitality in the Near East. For Guillaume Postel in 1560, the reason for this was directly linked to life at the Court: Tous hommes sont enclins a mal, & a la pire partie, & tant plus, quant moins sont instruis: dont il advient certe communement que les Muhamediques ont de plus mauvais garçons entr’eus, quant aus estrangers, que nous n’avons deça. Je di aus estrangers, car entr’eus certes il n’en ont la disme de deça: sauf les Mores. Mais ce que j’en diray ce sera pour le plus

82 83

Carré, I, pp. 349-350. De Vergoncey, p. 521.

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Postel, stating that Turks are subject to the same influences as the rest of humanity, strips them of otherness and makes them as subject to the mal that is court life as French society had been, in the past as well as the present. Of course, rather than attempting the rehabilitation of Turks, the author is attempting to explain possible reasons for their reputation as ‘mauvais garçons’, but nevertheless, by attributing a common cause to a common evil.85 Similarly, if 17th-century travellers like Du Loir were relatively surprised by Turkish good nature, it was in comparison to what was previously expected: Je vous diray donc quant aux Turcs, qu’il ne faut pas les croire si grossiers & si brutaux que plusieurs se les sont imaginez, & certainement si l’equité est plus considerable que la politesse dans les mœurs, ils ne sont pas moins gens de bien que nous […]. Naturellement ils sont bons, & il ne faut pas dire que le climat les rend tels, puis que les Grecs naissent dans le mesme pays, avec des inclinations si differentes, qu’ils n’ont retenu de leurs ancestres que les mauvaises qualitez: à sçavoir, la fourberie, la perfidie & la vanité. Les Turcs au contraire, font particulierement profession de la sincerité & de modestie, & si vous en exceptez les courtisans qui presque tous, & par tout sont esclaves de l’ambition & de l’avarice, la simplicité & la candeur regnent chez eux avec une franchise sans pareille.86

The widespread role of inherited imagination is recognized here by Du Loir, who sees the climate theory as incapable of explaining the differences between the deceitful and vain Greeks and the ‘gens de bien’ who are the Turks. The qualities of the Turk are those of virtue as opposed to graceful manners, and as with Postel, it is the courtesans who are the exception to a people who are otherwise refreshingly simple and candid. It may seem unusual that a travel writer should praise such personal qualities, if the sense of Ottoman threat is as deeply imbedded as other accounts indicate, but Du Loir’s praise, as with Postel’s, can only be understood in comparison with the existing 84

Postel, p. 68. The purpose of his account being ‘de vous monstrer par exacte description, quelles forces a vostre plus apparent ennemy, affin que les congnoissant, vous preparés a les debiliter…’ Postel, Au Roy dauphin, non-paginated. 86 Du Loir, p. 166. 85

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reputation of the Turk. For, if ‘plusieurs se les sont imaginez’, this author is essentially affirming the originality of his own description through that recurrent device of the travel narrative, the contradiction of the testimony of others.87 Arriving armed with the preconceptions of literary heritage, it is in reaction against these that the traveller recounts the surprisingly honest decency of the Turk. For still others, the Ottoman Court itself was a school for Politics governed by sound reason: J’ay ouï dire à Monsieur Quirini, en des Visites que j’ay eu l’honneur de luy faire, que la Politique des Turcs passoit de beaucoup celle des Europeans: qu’elle n’étoit point renfermée en des maximes, & des regles, qu’elle consistoit toute dans le bon sens, étant toute fondée sur le bon sens, & ne se remuant que par le bon sens. […] Il assuroit, que s’il avoit un Fils, il ne luy donneroit point d’autre école de Politique que la Cour Ottomane.88

However, in the 17th century, it was the kingdom of Persia which, among the Muslim peoples, was attributed the greatest level of honnêteté and of civilization in mœurs. Tavernier praised the civility of the Persians, ‘où les esprits sont plus rafinez & les plus grands politiques de toute l’Asie,’ while La Boullaye’s reception in Persia was disappointing precisely because it contradicted his preconceptions:89 je luy respondis […] qu’il me faisoit concevoir autre chose des Persans que ce que l’on m’en avoit dit en Europe, où on les croit civils & honnestes aux estrangers…90

Civility, honnêteté, and refinement were all traits consistently applied to Persia in the 17th century by authors who, even in the case of the ecclesiastic Bourges, contrasted the kingdom with the Ottoman Empire: Pour ce qui regarde l’instruction de ceux qui voudroient faire ce voyage, il est bon qu’ils sçachent que sortant de Turquie on quitte un Estat de

87

‘Ces Monsieurs voudroient bien qu’il fust aussi aisé de les voir qu’ils s’imaginent qu’elles sont belles & agreables…’ Du Loir, p. 170. 88 Chardin, p. 46. 89 Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 188. 90 La Boullaye, p. 89.

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Most remarkably, in an era when empathy with any eastern people was extremely rare, several texts even identify Persians with French. La Boullaye’s Rapport du Turq, Persan, & Arabe à l’Espagnol, François, & Italien attributes cruelty to the Ottomans/Spanish, while Persians had the best elements of French character: Dans le Gouvernement Ottoman, l’on ne pardonne aucune faute à ceux qui commandent, & l’on estrangle, ou l’on coupe la teste aux Chefs par maxime d’Estat, c’est la politique Espagnolle. […] Les Persans tiennent plus du naturel des François, donnent liberté de conscience, permettent de parler & disputer de la Religion aux naturels, & aux estrangers, confessent de bonne foy la perte d’une bataille, ou d’une ville; mais les Ottomans alleguent toujours quelque trahison qui en a esté la cause.92

This oft-admired freedom of conscience was supposed to contrast with other nations, and particularly with the Turk.93 For example, a 1631 pamphlet recounting the Turkish siege of Babylon is explicit in its equation of the French and Persian nations: ‘ceste nation guerriere qui est grandement conforme à la nostre’. 94 The Turkish invasion fails because of: La sotte & audacieuse temerité des infidelles, & principalement des Turcs, qui croyent que toutes choses leur sont deuës.95

By implication, Persians are therefore not infidèles to the same degree as Turks. A potential theological dilemma is further complicated by

91

Bourges, 1668, p. 88. La Boullaye., pp. 110-112. 93 ‘Ces superstitions [purification] ne sont pas observées des Turcs […] bien que les Chrétiens soient plus maltraités par eux que par les Perses, ils se plaisent toutefois davantage dans le païs du Turc, pour ne se point voir exposés à ces fantaisies d’impureté.’ Chinon, p. 91. Chinon’s preference for Turkish maltreatment to Persian superstitions is rare. 94 Anonymous, Relation de ce qui s’est passé entre les armées du Grand Seigneur & du Roy du Perse, depuis la fin de l’année mil six cens vingt-neuf jusques à present, où est descrit le troisiesme siege de Babylone (Paris: Chez Nicolas & Jean de la Coste, 1631), p. 3. 95 Ibid., p. 5. 92

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what the author identifies as another possible cause for the Turkish defeat: Voila ce que j’ay peu apprendre de tout le progrez des Turcs, il semble que Dieu se lasse de leur audace & tyrannie qui les perdra en bref.96

That divine intervention should work on behalf of one group of Muslims against another is a further, surprising, illustration of the empathy – in text at any rate – between Persians and the French reader. Yet La Boullaye concurs: Les nations estrangeres ont tousjours esté repoussez, lors qu’elles ont voulu envahir la Perse, y ayant un genie particulier, qui se porte protecteur de cette ancienne Monarchie.97

While the frequently mentioned ‘inimitié mortelle’ between Persians and Turks is attributed to religious differences, and mœurs and politesse distinguish their characters, the French attitude to their relationship is notable for being consistently more favourable to Persians.98 This may, to some extent, mirror the attempt at instigating a political relationship between the King of Persia and Henri IV at the turn of the 17th century, dictated by the sentiment of Ottoman threat.99 However, if the menace of the Ottoman Empire and the possibility of alliance with Persia (or at least, the perception that Persia did not actually threaten Europe) could lead to a sympathetic identification with the latter, a separation between Turcs grossiers and Persans aimables was often belied, in turn, by the testimony of the traveller.100 While Chinon asserts that Persians follow the form of Islam which is ‘la plus raisonnable’, he claims, nonetheless, that their clergy are hypocritical, and their religious feasts barbaric:

96

Ibid., p. 14. La Boullaye, p. 112. 98 For religious differences, see Chinon, pp. 2-3. 99 Bonnerot, 1988, p. 31. 100 ‘S’il est exact que depuis la deuxième moitié du XVIIe siècle l’on distingue dans les relations les Turcs grossiers des Persans aimables, la barbarie persane reste une formidable énigme.’ Bonnerot, p. 54. 97

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Veiled Encounters [Une] troupe de diablotins vont ainsi pêle mêle dans la place Royale, hurlans comme des loups: Mais cette journée lugubre ne se passe guere d’ordinaire, sans qu’ils s’entrebattent les uns les autres.101

In this vein, a project of marriage between the King of Persia and Mademoiselle d’Orléans inspired laughter because of ‘la folie & la temerité du personage’, and one assumes that this conclusion was due to the perception of a ludicrous match with a person of inferior social standing. 102 Persian forces were seemingly weak-willed, poor and debauched, but most incomprehensible for the voyager attempting the sympathetic depiction of Persia was what Bonnerot calls the ‘formidable énigme’ of Persian barbarity.103 The Persian monarchy was reputed to exercise a complete and despotic power over its subjects: Tavernier writes that an ambassador who makes a mistake on a diplomatic mission is publicly disembowelled, and recounts the following shocking anecdote of an architect who had just completed a construction for the King:104 L’architecte tout joyeux vint trouver le Roy qui mangeoit avec les Ambassadeurs, & l’avertir qu’il ne manquoit rien à l’ouvrage pour le bien finir, qu’une teste de quelque grosse beste qui en fit la pointe. Ce Prince dans la débauche, & pour faire voir peut-estre aux Ambassadeurs comme il est absolu sur ses sujets, se tournant brusquement vers l’Architecte; Tu as raison, luy dit-il, & on ne sçauroit trouver pour cela de teste plus propre que la tienne. Il falut que le mal-heureux Architecte donnât sa teste, & l’ordre du Roy fut executé en mesme temps.105

Tavernier furnishes another account of the ‘funeste spectacle’ of the Kanqui of Baghdad who exhorts his wife and son to follow him to their deaths by poisoning, which like the strangulations of the Ottoman Empire, helped demonstrate that Persia, as much as the Ottoman Empire, was governed by caprice and by arbitrary cruelty. 106 Despite frequent parallels, the Persians of the 17th century were ultimately irreconcilable with their French observers, by sharing in an 101

Chinon, p. 18; p. 27; p. 104. Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 191. 103 On Persian forces, see Chinon, pp. 62-63; pp. 72-73; Bonnerot, p. 54. 104 Chinon, p. 37; Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 414. 105 Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 384. 106 Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 209. On the strangulations of the Ottoman Empire, see Spon, I, p. 240; La Boullaye, p. 55. 102

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underlying – and fascinating – difference with what these observers attributed to their own culture.

Assuming an Oriental Identity In spite of this widely-acknowledged level of immense cruelty, the mœurs and refinement of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire and Persia continued to intrigue French travellers, and could inspire their own depiction in eastern clothing, or their adoption of the languages of the East. Tavernier’s advice for embarking in a desert caravan reserves ridicule for those who do not adopt local custom: Il faut s’ajuster selon la mode des pays où on doit passer, en Turquie à la Turque, en Perse à la Persienne, & qui en useroit autrement passeroit pour ridicule.107

This comment was of course intended as a piece of practical advice to permit the relatively painless inclusion of potential French travellers in desert caravans, but a subsequent portrait sees him wearing full Persian costume complete with pointed shoes/slippers, turban and robes. 108 Such depictions are not isolated, and François La Boullaye’s travel narrative is preceded by a frontispiece entitled: Portraict du Sieur de la Boullaye-le Gouz en habit Levantin, connu en Asie & Affrique sous le nom d’Ibrahim-Beg, & en Europe sous celuy de Voyageur Catholique.109

In this portrait, La Boullaye wears a turban, carries a shield and wears a sword and dagger among his robes, before a background of two globes, on one of which figures the signs of the zodiac, and the other representing the earth. Pétis de la Croix, the author of Thévenot’s voyage, is depicted in Persian costume in a contemporary miniature, and Thévenot himself is similarly portrayed in his frontispiece in

107

Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, 111. Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Baron d’Aubone en habit Persien, qui lui fut donné en 1665 par le Roy de Perse. Frontispiece of Tome 1 of Tavernier’s Six Voyages (Rouen: P. Le Boucher, 1713). 109 La Boullaye, frontispiece, non-paginated. 108

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turban and robes, dagger in belt, indicating a map of the Levant on which sits a globe. 110 The integration of travellers into this identity was supposedly so complete that La Boullaye claimed that he could pass for a Turk among the Persians, one of whom defended his mistreatment of the author as follows: Je ne te sçavois pas Frank, & jusqu’icy quel mal t’ay-je fait, je ne t’ay pas tué, qui t’auroit conneu pour homme de si loin avec l’habit de Keselbache, & la langue Turque que tu parle [sic].111

Grelot, vêtu à la Turque, recounts a slightly different encounter in Constantinople with some of his compatriots: Ils beurent si bien que ne songeant plus à retourner à leurs vaisseaux, ils commencerent à la Françoise à parler sur toutes sortes de sujets, & particulierement des femmes Gracques & Turques de cette Isle, & de tout l’Archipel, ne croyant pas qu’il y eust là personne qui pust entendre leur discours. […] Je leur dis en bon François, & de mesme que si j’avois esté en colere: En verité, Messieurs, il faut avoir beu & estre François pour pousser aussi loin que vous faites l’imprudence & la temerité, & pour venir insulter jusques chez nous à l’honneur de nos femmes; sachez qu’elles ont & par raison & par coûtume beaucoup plus de retenuë que les vostres, & quand mesme il s’en trouveroit d’assez malheureuses pour concevoir des pensées criminelles, le bon ordre qui s’observe dans tout cet Empire leur osteroit les moyens d’en venir à l’execution; […] vos Dames Françoises ne font pas difficulté d’aller se promener seules avec un gallant, & de recevoir mesme sans scrupule dans leurs ruelles des hommes qui leur content fleurettes…112

Here the narrator is able to adopt the appearance of the Oriental and to act as a mouthpiece for the perceived concerns of the latter, though these concerns might not be those which a native would share, given the opportunity to speak directly.113 However, while the purpose of this account, as is quite frequently the case with Grelot, was also humorous, the Turk the narrator represents is not necessarily 110

For the miniature of Pétis de la Croix see Père Raphaël Du eMans, Estat de la Perse e (1660), in Raphaël du Mans, missionaire en Perse au XVIIe siècle, 2 vols, ed. by Francis Richard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), II, pp. 118-119; For Thévenot see his Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant, frontispiece, non-paginated. 111 La Boullaye, pp. 89-90. 112 Grelot, pp. 10-11. 113 A procedure which the Lettres persanes was to repeat with considerable success.

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ridiculous, and provides a salutatory lesson to other, more frivolous French travellers. Such explicit adoption of visible or audible cultural traits by a narrator appears to valorize elements of the cultures that produced such costumes or langages. After all, if, for example, La Boullaye or Tavernier had been depicted in the (admittedly minimal) costume of a Cannibale, the value of their experience would not have been in any way heightened, and this depiction would have been ridiculous. 114 Despite the arbitrary cruelty attributed to the Near East, travellers testify to a wish to appropriate for themselves some of its external traits so as to valorize their own experience. As Requemora writes in relation to the image of the Orient in 17th-century theatre, the Orient could still be civilized: Société civilisée par excellence, différente en cela de l’Afrique ou de l’Amérique, l’Orient fascine par le faste et les intrigues de sérail faisant echo aux fastes et aux complots de Versailles.115

That in any form of literature or drama that is not deliberately designed to criticize French society, the Orient could mirror contemporary France, must surely reflect positively on the level of civilization attributed to the East (even if, as Requemora points out, the Orient is also ‘plus exacerbé en tout, plus passionné et plus sauvage’).116 However, while La Boullaye or others claim the ability to integrate, they also claim a superiority that is not reciprocal; there is no mention in the present corpus of travel narratives of a Persian or Turk successfully passing off as a European. These depictions serve first and foremost to prove the superiority and dedication of the individual voyager(s). That of Thévenot, for example, the voyageur parfait, shows the all-round completeness and thoroughness of his observations. The adoption of this ‘habit levantin’ enhanced the 114

Compare, for example, the many accounts of the Hottentots in Africa, who live ‘sans aucune loy n’y aucune discipline.’ L’Estra, 1677, p. 29. Also compare the descriptions of the Malagasy [Chapter 4 of present study] or on other continents, Pyrard and Dellon’s accounts of the Brésiliens [Chapter 1]; or of the ‘sauvages’ of Canada in Paul Le Jeune et al, Relations des Jésuites (Montréal: Éditions du Jour, 1972); Challe, I, p. 399. 115 Requemora, ‘Le Voyage dans le théâtre français du XVIIe siècle’, Irish Journal of French Studies, 4 (2004), 17-40, (p. 40). 116 Ibid.

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testimony and reputation of the traveller who, vaunting the ability to adopt oriental identity, is principally valorized. Of course, the apparent ability to move between cultures remained ultimately flawed for all those voyagers who claimed integration or dual identities as Levantins. They use the same devices to decipher oriental phenomena in order to display these to the French reader – including reference to Classical tropes or even ridicule – as those travellers who refused explicit eastern identity. As has been noted, Tavernier reduces a funeral rite in Baghdad to a comic spectacle reserved for the European reader, despite his adoption of Persian clothing. 117 Those traits that travellers might adopt and which might heighten the value of testimony, such as being depicted in ‘eastern’ clothing, might have appeared to belong to the Orient, but were, as much as the isolated descriptions of eastern clothing or artefacts, completely (and safely, in this case) decontextualized. Rather than a transformation of oneself, this was an inflation of one’s mobility or abilities, or of one’s status as a Cosmopolite, as Postel styled himself. 118 If this process contains elements of S. M. Islam’s ‘nomadic travel’, or has the potential to ‘fracture both a boundary and an apparatus of representation’, there is no question of a ‘joyful conjugation’ of cultures: it remained resolutely one-sided.119 Nevertheless, the fact that ‘becoming’ Persian or Turk – long before the question ‘comment peut-on être Persan?’ was ever asked – could act as self-inflation is representative of the relatively advanced level of civilization attributed to these peoples by the curieux, or parfaits voyageurs.120

117

Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 211. In his Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said has referred to Kipling’s Kim’s ‘inexhaustibly renewed capacity for disguises and adventure’ a ‘wish fantasy of someone who would like to think that everything is possible, that one can go anywhere and be anything’ – a fantasy expressed ‘over and over’ by T. E. Lawrence. Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 194. From this perspective, the case of the bourgeois traveller Tavernier is especially interesting. 119 Sayed Manzurul Islam, The Ethics of Travel, from Marco Polo to Kafka (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. vii; p. 211. 120 Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu [1689-1755], Lettres persanes (1721) (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1973), p. 105. 118

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The Temptation of the Orient: the Oriental Female and the Orient as Female Despite the ease of adopting oriental appearance, the blurring of identity boundaries between Christian and Oriental was not unproblematic. While one could adopt certain elements of eastern dress or language and heighten one’s status as traveller and the value of one’s experience, other elements were repeatedly warned against. The process of assuming oriental appearance or imitating certain oriental gestures was depicted, paradoxically, as potentially an extremely dangerous process. Warnings and anecdotes in travel narratives throughout the 17th century testify to a fascination with the theme of conversion to Islam, and with those Christians who actually did so.121 These former Christians, the renegades, who had abandoned their faith and adopted Islam were the object of constant condemnation by travellers to the Near East, and particularly to the Ottoman Empire, who insisted on the insidious danger of forsaking Christianity and adopting Islam in its place. How such conversions could be effected is revelatory of French perceptions of Islam in the Near East. Apparently, the voyage to the Levant necessitated constant vigilance in word and deed to avoid being faced with the choice between the relinquishment of Christianity or severe punishment, even death. The unwary Christian could quite simply ‘accidentally’ convert by a badly-chosen word or gesture. Entering a mosque, even mentioning the Prophet in any form, would result in a forcible conversion by Muslims eager to increase their number at any cost.122 So present was this danger that it even prevented the conscientious Grelot from including Muslim prayer in his text, lest it lead an unwary Christian to repeat it in the East and be forced to convert.123 Conversion to Islam could further be enforced because one accidentally made another sign, such as simply lifting a finger to the sky, despite one’s intentions, as Boucher recounts.124 The 121

The theme of conversion to Islam will be examined in greater detail in M. Harrigan, ‘Méchant Chrétien ne sera jamais bon Turc’ in Threat in French Cultural Studies, ed. by Georgina Evans and Adam Kay (Oxford: Peter Lang), forthcoming. 122 Postel, p. 40; Le Sieur Poullet, Nouvelles Relations du Levant (Paris: Louis Billaine, 1667), pp. 159-160. 123 Grelot, p. 256. 124 Boucher, p. 646. See also Postel, pp. 39-40.

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inexorable consequence of such accidental gestures would be the obligation to change religion – or face death by fire. The conversion would be finalized by the accomplishment of another rite, that of circumcision, marking the male Christian body for life with the sign of difference. This insistence on the (deliberate) misinterpretation of signs by watchful Muslims complements the misapprehension of Islam which had already led French observers to assume the religion consisted only in signs. If conversion would simply mean the adherence to rites alone, then implicitly, those who practised Islam were untroubled by the issue of faith, an issue that held considerable implications for 17th-century Europeans. Yet conversion to Islam could also be voluntary, the result of succumbing to illusory temptations. Antoine Galland’s stern warning to potential converts describes how a weak emotional state, or the consumption of wine is enough to lead renegades to utter la parole, where instead of finding an enviable new identity, they are despised for having relinquished their own faith.125 However, another even more insidious temptation supposedly lay in wait to trap the unwary Christian in the Near East. Onto the briefly glimpsed female inhabitants of Turkey was projected a great sexual appetite seemingly best whet by Christians: Les plus vives font quelquefois arrêter par leurs esclaves les gens les mieux faits qui passent dans le ruës. Ordinairement on s’adresse à des Chrétiens, & l’on n’aura pas peine à croire qu’on ne choisit pas les moins vigoureux en apparence.126

These liaisons with oriental women inspired as much commentary on their danger as they inspired fantasy on their frequency: Il arrive souvent dans Constantinople, que des jeunes hommes bien faits sont enlevez, lors qu’on n’a pû les pratiquer par quelque autre moyen. Il est neantmoins dangereux d’estre choisis pour ces bonnes fortunes. Apres que ces Dames en ont usé selon leurs desirs, Paribus lasciviis ad cupidinem & fastidium. Elles les font quelquefois secrettement mourir, craignant plutost le chastiment que l’infamie de l’adultere.127

125

Galland, Le Voyage à Smyrne, p. 131. Tournefort, II, p. 94. 127 Du Loir, pp. 178-179. 126

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Even were one to escape from the murderous intentions of these women, Christian-Muslim affairs led to a dreadful choice once known of, according to Tournefort among others: that of conversion or death. 128 Death, as Roger recounts, also awaited those who might attempt to convert back to Christianity from Islam.129 An agonizing complement to accidental conversions, Christians in the Near East could be easily enticed over the threshold separating them from the Muslim, but could never return. These warnings of forcible conversions or insatiable Turkish women were nonetheless scattered amongst chapters simultaneously reinforcing the functional, descriptive role of the travel narrative. In providing advice urging the traveller to avoid gestures and encounters which could lead to forcible conversion, the text potentially provides information at least as important as any lexicon or other paratext. Here however, the traveller is indisputably distanced from the first hand observation so often promised elsewhere in the text. While the traveller may even claim to have witnessed some of these conversions – Galland claims to have seen a drunken Englishman renege – the fascinating interest of the subject matter must surely have drawn the text itself progressively over a threshold refuted by the travel narrative, that of fiction, even of fantasy.130 This acknowledgement of the temptation of Islam – even given that the religion was supposedly based on words without meaning and (often unintentional) gestures – coexisted with the perceived impossibility of converting Muslims to Christianity. In Persia as in Turkey, the Muslim was accredited a level of faith which the Christian was unable to match: Dans l’entretien que nous eûmes avec ces Peres durant le sejour que nous fismes chez eux, nous apprismes la méme chose que nous avions apprise dans l’Estat du Turc, à sçavoir qu’il n’y a rien, ou fort peu à faire pour l’âvancement de la Religion avec ceux qui suivent l’Alcoran, estant beaucoup plus fermes dans leur creance que ne sont pas un grand nombre de Chrestiens dans celle de nostre sainte Foy.131

128

‘On les oblige à épouser leur galand, qui est condamné à mourir, ou à se faire Turc supposé qu’il soit Chrétien…’ Tournefort, II, p. 95. 129 Roger, p. 468. 130 Galland, p. 131. 131 Bourges, 1668, p. 73. See also Thévenot, Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant, pp. 71-72.

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Naturally, this conclusion could, in part, be taken as a reflection on the depth of faith of Christians, using the by now familiar strategy of depicting the characteristics of another society to criticize the failings of one’s own. Nevertheless, the frequency of the conclusion that Muslims – from all areas on the periphery of Christendom – were unconvertible, testifies to a lack of confidence in the proselytizing abilities of Christianity, and reflects the inability of Christian Europe to act and impact on the Near East. Islam, while theologically a heresy, despite the insistence that it was lust and other vices which formed its basis, was difficult to dismiss with the same ease one could ridicule the religions of little known indigenous peoples elsewhere in Asia, or in the Americas.132 The length of the testimonies recounting the nature of Muslim paradis bear witness to the fascination that it exerted on the French observer, and the tales of the renegades, to its potential to entice, and to transform. Ultimately, warnings about the dangers of conversion to Islam acknowledge its great power of temptation, which was at all times reinforced by an underlying menace. However, inseparable from the temptation of the Near East was the position of its female inhabitants, who were a constant source of fascination for the male traveller writing for a predominantly male readership. As the warnings of abductions in Constantinople will have hinted, much of the space devoted to women in the Orient relates either what is perceived as the cloistered and secluded nature of their existence, or – though linked – the simultaneous sexual potential the Orient was reputed to offer. This representation of women in the East was contemporaneous with the inevitable representation of the East as a female entity. Of course, representation of the continents as women in iconology was traditional, as in the numerous re-editions and translations in the 17th century of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593), but this, as in the text accompanying a 1660 engraving by Louis Colet, might be accompanied by the perception of the usurpation of Asia:133

132

Flacourt portrays the inhabitants of Madagascar as being excepted from ‘la Loy de Nature’, because of the existence of a ‘petit nombre de gens entachez de Mahometisme.’ Flacourt, Histoire, 1658, A Mesire Nicolas Foucquet, non-paginated. 133 Cesare Ripa, Iconologie…, trans. by J. Baudoin (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1987).

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De baumes, de parfums, de fruits, d’espiceries, De palmes, de cocos produitz en quantité, Je fournis tout le monde, et de mes pierreries, Les couronnes des rois tirent leur majesté. Cependant je languis sous le joug infidelle, Du funeste croissant et sans me secourir, On luy laisse usurper une terre si belle, Ou le divin Soleil voulu naistre et mourir.134

The potential gain from Asia (after the enumeration of its/her spices and natural products), was symbolic as well as material, prefiguring the glory and majesty that the possession of colonies would bring to a monarchy. However, references to the ‘joug infidelle’ and ‘funeste croissant’ insist on Muslim usurpation and incite intervention, lamenting the inaction of the European. This inaction is emphasized by the coincidence of the feminine imagery with verbs such as languir and secourir which underline the helplessness of Asia.135 Colet’s representation of the Femme-Orient invites the European to displace the tyrannical infidel who held her enslaved, and to take back this wrongfully occupied terrain. The 17th-century inhabitants of the region, depicted as its illegitimate occupants, were a presence which could – and had to – be removed. More discreet processes of personification indicate that this gendering of the Orient was a recurrent rhetorical trope. According to Grelot, for example, the Orient itself wished for the intervention of the West at the Hellespont: On est extremement satisfait de voir d’une seule œillade, l’Europe & l’Asie qui s’approchent si fort en cet endroit que l’on diroit qu’elles veulent s’embrasser pour s’unir ensemble sous un mesme Conquerant, ou qu’elles

134

My thanks to Dominique Torabi and Francis Richard for their assistance in locating this engraving. 135 On the relationship between the dessin allégorique and political ideology in the case of Jan Van der Straet’s well-known depiction of America (1575), Luigi Monga comments: ‘Critics have underscored in this image a series of striking dichotomies: woman/nature/passivity vs. man/technology/action […] The European male has conquered a new world, a gendered island, and her new owner has given her, appropriately, a feminine name.’ Luigi Monga, ‘Translating the Journey’, in Jane Conroy, ed., Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel, NUI Galway, 2002 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 11-30. (pp. 21-22).

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An ambitious Grelot portrays the sympathetic union of two distinct geographical entities under this hoped-for conqueror, the Hellespont ‘opening up’ to permit access. Similarly, Du Loir’s previouslymentioned dedicatory epistle also refers to Greece in implicitly feminine-gendered terms, as a mother whose children had been enslaved and who needed the generosity of France to relieve its suffering. 137 This oppression reflected negatively on the oppressors themselves, betraying an underlying weakness which could easily be countered by the French, according to La Boullaye, if political circumstances permitted: Je n’ay point de doute que si Naples estoit entre les mains des François, & qu’ils fussent en paix avec le Roy de Castille, ils prendroient tres-facilement Jerusalem, Constantinople, & toutes les Isles de la mer Aegée suivant les propheties des Orientaux, lesquels sont si foibles sur mer & sur terre, qu’ils cederoient plutost que de contester…138

The appropriation of Jerusalem, Constantinople and the Greek islands, which were perceived as rightfully Christian, had even been foretold by the prophecies of Orientals themselves, a destiny as divinely traced as that of two land masses uniting to assist a conqueror. Side by side with accounts of a gendered Orient are descriptions of the tyranny to which eastern – and particularly Near Eastern women – were subjected. Although, given the often-transitory nature of French travel to the Near East, or the relative inaccessibility of these same women, first-hand testimony might have appeared difficult to secure on this subject, voyagers left frequent condemnations of female submission. Perhaps the most extraordinary is Carré’s first-hand account of the ‘spectacle le plus touchant du monde’: a desert convoy of ‘deux cents jeunes filles agées de douze à quinze

136

Grelot, p. 19. ‘L’esclavage honteux de ses enfans legitimes qui gemissent sous l’orgueilleuse domination de leurs tyrans, touchera sans doute de pitié vostre generosité […]’, Du Loir, Epistre, non-paginated. 138 La Boullaye, pp. 50-51. The same author writes of the Armenians: ‘dans leurs Propheties ils lisent que les Europeens doivent reprendre Constantinople, & en chasser les Turqs infidelles.’ p. 81. 137

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ans’ which he encounters in the desert, destined for sale in Babylon. 139 When the bold Abbé attempts to give water to a dying girl, he is given a lesson in Arab ferocity: Mon Arabe entra en fureur; & je compris par l’action qu’il fit, combien ces peuples ont de ferocité dans les mœurs, & combien leur coûtent peu les actions les plus cruelles, dont le seul recit nous fait horreur. Il prit son arc, & d’un coup de fléche tua celle que je voulois secourir.140

While this is probably the most spectacular example of male domination and violence in the Orient reported as first-hand testimony by an ecclesiastic in the present corpus, it is matched in the case of other travellers by reports of unwitnessed extreme tyranny. The sequestration which was considered to be the daily lot of the Muslim wife was oft-lamented by travellers whose first-hand knowledge must necessarily have been of debatable value.141 The seraglios to which royal or imperial wives were confined were, in turn, one of the places which most fascinated travellers, and the frequency of the topos clearly reflects a similar interest within their French readership. The association of the harem with absolute power, intrigue and transgression in Bajazet has been well-documented, and it also features as a backdrop to the tales of Les mille et une Nuits.142 However, both Racine, who was himself familiar with travel narratives,143 and the voyager Galland, were long-preceded by what were claimed to be eye-witness accounts garnered by travellers. 144 That at least one such detailed description of the harem, recounting the attempts of its numerous women to gain the favours of an all-powerful 139

Carré, I, pp. 262-264. Ibid., p. 266. 141 Poullet is a notable exception, comparing the situation of Turkish women favorably with that of their Italian sisters, p. 120. 142 Jean Racine, Bajazet, in Œuvres complètes, I, ed. by Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 557-626; See Jane Conroy, ‘Constructions of Identity: Mirrors of the ‘Other’ in Racine’s Theatre’, in Racine: the Power and the Pleasure, ed. by Edric Caldicott and Derval Conroy (Dublin: UCD Press, 2001), pp. 75-99; Jean Dubu, ‘Bajazet: « Serrail » et transgression’, in Racine: La Romaine, la Turque et la Juive, ed. by Pierre Ronzeaud (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1986), pp. 99-112; Antoine Galland, Les mille et une Nuits, I (Paris: Veuve Claude Barbin, 1704). 143 Racine, p. 626. 144 Michel Baudier, Histoire Generalle du Serrail et de la Cour du Grand Seigneur Empereur des Turcs (Paris: Claude Cramoisy, 1624). 140

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lord, was inserted into a second edition of a travel narrative, with no further voyages to the East to back up the extra testimony, should surely demonstrate the role of imagination or hearsay in creating these accounts.145 Rich descriptions nonetheless elaborate on the stultifying life of the harem, and on the confinement of its occupants by tyrannical eunuchs:146 Ces pauvres femmes renfermées & malheureuses par leur beauté, n’ont point d’autres objets devant les yeux, à moins qu’elles ne voyent leur maître, qui n’est souvent ni plus beau ni plus aimable: au lieu qu’elles sont presque toutes d’une excellente beauté, & de mœurs assez douces pour meriter tout à la fois qu’on les admire & qu’on les plaigne.147

Somehow, despite the difficulty of acquiring testimony, descriptions of the seraglio filtered through to the text, relating the abovementioned beauty of these women, their ‘qualitez de l’ame’, and the promise of ‘plus belles passions’ if guided appropriately. 148 These passions were instead supposed to tend towards a fascinating excess, thanks to their cloistered existence, or were among the factors which coincided to lead Turkish women to infidelity:149 Les ardeurs d’un climat chaleureux, la servitude des femmes enfermées, & le mauvais exemple des maris lubriques, sont les principaux motifs des amours ausquels les Dames Turques s’abandonnent…150

Here, Baudier attributes female behaviour directly to external factors, which includes the influence of climate, servitude spilling over into abandon, and the lascivious husbands who provided poor examples. These accounts of extreme emotions were naturally very well-suited to anecdotes and histoires (as Chapter 5 will indicate), and the seraglio 145

Louis Deshayes de Courmenin [1600?-1632], Voiage de Levant Fait par le Commandement du Roy en l’année 1621 par le Sr. D. C. (Paris: Chez Adrian Taupinart, 1624; repr. 1629). See pp. 157-165 of 1629 edition. 146 Carré, I, p. 36. 147 Ibid., pp. 36-37. 148 Tournefort, II, p. 94. 149 Or as Mme de Gomez would write: ‘les climats où l’Amour a le moins de liberté, sont ordinairement ceux où cette passion a le plus de force. C’est dans la gêne & la contrainte des severes coûtumes des Orientaux, des Espagnols & des Italiens qu’elle se plaît à triompher.’ Madeleine-Angélique Poisson de Gomez [1684-1770], Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, I, part 2 (La Haye: Pierre de Hondt, 1733), p. 36. 150 Baudier, p. 150.

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was written about so often that it became inseparably linked to the position of women in the Muslim Proche Orient. Attributions of injustice to Turkish husbands – as in Du Loir’s account of the injustice which the galantes of Turkey suffered – seemed to call for their replacement: Elles sont galantes sans estre brutales, & je puis dire de plus qu’elles sont excusables si on considere l’injustice, avec laquelles on les traitte. […] Je vous advouë que l’indignation que je conçois contre les Turcs pour ce sujet est extraordinaire, mais que ferions-nous, pour ranger ce beau sexe, si ce n’est pas un traitement tout contraire a celuy de leurs maris, de tascher à leur faire reconnoistre que nous sommes plus dignes d’elles qu’eux. […] Pour vous dire en un mot, rien ne leur manque que de plus honnestes hommes.151

The ambiguous account of the young men kidnapped in Constantinople for the bonnes fortunes of such women is here completed by a further hint of their charms, were they too not dominated by Turks. As surely as with Colet’s engraving, the implication of such indignation must surely be intervention, to save the oriental women – as much as the Femme-Orient – and to acquire their favours. The question of how Du Loir came across this information, as with that concerning the enlèvements, must surely demonstrate, once more, the progressive distancing from situations of encounter of the observations of Near Eastern sexuality. Nonetheless, such portraits inevitably included an examination of masculine-feminine relationships which in turn also entailed condemnation of the dominating oriental male, who despite apparent strength, was tainted with an underlying weakness of which characteristics such as susceptibility or jealousy were the natural consequence. 152 While Chinon saw Persian women as having some level of influence (even cloistered in the seraglio) he considered this as a negative reflection on the weak and inconstant character of their husbands: Les hommes deferent beaucoup à leurs femmes en ce païs, & ils n’ont pas l’esprit si solide qu’en France, où les hommes sont plus reglés dans leurs affections & plus inflexibles dans l’administration de la Justice.153 151

Du Loir, pp. 177-178. Philippe, in Persia, p. 327. 153 Chinon, p. 63. 152

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That he followed the above citation with an elaboration on the power and influence of eunuchs, must warn the reader against seeing in this deference anything more than a testimony of corruption. The further corruption of the men of the Orient was confirmed by repeated condemnations of their supposed homosexuality, their ‘amours denaturez’ which in turn generated ‘folles amours’ in their wives.154 Such relations combined with weak (masculine) resolution were a reflection on the oriental man – in particular the Muslim – which contrasted with the oft-repeated desirability of Frenchmen to oriental women. The unjust, inverted husbands, undeserving of wives they mistreated and isolated because of their inordinate jealousy, seemed to invite replacement by the very object of the voyagers’ desire. These representations of hidden, imploring, oriental women exist alongside female-gendered representations of the Orient itself, depicted as being both dominated and imploring Christian intervention. Christianity, and particularly France, was called upon to free the Orient from tyrants who had ravished what rightfully belonged to Christianity, and an implicit link was drawn between the image of the Orient and the mysterious femme orientale. * The Near East had a long history of representation predating the 17th-century récit de voyage, and French travellers to the Near East brought with them a considerable amount of preconception based on their learned biblical and Classical culture, and the region’s long history of contact with Europe. This contact was perceived as being conflict-based due to the historical threat of the Ottoman Empire, on the edge of Europe, and to what was considered to be the unjust ‘occupation’ of the Holy Land. A variety of traits which perpetuated the sentiment of threat were projected onto the frequently interchangeable identities of Turk and Muslim. Masculine tyranny, cruelty and violation, in governance or in conflict, parallel the attribution of the same characteristics on the individual level. In short, the weight of tradition could so colour representation as to reflect directly on the individual.

154

Baudier, Histoire Generalle du Serrail, 1624, p. 152; La Boullaye, p. 108.

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The domination of the Proche Orient was further mirrored in male-female relationships which were reputedly based on tyranny, for French authors repeatedly fused the feminine-gendered East with its female inhabitants. Both, in their eyes, implored the intervention of Europe or Europeans, and this confusion ultimately rendered the representation of women as unfeasible as that of their male counterparts. The depiction of individuals was at all stages influenced by the image of an insidious Near East which, inviting the most seductive of interventions, also had the potential to blur identities and to threaten unwary and unwilling travellers with themselves becoming other. Behind the reiterated veils of threat, the region was thus made to appear to be imploring the European reader to release its territories from violence and sequestration. Such a narrative plea could only function by grossly simplifying what was seen, or even what was and would remain unseen. Thus, the representation of the Near Eastern Oriental ultimately reads as a narrative condemnation of a stark, menacing, but fascinating entity, largely divorced from encounter.

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Figure 1. François La Boullaye Le Gouz en habit levantin. Frontispiece of Les Voyages et Observations du Sieur La Boullaye Le Gouz (Paris: Gervais Clousier, 1653). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Figure 2. Jean Thévenot in oriental dress. Frontspiece of Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant (Paris: Louis Bilaine, 1664). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Figure 3. L’Asie, engraving by Louis Colet (1660). From Les Quatre Parties du Monde. Collection Hennin t. 44, n° 4022, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Chapter 4 The East Indies: le Jardin de l’Orient While 17th-century travel narratives to the Near East proffer a duplicitous representation of a region which had a long tradition of regular contact with Europe, those representing the East Indies point to a much more imperfect level of familiarity. While not constituting the ‘discovery’ the first contact with the Americas was considered to be, the Indes orientales were far from having been uncovered – even adequately mapped – at this time. European presence was confined in large part to commercial posts and enclaves in India and South-East Asia, with a peripheral presence of short duration in China and Japan. This mainly trade-based European presence was accompanied by missionary ventures, and the Frenchmen who embarked on both types of expedition left texts in which they attempted to reflect an image of the place of the Orientals they encountered in commerce or conversion. Although this European presence was limited, it still entailed long, arduous journeys around the Cape of Good Hope to lands which continued to inspire European interest and intervention, yet which had less historical and literary/textual precedent than those of the Near East. This chapter will assess how feasible the attempt to interpret, transmit and represent the cultures of the largely unfamiliar East Indies could be in the 17th century, and the extent to which the representation of its diverse societies was, taking into account greatly varying levels of observation of its indigenous peoples, reflective of its enormous diversity. It will also evaluate, in this period of early European expansion eastwards, how these early modern representations of the Indes orientales compare to those of later colonial Orientalism, as described by Said: Orientalism […] views the Orient as something whose existence is not only displayed but has remained fixed in time and place for the West. So

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impressive have the descriptive and textual successes of Orientalism been that entire periods of the Orient’s cultural, political and social history are considered mere responses to the West. The West is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor.1

Given the sheer geographical vastness of the Indes, the cultural diversity of its inhabitants, and the variety of responses to European intervention, it is such an assertion that has led to criticism of what have been qualified as ‘the simplifications of Said’s anti-orientalism’. 2 Nonetheless, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, 17th-century travellers, despite sometimes minimal levels of contact with the nonEuropeans about whom their texts would become authoritative, often produced texts of such uniformity that they would themselves be difficult to defend from a charge of simplification. Said’s emphasis on the importance of political circumstances in representation is less easy to dismiss. While clearly, as Rubiés says, ‘travel literature was not simply, or primarily, a technique for colonial justification’, European powers were attempting, during the 17th century, to increase the economic benefit they drew from the Indian Ocean Basin, and this implied a political role which was often extended to the settling of limited colonies.3 A further problematic offered by this chapter will thus be to assess the extent to which the representations of the East Indies were reflective of, and related to, the economic, proto-colonial concerns of 17th-century France.

The French Colonial Position Early French attempts at colonization in the East Indies were fragmented and ultimately unsuccessful. In the 16th century, religion had assisted the drive towards colonial attempts in the New World, as well as playing a significant role in their failure either through internal divisions, in the Brazilian settlement in the late 1550s, or in exacerbating external reaction, as in Spain’s massacre of the Huguenot colonists in Florida in 1565.4 It has been argued that the Wars of 1

Said, Orientalism, pp. 108-109. Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, p. 391. 3 Ibid. 4 La Roncière, IV, p. 28; Frank Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le Sauvage (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, diff. Klincksieck, 1990), p. 31. 2

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Religion were themselves a major impediment to attempting large colonial expeditions, restricting a unified French colonial policy, and pushing Huguenots in particular to attempt colonization.5 Even in the mid-17th-century narratives, the Huguenot-Catholic divide was accredited with weaking potential colonization in an Orient to which European religious conflicts were often exported. 6 In comparison with the size of the mid-1500s expeditions to Brazil and to Florida, and the optimism of the attempt to settle l’île Maragnon in the second decade of the 1600s, French presence was sporadic in the East Indies. While independent French merchants had reached as far as Aceh, commercial expeditions were of irregular frequency, due, in part, to precedent as well as to the domination by other European powers of the Indian Ocean.7 By the start of the 17th century, several European powers had begun to consolidate independent maritime commercial ventures into the companies, and one feature of their creation would be the unification of their ventures by nationality. Nonetheless, despite diverse French expressions of a national consciousness, France remained very much divided in its early 17th-century colonial efforts.8 Contemporary witnesses such as Pyrard attributed French colonial inferiority in the East to a natural abundance which was, at the very least, tactful: L’abondance de toutes sortes de biens que la France produit, & tant de graces que la bonté divine a si liberalement versé sur la terre, peut avoir esté cause que les François ont longtemps negligé la marine. […] Et au contraire on void que les nations, desquelles le terroüer estoit maigre, sterile, ou fort estroit, ont voulu moyenner leur recompense par la navigation, par le moyen de laquelle ils ont, non seulement suppleé à leur defaut, mais aussi rendu 5

This is the dissipation of which La Roncière writes in 1910, referring to the Wars of Religion. La Roncière, p. 5. 6 Etienne de Flacourt, Cause pour laquelle les interessez de la Compagnie n’ont pas fait de grands profits à Madagascar (n. pl: n. pub), pp. 3-5. 7 Denys Lombard, in Beaulieu, 1996, p. 6; Dirk Van der Cruysse, Louis XIV et le Siam (Paris: Fayard, 1991), pp. 120-121. 8 The Protestant Urbain Chauveton was not alone in the expression of his desire to ‘profiter à ma patrie’ during the times of the Ligue. Urbain Chauveton, Histoire nouvelle du nouveau monde (Paris: Eustace Vignon, 1579), Epistre, non-paginated. Myriam Yardeni argues that exaltation of the patrie was a particularly Protestant phenomenon linked to the realization that France would never adopt the Reformation, although as Pyrard demonstrates, this was not limited to the Huguenots. Myriam Yardeni, Enquêtes sur l’identité de la « Nation France »: de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Collection Époques, Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004), p. 21.

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Of course, Pyrard’s text appeared at a time when the Wars of Religion were fresh in many memories, and the possibility that the attribution of French naval inferiority to a simple contentment chez soi may have been a strategy to disguise its other apparent causes must surely not be discounted. In this second decade of the 17th century, Pyrard acknowledges the continuing superiority of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires (despite the conclusion that it was poor and infertile land which was at the root of their success at sea), and expresses the wish that his compatriots might obtain an equitable share in the eastern trade. In the latter half of the century, M. Thévenot, writing of the importance of ‘la Navigation & le Trafic’ in ‘grandes resolutions’ both in the Americas and the Orient, asserts that ‘il est certain que les Peuples qui sont nos plus proches voisins se sont enrichis, par le moyen de ces Arts, & infiniment élevez au dessus de leurs propres forces’: Par là l’Espagne s’est trouvée en estat de disputer de grandeur avec la France. Par là les Portugais, qui estoient resserrez dans l’un des plus petits & plus steriles cantons de l’Europe, se sont estendus par toute la Terre; & les Provinces Unies, qui jusqu’à la fin du Siecle precedent, s’estoient contentées de la Pesche, & d’un Commerce de Port en Port, se sont mises en possession des Indes d’Orient, ont entre les mains le plus riche Commerce de la Mer, tiennent plus de lieuës de pays dans les ces contrées si reculées, qu’elles ont d’arpens de terre dans la basse Allemagne, & par là sont arrivées à traiter d’égal avec des Princes qu’elles reconnoissoient auparavant pour leurs Souverains.10

It was precisely the mastery of trade and of navigation, according to Thévenot, which had the potential to magnify the economic potential of European states out of all proportion to their natural resources, allowing the Dutch to control a flourishing sea commerce in the East. This is also unequivocally equated both with the political power which 9

Pyrard, 1619, I, pp. 1-2. M. Thévenot, Relations… (Paris: T. Moette, 1696), I, Avis, non-paginated.

10

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the Dutch by then held and which had enabled them to subvert the previous order, and significantly, with their possession (like the extension of the Portuguese throughout the globe) of the Indes. For Thévenot, the process of settlement and domination which European states had been undertaking around the globe indisputably included the East Indies, and France played only a minor part within this process. While Henri IV had granted a charter to a company of merchants from Dieppe, Saint Malo and Rouen early in the century, the projected commerce in the Orient would prove fruitless for some time. In 1642 this company had been transformed by Richelieu into a compagnie privilégiée, and a series of disastrous expeditions attempted to colonize the island of Madagascar in mid-century, with the aim of creating a new French empire in the East. By 1664, it was becoming clear that Madagascar was no longer viable for such a role; this year saw the creation of the Compagnie royale française des Indes orientales, heavily financed by Louis XIV, and depicted as a religious, commercial or political enterprise: Je sçavois qu’elle [Sa Majesté] a témoigné hautement que son premier dessein dans l’établissement de la Compagnie Royale des Indes, étoit d’étendre le Royaume de Jesus-Christ & de faire connoître ce Dieu qui est veritablement un Dieu caché à tant de Nations.11

Carré, writing in 1699 of the Compagnie, says: Tout le monde sçait que feu Monsieur Colbert ayant formé le dessein d’établir en France un commerce avec les Nations les plus reculées, donna les commencemens à la celebre Compagnie des Indes Orientales, sous la protection du Roy. Rien n’étoit plus propre à mettre l’abondance dans l’Etat, & à occuper une grande quantité d’hommes. C’étoit former des matelots, & montrer à nos voisins, que même sans leur faire la guerre, nous sçavions mettre le tems à profit. Il ne fut pas difficile au Ministre d’engager bien du monde dans son entreprise; parce que le Royaume étant en paix de tous côtez, les particuliers qui éstoient riches ne demandoient qu’à faire profiter leur argent.12

Thus, for Carré, those lands furthest away from the perceived epicentres of France/Europe, might function as an outlet for the excess of 11 12

De L’Isle, Avertissement au Lecteur, non-paginated. Carré, I, pp. 3-4.

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money and also for that portion of the population of the now-pacified kingdom seeking employment. The creation of the Compagnie is considered in the context of a vision of inter-European political rivalry and of European penetration deep (‘les nations les plus reculées’) into the East Indies. For Souchu, neighbouring states had furnished the example of how commerce with the Indes could enrich and empower European states: Aprés avoir fait examiner en ses Conseils ce qui pouvoit enrichir son Royaume, ayant reconnu par l’exemple de ses voisins que les voyages de long cours & le Commerce étranger contribuoient à l’abondance des Empires, il ordonna par sa Déclaration du mois de May de l’année 1664. l’établissement d’une Compagnie Françoise pour le Commerce des Indes Orientales.13

Throughout the 17th century, Portuguese, Dutch and English sailors continue to be a constant presence in récits de voyage, possessing the ports which had to be passed through, providing courtesy or complications to French expeditions whose inferiority was perceived by contemporary writers. La Boullaye, promoting French commercial involvement in the East, cuts short his description of a ‘bon havre’ for the sake of national interest: Je m’estendrois davantage sur cette matiere, n’estoit que je crains que les ennemis de ma nation ne se servissent de mes escrits au prejudice de la France. Il sera assez à temps lorsque ces François auront dessein de negocier dans ces parties Orientales, aussi bien que tous les autres Europeens.14

La Boullaye’s possibly excessive caution confirms his status as a traveller as much as a faithful subject, as well as voicing, in 1653, not only the existence of a state of tension in the East Indies between France and other European states, but the continuing perception that the French were still essentially unengaged in eastern commerce. It was other Europeans who were demonstrably benefiting from this trade, as François Charpentier’s Discours d’un fidèle Sujet acknowledges:

13 14

Souchu, p. 2. La Boullaye, p. 215-216.

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Il semble qu’on n’a pas dû s’estonner, si les François ayant eu tant d’occupations chez eux-mesmes, n’ont point tourné leurs pensées vers la Navigation & le Trafic; & si nos voisins, qui cependant s’y sont appliquez avec soin, en ont remporté tant d’honneur, & y ont amassé tant de richesses.15

As in the case of other authors who lament France’s colonial position, blaming civil strife for it, Charpentier sees the Dutch VOC as a model, inspiring potential investors to unite instead of ruining each other by competition.16 It is particularly interesting that Charpentier’s emphasis on European competition and national union features in a text which is addressed ‘à tous les Français’, praising their esprit and courage, and which grudgingly admires the Dutch for their esprit de patrie.17 An expansion in national sentiment seems to accompany this profusion of other united nationalities. An optimistic Charpentier hopes France will eventually be able, because of its advantageous geographical position, the peace it now enjoys, as well as the patience and courage of its inhabitants, to undercut the Dutch and obtain a share in eastern trade. 18 However, the attempts to encourage a greater French share in the East Indies were to remain largely unrealized in the 17th century, and the accounts of travellers or commentators show that the attribution of incredible riches and possibilities of accumulation of ‘des biens innombrables’ to the East was accentuated by the inability to obtain them.19 While the European vision of the Indes could take the contours of a potentially huge exploitable market, France, in practice, had an unequal share in this, distinguishing its relationships with different populations at diverse stages of contact, from those other European populations maintained with indigenous peoples. So, while Europe (or la Chrétienté as Tavernier and others considered it), and the Orient, were concepts that very much existed in the 17th century, French travel narratives are uniquely situated in relation to both entities, the product of European textual influences and the

15

François Charpentier [1620-1702], Discours d’un fidèle Sujet du Roy touchant l’Establissement d’une Compagnie françoise pour le Commerce des Indes Orientales: adressé à tous les Français (Paris: n. pub., 1664), p. 5. 16 ‘La guerre intestine’, Ibid., p. 4; On the VOC see pp. 21-22. 17 Ibid., p. 27; p. 28. 18 Ibid., p. 47; p. 6. 19 Ibid., p. 57.

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experience of their narrators as peripheral actors within this period of increasing European penetration to the Indian Ocean Basin.20

L’Autre européen While the Portuguese sea empire was perceived as the principal colonial power in the East Indies during the first half of the 1600s, travellers became increasingly conscious of its decline, and of a consequent rise in Dutch and English power as the 17th century advanced.21 As such, the place allocated to the representation of Orientals in French travel narratives often competes with that devoted to other Europeans. Political and economic relationships between Europeans were reflected in their expeditions or colonies in the Orient, and while hospitality or assistance were not rare, hostility or combat were frequent. 22 Protestant/Catholic religious tension also exacerbated other rivalries, for example those between the Portuguese and other Europeans, as Geneviève Bouchon writes of the first decade of the 17th century: Tous les Européens naviguant sur l’océan Indien sont considérés comme des hors-la-loi, sauf ceux qui sont venus à bord d’un navire portugais [...] l’« autre Européen », jadis considéré comme un partenaire, est tout à coup perçu comme une menace contre un ordre établi à grand peine et déjà séculaire.23

In 1669, Philippe depicts a Portuguese empire which had been considerably weakened, precisely because of the intervention of other Europeans: Voilà le Domaine temporel des Portuguais aux Indes Orientales & aux Royaumes voisins, mais ayant esté fort affoibly & presque esteint, il sembloit tendre à son entiere perte; le commerce y avoit presque cessé par les courses continuelles des Pirates Hollandois; tous les jours les Vaisseaux des Portugais y estoient pris par eux; ils y avoient desja perdu quelques Colonies, comme j’ay dit cy-dessus; en un mot il sembloit que l’on n’en devoit plus attendre que la ruine totale; mais aujourd’huy tout le monde 20

Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 418. Tavernier, Six Voyages, II, p. 442. 22 See Souchu’s description of the origins of Anglo-Dutch conflict. Souchu, p. 4. 23 Geneviève Bouchon, preface to Pyrard, 1998, I, p. 21. 21

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asseure que les Portugais ne peuvent manquer d’y prosperer plus que jamais, depuis que sous leur nouveau Roy ils ont fait la paix avec les Hollandois.24

Other reasons thought to have contributed to this perceived decline include the worsening of existing tensions by the ‘rigueur extraordinaire’ of the Inquisition, the coincidence of commercial competition with imprudence caused by legendary Portuguese vanity, or even a folie which had earned the Portuguese the hatred of their Indian subjects.25 Numerous texts unambiguously criticize the negative consequences of Portuguese power on Indian natives. Mocquet, despite arriving in Goa with a Portuguese crew, pronounces extremely unfavourable judgements on the treatment of various Orientals, and particularly the Indians of Goa, opposing the vices, insults and abuse of the Portuguese canaille with the natural humanity and kindness of the Indians. 26 Mocquet’s text also features a series of vivid examples of Portuguese mistreatment, some directly recounted by the victims themselves in anecdotes which spared little detail of their cruelty: La cause pourquoy le Roy de Sian traittoit si mal les Portugais, est qu’ils usoient de mesmes traittemens envers ses subjets captifs. Comme j’en ay veu un à Goa aagé de plus de 90. ans, Menuizier de son estat et esclave d’un gentil-homme Portugais […]. Il me conta toutes les cruautez dont on usoit en son endroit: car quand il manquoit à payer ses deux tangues, son maistre l’attachoit comme une beste contre un escalier et luy donnoit tant de coups de baston qu’il le rendoit tout moulu & brisé…27

While La Boullaye praises the reception he receives from the Viceroy in Goa, he criticizes the abuse of authority which leads Portuguese gentlemen to treat natives as animals:28 Lors qu’un Gentil-homme Portugais va faire visite, il sort en palankin, ou à pied, s’il se met en palankin, il se fait porter d’ordinaire par 4. ou 6. noirs de la terre libres ou esclaves qu’ils appellent Boïas, ou bœufs, comme nous 24

Philippe, p. 277. On the Inquisition see La Boullaye, p. 200; on Portuguese vanity, Thévenot, Troisieme Voyage, p. 274; on folie, Le Blanc, I, p. 83. 26 ‘[Ils] font mille affronts & moqueries à ces pauvres gens’. Mocquet, 1617, p. 302; ‘[Une] canaille debordee à toutes sortes de vices & meschancetez’, p. 247; ‘La bonté & humanité naturelle de ces pauvres Idolatres abusez’, p. 301. 27 Ibid., p. 336. 28 On ‘la civilité, & generosité des Portugais’ see La Boullaye, p. 196. 25

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appellons les porteurs de chaises mulets, les hommes ne se contentans pas d’abuser de leurs semblables, sans leur donner des noms d’animaux par derision.29

Such negative descriptions of the Portuguese presence in the East Indies appear frequently in the travel literature of France at a time when it was largely absent from, or competing for, the Indian trade. The Abbé Carré also criticizes the misuse of force (although less brutal than that employed by the Spanish) and the conflicts which ensue: Le pretendu droit des Portugais sur les Indes Orientales, leur faisoit entreprendre toutes ces guerres, moins pourtant que l’exemple des cruautez horribles qui avoient assuré aux Espagnols l’Empire de l’Amerique. Ils se croyoient tout permis, parce qu’ils avoient la force en main.30

Later in the century, the increasing strength of the VOC led to a corresponding increase in the often critical accounts of Dutch presence in the East by French travellers. Chambelle, for example, describes the Dutch sailors he embarks with as ‘des gens tout à fait barbares, rudes, grossiers, sans amitié ni courtoisie quelconque’; his depiction of Europeans as barbares is notable.31 For L’Estra in 1677, it is again the Dutch, engaging in open conflict with De La Hayes’s expedition around India, who are inhumains, or Barbares, reputed to drown Portuguese prisoners and even abandon their own children in the wilderness.32 The terms of L’Estra’s outrage at a crisis just prior to a shipwreck in which a group of French captives escape, but a great number of Bengali slaves drown, is striking: Plusieurs Hollandois disoient tout haut qu’il falloit jetter les François dans la mer pour sauver ces Esclaves, qui valoient mieux que nous: s’ils avoient eu le temps de raisonner & d’executer ce qu’ils projettoient, ils auroient sans doute conservé ces Infideles, & nous auroient laissé perir.33

The Dutch protest is based on purely mercantile considerations: that a number of crew members had bought these slaves and would incur a 29

Ibid., pp. 211-212. Carré, I, p. 15. 31 Chambelle, p. 77. 32 L’Estra, p. 143; p. 142; p. 252. 33 Ibid., pp. 204-205. 30

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financial loss by their demise. L’Estra’s shock, in turn, is founded on his assumption that the French, as Christians, are more worthy to be saved than infidels. Although it might have appeared unheard of, it would seem that European competition for eastern trade was capable of overturning even this order. While the Abbé Carré, as has been seen, found the Portuguese claim to the East Indies disputable, he did not, notably, question the principle of European intervention in the region itself. The Abbé had, after all, praised the foundation of the Compagnie, and for him, as indeed, for others, while the abuse of power was unacceptable, the establishment of Europeans in the East was itself quite legitimate. 34 Although Portuguese authority was often criticized, it was simultaneously envied, and aspired to, and French voyagers such as Le Blanc marvel at the extent of Portuguese domination, especially given the small size of their expeditions in comparison with the power and riches of the kingdoms of the Orient: C’est une merveille de la Providence, qu’une poignée d’hommes avec peu de moyens, ait pu si puissament s’establir dans ces grandes Indes, & resister, & mesme dompter l’effort des plus puissans & riches Roys du monde, & que leur exemple ait attiré en suite les Anglois, Holandois & François, qui y frequentent & trafiquent aujourd’huy.35

While the nature of this power, and the strength of Orientals themselves, as will be seen later, is more questionable in other depictions, the pioneers are nonetheless represented as having surmounted considerable obstacles, creating a route which other Europeans could only follow. For a cleric such as Philippe, Portuguese colonizers were to be admired for their invention, their persistence and bravery, and especially for their apparent conversion of the East Indies: Enfin, il y a les Conquestes des Portugais que je descriray plus bas. Ces braves Conquerans ayant inventé une nouvelle navigation, surmonté le Cap de bonne Esperance, traversé six milles lieuës de mer, essuyé d’infinis travaux & souffert plusieurs naufrages, ont resveillé dans les Indes la Foy de Jesus-Christ, laquelle y estoit presque entierement esteinte; & se rendans les dignes successeurs de l’Apostre S. Thomas, y ont converty quantité de

34 35

On the Compagnie, see Carré, I, p. 3. Le Blanc, I, p. 62.

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Veiled Encounters monde, & plusieurs d’entre-eux y ont acquis la Couronne du Martyre pour la defense de la mesme Foy. 36

Nonetheless, Christianity was assumed to have lapsed and degenerated since Saint Thomas’s legendary conversion of the Indians, as those seemingly ‘passed-on’ European customs or skills were supposed to, when the Orient was left to itself. Despite displays of admiration for their Portuguese predecessors, French writers who did voyage to the East were unanimous on the preference Orientals had for their compatriots. Le Blanc recounts that the Chinese at Banten were particularly fond of the French ‘à qui leur humeur plait fort’, although this one-sided appreciation did not, naturally imply a resemblance in humeur which would equate Chinese with French character.37 L’Estra is particularly insistent throughout much of his account on this preference: Les peuples de toute la coste de Coromandel sont amis des François, qu’ils estiment à cause de leur generosité & de leur franchise.38

Given the virulently anti-Dutch tone of L’Estra’s text, such a preference must be at least in part expected. One might also expect an ambassadorial account like that of Chaumont to highlight the privileged place of France, though here again, the preference which Chaumont claims to have been granted by the Prince of Borne is attributed to some other attachment which Orientals had for the French: ‘il y a eu des François qui y ont commercé, il se fie plus à eux qu’à aucune autre Nation.’39 For these three travellers, a mythical preference for their compatriots is in fact the only means to claim semantic or textual superiority in an East dominated, in reality, by other European powers.

36

Philippe, p. 119. Le Blanc, I, p. 149. 38 L’Estra, p. 111. Also, of Ceylon, ‘L’humeur des François leur plaist davantage que celles des autres nations.’ p. 130. 39 Chaumont, p. 41. 37

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European Action The admiration of Le Blanc or of Philippe for the supposed bravery and power of the Portuguese, while symptomatic of French exclusion from the East Indies, also implied that its indigenous peoples did not possess these qualities to the same degree. Europeans were perceived as sharing a common ability to act on the East Indies during this period, which frequently translated into the assumption of technological superiority, as La Loubère writes of the Siamese, and of the Indes in general: Il ne leur importe d’être cinq-cent ouvriers, plusieurs mois durant, à ce que peu d’Européans bien payés acheveroient en peu de jours. Si quelque Etranger leur donne quelque adresse, ou quelque Machine, ils l’oublient dés que leur Prince l’oublie. Aussi ne s’offre-t-il point d’Européan au service d’un Roy Indien, qui n’y soit reçû, pour ainsi dire, à bras ouverts. Quelque petit mérite qu’il ait, il en a toûjours plus que les Indiens naturels: & non seulement pour les Arts mécaniques, mais pour la Marine, & pour le Commerce, à quoy ils sont encore plus affectionnez.40

Here, significantly, European technological skill is apparently intransmissible within Siamese or Indian cultures, in which the use of a skill or practice, depending on the monarch, ceased with the end of direct East-West contact. Meanwhile, according to Chaumont, European military superiority demonstrated the ineptitude of Orientals rather than technological advantage: ‘trois cens Européens battent toûjours cinq ou six mille hommes de ces Nations, qui ne sçavent pas faire la guerre.’41 In contrast to the European ability to act, a multitude of authors berated Orientals for what they saw as their essential inaction, a character which preferred the immediacy of rest to betterment through work and the progress of technology and the arts. For Chaumont in Siam, the land – comparatively fertile – had been neglected principally, though not exclusively, because of its inhabitants’ lack of effort:

40 41

La Loubère, I, p. 269. Chaumont, on Sumatra, p. 23.

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Veiled Encounters Ils sont d’une grande docilité qui procede plûtost de leur naturel amoureux du repos que de toute autre cause.42 Le terroir y est passablement fertile; mais tres-mal cultivé, […] & comme ils sont ennemis du travail, ils n’aiment à faire que les choses aisées.43

However, such assertions are not, strikingly, related to one other factor which would have had a considerable impact on Siamese amour du repos, that of the servitude to which the male population was subject: ‘Le peuple est obligé de servir le Roy quatre mois de l’année regulierement, & durant toute l’année, s’il en a besoin.’44 La Loubère accredits a combination of laziness and tyrannical government with causing such a lack of industry: Ils n’ont point de Corps de Mêtiers, & les Arts ne fleurissent point parmy eux; non seulement à cause de leur paresse naturelle, mais encore plus à cause du Gouvernement sous lequel ils vivent.45

Elsewhere in the East Indies, the inhabitants are constantly depicted as incapable or unwilling to act. For Challe, none of the Indian castes were willing to work: ‘Ces gens-là ne travaillent point, ni banians, ni neyres, ni bramènes.’46 In L’Estra’s account of Tranquebar, inaction coincides with the absence of courage: ‘Le pays est tres-agreable; les habitans y sont bien-faits de corps, mais ils sont lâches & faineans…’47 Thus, these 17th-century French accounts prefigure later such manifestations, such as the Mughal indolence and immobility which Kate Teltscher has identified in 18th-century British texts and linked to the transition to political rule in India.48 They also demonstrate the enormous flexibility of such a claim, for wherever Frenchmen misunderstood or disapproved of the indigenous politicoeconomic context, or its participants seemed to contrast with their self-vision of Europeans as technologically superior actors on the 42

Chaumont, p. 16. Chaumont, in section entitled État du Gouvernement, des Mœurs, de la Religion, & du Commerce du Royaume de Siam, dans les pays voisins, & plusieurs autres particularités, pp. 46-47. 44 Chaumont, p. 53. 45 La Loubère, I, p. 268. 46 Challe, 1721, II, p. 178. 47 L’Estra, p. 109. 48 Teltscher, pp. 109-156. 43

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East, inaction, sloth or cowardice could be attributed to Indians, Siamese and indeed (when the term is used) to Orientals in general. Even in the 1600s, this contrast could function as justification for intervention, which was seemingly welcomed by Orientals: Toutes les nations peuvent faire dans les Indes ce que les Portugais ont fait, à cause qu’ils se sont establis sous ombre d’y negocier: car ceux du païs desirent avec passion le commerce de qui que ce soit, ils le reçoivent, & luy donnent tel lieu qu’il desire pour faire une maison, & pour descharger ses marchandises.49

The installation of Europeans in the Indies was allegedly a mutually satisfactory arrangement, bringing the commerce which was perceived to be the common factor uniting, even defining, ‘toutes les nations’, who could potentially occupy the space the welcoming Indies seemed to afford.

A Splendid Isolation: China and Japan Nonetheless, in this period of proto-colonization, the potentially exploitable space of the East abruptly ended with the fascinating enigmas of the Far Eastern monarchies of China and Japan. In the furthest reaches of the Orient, in lands to which Europeans had difficult access, or which were impenetrable, paucity of information coexisted with the attribution of insularity. Restricting or even repelling European commerce and intervention, these lands were commonly depicted in terms such as those used by Baudier, concerning China: Les Chinois peuvent desdaigner, & avoir à mespris le secours des autres hommes, & les commoditez de leurs provinces. Aussi sont-ils enclos, & renfermez comme dans un autre monde. 50

The Chinese, isolated in this other world scorn – unlike, according to so many other relations, most of the East – interference (the term commoditez would seem to preclude any question of European trade). As in Le Comte’s account of Chinese wisdom, French authors 49 50

Feynes, pp. 192-193. Baudier, Histoire de la Cour du Roy de la Chine, 1624, p. 10.

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consistently refer to the disdain and pride of a people who did not seem to need Europeans: Mais cette [sage] politique qui les porta à se distinguer des autres, & qui peut-estre estoit au commencement une maxime tres-utile, dégenera dans la suite en orgueil. Ils se regarderent comme un peuple choisi, que le Ciel avoit fait naistre au milieu de l’univers pour luy donner la loy; seul capable d’instruire, de polir, de gouverner les nations.51

However, their reputation for wisdom was already extremely longstanding by the time Le Comte was writing. Montaigne had drawn a lesson on the relativity of cultural phenomena through reading of the government and arts of a land which, isolated from Europe, appeared to him to be superior in many aspects: En la Chine, duquel royaume la police et les arts, sans commerce et cognoissance de nostres, surpassent nos exemples en plusieurs parties d’excellence, et duquel l’histoire m’apprend combien le monde est plus ample et plus divers que ny les anciens ny nous ne penetrons […].52

Notably, the ‘sages conseils’ of the Chinese, for Baudier, deserve to be brought from the land where they are hidden: Ce qui m’a porté à la tissure de cet ouvrage, sont les rares & eminentes qualitez des esprits Chinois, lesquels dans le monde particulier, où ils sont renfermez, fournissent des sages conseils, & des veritables maximes pour reformer les desordres des autres nations de la terre.53

Considering the frequent dismissal, in other contexts, of the learning or sciences of the Orient, this exception is striking, especially when the first point of reference for wisdom in so much of the East is pointedly not Europe, but China: Cette sage politique fit une si grande reputation aux Chinois, que dans toutes les Indes, dans la Tartarie, dans la Perse on les regardoit comme les oracles du monde; & les Japonois en avoient conçu une si haute idée que quand saint Xavier leur porta la foy, (quoy qu’en ce temps-là la Chine eust beaucoup perdu de son ancienne probité) une des plus grandes raisons qu’ils

51

Le Comte, I, p. 260. Montaigne, III, De L’Experience, p. 1071; see Atkinson, p. 83. 53 Baudier, Histoire de la Cour du Roy de la Chine, 1624, p. 6. 52

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opposoient au Saint, estoit que cet empire si sage, si éclairé ne l’avoit pas encore embrassée.54

Such was the wisdom of this enclosed land, that a perception that the Emperor seemed accommodating to Christianity could even inspire an implicit (rhetorical) comparison with the King of France himself: Un Prince de ce caractere mérite bien que Vostre Majesté le connoisse à son tour, & jette un moment les yeux sur son Portrait & sur ces mémoires, où elle verra ce que le sang Tartare, temperé par une éducation Chinoise, luy a inspiré pour le gouvernement, de force & de sagesse tout ensemble. […] Mais ce qui l’approche encore davantage de Vostre Majesté, c’est la protection qu’il donne en ses Estats, à la Religion Chrestienne.55

The depiction of China also contrasts sharply with that of the East Indies in its industrie which, independent of European influence, reflected the productivity western observers attributed to themselves. 56 But the fact that so many of its natives were encountered in ports outside China also reflects the primarily mercantile nature of SinoEuropean contact. Though extremely productive and ‘patiens au travail’, they also seemed ‘fort subtils et grands trompeurs’, and were attributed a deceitful finesse by French travellers in the trade-based contact they maintained with them.57 It would appear that Chinese traders seemed to such informants to have an appreciation of the relative value of objects which approached their own. Despite their mitigating points, the Chinese remained Orientals in the generic and critical sense implied within the 17thcentury term. While, for example, they were considered less fanatical in their extravagant funeral rites than some other Orientals, notably those who practised sati, the deformities due to foot-binding were an oft-repeated topos which horrified Europeans.58 While their morals furnished lessons for Europeans, the Chinese were simultaneously 54

Le Comte, I, p. 259. Le Comte, I, Epistre, non-paginated. 56 Leguat, II, p. 119. 57 Mocquet, 1617, p. 341; Chaumont, État du Gouvernement…, p. 16. 58 On Chinese funeral rites, see Baudier, Histoire de la Cour du Roy de la Chine, 1624, pp. 55-56; On foot-binding, see Xavier Beguin Billecocq, ‘Henry de Feynes (1573-1647): Le premier Français en Extrême-Orient’ (doctoral thesis, Université de Provence, 1999), p. 399. Foot-binding is mentioned in Feynes, pp. 164-165; Le Comte, I, pp. 269-270. 55

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imputed a range of immoral behaviours such as grossièreté, finesse and volupté.59 Sloth, at least was not one of them, though the reverse side of their industry was their scorn of the poor, and the corollary of their wisdom, their cruelty:60 Quand un père a trop d’enfants, il peut noyer les filles après les avoir fait crier pour voir si personne ne les voudra nourrir.61

However, all of these characteristics defined a people primarily represented as isolated, and even seeming to follow an independent chronology to that of Europe, with the revolutionary repercussions that this would have on the conception of history according to biblical chronology.62 Further east, 17th-century Japan combined its geographical insularity with an absence of eye-witness testimony, as from the 1640s on, European contact was to be restricted to very limited trade links. Those French accounts that do exist from after this period are generally limited to offshore descriptions or second-hand testimonies which are integrated into travel narratives.63 While in terms of quantity, a regular flow of texts (approximately three hundred by the mid-17th century) continued to perpetuate the representation of Japan in Europe, the lack of first-hand testimony renders problematic the role of ecclesiastical texts in this production.64 Of the Catholic orders responsible for perpetuating the image of Japan, the Jesuits had the greatest role, especially in their dramatization of the sufferings of their martyrs which was accompanied by an abundant iconography. 59

On the lessons furnished by the Chinese, see Atkinson, p. 87; on grossièreté and finesse, Chambelle, p. 114; on volupté, Mocquet, 1617, p. 347; L’Estra, p. 225. 60 On the scorn of the poor, see Anonymous, 1645, in Van der Cruysse, Mercenaires français de la VOC, pp. 224-225. 61 Ibid., p. 225. 62 Attempts such as those of Baudier to equate Chinese idoles with the remnants of Christian belief are rare. Baudier, Histoire de la Cour du Roy de la Chine, 1624, p. 53. It was precisely the difficulties of historical-biblical chronology in Le Comte’s text that inspired the Querelle des rites chinois. Atkinson, p. 89. 63 Such as that in Anonymous, 1645, in Van der Cruysse, Mercenaires français de la VOC. 64 Léon Pages, Bibliographie japonaise ou catalogue des ouvrages relatifs au Japon qui ont été publiés depuis le XVe siècle jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Benjamin Duprat, Libraire de l’Institut impérial de France, 1859).

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A case in point is the textual production of Rhodes who, in his mid-century blending of the genre of travel narrative with accounts of martyrdom, includes observation of societies that he did personally visit. These observations were organized into the familiar categories of the travel narrative, although the missionary does distance himself from the description of the grandes curiositez of the East in his mission to act, and effect change on the lands he visited. 65 However, in his translation of an Italian account of the martyrdom of Jesuits in Japan, Rhodes depicts Japan in terms which were to become familiar, without having ever visited the island: Depuis le commencement de l’Eglise, nous ne sçavons pas, qu’il y ait jamais eu de Tyrans si obstinez à exterminer du monde le nom de Chrestiens, que sont les Japonnais à les chasser de leur Royaume. Il y a déjà 40. ans que l’on n’y entend que menaces, l’on n’y void que feux, & que gibets, & que la mort est le moindre des maux, qu’on fait souffrir à ceux qui adorent Jesus-Christ: Deja plus de mille Japonnois ont souffert les mesmes supplices, que les Nerons, les Deces, & Diocletians faisoient souffrir aux Chrestiens, dans les premiers siecles de l’Eglise.66

By resituating the ‘kingdom’, equating it with another empire familiar to French readers, the events glorify the Jesuit missionary effort and the claim to having furnished martyrs for the Church, polarizing Japan between Christians and the non-Christians inflicting the most horrific of punishments on them. Yet the conclusion that ‘l’on n’y entend que menaces’ is also a powerful tribute to the ecclesiastical, and especially Jesuit, near-monopoly on the information emanating from Japan. Unseen and unapproachable, Japan was to exist as a theatre of menaces, gibets and supplices for the Christian throughout the 17th century, in Jesuit accounts of martyrdom or pièces de collège, and throughout the 18th century and afterwards.67 65

‘la fin que je me suis proposée dans mes Voyages, n’a pas esté de voir de belles choses, mais plutost d’en faire de bonnes…’ Rhodes, Divers Voyages et Missions, 1st part, p. 2. 66 Rhodes, Histoire de la Vie, & de la Glorieuse Mort de cinq peres de la Compagnie de Jesus (Paris: S. & G. Cramoisy, 1653), pp. 2-3. This text is a liberal translation of Pietro Marquez, Breve Relatione della Gloriosa Morte… (Rome: Corbelletti, 1652). 67 Jean-Marie Valentin, Les Jésuites et le théâtre (1554-1680) (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 2001), pp. 507-512. One example mentioned by Desgraves is Le Phénix Mourant au milieu des flammes. Le Père Charles Spinola de la Compagnie de Jésus, martyrisé à petit feu, près de Nangasachi au Japon (Lille: Nicolas de Rade, 1665). Louis Desgraves, Répertoire des Programmes des pièces de théâtre jouées

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Ecclesiastical texts, originally based on the death of European priests in Japan, thus decontextualized these events and helped to perpetuate an image of hostility and violence throughout the 17th century. When contact was established with Japan, and on the rare occasions when Europeans succeeded in obtaining an economic advantage, this was, as Charpentier writes of the English success in obtaining trade concessions, through accommodation instead of force: ‘Ceux-ci ménagerent si bien l’esprit de ces Barbares, qu’ils en obtinrent tout ce qu’ils desiroient.’68 Japanese character, unlike that of so many other occupants of the East Indies, was not to be imposed on; the verb ménager does not indicate a confidence in power. Accordingly, the relationship between Europeans and Japanese, in the travel narratives which purport to describe the people, is impossible to characterize as European action on inactive Orientals. As a French member of a Dutch expedition faced with ‘600 Japonais résolus de se venger’ notes: L’humeur des Japonais est de se venger et ne savoir point souffrir un affront. Ils sont vaillants, ils ont beaucoup d’esprit et se tuent quand ils ne peuvent se venger. Ils sont aussi si adroits aux arts, que notre commandeur eut un coutelas duquel il avait promis 600 richedalles s’il coupait une barre de fer grosse comme celles qu’on met aux fenêtres, ce qu’il exécuta.69

Tantalizingly, Japan, like, as shall be seen, so many other eastern lands, was supposed to afford great commercial possibilities, (such as the mines beyond its shores of which Thévenot wrote), were it not for its cruel, vengeful and resistant human presence. 70 Thévenot’s attempt to provide authoritative information, furnished by ‘un ami’, and supplemented by Jesuit accounts, is limited to what little data could be

dans les Collèges de France (1601-1700) (Geneva: Droz, 1986), p. 69. In the 18th century, see Père Pierre-François Xavier de Charlevoix [1682-1761], Histoire de l’Établissement, des Progrès et de la Décadence du Christianisme dans l’Empire du Japon, où l’on voit les différentes révolutions qui ont agité cette monarchie pendant plus d’un siècle, 3 vols (Rouen: Guillaume Behourt, 1715). 68 Charpentier, p. 14. 69 Anonymous, 1645, in Van der Cruysse, Mercenaires français de la VOC, pp. 227228. 70 ‘Ils ont dans le Royaume plusieurs mines d’or, d’argent & de cuivre.’ Thévenot, Troisième Voyage, p. 333.

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gleaned from the peripheral Dutch trading presence and returns to a by now familiar topos:71 Ils tâchent par tous moyens d’exterminer le Christianisme au Japon, & ils n’épargnent ny promesses ny menaces, ny supplices pour faire idolâtrer les Chrétiens, quand ils en rencontrent.72

In 1679, Tavernier claims to have had access to a substantial array of oral sources, including Jesuit Fathers and Protestant Dutch who are surprisingly unanimous in their depiction of Japanese cruelty: En toutes les persecutions que l’Eglise a souffertes, on ne trouve rien qui approche de celly-cy pour la rigueur des supplices, & l’on peut dire que les Japonais sont les peuples du monde les plus ingenieux en cruauté & les plus constants dans le martire.73

Despite Tavernier’s use of supposedly unbiased Protestant sources, his and Thévenot’s travel accounts were now completely separated from the process of encounter. Neither traveller was himself able to enter Japan, yet their texts were either intended or considered to be an authoritative source of knowledge about the country. Their return to the account of the fate of the Church demonstrates the strength of the ecclesiastical corpus in maintaining the image of barbarity, and with the country closed off from the 17th century onwards, it was this that would be retained by others, including Montesquieu.74 In short, the openly acknowledged paucity of information on both China and Japan, combined with their progressive inaccessibility, resulted in accurate representation being rendered impossible. The narrative attributes to these lands a level of resistance which contrasts with the rest of the East Indies, but little data had actually been generated by cultural encounter. So China was represented as an unlikely reflection of Europe, with the same self-attributed values of productivity and wisdom, and Japan as a potentially vast market, were it not for the excessive violence which the predominance of ecclesiastical texts helped to taint its inhabitants with. The resultant 71

Ibid., p. 325. Ibid., p. 333. 73 Tavernier, Relation du Japon, p. 31. 74 Montesquieu was to write of the caractère ‘atroce’ du ‘peuple japonais’ in L’Esprit des lois. Œuvres complètes, ed. by Roger Caillois, Éditions de la Pléiade (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1951), II, p. 489. 72

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representation is an extremely unreliable and unsubstantiated vision that is fallacious in both source and content, yet which hearkens back to images recognizable for the contemporary reader.

Riches and Fertility The description of opulence is a long standing topos of the East and, long before the 17th century, accounts abounded in travel literature of the richesse de l’Orient.75 This was perpetuated throughout the 1600s by descriptions which, in some cases, certainly resulted in large part from the circumstances of encounter itself. For example, in Choisy’s very popular Journal du Voyage de Siam, great space is taken up – literally – by the presents sent by the King of Siam to the French court: Sérieusement je ne sçai pas comment nous ferons pour mettre tout cela dans les deux vaisseaux. Il y a déjà trois cens balots, & cependant on ne veut pas qu’il y ait rien sur les ponts […]. Je disois cela tantôt à M. Constance, qui s’est mis à rire, en disant que cela serait plaisant, que deux vaisseaux François ne pussent pas porter les présens du Roi de Siam; & pour me faire enrager, il est allé querir un bassin d’or, une écriture d’or, & une coupe d’or pour ajouter au présent de Monseigneur le Dauphin.76

That these gifts were sent, or that they were anything but extravagant is not in question. What is notable is that it was this diplomatic mission, with a consequent great exchange of wealth, which was to be the main source of information on Siam at the end of the 17th century. As with the twenty-eight page Memoire des Presens du Roy de Siam au Roy de France which ends Chaumont’s Relation, and which is nothing more than a transcription of the considerable list of presents sent by the King of Siam, texts resulting from the ambassadorial encounter focus on wealth as a sign of the honour extended to the

75

For Ripa, unlike the generally infertile Africa, or naked and cannibalistic America, Asia is richly dressed: ‘Son riche habillement est le vray Symbole de l’abondance & de la fertilité de ce Pays-là, dont les peuples vont suberbement vestus, & où les femmes particulierement estalent dessus leurs corps tout ce que la magnificence & le luxe ont de plus precieux & de plus charmant.’ Iconologie, II, pp. 8-10. 76 Choisy, 1687, pp. 287-288.

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King of France, but also can only have accentuated the wealth-Orient association. In other cases based on more problematic encounter, the terms of description often reveal the preoccupations of the author writing for an expectant audience: Un matin que nous sortions de bonne heure du côté de la rivière, nous vîmes une jeune femme qui avait quatre roses de diamants, devant et derrière et des deux côtés de la tête, et aux oreilles deux pendants d’or massif éclatants de pierreries, et trois cercles d’argent à chacun de ses bras et jambes. Etant sur le bord elle dépouilla une robe de soie rouge et une chemise verte, et après s’être baignée et rhabillée, dix ou douze prêtres lui firent des marques de diverses couleurs sur le visage et lui dirent les uns après les autres plusieurs oraisons, et firent des cérémonies assez grotesques. Et quand elle fut achevée de peindre, elle leur donna à chacun plusieurs pièces d’argent de la valeur de six deniers.77

The narrator turned voyeur, a Frenchman under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company in India, is clearly fascinated by this double exposure, of the body of the female Oriental vividly bedecked with eastern wealth. Extracts elsewhere in this same Relation graphically illustrate the preoccupations of Europeans: Nous partîmes de devant Monteli le premier de décembre et rôdâmes huit jours sur la côte de Goa, et fîmes rencontre d’un vaisseau que nous prîmes, et tuâmes tous les hommes. Mais nous ne touchâmes point à cinq femmes qui y étaient, excepté à une à qui on coupa les oreilles pour des pendants qui y étaient.78

Souchu describes a diamond, possessed by the Mughal, by comparing its size with an easily recognizable European product, demonstrating its immense value: [L’Empereur] porte au bras un diamant gros comme un œuf de poulette, qu’il a achepté un million. Il est sans prix, & a esté volé dans la mine de diamans du Roy de Bisnagar, entre Tonquin & Pegu, où vingt mille hommes travaillent: ce Roy met tous les beaux diamans dans son tresor, & ne souffre pas qu’on en vende. Les meilleurs de ceux qui passent en Europe sont de petits qu’il permet qu’on donne aux Marchands pour negocier; s’il s’en voit d’autres, ils ont esté dérobez comme celuy du Grand Mogol, qui

77 78

Anonymous, 1645, in Van der Cruysse, Mercenaires français de la VOC, p. 232. Ibid., p. 239.

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Yet the already stupendous visual evidence is exceeded by what is unseen: by the best diamonds, hidden away by the King of Bisnagar, and by the vast amount of labour needed for the exploitation of the mine. L’Estra writes that in Ceylon, riches are similarly hidden in mines to which Europeans have no access, thus calling into question how their existence could have been known of in the first place: Il y a plusieurs mines d’or & d’argent dans cette Isle, qui sont inconnuës aux Hollandois, lesquels n’osent pas s’écarter de leurs forteresses & de leurs Villes, de peur d’estre tuez […]. Il y a aussi quelques rivieres où l’on trouve plusieurs pierres precieuses que les torrens entraînent des montagnes. Les Mores mettent des filets dans le courant des eaux pour les arrester; d’ordinaire quand ils les retirent, ils trouvent des topases, des rubis, & des saphirs…80

Given that the natives of the Orient were repeatedly criticized for their sloth and their lack of effort, the commercially minded reader must surely have been driven to ask him/herself what such mines or streams could yield if they were in the right hands. 81 Of course, one might speculate that the nature of the trade goods coming to Europe from the East – concentrated, expensive and often provoking sensual response – helped to promote this association, so that a material reality was the basis of further attributions. This was perhaps compounded by the fact that contacts entailed the appropriation of material goods (or the attempt to appropriate them), and that Europeans might, indeed, gain great sums in the East, as Wicquefort writes:82 il n’y a point de comparaison à faire entre les richesses de l’Europe aux richesses de l’Asie, où celles de tout le reste du monde se vont rendre, comme les rivieres à la mer, il y a une trentaine de personnes dans Paris,

79

Souchu, p. 339. Feynes had used exactly the same comparison to ‘un œuf de poullette’ in his own enthusiastic account of the mines of Bisnegat, where ‘L’on peut faire des gains inestimables en ce Royaume où l’on peut aller fort facilement.’ p. 187. 80 L’Estra, p. 127-128. 81 For the response to such tales of voyagers embarking with the VOC, see Van der Cruysse, Mercenaires français de la VOC, pp. 23-24. 82 See Choisy on the cour of Batavia. Choisy, 1687, p. 143.

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assez riches, pour justifier de ce que nostre relation dit sur le sujet, en distelle six fois davantage.83

Nonetheless, such descriptions, whatever basis in observed phenomena or acquired wealth they might have had, were magnified beyond any recognizable limits in French representations (by travellers or commentators) of the East. For Pyrard, as has been seen earlier in this chapter, precious metals, spices and wonders, ‘l’or, les espiceries & singularitez de l’Orient’ were together synonymous with the East.84 Late in the century, De L’Isle concurs: De toutes les parties [de l’Asie] la plus considerable, sont les Indes, que j’estime surpasser toutes les autres, tant à cause de leurs grandeurs que de leurs richesses, & des choses extraordinaires que l’on en a dites.85

De L’Isle even asserts that gold, in Pegu, is a ‘métal si commun que l’on y dore la pluspart des maisons.’86 The fantastical attributions of the amount of wealth within the East Indies are only matched by the apparent ease of obtaining it. Souchu’s vision of the benefits of travel is standard in that knowledge of foreign customs, especially those of particularly faraway lands, would be useful and glorious: En effet, il n’y a pas moins de satisfaction & d’utilité que de gloire, à s’instruire par soy-même des differentes coûtumes des Nations éloignées, à les dépoüiller, pour ainsi dire, de ce qu’elles ont de rare & de pretieux, à puiser dans leur source l’or, les perles, les pierreries & les parfums, & à faire connoître jusques aux extrémitez du monde la grandeur & la puissance de son Prince.87

However, the quest for knowledge becomes a metaphor for the more readily identifiable quest to exploit gold, jewellery and precious stones. For other authors, these immensely precious natural resources were symptomatic of an innate quality in the Orient which surpassed that of opulence, or of the prospecting of natural resources. Asia was

83

Wicquefort, in Olearius, Preface, non-paginated. Pyrard, 1619, I, p. 2. 85 De L’Isle, pp. 5-6. The same author also sees a biblical link with the wealth of Malaca. Ibid., pp. 17-21. 86 Ibid., p. 20. 87 Souchu, p. 2. 84

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for long associated not only with wealth, but even, in the text of Père Martin Martinius, with the creation of humanity itself: Il faut demeurer d’accord que l’Asie a esté de tout temps, & est encores à cette heure, le premier & le plus excellent pays de tout le monde. C’est elle qui a eu ces beaux & agreables jardins du Paradis terrestre, que la divine main avoit plantez avec les premiers hommes nos premiers peres: c’est de là, que ces grandes colonies se sont estenduës au long & au large, & ont peuplé tout le monde.88

While many other 17th-century travellers were hesitant on the location of earthly Paradise, the East was repeatedly attributed a similar abundance and fertility. In De L’Isle’s vision of Siam, for example, precious stones are only one of the délices of the country: Ce Pays est un des meilleurs, des plus fertiles & des plus delicieux du monde, abondant en toute sorte de vivres, de fruits, de métaux & de mineraux, de soie & de pierreries, de parfums & de bois odoriferans de plusieurs sortes…89

Fertility was frequently attributed to the soil of oriental regions, the parallel of the abundance within the earth. Baudier, in 1624, writes of China: La bonté admirable du pays fait envie à tout le reste de la terre; les hommes y respirent l’air de l’Orient du monde: les vins, les grains, les fruicts y sont en abondance.90

For Feynes, a generous Nature provided, in a similar fashion, for the inhabitants of Cambay: Les Indiens n’ont aucunes boutiques d’Apoticaires comme nous n’en avons que trop parmy nous. Car la Nature les ayant pourveu liberalement de tout ce qui peut maintenir ou remettre la santé du corps, s’il advient qu’estans malades ils ayent besoin de quelque medicament, ils le vont chercher aux champs, où par une cognoissance dont ils heritent de pere en fils, ils treuvent tout ce qui leur est necessaire.91

88

Père Martin Martinius, Description Geographique de l’Empire de la Chine, in M. Thévenot, ed., Relations de divers voyages… (Paris: T. Moette, 1696), II, p. 1. 89 De L’Isle, p. 11. 90 Baudier, Histoire de la Cour du Roy de la Chine, 1624, p. 10. 91 Feynes, pp. 106-107.

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Negative reflection on French apothecaries aside, the needs of the human body, in Cambay, are depicted here as being met by the almost effortless provision of benevolent Nature, although this privilege was not extended to the Europeans who, travel narratives also reveal, were far more likely to fall ill in the Orient. The fertility attributed to the Orient was matched by frequent accounts of the resilience and fertility of Indian women, of which one related by L’Estra is exemplary: Elles enfantent & nourrissent sans peine, se levant un quart d’heure après leurs couches sans garder le lict davantage, & faisant les mêmes fonctions qu’auparavant.92

Such a parallel of a human and a natural feature was not unusual in the representation of the East, and the repetition in text would appear to indicate the perception of a causal link. The people who inhabited a region could be attributed the features of that region; if it was fertile, its inhabitants might also be depicted as being so. Such a stock of attributions could be drawn on by those Frenchmen attempting various types of colonial or missionary intervention in the Indian Ocean Basin or in Asia. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Huguenot Henri Duquesne praised the salubrious air and climate which would welcome settlers to his ‘île de l’Eden’:93 Le poisson […] y est assez abondant […] l’eau en est très bonne à boire; […] il y a des bois de toutes espèces, et même de ceux qui sont rares en Europe comme des cèdres, de l’ébène, et d’autres semblables; enfin il est certain qu’il y en a beaucoup de propres pour la charpente, et c’est le principal; il y a aussi beaucoup de fruits que la terre produit d’elle-même […] il est hors de doute que puisque la terre y produit ces choses sans culture lorsqu’elle sera cultivée et que l’on y plantera des fruits de notre continent, ils y profiteront tout au moins aussi bien, comme ils sont dans les lieux situés sous le même climat; […] Il y a par-dessus cela beaucoup de gibier de toutes sortes, et beaucoup d’animaux propres à la nourriture de l’homme, comme des bœufs et des vaches, mais surtout des cochons et des chèvres dont il y a abondance, et que l’on prend sans peine…94

92

L’Estra, p. 194. Also ‘Il y en avoit environ soixante [esclaves], tant garçons que filles, dont l’une accoucha en dansant sur le Pont avec ses camarades…’ L’Estra, pp. 210-211. 93 Duquesne, 1995, p. 248; p. 258. 94 Ibid., pp. 248-249.

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The fertility of the soil would actively assist the creation of a colonial commercial economy based on construction and cultivation. The land produces without the need of human intervention, while the claim that so many animals could be caught ‘sans peine’ seems to indicate a comfortable conjunction of European prerogatives and the will of nature. It was, in turn, as the head of the reconnaissance mission for the expedition promoted by Duquesne that Leguat was to be shipwrecked on Rodriguez Island.95 During the two years he spent on the island he was, in a novel manner, to himself accede to the riches of the East, in terms that foreshadow Rousseau’s 1750 Discours sur les sciences et les arts:96 j’ai respiré là un air admirable, sans la moindre altération de ma santé. J’y ai été nourri en Prince, dans l’aise & dans l’abondance, sans pain, & sans Valets. J’y ai été riche, sans Diamans, & sans or; comme sans Ambition. […] Recueilli très-profondément en moi-même, mes serieuses réflexions m’ont fait voir là, comme au doit & à l’œil, le néant d’une infinité de choses qui sont en grand’vogue parmi les habitans de cette malheureuse Terre; de cette Terre, ou l’Art détruit presque toûjours la Nature, sous prétexte de l’embellir: où l’Artifice, pire que l’Art, l’Hypocrisie, la Fraude, la Superstition, la Rapine exercent un tyrannique Empire…97

The moral riches which Leguat has obtained contrast with those traditionally associated with the East – the diamonds and gold – and which for their exploitation depend on ambition. It is the nature of his seclusion, isolated from the route to the Indies while paradoxically still on it, which permits this reflection on the nature of riches, and in what they consist. While the art/embellisement/artifice versus Nature contrast is (in the history of the early modern récit de voyage) at least as old as Léry, the transfer of these characteristics from the New World to the East Indies constitutes a novel version of a discovery narrative, eastwards in the late 17th century. However, fertility could also symbolize the religious promise the Orient held, in which the conversion of the multitude of infidèles is compared to a harvest: 95

The island is situated in the Orient in the Ode à l’île: ‘Toi, Petite Île aimable! Que je rendrais fameuse entre les îles de l’Orient, Si mon pouvoir répondait à mes vœux […].’ Leguat, 1708, p. 159. 96 Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1712-1778], Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750) (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1996). 97 Leguat, 1708, I, pp. XXVIII-XXX.

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Une ample & riche moisson où travaillent tous les jours plusieurs bons Religieux Cordeliers, Jacobins, Jesuites & autres.98

For Rhodes, the fertility of Cochin China was spiritual: [Une] terre plantureuse, de laquelle parle David, sur laquelle le Ciel verse sa rosée, & tous les champs portent toutes sortes de fruits avec abondance.99

The abundance reflects Rhodes’s intensely optimistic view of the implantation of Christianity in which the ‘terre plantureuse’ of the lands to which missionaries travelled is equated with that of the Old Testament. The metaphor also depends on the assumption that the Orient itself was literally plantureux, an assumption that contemporary travel narratives furnished considerable evidence for. Missionaries such as Philippe thus hoped that Japan, in which Christianity was in an ‘estat deplorable’, might be rendered spiritually fertile:100 Il ne faut pourtant desesperer de sa conversion, il est à croire que le sang de tant de Martyrs qui a esté versé si souvent dans cette Isle, & dont elle a esté si abondamment arrosée, y fera pulluler de nouveau la Religion Chrestienne avec plus de vigueur & plus de gloire.101

These metaphors for the religious conversion of the East Indies coexist with the contemporary assumption of its innate fertility and abundance, and reflect a wider perception of European potential to influence or to exploit. Numerous reports of personally-seen, stupendous wealth, and of great, exploitable natural riches, reinforced this legend. This natural, economic and spiritual potential served an extremely persuasive purpose. Travellers imply that if it were harnessed, the East Indies would pullulate both religiously and economically, in a way it allegedly could not, left to its indigenous inhabitants.

98

Le Blanc, I, p. 62. Rhodes, Divers Voyages & Missions, 1653, p. 67. 100 Philippe, p. 275. Of the rest of the East Indies, Philippe writes: ‘Les Portugais apres avoir surmonté le Cap de Bonne Esperance & traversé les longues & vastes estenduës de l’Ocean, allerent à la conqueste des Indes sous le Roy Emmanuel, pour y semer la foy Catholique…’ Ibid., p. 496. 101 Ibid., pp. 276-277. 99

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Promiscuity and Commerce French travellers’ accounts of lands in the East Indies to which they did actually have access often demonstrate a further problematic extension of the conclusions drawn from barely observed behaviours. The sexual habits of Orientals were a source of great interest to travellers, yet the clear difficulty of obtaining eye-witness testimony in any but the most isolated occurrences does not seem, in the present corpus, to have prevented wide-ranging conclusions from being made on these habits. Even postulating that prostitution in urban centres, or the knowledge which travel writers had with or had of prostitutes, might be in some measure responsible for the attribution of promiscuity, does little to account for a claim like that made by Martin de Vitré that, in Sumatra: ‘les filles premierement que d’estre mariees, ne font difficulté de se prostituer à qui bon leur semble, ce qui ne les empesche point de se marier’.102 Indeed, while Thévenot might certainly have observed evidence of prostitution in India, his observations are accompanied by a judgement on its acceptability which is extended far beyond visual evidence: Les femmes publiques sont permises dans le Royaume, & personne ne trouve étrange qu’un homme aille chez elles, & elles sont souvent sur leurs portes bien parées, pour attirer des passans; mais on dit que la pluspart sont gâtées.103

On the other hand, Robert Challe intersperses the description of the prostitution of the East with conclusions which are even more wideranging than those of Martin de Vitré: Leurs Femmes sont communes à tous les Gentils & Mores; & c’est dans leur ordre que se prennent les Filles de mauvaise vie. Par toute l’Europe, ce sont ordinairement des Femmes qui sont marchandes en gros ou en détail des filles faciles. Ici, ce sont les Hommes qui font cet infame commerce; & il n’y en a aucun qui, pour une roupie, ne vende sa Sœur, sa Fille ou sa Femme, qui de leur côté s’abandonnent volontiers aux Blancs ou Européens. […] J’y ai été, mes yeux ont vû, mes mains ont touché: j’ai satisfait ma curiosité; & c’est tout. Si je n’avois pas craint les suites, peut-

102 103

Martin de Vitré, p. 41. Thévenot, Troisieme Voyage, pp. 287-288.

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être n’aurois-je pas été si sage. […] On ne peut pas s’imaginer jusques où va ici cette prostitution…104

Here, the supposed trade in human beings in the East, carried out for a paltry sum by men on their own relations, having no respect for any of the closest male-female familial links, is reinforced by the claim of not only visual, but even tangible evidence. The last line of this extract, and the claim that it would be impossible to ‘imagine’ the degree of such prostitution, is telling. The role of fantasy within, attributing total sexual freedom to women who gladly abandon themselves to white Europeans, is clearly considerable. Challe’s conclusions on the libido of Orientals stretch far beyond whatever evidence of prostitution he may have seen or witnessed himself, first hand: Ce n’est pas le simple peuple, qui fait de ces sortes de marriages, & qui vend les Filles; ce sont aussi les plus considérables du Royaume. Ceci est du génie universel des Orientaux: les plaisirs de l’Amour priment sur tout; c’est leur Passion dominante & favorite.105

L’Estra’s travel narrative is also insistent on the receptiveness of women all around the Orient to Europeans, and his description of those of Bengal unites a number of topoi: Les Negres […] ne sont point jaloux de leurs femmes, lesquelles sont extrémement libres & ne font point de difficulté de faire quelque galanterie avec un étranger en présence de leurs maris, ayant la liberté de se divertir où il leur plaist. Les riches ont quantité d’esclaves qu’ils vendent comme des chevaux […]. Les pauvres gens vendent mesme leurs enfans & leurs femmes aux étrangers qui les emmenent dans toutes les parties du monde, & ensuite on les rend au pere & la mere qui sont bien-aises quand elles sont grosses. Ceux qui ne veulent pas en acheter, en loënt; & pour trente sols par mois ils ont une belle fille qui leur sert de femme & de servante: les filles font gloire quand un patron les achete pour les honorer de sa couche: & elles s’estiment heureuses de pouvoir devenir grosses pour luy donner de leur fruit.106

The realities of slavery and oppression are justified by the assumption that a liberal moral climate is the main reason that the poor are supposed to engage in the trade in and/or prostitution of their own 104

Challe, 1721, II, pp. 191-192. Challe, 1721, II, p. 52. 106 L’Estra, pp. 193-194. 105

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families. In this region in which Europeans could seemingly engage in unlimited galanteries and divertissement, the preference for Europeans that Challe attributes to these women is extended to the fruits of these encounters; it becomes an honour to give birth to a child of such origin. As with Challe, the role of fantasy in describing the sexual liberty of the East, the beauty of women who are both sexual partner and servant, and the joy of parents and daughter alike in the event of her pregnancy, must clearly be considerable. Indeed, in some cases, the purely subjective nature of a narrator’s judgement is even more obvious, as in Souchu’s conclusion on the women of Surat: Elles ont même de petites couronnes d’or sur leurs têtes, sont presque toutes belles, & de facile accez, & il semble qu’elles ne soient au monde que pour faire l’amour.107

However, the promiscuity frequently attributed to the inhabitants of the East had a particularly commercial flavour in the Indes orientales. Contact with Europeans was depicted as being actively sought out by its inhabitants so as to engage in the commerce in human beings (especially women) and the reasons for it might surpass simple monetary exchange. Chambelle judges Africans, Indians and people of mixed European and Asian extraction together with a litany of familiar adjectives which culminates in the assertion that they sell themselves: Pour les Malabars, Bengals, Macassars, Mammelus, Candiots [métis], Cafres et Nègres, [ce] sont nations qui sont noires et allant tout nus aussi bien que les femmes, hormis qu’ils se mettent quelque méchant linge qui leur sert de ceinture à l’entour du corps et couvre leurs parties honteueses. Ils adorent le diable craignant qu’il leur fasse mal, parlent avec lui et quelquefois en sont bien battus, [lui] ne se mêlant de rien et qui ne veut pas qu’on l’importune. Ce sont gens lâches, pusillanimes, poltrons, paresseux et idiots, et se vendent eux-mêmes pour presque rien.108

That forms of slavery already existed in the East Indies is attested to by travel narratives, and further justified here by Chambelle, who attributes characteristics such as sloth, cowardice and idiocy to a great 107

Souchu, p. 334. Chambelle, p. 116. The ethnic group that emerges most positively from Chambelle’s account is the Malay: ‘Les Malais, nation la plus civilisée de toute l’Asie...’ Ibid., pp. 116-117.

108

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range of peoples who, he surmises, are voluntarily enslaved for paltry sums. 109 The objective value of this description of a vast range of ethnic groups, like those attributing indiscriminate promiscuity and prostitution to others, is indisputably minimal. The result of incomprehension, or even fantasy, such associations nonetheless enter tradition, and become characteristic of the difference attributed to Orientals. The terms in which this difference appears in the text, in the form of vast generalizations associating promiscuity with commerce, reveal these attributions to be ultimately divorced from observation.

Climate, Spices and an Oriental Essence While oriental promiscuity, riches and resources were strands of a fascinating tapestry which reflected the nature of European presence in the Indes and could also encourage intervention, another all-enveloping difference was generated by assertions of the power of the climate of the Indes and the susceptibility of its indigenous peoples to it. 110 Bernier, for example, writes that settlers in India, after several generations, adopt the physical appearance and the humeur lente of the country, while La Boullaye writes that climate had a much more immediate effect:111 Les Anglois qui naviguent dans ces parties meridionales y menent plusieurs dogues qui sont tenus universellement pour les meilleurs chiens du monde, mais ils y deviennent lasches dans deux ou trois ans de mesme que les chevaux & les hommes blancs, & l’on pourroit conclurre que le mesme

109

On the purchase of slaves in India see L’Estra, p. 201; p. 204. Of course, the neo-hippocratic theory of climate was to find its most famous formulation in the following century. Montesquieu links a reduction in force to l’air chaud which means that ‘on a donc plus de vigueur dans les climats froids’. Montesquieu, De L’Esprit des lois, pp. 474-475. 111 ‘Les enfans qui passent la troisième ou quatrième generation […] ont pris le visage brun & l’humeur lente du païs.’ Bernier, Voyages, 1710, I, p. 282. Choisy reflects on the invasion of China: ‘De sorte que les tartares […] dans cinquante ans prendront les manieres chinoises. La bonté du païs les rendra efféminez; ils laisseront croître leurs cheveux […]’ Choisy, 1687, p. 147. 110

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The characteristics La Boullaye attributes to the temperate zone, that is, vigour and courage for animals, and valeur for European white men are, he says, sapped after some time spent in the Indies, to be replaced by cowardice. However, most writers were content to attribute this susceptibility to Orientals (including settled Europeans) without elaborating on the contagion that La Boullaye implies. The climate-character link might reflect the inherent weakness of oriental character as much as the strength of the agent of extreme climate, as in Philippe’s reflection on conversion in India: Comme les Indiens se convertissent facilement à la Foy de Jesus-Christ, de mesme s’en pervertissent-ils facilement, & s’ils ne craignoient la rigueur de la sacrée Inquisition, ils la changeroient tous les jours. Il n’en manque pas mesme qui ont reçeu deux ou trois fois le Baptesme, disant qu’ils sont plus Chrestiens que les autres qui ne l’ont pas reçeu qu’une fois.113

Indians were thus alleged to add to a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian sacraments by their inability to persist in their faith, thanks to a nature which was subject to outside influence. In fact, it was also this incapacity to resist any influence that made Islam, in the eyes of Philippe, threatening to the East Indies: La detestable peste du Mahometisme a passé presque par tout l’Orient; car outre les Terres des Turcs, des Arabes & des Persans dont nous avons desja traité, outre le Royaume de Mombassa, de Melindi, de Chiola, & les autres de l’Affrique Orientale, la principale partie des Indes est infectée de ce venin.114

The Orient is depicted as nothing more than a passive agent for an external cultural manifestation, although the metaphor of poison certainly demonstrates, once more, the particular terror Islam held for Philippe and his contemporaries. Yet when the heat of India (and its indisputable difference with the climate of France) was associated 112

La Boullaye, p. 240. Kate Teltscher identifies another instance of the debilitating effects of India on dogs in the case of Luke Scrafton’s Reflections on the Government of Indostan (London: 1763), pp. 22-23. Teltscher, p. 112. 113 Philippe, pp. 297-298. 114 Ibid., pp. 328-329.

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with reputed or perceived cultural difference, this could open the way for further attributions to the environment, such as that of Mocquet: Ils marient leurs filles à l’age de huict ou neuf ans, car si tost qu’elles ont passé douze ou treize ans, on n’en veut plus, parce qu’ils ne les croyent plus pucelles, attendu la chaleur du païs.115

This extremely tenuous link was also supported by Mocquet’s contemporary Pyrard, in Goa and in the Maldives:116 L’on peut assigner plusieurs raisons de ce que ces femmes sont d’une complexion si chaude et amoureuse; mais les principales me semblent estre, de ce qu’elles sont fort oisives, & ne font autre chose que d’estre tousjours couchees et se faire berser par delicatesse, puis elles mangent continuellement du bettel, qui est une herbe fort chaude, outre qu’en leur manger ordinaire, elles usent de tant d’espiceries, qu’à peine en pouvois–je quelquefois mettre dans la bouche […] Avec tout cela le climat estant directement sous la ligne y fait beaucoup, & c’est ce qui rend d’autre-part les hommes plus lasches et moins puissans, & nonobstant cela ils ont deux ou trois femmes la plus part, s’entend ceux qui ont dequoy. Et sont aussi faineants & oysifs que sçauroient estre les femmes, n’ayans autre plus grand exercise que d’estre couchez prés d’elles, & le plus souvent avec plus de volonté que d’effect.117

Pyrard establishes a link between climate and inaction, although paradoxically, the heat which renders men ‘lâches et moins puissants’ seems to induce, along with sloth, the opposite effect on the libido of women. Furthermore, spices, herbes (betel), and heat are all supposed to have a direct influence on the behaviour of Orientals. The ubiquity of commercially desirable products coincides with the potential willingness of desirable sexual partners, but this is clearly, as LinonChipon writes, a fantasy: Le stéréotype qui associe luxuriance et luxure fait partie des schémas intellectuels que l’Occidental plaque sur l’Oriental, l’associant à ses fantasmes les plus secrets comme si l’éloignement était capable de l’affranchir de tous les tabous.118

115

Mocquet, 1617, p. 291. On Goa, see Pyrard, 1619, II, p. 119. 117 Pyrard, 1619, I, pp. 325-326. 118 Linon-Chipon, Gallia Orientalis, p. 473. 116

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The other side of the link between spices, herbes and heat, which causes women to become amorous, is a corresponding feminization of the men which renders them unable to act; contained within Pyrard’s scorn of the impotence of the men of the Maldives is an implicit affirmation of the narrator’s contrast with them. For Bernier, climate and diet act together on the Indian temperament, which is anathema to labour: La plupart des Indiens sont d’une humeur lente & paresseuse, la chaleur du pays & leur manger y contribuant beaucoup; & parce qu’ils ne sont pas comme nous animez au travail par cette esperance que nous avons de parvenir à quelque chose.119

The affirmation of Raynal a century later on the Indian ‘fougue des sens pour les plaisirs de l’amour’, demonstrates the perennity of 17thcentury ideas on oriental libido and sloth: Ils connoissent à peine plusieurs des passions qui nous agitent. […] Ce sont les travaux paisibles & l’oisiveté qu’ils aiment.120

Such Indian Orientals, as inactive as the Siamese depicted earlier in this chapter, differ – again – from nous by their supposed indifference to advancement in status and/or the accumulation of possessions or money. Made to appear unable or unwilling to act in the sense that Europeans were (or were attempting to) in the Indian Ocean Basin, they react to external forces and influence. The physician Bernier’s use of the term humeur in describing Indian character, in 1671, is not insignificant. The balance of the four humours (bile, atrabile, sang and flegme) had been long assumed in medicine to determine human temperament, and the term is derived from the Latin humor, humoris – liquid, and originally, water. 121 While 17th-century anatomical discoveries such as those of William Harvey [1578-1657] made such a theory medically untenable, the association between liquid and temperament seems to have continued 119

Bernier, Suite, I, pp. 181-182. Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal [1713-1796], Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Établissements et du Commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 3rd edition, 10 vols (Geneva: Jean-Leonard Pellet, 1780; repr. in facsimile Paris: Bibliothèque des Introuvables, 2006), I, pp. 118-119. 121 Alain Rey, et al, Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 2 vols (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 2000), I, p. 1051. 120

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to be a factor in contemporary understanding of character, as the following extract from La Loubère demonstrates:122 Les Anciens ont remarqué que c’est l’humidité des aliments, qui défend les Indiens contre cette action du Soleil, qui brûle le teint des Negres, & cotonne leurs cheveux. La nourriture des Siamois est encore plus aqueuse que celle d’aucun autre Peuple des Indes; & l’on peut sûrement leur attribuer toutes les bonnes, & toutes les mauvaises qualitez, qui viennent du flegme & la pituïte; parce que le flegme & la pituite sont des effets nécessaires de leur nourriture. Ils ont de la douceur, de la politesse, du sangfroid, & peu de soucy. Ils se possédent long-temps; mais quand une fois leur colére s’allume, ils ont peut-être moins de retenuë que nous. Leur timidité, leur avarice, leur dissimulation, leur taciturnité, leur inclination à mentir croissent avec eux. Ils sont opiniâtres dans leurs coûtumes autant par paresse, que par le respect de leurs Ancêtres, qui les leur ont laissées. Ils n’ont nulle curiosité & n’admirent rien. Ils sont orgueilleux avec ceux qui les ménagent, & rempants avec ceux qui les traittent avec hauteur. Ils sont rusez & changeants, comme tous ceux qui sentent leur propre foiblesse.123

Flegme was associated with ‘calme et froid’ in the late 17th century and pituite, when dominant, made a person ‘sérieuse et disposée à l’étude’. 124 These humours, deriving from diet, are assumed to be the root of the mainly negative traits which La Loubère attributes to the Siamese. Characteristics, in turn, such as a tenacious persistence in old beliefs due in part to sloth, a changeability which betrays innate weakness, or seemingly excessive emotional reactions, are all based on an implicit contrast with narrator and readership. Essentially created by the process of external observation (itself of short duration and, as has been seen, heavily influenced by precedent), such traits are in turn traced to a external cause which results, in this instance, in the depiction of a people irreconcilably different to Europeans. This Orient in which immensely valuable natural resources were rumoured to abound was also the stage for natural phenomena which further heightened its potential to fascinate. Extreme riches were matched by other attributions, further enlarging the horizons of possibility beyond interesting, or exciting character traits. For Le 122

‘Cette classification […] connaîtra diverses fortunes au cours des siècles sans jamais disparaître.’ Roger Teyssou, La Médecine à la Renaissance (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), p. 60. 123 La Loubère, I, pp. 293-294. 124 Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, I, p. 860; II, p. 1653.

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Blanc, for example, the consumption of spices and drugs in Aceh has a remarkable consequence: Au reste il y a une chose remarquable en cette isle, c’est qu’elle porte plusieurs hommes hermaphrodites; ce qui semble provenir de la trop grande abondance de semence, mais imparfaite, causée par les espiceries & drogues chaudes du pais.125

While the root of this abundance is again heat, it has a corrosive effect which outdoes the effects on character which were restricted to the individual; here the process of generation itself is warped by oriental excess. On the other hand, in other, ostensibly more sober travel narratives, the Orient might become the setting for attributions to which Europeans might themselves be reasonably assumed to aspire. Orientals, for example, were frequently attributed a life span which was considerably longer than that of their European counterparts.126 While one might speculate that claims of vastly inflated ages might be at least in part the product of intercultural misunderstanding due to the collision of two differing language-based ‘real worlds’ in the spirit of Sapir, rather than pure invention, the willingness to report these claims is notable.127 Clearly, age was largely unverifiable, especially in contact with ethnic groups with which the voyager was unfamiliar, but attributions of great age were so readily repeated as to hint at being as much of a fantasy as that of numerous sexual partners. While Tavernier accredits the elephant with a life-span of several centuries, L’Estra states that the salubrious air of certain parts of the Indies allows their human inhabitants great longevity, and even 120 years, in the case of Ceylon.128 Le Blanc’s narrative outdoes the others and combines a number of wonders, namely extremely long life, conservation of youth and numerous female partners: Le climat de ce pais est assez temperé & d’un fort bon air, ce qui les fait vivre long-temps. Tesmoin ce More de Bengale âgé de trois cens trente ans

125

Le Blanc, I, p. 138. This is not restricted to voyages to the East, Pyrard claiming the Brésiliens live for 150 years. Pyrard, 1619, II, p. 338. 127 Sapir, Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, p. 162. 128 Tavernier, Six Voyages, II, p. 434; L’Estra, p. 82, p. 130, p. 220. 126

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en 1537 que les plus vieux du pais avoient tousjours veu en mesme âge & de mesme taille […] Il avoit eu environ sept cens femmes en sa vie.129

For this ‘More de Bengale’, the climate does not lead to any disparaging assumptions on his character; he is the unknowing (and one assumes, favourable) protagonist in circumstances outside his control. The representation, however flimsy, must be nonetheless considered to have been most enticing and appealing to the male reader.

Violence and Excess Despite the riches, fertility and albeit paid-for galanterie mentioned repeatedly above, the representation of the East Indies was curiously double-sided. Blessed with the bounties of Nature, the region had all that was necessary for life and indeed for the accumulation of wealth, but was inhabited by natives who seemingly could not or would not exploit it. Portuguese or Dutch colonists were accredited with dominating the oceans, and the immensely powerful oriental monarchs of the Mughal Empire, China and Siam ruled over huge tracts of land. However the East Indies, especially inland, was still largely unknown and retained a vast power of fascination. While L’Estra or Mocquet recounted the atrocities that the Dutch or the Portuguese committed on suffering natives, extremes of power and of violence unmatched by Europeans were simultaneously associated with the native governance of eastern kingdoms. It is in this that the bounty of the Orient, fabulously rich, immensely fertile, promising long life and endless sexual possibility, was matched by the corresponding harshness of its rulers and the excesses of cruelty which were the daily lot of the Oriental. The monarchy of Siam is repeatedly referred to (especially with the increased contact of the end of the century) as an example of the terrible consequences of despotism. So while De L’Isle ascribed a magnificent grandeur to its monarch, this magnificence was also criticized for being founded on slavery:130 129

Le Blanc, I, p. 130. ‘L’on connût si peu en France la grandeur & la puissance de ce Prince, qui devoit relever de beaucoup la gloire de nôtre puissant Monarque.’ De L’Isle, Avertissement

130

214

Veiled Encounters On n’y voit presque travailler que les femmes, les hommes étant le plus souvent employez au service du Roy, de qui ils sont comme les esclaves.131

La Loubère criticized the forced labour imposed by the monarch, which made prosperity among his subjects impossible: comme chaque Particulier doit tous les ans six mois de Corvées au Roy, & que souvent il n’en est pas quitte pour six mois, il n’y a personne en ce Païslà qui ose se distinguer dans quelque art, de peur d’être forcé à travailler toute sa vie gratuïtement pour le service de ce Prince.132

Even more graphic are the descriptions of the punishments inflicted on subjects. Chaumont recounts that it was the monarch who directly imposed sentence, abusing absolute power by the disproportion between crime and punishment: Le Roy est tres-absolu, on diroit quasi qu’il est le Dieu des Siamois, ils n’osent pas l’appeler de son nom. Il châtie tres-severement le moindre crime; […] à l’égard des complices d’un crime digne de mort, après avoir fait couper la tête au veritable criminel, il la fait attacher au col du complice, & on la laisse pourrir exposée au Soleil sans couvrir la tête pendant trois jours & trois nuits, ce qui cause à celui qui la porte une grande puanteur.133

The great violence recounted by travellers reflects what was considered as excess – the abandon of maîtrise de soi necessary for the application of law. Behind the appearance of strength and power thus lay a monarchical regime which abused of its own subjects both in its impositions and in its exactions. Thévenot’s account demonstrates that the excess in punishment was perceived to be the case throughout most of the Indes: Lorsqu’il se fait quelque vol à Bagnagar ou ailleurs, on punit le voleur en luy coupant les deux mains; ce qui se fait aussi dans la plûpart des pays des Indes.134

Au Lecteur, non-paginated; ‘Tout le peuple de ce Royaume est esclave, ou du Roy, ou des Grands-Seigneurs.’ Tavernier, Six Voyages, II, p. 433. 131 Chaumont, p. 40. 132 La Loubère, I, pp. 268-269. 133 Chaumont, État du Gouvernement, second pagination, p. 3. 134 Thévenot, Troisieme Voyage, p. 288.

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Cruelty and violence, as the next chapter will indicate, were enthusiastically recounted in the anecdotes and histoires remarquables within travel narratives, just as in other anecdotes and histoires of the 16th and 17th centuries. However, the violence which might form a large part of the interest of anecdotes situated in the East was often simultaneously attributed to the Orient in the flawed, supposedly firsthand, testimonies of travellers or travellers’ informants. The very people who were subject to despotic government or excessive punishment were themselves portrayed as being as weak or fatalistic as they were susceptible to outside influence. Orientals might be impressionable or unable to resist adversity:135 C’est l’ordinaire de ces peuples là de se noyer ou empoisonner, ou mourir en quelque autre maniere que ce soit, quand il leur arrive quelque chose de sinistre; ne se soucians alors plus de vivre.136

Such attributions of fatalism were contemporaneous with descriptions of the remarkable constancy of the women who were depicted going to their deaths on funeral pyres in India. All of the 17th-century voyagers to India which this study examines give accounts of the sati rite and many claim to have witnessed it, so that by the time of Bernier’s Suite des Memoires, the author was aware it might have become tedious, or at the very least predictable, for the reader.137 This most extensive of his several accounts is typical: Celle que je vis se brûler en partant de Sourate pour venir en Perse, en presence de Monsieur Chardin de Paris & de plusieurs Anglois & Hollandois, estoit entre deux âges & n’éstoit pas laide; de vous representer cette intrepidité bestiale & gayeté feroce qui se remarquoit sur son visage; avec quelle fermeté elle marchoit, se laissoit laver, parloit à l’un, parloit à l’autre, avec quelle assurance & insensibilité elle nous regarda, considera sa petite Cabane faite de grosse paille de millet bien seche, entrelacée de menu bois, entre dedans cette Cabane, s’assit sur le Bucher prenant la teste de son mary dans son giron, prit un flambeau à la main, & mit le feu elle-mesme par dedans, cependant que je ne sçais combien de Brahmens armez de

135

‘Ces pauvres gens se persuadent que le Roy va couper les eaux avec son sabre, afin de les congedier & de leur ordonner de se retirer dans la mer.’ Tavernier, Six Voyages, II, p. 434. 136 Mocquet, 1617, p. 294. See also L’Estra, p. 227. 137 Bernier, Suite, I, p. 132.

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The brutality of the priest-class and the almost trancelike mental states (assurance, insensibilité, and fermeté) of the sati are the central, oftrepeated elements of a scene of near-inhuman (bestiale, féroce) violence. Yet this excess is also notable for inspiring, in French narratives, the action of Europeans who attempt, using various strategies, to stop the accomplishment of the sati rite. Bernier succeeds in dissuading a women from burning herself on the pyre by ‘paroles dites avec un ton de voix le plus fort & le plus menaçant que je pûs.’139 European reason and force would thus appear to be one means to stop this custom. 140 Wives forced into self-immolation might themselves seek European aid, as Philippe recounts: Les Gentils […] leur donnent quelque chose à manger qui leur trouble l’imagination & leur confond le sens; ensuite dequoy une grande troupe de parens & d’amis estant presente à ce lugubre spectacle, elles courent autour du bûcher, & enfin elles s’y jettent; & si elles tardent trop, elles y sont poussées par leurs propres parens […]. Il arriva un jour que tandis qu’une jeune femme tournoit à l’entour du feu qui devoroit le corps de son mary, & qu’elle estoit forcée de s’y jetter, un Vaisseau de Portugais vient prendre terre proche de là; ce que voyant cette femme, elle y court de toute sa force, demande secours aux Portuguais, & les conjure de la délivrer de la mort qui la menaçoit.141

Rather than reason, it is perhaps Christianity, as exported by the Portuguese (whom Philippe characterized as braves Conquerans), which saves this young woman from being drugged and sacrificed by her own family. It would be difficult, in the present corpus, to find a more striking illustration of the narrative of the salvation of the Indian woman by European man which Spivak has identified as central to sati accounts, in a later colonial context.142 The fortuitous landing of the Portuguese allows Philippe to dramatize the happy conjunction of 138

Ibid., pp. 143-144. Ibid., p. 135. 140 In Bernier’s case, sati, as well as many other Eastern customs, is just one example of the general extravagance of l’esprit de l’homme. Ibid., pp. 206-207. 141 Philippe, pp. 335-336. 142 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Williams, Patrick, & Laura Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: a Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 66-111. 139

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male European intervention and female Indian will. Similarly, in Robert Challe’s second-hand account, a group of French officers attempt to stop a young widow from participating in the ritual, rendered all the more barbaric by the description of those who encourage her.143 The officers are powerless, in any case, against her determination: Notre peine fut inutile: elle parut cependant nous en temoigner de la reconnaissance, par des regards gracieux qu’elle jetta sur nous, en nous saluant en riant. Sa constance alla jusques au bout. Elle monta resolument sur le bucher toute seule, baisa & embrassa le cadavre…144

While the Frenchmen who recount this story to Challe do not succeed in saving this young woman, they are at least accorded the (unspoken) evidence of her gratitude, not in words, but rather in gestures and expressions. Conjecture based on the interpretation of signs is again transmitted, this time in a second hand description of sati, and comes to constitute silent acknowledgement of the value of these European interventions, however unsuccessful.145 However, the sati rite is also inseparably woven into the tapestry of climate, weakness and fanaticism that constituted the 17thcentury East Indies. Catherine Weinberger-Thomas highlights the creation by the torride (especially in India) of two apparently contradictory effects, la timidité and ‘l’hypertrophie de l’imagination’: Le torride, amollissant les fibres, énerve et accable les sens, créant la faiblesse d’organes qui s’observe partout en Afrique et en Asie, mais surtout en Inde où la chaleur connaît son acmé. Cette faiblesse d’organes se manifeste par deux effets contradictoires, ou plutôt asymétriques: elle engendre, d’un côté, la « timidité », notion qui englobe l’apathie, la passivité, la paresse, la lâcheté, la féminisation, le penchant naturel pour la servitude, l’attachement aux usages anciens, la tendance à la spéculation (les Indes sont « remplies de derviches et de moines »), le goût de la métaphysique, l’ « ataraxie » et le « quiétisme » des mœurs religieuses; 143

‘Les Braménes firent trois autres tours, en jettant des cris et des hurlemens effroyables…’ Challe, 1721, II, pp. 183-185. 144 Ibid., pp. 184-185. 145 Perhaps the most spectacular account of European intervention is that of Niccolo Manucci [Nicolò Manuzzi] [1638-1717] who charges a group of brahmanes affolés, responding again to ‘un regard qui semblait implorer de l’aide.’ Niccolo Manucci, Un Vénitien chez les Moghols, ed. by François de Valence and Robert Sctrick (Paris: Éditions Phébus, 2002), p. 136.

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It is the same duality that Montesquieu would attempt to resolve early in the following century in his chapter Contradiction dans les caractères de certains peuples du Midi, basing his evidence on the travel writers who form the basis of this study: Les Indiens147 sont naturellement sans courage; les enfants148 même des Européens nés aux Indes perdent celui de son climat. Mais comment accorder cela avec leurs actions atroces, leurs coutumes, leurs pénitences barbares? Les hommes s’y soumettent à des maux incroyables, les femmes s’y brûlent elles-mêmes: voilà bien de la force pour tant de faiblesse.149

But while these effects seemed contradictory, they have in common the irresistible effect of climate on an unresisting oriental mind, inspiring bizarre extremes of behaviour and absence of self-control. The East Indies is depicted as being subject to despotism and violence, just as the familiar Near East had been, but in the former, this violence is amplified beyond all recognizable limits. Vast populations were reportedly held in the sway either of the fatalistic caprices of climate, or of monarchs who were themselves subject to the most terrible of whims. The Indes orientales, which destroyed its own people on funeral pyres or with inordinate punishments, was represented as hiding a monstrously cruel and irrational reality behind its lush fertility and incredible riches. Travellers such as Bernier or Challe may have left implicit condemnations of the excesses of contemporary European religion, by depicting the worst excesses of religious fervour or rituals in the East. However, such condemnation of excess depended on the existing perception of great violence in the East Indies, over which the European mind alone was ultimately triumphant.

146

Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, l’Inde et l’imaginaire, p. 20. Montesquieu’s note: ‘Cent soldats d’Europe, dit Tavernier, n’auroient pas grand’ peine à battre mille soldats indiens.’ 148 Montesquieu’s note: ‘Les Persans même qui s’établissent aux Indes prennent, à la troisième génération, la nonchalance & la lacheté indienne. Bernier, Sur le Mogol, t. I, p. 282.’ 149 Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, p. 478. 147

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Madagascar: entre les deux Indes In the mid-17th century, the frequently expressed hopes of a French commercial colonial empire crystallized around Madagascar. While it had previously been mentioned in travel narratives and would continue to be afterwards, the mid-century saw the publication of the texts of Cauche, Flacourt and Charpentier which are striking in their overtly colonialist portrayal of the island. Madagascar would firstly be useful for its strategic value at the vanguard of a future empire, according to Charpentier, as a stop-over from which ‘on peut trafiquer sans peine dans toutes les Indes, à la Chine, au Japon.’150 The situation had been similarly vaunted by Cauche: Il n’y a point de païs au monde dont la situation soit plus à estimer, cette isle estant entre les deux Indes, comme arbitre de la Conqueste des unes & des autres, ayant tout ce qui est necessaire pour la navigation, entretien & nourriture de l’homme.151

Yet Madagascar was not only admirably situated between les deux Indes: at this period of attempted colonization, it was also attributed the characteristics of the rest of the Indes orientales, such as natural riches: Des mines de fer, d’or, et d’argent, des gommes, des resines, et du sel, que les vagues et vents de la mer laissent dans les trous des rochers, des forests, du coton, du Mahault, des roches entieres de cristal dans la province d’Anthongil, où foüissant dans les ruisseaux qui en sortent on trouve des esmereaudes, et des saphyrs: comme du talque…152

Cauche’s praise of a bountiful nature, leaving precious stones and stocks of commercially viable substances to be freely gathered, mirrors the abundance described by Charpentier: Mines d’or si abondantes, que devant les grandes pluyes & ravines d’eaux, les veines d’or se descouvrent.153

150

Charpentier, p. 18. Cauche, pp. 173-174. 152 Ibid., p. 173. 153 Charpentier, p. 18. 151

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This parallel of oriental riches is mirrored by the gratuitous fertility of the island: Cette Isle est une des plus grandes qu’il y aye au monde, remplie de montagnes fertiles en bois, pasturages & plantages, de campagnes arrousées de rivieres, & d’estangs poissonneux, elle nourrit un nombre infiny de bœufs.154

However Charpentier also writes that the land required intervention, in the form of cultivation, to exploit its full potential: La terre y est admirable pour toutes sortes de grains et d’arbres, & ne demande qu’à estre cultivée pour estre merveilleuse. […] Il est aisé d’en faire un vray Paradis terrestre.155

Were this to occur, the earthly Paradise would be – metaphorically – resituated, this time in the French colony. The land, for the time being, remained commercially unexploited thanks to a conjunction of natural bounty and the absence of the commercial acumen attributed by commentators to themselves and their readers: Ils vivent de ce que leur rapporte la terre qu’ils cultivent […]. Ils sont sans ambition & sans luxe, & vivent plus contens des fruicts que la terre leur donne […]. La Terre ne s’y vend point, les bastimens, le bois, & les couvertures des maisons ne leur coustent que la peine de les aller querir.156

So, while the Malagasy were either innately lazy and commercially inept, according to Flacourt, or of ‘humeur facile & laborieuse’, as Charpentier writes, they were in both cases considered devoid of the ability to fully exploit their naturally fertile land. 157 The textual consequence – as with other accounts of the East Indies – would naturally be to invite intervention. For Cauche, the invitation to action is achieved through the insertion of paratexts: four colloques duplicating the dialogue between Frenchman and native. While the didactic value to the potential traveller of an exclamation such as ‘O que cela est beau, que la France est riche, & que nous sommes pauvres’ is questionable, the paratext 154

Flacourt, Histoire, 1658, p. 2. Charpentier, pp. 18-19. 156 Flacourt, Histoire, 1658, Avant-Propos, non-paginated. 157 Flacourt, Histoire, 1658, p. 87; Charpentier, pp. 31-32. 155

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again reinforces the value of the colonial economy, this time attributing praise of it to the native. 158 This latter marvels at the labour of the potential arrivals, and learns that: ‘Celuy qui ne travaille point est pauvre, & a faim, au lieu que celui qui travaille se soule, & devient riche.’159 His first sight of a hammock causes him to exclaim ‘vous estes riches d’esprit’, and it is precisely in this richesse d’esprit and in the ability to produce that the potential French colonist claims superiority over his native interlocutor, and promises:160 dans peu de temps vous verrez d’autres hommes de France qui feront bien d’autres choses. […] Ils travailleront à bastir de belles maisons de pierre & de bois, avec de grandes portes & ouvertures, semblables à celles de France, ornées de beaucoup de tapisseries, faittes de soye, de laine de mouton, de poil de chevre, de poil de bœufs, de rouge, noir, jaune, citrin & de toutes coleurs.161

It is this very same ability to act, and to transform one’s surroundings that, Cauche claims, led him to penetrate deep into the island using a team of oxen, astonishing the indigenous people. 162 Their temperament, in Charpentier’s opinion, also seemed to demand subjection: Peuplée de gens de humeur assez traitables, & que l’on employeroit en toutes sortes de services, pourveu qu’on les gouvernast doucement. Ce sont des hommes qui sont humbles, soumis, & qui ne ressemblent pas aux peuples des Pays & des Isles plus avancées dans les Indes, qui pourquoy que ce soit au monde ne se veulent assujettir au travail.163

However, while they contrasted with those peoples further to the East who refused to subject themselves to work, it would only be as directed by Europeans, by being governed and used, that the Malagasy could be transformed into a viable labour force. Nevertheless, the colonization of Madagascar was not justified by productivity alone, for French maîtrise would also allow the establishment of Catholicism, seemingly because the indigenous people were dociles,

158

Cauche, p. 177. Ibid., p. 182. 160 Ibid., p. 180. 161 Ibid., p. 181. 162 Ibid., p. 48. 163 Charpentier, p. 19. 159

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and had not yet chosen a religion.164 In addition, the inhabitants are depicted as explicitly desiring French occupation and trade: Au surplus, aymant extraordinairement la conversation des François, avec lesquels ils trafiquent librement, leur decouvrant leurs secrets, & les invitant à prendre alliance avec eux.165

This unspoken covenant between native and Frenchman is further epitomized by the ‘plusieurs plaintes, pleurs & regrets’ shed by Cauche and a local king upon separation. 166 In Flacourt’s text, it is the personified, female gendered island itself which implores the intervention of Europeans (as surely as Asie did in Colet’s engraving), so as to govern and to teach its inhabitants ‘la bonne manière de cultiver la Terre, les Arts, les Mestiers, & les Manufactures de choses, qu’elle contient en son sein’.167 However, Madagascar is completely lacking in fard and artifice, making it amenable to occupation and transformation: Je vous offre donc cette Isle, Monseigneur, non point parée ny enrichie, comme sont la Chine, le Japon, la Perse, ny la grande Inde: Mais comme elle est dans sa rudesse & dans sa naïfveté, aussi est-elle sans fard & sans artifice. Il n’y a rien d’ajusté en elle que son antiquité, parmy laquelle elle a conservé ce qu’elle a apris de la Loy de la Nature dans laquelle elle subsiste encor, à l’exception de quelque petit nombre de gens entachez de Mahometisme.168

Just like the women of the Orient in so many travellers’ testimonies, the symbolically female island is made to invite French intervention, in this case to begin the implementation of a colonial economy. The creation of this economy would appear to be facilitated by already existing hierarchies, for Malagasy society was supposedly based on the servitude of peoples according to colour. Blancs were entitled to superior drinking vessels, took precedence in processions, and carried out intellectual labour while: ‘les noirs, comme valets des

164

‘ceux du païs se porteroient [à ‘la Religion Romaine’] facilement, pour estre dociles, & pour n’avoir encore fait chois d’aucune religion.’ Cauche, pp. 173-174. 165 Ibid. 166 Ibid., p. 104. 167 Flacourt, Histoire, 1658, à Foucquet, non-paginated. 168 Ibid.

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autres, font tout le reste.’169 Those Malagasy who themselves were of lighter skin tone seemingly respected Europeans for being even whiter than they were, which Cauche accredits to the divisions within humanity originating in the lineage of Noah. 170 Such a division according to skin colour could justify the existing industry in slavery – for Madagascar was already a part of the trade route between les deux Indes, in which European currency or products from the East were exchanged for slaves to be exported either within the East or to the Americas. Indeed, Cauche enthusiastically relates a conversation with two Dutchmen about the advantageous exchange with local leaders of Spanish currency, or cotton from the Indes Orientales, for child and adult slaves, as well as their relative value. 171 The texts bequeathed by Cauche, Charpentier and Flacourt, despite projecting the unproblematic occupation of an idyllic island, furnish further insight into an underlying state of continual violence. While the indigenous peoples were supposed by Cauche to have been in perpetual conflict amongst themselves, much of the violence seems rather to have been related to the French presence.172 Cauche furnishes an account of the escalating consequences of the punishment of a native, for a minor offence, by having had his ears cut off, and Flacourt’s foreword, depicting an innocent Malagasy population living in the ‘Loi de la Nature’ is belied by his justifications of the considerable violence of his governorship. 173 In complete contradiction with his initial depiction of the island, its people are later characterized as ‘un peuple infiny de barbares perfides, sans foy, & sans parolle, poltron, craintif & nud’, terms themselves reminiscent of other, previously-encountered barbares.174 The great level of force 169

Cauche, p. 62; p. 80; p. 75. Ibid., p. 122. 171 Ibid., pp. 37-38. 172 Ibid., p. 40; Ibid., pp. 42-43. ‘Andianmachicore m’en dissuadast, me disant, que ces peuples estoient barbares, & sans foy.’ Another chief states of his neighbours that ‘c’estoient tous voleurs et meurtriers’. 173 Ibid., p. 100. 174 Flacourt, Relation, 1658, Avant-Propos, non-paginated. The Dédicace à Foucquet and the Avant-Propos of the Relation have thus been considered as ‘deux fresques diamétralement opposées’ by Linon-Chipon. See Gallia orientalis, p. 535. See also M. Harrigan, ‘Trahison and the native: Flacourt’s Histoire de la Grande Isle Madagascar (1658)’ in Reverberations: Staging Relations in French since 1500, ed. by Michael Brophy, Phyllis Gaffney & Mary Gallagher (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008), pp. 315-326. 170

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underlying the colonizer-colonized relationship comes to appear less shocking when aligned with the extant violence of native society.175 Flacourt attributes the practice of avortement or the abandon of the newborn to the population, claiming that superstition or vanity was the cause.176 The consequences of Malagasy galanterie are extreme, and the causes, and its commerical flavour, now familiar: Si les hommes sont sensuels, les femmes ne le sont moins […]. Avant que d’estre mariées, elles se joüent tant qu’elles veullent, & se prostituent à tous venan pourveu qu’ils payent.177

The example of Madagascar should demonstrate the malleability of the notion and attributes of the Indes orientales as textually conveyed in the 17th century. In a group of texts responding to the commercial impetus to colonize the East and to establish a French empire which could compare with those of their European neighbours, French authors came to attribute many of the legendary characteristics of the Orient to the potential colony. Fantastical riches and the fertility which made it so attractive were complemented by the depiction of a population which lacked the ability to exploit them. The characteristic violence attributed to the Orient is mirrored in the violence – albeit of questionable origin – of Madagascar, and the potential servitude of its occupants justified by a supposed hierarchy of peoples based on assumed colonial superiority and by the eastern willingness to sell, or even to prostitute, oneself. The island, barely written about in previous récits de voyage, was effectively assimilated into the existing textual vision of the Orient, its representation being at once recognizable and fallacious, reassuring and flimsy. * The Indes orientales was simultaneously considered a place of great riches, fertility and natural phenomena and a locus of horror and cruelty throughout the duration of the 17th century. Occupied in part by lascivious women and welcoming natives, the fanaticism of Indian 175

As in the account of a woman who is punished for adultery by the severing of her hands. Cauche, p. 98. 176 Flacourt, Histoire, 1658, p. 91; p. 92; p. 93. 177 Ibid., p. 85.

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‘priests’ or the insular barbarity of the Far East tarnish an otherwise idyllic portrait. Certain traits, like those of promiscuity or sloth, could be assigned almost indiscriminately to vast swathes of greatly diverse peoples, and the terms used to describe the potential colony of Madagascar reveal the ubiquity of the concomitant image of a naturally abundant East. Nonetheless, descriptions of powerful monarchies like those of Japan or China, or criticism of the actions of other Europeans in the Orient, ultimately mean that assimilating the difference between the Indes orientales and Europe to a strict opposition such as Self and Other must be considerably nuanced, at the very least, in its 17th century form. However, French representations in this era of economic expansion do frequently reinforce, justify and encourage European intervention in what contemporaries themselves considered the Indes. The descriptions of the riches of the kingdom of Ceylon, or of the ‘barbaric’ Empire of Japan, have in common the perception that, whether successful or not, Europeans had a right, or a duty, to enter and to transform lands, governments or beliefs. The fact that French expeditions continued to remain on the periphery of the East Indies during the 17th century meant that an increase in the quantity of eye-witness accounts could compensate little for the inherently defective nature of cultural encounter. Even late-century accounts such as those of the voyages to Siam continued to perpetuate what were, in large part, traditional representations in the absence of quantifiable data. Such problematic representations have in common their place as fantasies projected onto a largely still-unknown Orient, further seriously undermining whatever value the original encounter may have had. The Oriental in the East Indies was thus essentially a fallacious and formulaic representation, largely divorced from the circumstances of encounter.

Chapter 5 Aventures in the Orient The Orient, fascinating in its riches and its possibilities, and simultaneously threatening by its despotism and its dangerous proximity, was known in the 17th century through eye-witness accounts where representations had been tainted by pre-existing literary and cultural heritage. These accounts have been repeatedly shown in the preceding four chapters to provide treacherous narrative depictions in the guise of factual information. However, récits de voyage were not restricted, despite the best assurances of authors, to empirical evidence, or what the traveller alone saw, or assumed to have seen. The privilege of testimony was often extended to other voyagers, and this small step permitted the insertion into the travel narrative of aventures or histoires, anecdotes which recount notable, dramatic occurrences. These anecdotes, as the following chapter will demonstrate, further accentuate the already factually-attributed difference of the Orient by their inextricable relationship with fiction and its models. Through their distance from the events described, they once again highlight the problematic difficulties associated with the textual rendering of cultural representation.

Aventures and Digressions The texts which the present study has classified as voyages d’aventure, or the accounts of far-reaching voyages such as those of Ripon, Mocquet or Le Blanc, place a particular importance on dramatic peripeteia. These voyages d’aventure maintain a consistent presence throughout the 17th century, and their titles or their chapter headings often made the narrative place of such aventures clear. Similarly, Carré’s histoires curieuses, Le Blanc’s histoires estranges or Tavernier’s histoires remarquables immediately claim significance

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because of the unusual circumstances in which these histoires take place.1 However, if the classification of such travel narratives assigns an immediate importance to dramatic events within certain texts, even those accounts which were considered to be composed mainly of information on the East often contained a multitude of such aventures. In fact, according to at least one definition of the récit, the form was inseparable from aventure: Narration d’une adventure, d’une action qui s’est passée. […] Les Voyageurs sont souvent importuns par les longs récits qu’ils font de leurs voyages.2

That the récits of travellers were also reputed to be of exhaustive length reflects the awareness of the features of the burgeoning tradition of the récits de voyage. The relation, as has been noted, was defined by Furetière particularly by its relationship with travel, and with the aventures of voyagers, and both récit and relation recounted aventures:3 Adventure, se dit aussi de ces accidens surprenants et extraordinaires qui arrivent parfois dans le monde, et qui sont souvent de pures imaginations. Il y a des gens qui sont sujets à trouver des adventures. On n’estime dans les Romans que les adventures extraordinaires. […] Adventure signifie aussi, ce qui est au pouvoir du hasard de la fortune. […] On dit en ce sens, mettre de l’argent à la grosse adventure, pour dire, le mettre à profit sur le negoce de mer, et sur la quille du vaisseau, où on risque le naufrage, & la prise des Corsaires.4

So when récits and relations were accounts of voyages, they were clearly assumed to tend to represent events, as well as observations, which laid claim to some considerable significance. The aventure, as ‘surprenante et extraordinaire’ is immediately subject to several cautions: there were those who had a tendency to imagine them, while in literature, the roman is somewhat disparagingly referred to precisely because of the aventures in which its value consisted. Yet, 1

Histoires remarquables de plusieurs femmes qui se sont brûlées après la mort de leurs maris, Tavernier, Six Voyages, II, p. 389. 2 Furetière, entry Récit, III, non-paginated. 3 Furetière, entry Relation, III, non-paginated. 4 Furetière, entry Adventure, I, non-paginated.

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the aventure was integrally bound up with the sea, and with the most risky of business ventures: maritime commerce. Such aventures were explicitly promised in the title of Les Avantures de L. M. Pilotte Real des Galeres de France, in the titles of Leguat and Pyrard, as well as in other titles through various synonyms.5 The definitions of récit and relation thus demonstrate an immediate association with aventure, and hint at its fundamental role in 17th-century récits de voyage. The narrative form used to depict aventure, illustrated by the example of travel literature, draws on a familiar example in order to clarify a theoretical definition. Yet despite the fact that récits or relations were so closely associated with aventure, these ‘accidens surprenants et extraordinaires’ might still be characterized as minor digressions in a text which claimed to be devoted to conveying information. Jacques Chupeau has described the coexistence of these two genres as an essential ambiguity between two contradictory forms: La double nature – narrative et descriptive – du voyage révèle surtout l’ambiguité d’un genre partagé entre les exigences souvent contradictoires de la documentation et du récit.6

As Wicquefort writes in his preface to the Voyage of Olearius, it was precisely in this ambiguity that the relation de voyage was superior both to the histoire and to the roman: Car comme d’un costé, en voyant les mœurs & les villes de divers peuples on se forme l’esprit & l’on acquiert beaucoup de lumieres & de prudence, de l’autre on trouve d’autant plus de divertissement dans les relations, que l’on y prend part au plaisir qui charme les voyageurs, & que l’on n’en a point à une infinité de dangers, de fatigues & d’incommoditez, qui les accompagnent.7

According to Wicquefort’s criteria, the value of the didactic text devoted to the observation of peuples would be enhanced by the inclusion of diverse circumstances which in fact correspond to aventures. The documentation of Tavernier’s Six Voyages is punctuated by numerous, strategically placed, histoires: 5

Les Avantures de L. M. Pilotte Real des Galeres de France, in Daulier-Deslandes, pp. 83-133. 6 Chupeau, p. 544. 7 Wicquefort, in Olearius, Preface, non-paginated.

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The soulagement of which Tavernier writes is obtained by the insertion of content deliberately contrasting with the informative material in his text, and a strategy is used similar to that which Genette defines as développement diégétique: C’est l’expansion: dilatation des détails, descriptions, multiplication des épisodes et des personnages d’accompagnement, dramatisation maximale d’une aventure en elle-même peu dramatique.9

That histoires were accompanied by affirmations, such as that of Tavernier, which justify their presence in the text by their contrast with other (wearisome) material, implies that they were seen as agréables, rather than utiles. L’Estra furnishes an account of the aventures of a gentleman which contrast with the tedium which the rest of his Relation must, he declares, have inspired: Elles sont si extraordinaires que je ne puis m’empécher d’en faire part à mes lecteurs, pour leur faire passer l’ennuy que le reste de ma Relation leur aura causé.10

This declaration, announcing a clear separation from what was supposed to be the principal matter of the travel narrative – useful information – unequivocally indicates that the aventures which follow will explicitly tend to be even more extraordinaires than the accounts of curious customs had already been. Récits métadiégétiques among the récit premier of the voyage, such anecdotes were naturally not limited to the East.11 However, the Orient itself – long before Galland 8

Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, Epistre, p. 5. Genette, Palimpsestes, p. 309. 10 L’Estra, p. 265. 11 Genette, Figures III, p. 242; In the case of Germain Moüette [16??-17??], the interest of the histoires particulières is rather in providing temporary relief, again, délasser, from subject matter which is supposedly wearisome due to the extent of the cruelty recounted: ‘Pour delasser l’esprit du Lecteur des horreurs et des cruautez qu’il a leus dans les chapitres precedents.’ Germain Moüette, Relation de captivité dans les royaumes de Fez et de Maroc (Paris: Jean Cochart, 1683), p. 203 [quoted in Chupeau, p. 547]. These histoires particulières have themselves such a considerable share of 9

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edited Les mille et une Nuits – was itself seen as a source of histoires, as profitable for the healing of désordres and passions as the burgeoning market in (medicinal) drugs was perceived to be for the body: Le soin des hommes va chercher aux Indes, & dans tout l’Orient, les drogues, & les remedes, qui purgent le corps des maladies qui le travaillent. Et ce labeur va puisant dans les histoires des semblables regions Orientales, des exemples, lesquels exposez aux yeux du public peuvent en les imitant oster plusieurs desordres, & guerir dans les esprits du temps les passions qui les troublent.12

The inclusion of such histoires is justified by their moral and didactic purpose, as in Baudier’s transportation of the reader to the pomp of the Chinese court. Without having to suffer the discomfort and danger of a long voyage, the wise and judicious reader could benefit from the lessons furnished by a kingdom in which vice was punished as assuredly as virtue was rewarded.13 The histoires also followed on the very popular translation – and embellishment – of Bandello [1484?-1561] by François de Belleforest [1530-1583], and were contemporaneous with the vast literary production of Jean-Pierre Camus [1584-1652].14 The accounts of lascivity, cruelty and revenge in the tales of Belleforest and Camus are part of an overall current which Thierry Pech calls ‘une esthétique tragique de la violence criminelle’ in 16th- and 17th-century European literature.15 Their anecdotes of the violent consequences of a variety of misdeeds claim justification in their edifying purpose, and are accomhorreurs and cruautez that Moüette’s affirmation might read rather as another justification for the inclusion of subject matter. 12 Baudier, Histoire de la Cour du Roy de la Chine, 1624, p. 6. 13 ‘Le sage & judicieux lecteur verra dans le recit de la Cour Chinoise, deux puissances tousjours agissantes, par lesquelles tout ce grand & immense Royaume est heureusement conduit: à sçavoir la recompense asseuree pour la vertu, & la peine infaillible pour le vice; & sans faire les frais d’un si long voyage, ny encourir les perils qui s’y rencontrent, pourra sans partir de chez luy, en lisant ces fueilles, voir la Cour de la Chine, estre present à ses pompes.’ Ibid., Préface, pp. 6-7. 14 François de Belleforest, Histoires Tragiques, extraites des œuvres Italiennes de Bandel, & mises en langue Françoise, 7 vols (Rouen: Pierre L’Oyselet, 1603); JeanPierre Camus, L’Amphitheatre Sanglant (Paris: André Soubron, 1630); repr. ed. by Stéphan Ferrari (Paris: Champion, 2001). 15 Thierry Pech, Conter le Crime: Droit et littérature sous la Contre-Réforme: Les histoires tragiques (1559-1644) (Paris: Champion, 2000), p. 27.

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panied by explicit moral lessons on the consequences of immorality and particularly, adultery. The Oriental, or other non-Europeans, might certainly be present in these tales in familiar form, as Christian Biet’s recent anthology of plays, histoires and canards sanglants clearly demonstrates.16 The histoires which were inserted into the travel narrative itself often demonstrate many of the same moral and aesthetic preoccupations as do those histoires written by authors who never travelled, or those which were situated in Europe. Within the récit de voyage, the recurrent justification of the presence of these histoires/aventures (or their variants) is a striking demonstration that the claim of textual functionality had to be maintained against any accusations of frivolity. Repeatedly characterized as mere digressions or as having some didactic end, they are in fact an inseparable component in the creation of the Oriental in the French travel narrative.

The Forms of Histoires In the récit de voyage, the interest of whatever divers accidents, aventures et dangers that had befallen the traveller was amplified by them having supposedly taken place instead of being the product of imagination(s).17 Authors, or commentators on the travel narrative, were aware of a possible crossover between its extradiegetic aventures and those of the roman, and travellers like Bernier were anxious to distance themselves from the latter form: Je ne craindray pas de dire icy un mot en passant de quelques intrigues d’amour de cette Princesse quoy qu’enfermée dans un Serail et bien gardée comme les autres femmes, et je n’apprehendray pas qu’on dise que je prepare de la matiere pour quelque faiseur de Romans, car ce ne sont pas des amourettes comme les nôtres qui n’ont que des aventures galantes et comiques, elles sont toûjours suivies de quelque chose d’horrible et de funeste…18 16

Belleforest notes, for example, the ‘lubrique paillardise’ of the Persians, Belleforest, I, p. 576; Christian Biet, Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France (XVIeXVIIe siècle) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2006), pp. 549-824. 17 The full title of the 1619 edition of Pyrard’s Voyage promises an account of such ‘divers accidents, aventures, et dangers qui lui sont arrivez.’ 18 Bernier, Histoire de la Derniere Revolution des Estats du Grand Mogol (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1671), p. 17.

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A justification of the inclusion of the narrator’s material thus becomes a reflection on the inevitable violence of Indian (royal) love affairs. The opposition between L’Estra’s account and the roman, despite the apparent similarity between their aventures, is insisted on in the preface, which concludes that any such resemblance should be taken as evidence of the extraordinary world in which both traveller and reader live: Il n’a rien dit qui ne soit conforme à la verité, & si l’on trouve quelques unes des avantures qu’il décrit semblables à celles des Romans, on doit faire reflexion qu’il arrive tous les jours des choses plus extraordinaires; & que si l’on sçavoit tout ce qui se passe dans le monde, on n’auroit que faire de rien inventer pour dire des choses incroyables. Nous sommes dans un siècle où il est arrivé dans l’amour & dans la fortune des evenemens plus surprenans que ceux du grand Cyrus & de Cassandre.19

Yet in a world that was considered so surprising as to make fictional invention unnecessary, the Orient retained a great range of possibilities for the situation of surprising or interesting events. The subtitle of Henry de Lisdam’s roman, Les Sainctes Inconstances (1632) makes this clear, associating diversity itself with Turkey: ‘une quantité de belles choses, dans la diversité de plusieurs fortunes arrivées dans la Turquie’. 20 However, aside from the claim that the events took place in Turkey, there is little or no use of any of the many extant cultural assumptions on the Orient, and it is instead the dramatic possibilities, fortunes, which, as ‘belles choses’, are aesthetically pleasing, which justify situating them in the East. Du Vignau’s Histoire de YoussufBey et de Gul-Beyaz (1688) transplants the many gifts, letters, troubles d’âme and unretainable sighs of the French roman into an other setting in a similar way.21 By attributing états d’âme which are recognizably romanesque to Orientals, the author strips any potentially threatening difference from characters which are intended merely to illustrate histoires d’amour.22 19

L’Estra, Preface, non-paginated. The full title being Les Sainctes Inconstances de Leopolde & de Lindarache, où l’on voit une quantité de belles choses, dans la diversité de plusieurs fortunes arrivées dans la Turquie. 21 Du Vignau, Le Secrétaire Turc, 1688, p. 41; p. 57. 22 ‘[Les Turcs] ne sont pourtant pas insensibles [aux Femmes]; au contraire il semble qu’ils soient plus susceptibles d’amour, qu’aucune des autres Nations Orientales.’ Ibid., p. 4. 20

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While narrators of récits de voyage primarily defend the factual basis of their texts by reiterating their status as direct visual evidence (as Chapter 2 demonstrated), their aventures are especially reliant on assurances of the validity of testimony and on the trustworthiness of the witnesses who furnish it. Mocquet, for example, claims to have learnt certain histoires from ‘un Chinois appellé Joan Pay Secretaire de Dom André Furtado’ or states ‘un matelot de mes amis du nombre de ceux qui s’estoient ainsi sauvez, me conta toute ceste histoire estrange.’23 The naming of the first witness, with his social rank added, made him clearly more worthy of faith than did the claim to presence of the unnamed second witness, even if his status as a friend of the narrator might demand some increased level of credence. In descending value of credibility, other sources utilized by the narrator include the selective testimony of an unnamed witness, ‘Il me fut dit entr’autres choses,’ or even a source which is so unverifiable as to be classable as rumour: ‘j’ouy dire.’24 In all cases, the narrator’s first hand visual testimony, that constantly vaunted but most subjective of sources, has been replaced by the verbal transmission of another’s supposedly eye-witness account. The anecdote must thus be – at least – doubly subjective, with all the risks that this entails. The result, as the rest of this chapter will demonstrate, is of considerable importance for the depiction of the Orient and its inhabitants in the travel narrative. The transformation of récit homodiégétique to hétérodiégétique (Challe’s attempt to adopt the voice of his witness is rare) permits the insertion of many of what L’Estra classed as ‘evenemens surpenans’.25 These histoires, taking romantic or sexual intrigues as their most common subject matter, depended, for the most part, on existing flawed images of the Orient or of its inhabitants for their insertion. Those that rely on existing conceptions of the Orient use its supposed possibilities of wealth, advancement, sexual liberty or other fantasies to create a dramatic setting in which surprising events could occur, or use its acknowledged difference as a setting for the deeds of exceptional characters. Of those that rely on this sense of possibility, longer histoires are characterized by what Genette called expansion, the ‘multiplic23

Mocquet, 1617, p. 333; p. 271. Ibid., p. 325; p. 255. 25 ‘Nous (je fais parler les François), à qui un pareil spectacle faisoit horreur, lui dîmes…’ Challe, 1721, II, p. 184. Quoted in full later in this chapter, p. 242. 24

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ation des épisodes et des personnages d’accompagnement’ such as those in L’Estra’s seventeen-page Histoire d’un Breton.26 Here, the eponymous hero’s renunciation of the cloth on sight of his lover leads to duels, prison, an escape to the Indies, the deceitful separation from his lover by a Dutch Captain, and numerous other dramatic peripeteia. Rather than the strong characterization of the many protagonists, the interest of this histoire is in the background of the East Indies as a space full of potential in which such events could occur. However, its indigenous inhabitants, who, one recalls, L’Estra characterized as indiscriminately promiscuous, weak or lazy, are notably absent. When, on the other hand, the inhabitants of the Orient were the subject of histoires, they might, as with the romans/histoires of Lisdam or Du Vignau, be emptied of any of the cultural difference on which the rest of the travel narrative founded its interest. The Abbé Carré, in Persia, encounters two young women destined for the seraglio, whose beauty combined with an attractive ‘air mêlé de tristesse et de douceur’, and embarras ‘se voyant avec des hommes’, inspires various galanteries on his side.27 The twenty-five-page Histoire de deux Géorgiennes which the Abbé devotes to the pair was seemingly recounted to the merchant who bought them by ‘une femme qui a élevé la plus grande.’28 This histoire relates the reciprocated passion of Prince Selim for both, and the resulting events which cause the pair to be sold into slavery. The exploration of the sentiments of all three, their different levels of joy, disappointment and confusion at various stages of the plot, are clearly details to which no witness would have had access.29 The Persian merchant – curiously familiar with the literary form – himself acknowledges they are correspondingly characteristic of the roman: C’est d’elle [une esclave] de qui je tiens toute cette histoire, que je prendrois pour un roman, si un autre qu’elle me l’avoit contée.30

Not only is the form of this histoire capable of being confused with a French literary form, it is so empty of manifestations of cultural 26

Genette, Palimpsestes, p. 309; L’Estra, p. 146. Carré, I, pp. 162-163. 28 Ibid., p. 165. 29 ‘Sa passion lui faisoit tout apprehender’; ‘Cela mettoit dans ses actions une sorte de timidité qui les rendoit moins assurées.’ Ibid., p. 174. 30 Ibid., p. 191. 27

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difference that it could be quite easily transferred from the Orient to France with the simple adjustment of character names. Furthermore, the qualities of the princesses, the prince, or indeed the ‘jeunes Seigneurs du païs’ who are their original suitors, these ‘honnêtes gens’ and their galanteries were all derived from 17th-century French cultural standards, difficult to reconcile with either those of Georgia or the Persia in which the tale was recounted.31 The exceptional renouncement which the princesses eventually undertake is matched in another of Carré’s tales by the protagonist of his Histoire d’une Princesse de Perse: Elle n’étoit pas comme le reste des femmes accoûtumée à manier la quenoüille & le fuseau, mais formée dés son enfance aux exercises des armes, son plaisir étoit de travailler des chevaux, de tirer de l’arc, & de s’occuper à la chasse, quand la guerre luy manquoit.32

The sieges which she and her followers suffer, ‘un spectacle affreux à voir’, are elaborated with detail of the participants’ manoeuvres and vivid descriptions of their injuries and physical suffering. The courage of the princess is mirrored in defendants who resolve to die rather than surrender, and assailants who fight less for their lives than for their honour. Indeed, the princess, only spared because the King of Persia has fallen in love with her, kills herself with two ‘javelots empoisonnez’, after saving the honour of ‘une jeune personne de ses compagnes’, and dies alongside her in an edifying climax of virtue. 33 When the histoires are not composed uniquely, as in Carré’s case, of an array of exceptional characters with no recognizably oriental traits other than their names, they could represent Orientals who differ from other Orientals by their superior characteristics. L’Estra writes of a young Indian couple who are extraordinary for their extreme devotion to one another, even during a shipwreck which seems to promise their impending death: Il y avoit un garçon & une fille qui surpassoient tous les autres en esprit & en beauté. Ils avoient memes un peu plus de politesse que n’en ont d’ordinaire ceux de leur nation, & la modestie qu’ils faisoient paroître marquoit la bonté de leur naturel: Le garçon avoit seulement dix-huit ans & 31

Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 147. 33 Ibid., pp. 156-157. 32

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la fille quinze, ils s’estoient aimez dés leur bas âge, & ils s’en estoient donné des marques sensibles.34

The level of politesse and modesty, both culturally-determined traits, which the couple possess, mark them in the eyes of the French observer as distinctive, and this difference allows these Orientals to be the central characters of a remarkable anecdote. Rather than being part of an unrecognizably transformed and heroic Orient – as in Carré – the lovers are themselves remarkable. By surpassing their compatriots in their physical and mental qualities, they are also, as the narrator implies, distinctly un-oriental in the 17th-century sense. The interest of this extract stems from the edifying qualities of two lovers faced with death, who demonstrate more concern for one another than for their own lives. Intended for a European audience already known to appreciate such tales, their characters are moulded – or remoulded – according to the standards of this audience. 35 Therefore, the narrator’s assurance that such histoires took place is in many cases the only link between the text and the East that it implicitly or explicitly claims to represent.

Pathos in the Orient Other anecdotes accentuate the pathos of dramatic situations by elaborating existing stereotypes of Orientals, or in an interesting variant, the inhabitants of the Orient. In the latter case, European penetration into the Indian Ocean Basin since the 16th century inspired tales which again drew on the perception of the huge possibilities and freedom to act this region seemed to afford. Integrating persistent character types in variations on sexual or romantic intrigue, these anecdotes were so popular at the time that they constitute, as Xavier de Castro notes, a veritable pan-European literary (sub-)genre, the littérature tragico-maritime. Often assembled in compilations particularly devoted to the histoire tragico-maritime, they had a long

34

L’Estra, p. 205. Such as the ‘piteuse & infortunee mort’ of a certain Veronese couple recounted in Belleforest, I, p. 67. 35

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posterity in various adaptations including plays and poetry, furnishing the hypotexts for many of the aventures in the East Indies.36 Such a hypotext, published ‘sous la forme de feuillets bon marché’ since 1555 and featuring in Mocquet’s Voyage, is the tale of Manuel de Sousa Sepúlveda, a Portuguese gentleman in India who, forbidden to marry Leonor by her father, takes the drastic step of murdering him. 37 Despite enjoying marital happiness for some time, the initial good fortune of the couple changes with the ambitious de Sousa’s decision to go to Portugal to attempt to gain greater charges in the Indies. 38 Shipwreck and miseries follow, and the couple and their two children find themselves wandering through the deserts of Ethiopia. It is at this point that an intervention extradiégétique furnishes the true significance of the tale: Ce fut lors que le juste jugement de Dieu, qu’on ne sçauroit éviter, commença à bon escient à tomber sur ce miserable meurtrier Sousa, et que le sang de son beau-père excitoit les furies vengeresses contre luy, qui s’en alloit çà et là par les bois cherchant quelques racines de quoi nourrir luy, sa femme & ses enfans: mais la compassion plus grand estoit de ceste pauvre dame innocente, qui se voyant nuë, de honte s’enterroit dans le sable, pour n’estre veuë en cet estat de ceux qui estoient restez avec eux: […] enfin ceste infortunee femme ayans veu desja mourir ses enfans, accablee d’ennuis, de faim, et de toute autre sorte d’incommoditez, fut trouvee mourante par le desastré Sosa…39

All are lost, although one witness, whose supposed presence at the scene justifies its inclusion in the travel narrative, does escape to Mozambique, to recount this ‘piteuse aventure’ to Mocquet. However, given that the story had been circulating in printed form at least a halfcentury before Mocquet even embarked on his own voyage, this must surely be considered to be the most tenuous of testimonies; indeed, in Rouen in 1608, a dramatized form of the tale had been printed as Les Portugaiz Infortunez.40 The narrator – or indeed the author – of Mocquet’s Voyages further embellishes the hypotext (the murder of 36 Bernardo Gomes de Brito, l’História Trágico-Marítima (Lisbon: 1735-36); See Castro, in Mocquet, 1996, p. 209. 37 Castro, in Mocquet, 1996, p. 209. 38 Mocquet, 1617, p. 275. 39 Ibid., p. 277. 40 Nicolas Chrétien, Sieur Des Croix [15..-16..], Les Portugaiz Infortunez, in Les Tragedies de N. Chrestien, Sieur des Croix (Rouen: Théodore Reinsart, 1608). See Biet, pp. 711-804 for this and other versions in poetry.

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the father-in-law not having featured in other versions) to achieve what Genette termed ‘dramatisation maximale’, further distancing the histoire from whatever basis in observed events it ever had. A second group of digressions in Mocquet’s Voyages begins with a tale with greatly similar characterization; another Portuguese in India falls in love with a young woman, beautiful and of high birth, but there is no need to resort to murder, thanks to a by-now familiar consequence of climate. 41 The couple elope, live – as did de Sousa and his wife – happily for some time before another form of ambition, the gambling of the principal male character, introduces a murderous element into the tale. This time, the mistress along with her slave fall victim to Portuguese masculine violence, and once more the crime remains hidden for some time. Rather than explicitly attributing the cause of the murderer’s undoing to divine justice, Mocquet is content to stage a confession on the scaffold. Other anecdotes relate the manners by which husbands poison, strangle or drown their wives because of an inordinate jealousy which mirrors the excesses of Portuguese domination of the East Indies. 42 The fugitive Louys de Sosa, in a manner which demonstrates the weakness which lies behind apparent courage, mercilessly kills his wife, despite her pleas: il luy passa son espée à travers le corps, elle s’estant jettee à ses pieds, en le suppliant de regarder bien ce qu’il faisoit, mais ceste priere n’amolit pas son courage felon, & ne laissa pour cela de l’achever, se monstrant plus cruel et furieux envers sa femme que contre les Holandois ses ennemis.43

In fact, in Mocquet’s anecdotes, the sexes are represented as being in a relationship of conflict which often degenerates into outright cruelty administered on victims of the colonial slave economy: Il me contoit encor que son frere qui estoit le maistre du logis, ayant un jour achepté au marché une esclave Japonoise, comme en disnant avec sa femme il vint à dire en se jouant que ceste esclave avoit les dens bien blanches, ceste femme ne dit mot sur l’heure, mais ayant espié le temps que son mari 41

‘En un pays si chaud qu’est celuy-la, où tout homme qui peut avoir seulement le moyen de pouvoir parler à une femme ou fille, est asseuré d’en avoir ce qu’il desire pourveu que la moindre occasion s’en presente.’ Ibid., p. 328. 42 ‘Ils sont si desmesurement jaloux de leurs femmes qu’on n’oseroit les regarder au visage, et s’ils les voyent parler à quelqu’un, ils les estranglent et les empoisonnent aussi tost.’ Ibid., p. 311. 43 Ibid., p. 326.

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While examples of masculine cruelty, as has been seen, were frequent, such an anecdote also strips women of any self-control and attributes a level of violence to them as excessive as that of their male counterparts. In all these extracts, the accentuation of pathos is the defining feature of the histoire (étrange or tragico-maritime). An innocent victim, usually a woman, suffers a terrible, vividly depicted, fate at the hands of a brutal captain or husband, or even a colonial mistress. The characterization and its transmission bear the hallmarks of Northrop Frye’s definition of low mimetic tragedy: In low mimetic tragedy, pity and fear are neither purged nor absorbed into pleasures, but are communicated externally, as sensations. […] The central figure of pathos is often a woman or a child […] [and] pathos is usually concentrated on a single character. […] The terrible figure in this tradition […] is normally a ruthless figure strongly contrasted with some kind of delicate virtue, generally a helpless victim in his power.45

The ‘ruthless figure’ in the short anecdotes above could very often be a European, at least in the colonies, who abuses a position of power over others such as, in Mocquet’s case, the power of a husband over a wife in a tyrannical marriage.46 Certainly, in French récits de voyage, it was not exclusively Portuguese settlers who were attributed this ruthlessness, and Le Blanc furnishes a colourful account of the various misdeeds of a group of French corsairs shipwrecked in Brazil, which includes the kidnapping of the wives of the very sugar producers who had saved their lives, clubbings by Sauvages and cannibalism. 47 The same forces that caused the downfall of Manuel de Sousa are

44

Ibid., p. 317. Frye, pp. 38-39. 46 The possibilities of pathos in the encounter between ‘ruthless figures’ in L’Estra’s Histoire d’un Breton, and a ‘helpless victim’ (the lover of the Breton, an ‘infortunée Ariad’) are somewhat neglected. L’Estra, p. 158. 47 Histoire estrange d’un Capitaine Portugais, & de quelques Corsaires François, Le Blanc, I, p. 95. 45

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eventually unleashed on the chief pirate, followed by a confession on the scaffold which enables the transmission of the account.48 However, the supposed master-servant relationship between Portuguese and native allowed the author of Mocquet’s Voyages to graft tales onto the Estado do Índia generously exploiting its full – and often horrific – potential, like the vividly described examples of the ‘Cruel chastement envers les Esclaves’ inflicted by the Portuguese. 49 A great range of vices were attributed to the Portuguese colonist in the documentary evidence, but the recurrence of anecdotes depicting masculine violence like that of Louys de Sosa, also testifies to the attribution of underlying weakness. Underneath the veneer of power still ascribed to the Portuguese in the early 17th century apparently lay a lack of control, a dishonourable stealth or a tendency to needless violence. This Autre européen, viewed from the exterior, was depicted as being as subject to emotional excess as indigenous Indian people supposedly were, a trait which contrasted with French narrators’ constructions of self. Orientals themselves, in the positions of power that monarch or husband were supposed to be, were themselves quite frequently depicted as ‘terrible figures’ (one recalls Tavernier’s anecdote of the joyous architect who made the mistake of recommending ‘une teste de quelque grosse beste’ to finish off a construction for the King of Persia and who ended up sacrificing his own).50 The rois gentils exact terrible revenges on disobedient subjects which Mocquet enthusiastically recounts in all their horror, reinforcing the stereotype of barbaric and unbridled power: Ce Roy de Siam voulant un jour faire guerre à quelqu’autre Roy sien ennemy, se resolut d’envoyer quelques-uns des plus grands Seigneurs de son royaume pour estre chefs de son armee: mais aucuns firent les malades par le conseil de leurs femmes qui ne les vouloient pas perdre de veuë, dont le Roy adverty les envoya querir avec leurs femmes, et ayant faict couper la nature à ces femmes et attacher cela sur le front de leurs maris, il les fit ainsi promener par toute la ville, puis trancher la teste.51

48

‘Enfin Dieu voulut faire ressentir sa juste indignation à ce perfide voleur, luy envoyant une si furieuse tempeste, qu’il fut rejetté vers le cap de Bonne-Esperance.’ Ibid., p. 98. 49 Mocquet, 1617, p. 313. 50 Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 384. Quoted p. 156. 51 Mocquet, 1617, p. 332-333.

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The sati rite is another hypotext, seemingly witnessed by an extraordinary number of voyagers who dwell at length on the horror of a scene which, as Teltscher writes, was a dramatization of the death of an oriental woman who had many of the characteristics of a tragic heroine. 52 However, within the descriptions which often abound with notable frequency within the same travel narrative, the privilege of having witnessed the scene is often renounced by the narrator, permitting substantial elaborations on the original hypotext. In his earlier-mentioned account of the ceremony, Challe acknowledges that he is elaborating the testimony of his witnesses, yet recounts the scene in the first person, the subtle confusion of two voices allowing him to develop the full horror of the scene and its powerful impact on the observer: La Femme parut ensuite, vetue de ses plus beaux ornemens, pleine de colliers & de brasselets, & enfin parée comme si elle avoit été à sa nôce. Elle avoit le visage riant, la démarche assurée, & rien ne témoignoit dans sa personne que la mort cruelle qu’elle alloit souffrir lui fit aucune horreur. […] Nous (je fais parler les François) à qui un pareil spectacle faisoit horreur, lui dîmes, que si c’étoit la pauvreté qui la poussoit à mourir, nous lui promettions de l’en mettre à couvert, & dans un état à ne rien desirer pour sa vie, & à ne rien craindre pour sa réputation.53

The self-assurance and apparent joy of the young woman makes classifying her as a victim problematic, although in sati accounts fanatical brahmans function as ‘ruthless figures’.54 The sati’s acquiescence is further mitigated by the trance-like state and fatalistic determination so characteristic of oriental representations and which contrasts with the reasonable objections of the Europeans who attempt to dissuade her. L’Estra also benefits from the privilege accorded by the anecdote of allowing the inclusion of unwitnessed events, despite vigorous assurances in his preface of his reliance only on his or his covoyagers’ testimony. 55 He thus recounts the circumstances which had originally given rise to the sati rite, how an obsessively jealous 52

Teltscher, pp. 51-68. Challe, 1721, II, pp. 183-184. 54 Bernier, Suite, I, p. 134. 55 ‘on ne doit donc pas se défier de la verité de cette Relation; outre la protestation que l’Autheur fait de n’avoir rien inventé, on peut encore se fonder sur le témoignage de Ceux qui ont esté les Compagnons de son voyage’, L’Estra, Preface, non-paginated. 53

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puissant baignan had resolved, on his deathbed, to falsely accuse his wife of having poisoned him. 56 Clearly, the narrator could not – any more than the compagnons de voyage who supposedly witnessed those events he had not himself seen – have been present at this scene. Nonetheless, an anecdote is inserted which contrasts the innocence, virtue and honour of the wife with the jealousy of the husband, and depicts her death as encouraged by prêtres who insist Mohammed will reward her, or by a family certain of being blessed by the same prophet. The young wife’s death is inevitable, necessary to perpetuate such rites, and becomes evidence of a society which consumes its own innocent members for the needs of tradition.57 In another such account, the narrator again confuses Hinduism and Islam in a ‘dernier & cruel spectacle’ of a sati which he claims to have witnessed himself.58 Here, the deceased husband is once more attributed considerable vice, and the appearance of the wife before the governor allows not only the description of her physical charms, but access to the same governor’s emotions before her beauty.59 Her ‘resolution intrepide’, her constancy and self-assurance contrast with the ‘cris & […] hurlemens effroyables’ of the Prestres, who send her to her death, accompanied by ‘un étrange charivary’ of music and shouting designed to cover the cries of the sati.60 These accounts, contrasting the brutality of male Orientals with the innocence or virtue of their wives, while apparently belying simultaneous attributions of oriental promiscuity, conform to typical descriptions of sati in the 17th century. The female constancy which they depicted (as in L’Estra’s second example) was also typically oriental in its excess. Like Bernier’s ‘intrepidité bestiale et gayeté feroce’, the near-diabolic persistence of women in immolating themselves on the funeral pyre fascinated narrators. It was precisely this that furnished the matter for Tavernier’s descriptions of actual – or intended – widow burnings, which were inserted into the text under the heading of histoires remarquables, subtly mixing the two he claimed to have witnessed with dramatizations of events he could not 56

Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 47. 58 Ibid., pp. 44-50. 59 ‘[Le Gouverneur] sentit une émotion qui luy reprochant l’aveu qu’il avoit resolu d’accorder, [ce qu’elle souhaitait]’, p. 46. 60 Ibid., pp. 49-50. 57

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have. 61 In one, for example, eleven women from a royal household are imprisoned to prevent their self-immolation, and are mysteriously found dead some hours later; in another, thirteen women, dancing arm in arm, are suffocated on a funeral pyre.62 Tavernier exceeds previous authors here by the unexplained nature of the victims’ death, or by the number of victims, in histoires, one recalls, which were intended to ‘délasser l’esprit’. Such histoires, whether grafted onto Portuguese hypotexts accentuating pathos or making a spectacle from a rite which fascinated Europeans, are thus inseparable from the characterization inherent in such dramatic forms as well as from the representations of the East which allowed them to be inserted. They both rely on and perpetuate the image of a brutal and self-consuming Orient, which contrasts with the humanity and compassion of the French narrator, and reflect negatively either on other Europeans or on Orientals themselves, depicted in moralistic and didactic terms as ‘terrible figures’ who abuse their ‘power’ over the East or its women. However often they were recycled, such narratives combine the best elements of education on the threat of oriental otherness and entertainment for the reader safely ensconced in the familiarity of Europe.

Une Complexion extraordinairement amoureuse… While the victims of sati were depicted as virtuous and devoted, even fanatically so, either to their husbands or tradition, previous chapters have demonstrated how other eastern women were assumed to be subject to a complexion amoureuse.63 Again, a trait frequently repeated within travel accounts both provided the material for, and was perpetuated by, generalizations on temperament of debatable empirical value, or individual anecdotes recounted by the voyager-narrator. These associated many by now familiar characteristics attributed to the women of the East, and allowed digressions of great dramatic interest. Throughout the 1600s, the supposed promiscuity of oriental women – or of European women subject to the 61

Tavernier, Six Voyages, Histoires remarquables de plusieurs femmes qui se sont brûlées après la mort de leurs maris, p. 389. 62 Ibid., pp. 389-391. 63 Le Blanc, I, p. 52, (Persia); Pyrard, 1619, I, p. 325, previously quoted, p. 209.

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influence of the Orient – was thus associated with insidious druggings in histoires which recount, in particular, the administration of the datura plant to unsuspecting spouses. The reputation of the (in reality, extremely toxic) datura of being able to send the victim into a state of total stupor lasting several hours had a vast dramatic potential which could be exploited by French travellers who relate its administration to unknowing victims:64 Quand les femmes veulent jouyr de leurs amours en toute asseurance, elles font boire à leurs maris de ces fruicts destrempez en leur boisson ou en potage, & une heure apres ils deviennent estourdis […] Et lors leurs femmes prennent leur temps de faire entrer qui bon leur semble, & en user comme il leur plaist, en presence de leursdits maris, qui n’en peuvent rien recognoistre.65

This extract allows the introduction, not only of the wife’s lover(s), but the reader as well, present at the infidelity (‘en user comme il leur plaist’) which only the husband is unaware of. In a variant of what would be an oft-repeated topos, men were reputed by Pyrard to be just as willing to use this herb.66 Similarly, in mid-century, La Boullaye repeats the depiction of this conflict by stealth between the sexes in Portuguese Goa: si elles sont malicieuses de leur costé, leurs marys ne le sont pas moins, parce que s’ils ont le moindre soupçon d’elles ils les poignardent avec leurs galands, & se servent du mesme simple pour connoistre leurs esclaves sur le mesme lict où elles sont assoupies.67

In masculine hands, the use of the drug could even allow the reader to be privy to the rape of unconscious slaves. Nonetheless, these ‘intrigues merveilleuses’, as La Boullaye calls them, were predominantly ascribed to the supposed complexion amoureuse of oriental – in this case métisse – women who, as the same traveller relates, ‘aiment à faire l’amour au dessus de toutes les femmes du monde’.68 Women in the Orient, the objects of frequent and overt violence,

64

See Linschoten, p. 63; Castro in Mocquet, 1996, pp. 217-218. Pyrard, 1619, II, pp. 118-119. 66 Ibid., p. 119. 67 La Boullaye, p. 262. 68 Ibid. 65

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respond by surreptitious means to reduce their own oppressors to victims, as in Mocquet’s dramatization of an exemplary encounter: Ainsi les femmes qui ont des amis particuliers baillent de ceste herbe à leurs marys en y meslant je ne sais quelle autre drogue, qui est telle que le pauvre mary entre comme en furie et resverie, et prend une picque ou hallebarde pour garder la porte, demeurant ainsi là en posture sans dire mot à ceux qui entrent et sortent: Apres cela la dame envoye querir son amy, et passe son temps en la présence du mary mesme, tant que l’opération de la drogue, qui dure environ jusqu’à 24. heures, soit presque achevee; & ne se souvient celuy qui en a pris, de rien qu’il ait veu ou fait, tant les yeux et la pensee sont agitez et troublez de ceste herbe. Les Metices des Indes sont fort duites et faites à ces sortes de meschancetez pour tromper ceux qu’elles veulent.69

Though the wives of Portuguese settlers were supposedly as fatally jealous as their husbands, it was the métisses who were accredited the knowledge which enabled what was depicted as abusive masculine power to be subverted. 70 Travellers, who also insist on the temptation of the oriental woman, warn repeatedly of the poisonings (or other revenges) administered by ‘ces femmes Metices ou Indiennes impudiques’. 71 This warning extends beyond Goa to all the women of the Indes; Chambelle warns the reader to be faithful to Malayan women, to avoid falling victim to a slow and painful death by poisoning.72 This permits him to insert the Histoire d’un marchand qui fut empoisonné par une Malaise, the tale of a European who prepares to leave the Malayan woman who has just given birth to his son. ‘Artificieuse et fine’, she inserts a poisoned pinang among those which she places in the merchant’s handkerchief, which reduces him, several weeks later, into a state in which he suffers among other symptoms ‘le sens renversé et tout hébété’.73 Summoned by the Governor, the woman initially justifies her actions by stating that an unfaithful man does not deserve to live, although on the promise of marriage she relents, and provides an antidote to the merchant. The tenuous link to personal testimony is furnished by Chambelle’s claim

69

Mocquet, 1617, pp. 312-313. ‘Mais aussi de mesme les femmes, quand elles sçavent que leurs maris en entretiennent quelqu’autre, elles s’en desfont par poison ou autrement.’ Ibid. 71 Pyrard, 1619, II, p. 135. 72 Chambelle, p. 118. 73 Ibid., p. 120. 70

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to have seen the couple living happily after, the merchant only retaining a slight pallor after his ordeal.74 In turn, Tavernier relates how a Dutch ambassadeur in Java suffers from a debilitating illness for fifteen years from which nothing can heal him. However, at an audience with a local monarch, the King’s doctors enquire if he has ever ‘entretenu quelque fille du païs, & comment il l’avoit quittée’. 75 Upon receiving an affirmative reponse, the appropriate remedy is offered: On crut qu’il mourroit des étranges efforts qu’il fit, & enfin il vomit un tapon de cheveux gros comme une petite noix, apres quoy il fut aussitost gueri.76

In both these anecdotes, the oriental woman exacts a slow-acting revenge on a European who has spurned her, all the more insidious because the poisoning can at any stage be undone by its administrator. While Europeans retain a predominant place in these tales, they are not the only victims of oriental poisoning. De L’Isle writes of a Queen of Pegu who ‘s’abandonna honteusement à un officier de sa Maison’, becoming pregnant, which in turn leads to a chain reaction of numerous poisonings, including that of her own son. 77 As with L’Estra’s dramatization earlier in this chapter, the frequently repeated theory that sati had originated from the suspicion of murder falling on women could also inspire anecdotes.78 Here again, Mocquet’s text is of great inventiveness, confirming that a Roy Gentil had introduced it as a direct response to the fact that ‘tous les hommes de son Royaume mouroient’.79 Such poisoning anecdotes, associated with a perception that the relationship between the sexes was fraught with conflict, were present from the early- (Mocquet, Martin de Vitré and Pyrard) or mid(La Boullaye and Chambelle) 17th century. So, although those of Tavernier (1676) or L’Estra (1676) were contemporaneous with the mass hysteria surrounding the Affaire des poisons, and others such as Leguat or Challe appear decades later, they seem, like the Affaire des 74

Ibid., p. 121. Tavernier, Six Voyages, II, p. 452. 76 Ibid., p. 453. 77 De L’Isle, p. 24. 78 ‘On dit au pays que ceste coustume est procedée de l’envie qu’ont eue les femmes d’eviter le soubson d’avoir empoisonné leurs maris.’ Martin de Vitré, p. 51. 79 Mocquet, 1617, p. 295. 75

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poisons itself, to constitute evidence of a very deeply-rooted association between witchcraft, poisonings, and women. 80 Nonetheless, this does not exclude differences in tone, at least at the end of the century. So, while Leguat certainly continues to link druggings with the passions of Asian women, his warnings, some decades after the Affaire des poisons, are mitigated by a light-hearted depiction of Javan galanterie: Mesdames les Javanes sont, dit-on, d’une complexion extraordinairement amoureuse; et ce qu’il y a de rare, c’est que leur passion n’est pas moins constante que forte. Elles se servent souvent de philtres qu’elles font prendre adroitement et avec succès, comme on me l’a assuré, à leurs Maris ou à leurs galans afin d’augmenter & d’assujettir de plus en plus leur amour, et quand elles soupçonnent que l’un ou l’autre leur est infidelle, elles ne manquent pas de le régaler de quelque drogue qui le mine peu à peu et qui l’envoye enfin dans le sombre pays que plusieurs appellent, aussi bien que nous, le Royaume des Taupes. De sorte qu’il faut y regarder à deux fois, avant que de s’accointer beaucoup avec ces femelles-là. […] Je ne sais si après tout cela il est nécessaire de dire que l’Isle de Java n’est pas un pays où la galanterie soit inconnue: l’amour y règne, finement même, et violemment.81

However, in the case of poisonings inflicted on women, as in Le Blanc’s account of an oriental king who deliberately poisons himself to render himself immune to attempts on his life, a strong element of fantasy prevails: Ce Prince se nourrissoit de viandes envenimées, ausquelles il s’estoit accoustumé, si bien qu’il devenoit si venimeux, qu’une mouche le piquant mouroit aussi tost. Il tuoit ainsi toutes les femmes qui couchoient avec luy infectées de son haleine; si bien qu’il luy en falloit changer tous les jours.82

Here, a fantastic means of overcoming the danger of poisoning allows the monarch to accede to a recurrent fantasy, namely that of numerous sexual partners, as well as the absolute power attributed to oriental monarchs.

80

‘Pendant des siècles les deux mots [sortilège, poison] ont été constamment réunis, parfois même confondus.’ Arlette Lebigre, L’Affaire des poisons (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1989), p. 90. 81 Leguat, II, pp. 129-131. 82 Le Blanc, I, p. 68.

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While all the above accounts depict circumstances which, within themselves, have great dramatic interest, and relied on existing European representations of conflict between the sexes, they also either depend on or perpetuate non-dramatized characteristics of the Orient. The complexion amoureuse of the Oriental – or to Orientdwelling, and therefore influenceable, settlers – is common to all, but what was acknowledged by travellers to be a source of great temptation is simultaneously warned against. The slow-acting revenges of spurned mistresses mirror the insidious effects of an Orient which ‘poisoned’ its settlers with weakness, as much as its half-oriental métisses. These anecdotes are supported by explicit warnings of the dangers of succumbing to the intense sensual pleasures of the Orient, once again evoking the threat implicit in its depiction. While seeming to instruct travellers on the ubiquity of poisoning, the anecdotes simultaneously entertain by recounting numerous, richly imaginative, variations on the subject of the treacherous, yet tempting, Oriental.

Fanaticism and Fortune The excessive revenges carried out by spurned wives, just like the insistence of prêtres on the death of young widows, are thus dramatizations of the 17th-century preconception that the Orient was a place of excess, and that the oriental mind was subject to similar excess. This could make credible anecdotes which exacerbate horror and cruelty, as in De L’Isle’s account of a Far Eastern lieutenant: On ne sçauroit lire sans horreur, les cruautez qu’il commit dans la pluspart de ces Royaumes.83

Such a warning does not prevent the description of a series of such cruautez in which the victims of various vividly depicted forms of slaughter include children, ‘helpless victims’ as much as women in the anecdotes of pathos.84 In other words, this perception of oriental fanaticism allowed tales of excess – particularly of cruelty – to be placed in travel narratives. In the Near East, these anecdotes might illustrate the resilience of a Christian (or Christians) to the insistence 83 84

De L’Isle, p. 31. Ibid., pp. 32-33.

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of Muslims who attempt his/her conversion. Grelot, for example, furnishes a tale of a young Christian boy who imitates the ‘crieries de Turcs’ which he hears from outside a mosque, is urged to convert, imprisoned and then tortured: Ce jeune enfant par une generosité toute sainte, aima mieux souffrir les bastonades, & la mort mesme que l’on luy fit endurer en-suite en luy trenchant la teste, que de faire aucun signe aux Turcs pour embrasser leur Religion, ny dire aucunes paroles de leur profession de Foy […]; & mourant ainsi dans la confession de la Foy Chrétienne, il emporta sans doute la couronne du martyre.85

This anecdote is obviously indebted to other tales of martyrdom which long precede the 17th century, accentuating pathos by the description of the boy’s torture and death, and of his courage, despite his young age, before the insistence of his captors. Other such anecdotes have no clear parallel in Christian tradition, but rely on the dramatic interest of a character trait such as the extreme jealousy which was supposedly a characteristic of all Orientals. Such a trait is behind Thévenot’s account of the mutilation of Eunuques noirs, as with that of Bernier recounting the brutal and jealous revenge of Shah Jehan upon the discovery of a young man sharing his daughter’s affections.86 In Du Vignau’s Le Secrétaire Turc, the eunuchs relate that the Sultana herself is capable of murdering a rival, while Mocquet writes of the King of Siam:87 Ce mesme Roy ayant sçeu quelquefois que ses concubines exerçoient entr’elles le peché contre nature avec membres contrefaits; il les fit venir en sa presence, et leur ayant faict peindre à chacune un membre viril sur la cuisse, les fit aller ainsi par toutes les ruës, puis les fit jetter au feu et brusler. Voyla les supplices cruels que ces Rois Gentils exercent sans pitié sur ceux dont ils se veulent avenger.88

85

Grelot, p. 230. Thévenot, Relation d’un Voyage faict au Levant, p. 45; ‘[Un homme] qui n’estoit pas de grande condition, mais bien fait et de bonne mine.’ Chah-Jehan arriving, the former hides inside ‘une de ces grandes chaudieres de bain […] [Chah-Jehan] s’en doutât, neanmoins il ne la querela ny la menaça, […] il luy dit qu’il la trouvoit toute mal propre et toute negligée […] commanda fort severement qu’on mît le feu à l’heure mesme sous la chaudiere.’ Bernier, Histoire de la derniere Revolution, p. 17. 87 Du Vignau, Le Secrétaire Turc, p. 289. 88 Mocquet, 1617, pp. 332-333. 86

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Oriental fanaticism is not restricted to the trait of jealousy, as in Tavernier’s previously mentioned Histoire remarquable of a Raja de Velou whose death inspires such grief in eleven ‘femmes de sa maison’ that they resolve to die on his funeral pyre. Learning of this, the General of the Army of Visapour attempts to dissuade them, and when this fails, has them held prisoner. ‘Comme furieuses’, they resolve to die in any case, which gives rise to a remarkable discovery: Mais celuy qui avoit la garde de ces femmes ayant ouvert la porte de la chambre au bout de trois heures, les trouva en effet toutes onze mortes & étenduës sur la place, sans qu’il parût aucun indice qu’elles eussent hâté leur mort, ni par le fer, ni par la corde, ni par le poison, ni que l’on pût juger de quelle maniere elles s’estoient pû ôter la vie. Il faut assurément qu’en cette rencontre le malin esprit ait joüé son jeu.89

This fury is so intense that it seems to be capable of causing the death of the Orientals who experience it in a manner that could only be – for Christians – compared to the effects of demonic intervention. This variation on the sati account is also notable for the multiplication of its victims, a further consequence of unbridled eastern emotion. Another notable hypotext is the tale of the white elephant, the possession of which was supposed to inspire intra-Oriental wars, in which the number of soldiers similarly assume fantastical, and needless to say, unverifiable, proportions.90 The fanaticism of the Orient could even, as an anecdote in Le Blanc’s account implies, be transmitted to Christians. In this, the recipient of ‘un grand soufflet’ from a judge, disguises himself as a Dervis and attends his aggressor’s audiences for an entire three years, patiently awaiting the moment for his revenge. The unfair judgement of an orphan – for even helpless orphans might be put on trial in Le Blanc’s Orient – allows the assassin to seize the moment, kill the judge, and give a new, just, verdict, before his own execution. 91 While the circumstances which gave rise to such dramatic events were supposed to have been primarily caused by the innate extremes of oriental character, a significant role was also accorded to the whims of a constantly-changing Fortune which was perceived to govern the Orient. In a first-hand account, L’Estra claims to have been 89

Tavernier, Six Voyages, II, p. 390. Pyrard, 1619, I, p. 355; Mocquet, 1617, p. 331; De L’Isle. p. 39. 91 Le Blanc, I, pp. 10-11. 90

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a frequent visitor to the house of a Portuguese gentleman who lodges not only the widow of the Gentilhomme Breton mentioned above, but a slave who enables the narrator to meet a dethroned Prince of Ceylon. 92 At Mocquet’s lodging in Goa the considerably-aged child Princess of Siam captured after the infamous war over the white elephant, could be heard lamenting her misfortunes.93 Such testimonies of dramatized lovers literally side by side with slaves and ex-Princes fostered a powerful sense of the possibilities of the Orient, or as Du Vignau writes, of fortune: L’on peut remarquer par cette avanture les caprices de la fortune, qui éclatent par tout le monde en diverses manieres. Ses plus surprenants effets paroissent en Turquie, où l’on voit les Païsanes Reynes, les Princesses Esclaves, & les hommes de la plus basse naissance elevez en un moment aux plus hautes dignitez de l’Empire.94

For Du Vignau, Turkey is a place in which the most astonishing manifestations of fate and destiny appear, in which social status is constantly overturned; royals become commoners, peasants become Queens, and the lowest in birth could acceed to great social rank. Indeed, the Sultana, passing through the market in a carriage in which she is unseen, recognizes a younger brother from whom she had been separated at twelve years of age, and who by this simple glance is ultimately elevated from slave to dignitary of the Empire.95 Baudier, nonetheless, claims that one exception did exist to the caprices of the Orient: that of the immutable court of China, a model of stability and wise government: [Le lecteur] ne verra point par le cours des inconstances qui maistrisent tout ailleurs […]. Le merite de ceux de la Chine a desmonté la fortune de la roüe inconstante, & apres l’avoir desarmée de ses aisles legeres, l’a assise sur la fermeté d’un rocher…96

92

L’Estra, pp. 236-237. ‘Je l’ay veuë assez souvent, estant lors assez aagee, & venoit voir mon hostesse Chinoise; car elles estoient fort amies, & mangeaient ordinairement avec nous, se consolant à raconter ses miseres.’ Mocquet, 1617, p. 331. 94 Du Vignau, Le Secrétaire Turc, p. 267. 95 Ibid., pp. 257-267. 96 Baudier, Histoire de la Cour du Roy de la Chine, 1624, p. 7. 93

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However, another anecdote recounted by Louis Le Comte strikingly demonstrates that for certain members of Parisian society at least, the Chinese too seemed subject to oriental inconstances. According to the narrator, in the year preceding his account (1696), several ‘Dames de Paris’ welcomed a young Frenchwoman who attempted, and seems to have succeeded, in passing herself off as a Chinese princess.97 In this curious reflection on the contemporary image of the Orient, Le Comte inserts the young woman’s tale of the miseries of a princess en route to Japan, attacked by Dutch and then French pirates, and who is abandoned after a long and dangerous voyage. 98 Of this aventure which evidently owes much to a format recognizable by the late 17th century, Le Comte – who criticized the ‘contes publics et des discours populaires’ of travel narratives – observes:99 j’avouë que le seul recit de cette avanture m’a paru un peu fabuleux, & qu’il a un air de Roman capable de détromper ceux qu’un excés de charité n’auroit pas entierement aveuglez.100

The young woman’s attempt to assume an oriental identity appears to have relied heavily on aventures and fails, in part, because of their excessive resemblance to those of the roman. Nonetheless, the perception of the role of fortune in the Orient seems, in this case, to have allowed a person falsely claiming to be a ‘victim’ of extraordinary circumstances to be embraced by society, through her use of the recognizable peripeteia of the oriental adventure.

Transgressions of Nature The strangeness of the fury or fortune of the Orient was further accentuated by manifestations of Nature which similarly transgressed the boundaries of European vraisemblance, and which could also furnish ample matter for histoires or anecdotes. The long 97

Le Comte, I, p. 271. Ibid., p. 274. 99 ‘A peine sont-ils débarquez qu’il courent de toutes parts, comme des gens affamez, ramasser avec avidité tout ce qui se présente, & charger indifferemment leur recueil des contes publics & des discours populaires.’ Le Comte, I, Avertissement, nonpaginated. 100 Ibid., p. 277. 98

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heritage of its intriguing flora and fauna stretches back before the 1600s, and while predecessors were sometimes corrected on their more fantastical claims, 17th-century travel narratives confirm the existence of mythological beasts, or elaborate in equally majestic measure on the qualities or behaviour of those animals which did exist.101 In anecdotes which, again, were backed up by the testimony of witnesses, oriental animals could thus possess characteristics which resembled those of human beings, such as the unnaturally strong maternal tendencies whales had due to their ‘naturel, astuce et dexterité.’102 In Choisy, one of the numerous tales of the elephant’s behaviour was even guaranteed by no less than M. l’Evêque de Métellopolis:103 Il y avoit dans un convent de Franciscains à Ceylon un petit éléphant qui venoit dîner & souper au réfectoire. Sa mere trop grande demeuroit à la porte, & l’observoit; & quand il faisoit quelque sotise, qu’il renversoit quelque portion, elle l’appelloit rudement, & luy donnoit cinq ou six coups de trompe, plus ou moins selon sa faute.104

Clearly the interest of this anecdote is in the ability of a mother elephant to correct her young in the same manner (albeit with a different appendage) as a human mother. The animals of the East, significantly, could also interact in unusual ways with human beings. Another of Choisy’s anecdotes recounts the fate of an ‘éléphant voleur de grands chemins’ who halts a Cochinchinois one day, not to hurt him, but to indicate its suffering caused by a large thorn implanted in its foot.105 The courageous Oriental is rewarded for removing the thorn by being put on the elephant’s back, brought to a cave full of treasure ‘où tout estoit rangé en fort bon ordre’ and left there.106 Other anecdotes relate the elephant’s mimicry of human gestures such as the curtsey, its punishment of badly-behaved infants,

101

Ripon so alters the myth that the oiseau de paradis has no feet and, never landing, does not eat or drink; Ripon, p. 72. On the licorne, see Pyrard, 1619, I, p. 354. 102 Pyrard, 1619, II, p. 341. 103 ‘Les relations sont pleines d’histoires d’éléphans.’ Choisy, p. 282. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., p. 283. 106 Ibid.

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its pitiless single-mindedness and the horrific consequences of its extraordinary obedience.107 For Le Blanc, elephants are: Bestes fort aprochantes de la raison, à qui rien ne manque que la parole pour l’exprimer, & entendent fort bien la langue du pais.108

Despite such claims, anecdotes of oriental animals, in travel narratives, tend to differ from animal manifestations in the popular tales of Bidpay published in several editions in the 17th century. 109 In Bidpay, as in La Fontaine’s Fables, human faculties (such as speech) accorded to animals are the vehicle which permit them to illustrate a moral truth or maxim, and these faculties are accepted by other animals, as well as human beings.110 In the récits de voyage, however, it is the resemblance itself of animal to human behaviour which forms the interest of the claims for exceptional oriental animals. While an occasional overlap with a moral lesson may occur, as in Choisy’s anecdote of the Cochinchinois rewarded by an elephant for his courage, the interest of such tales stems from the illustration that an animal could behave like a human being (for instance, by indicating suffering with gestures, and accumulating riches), rather than from the representation of humanity by an animal world identical in all but name. The readily-recounted anecdotes within the récits de voyage to the East thus embroider the text with situations in which the normally fixed boundaries between nature and human beings could be transgressed or blurred by humanlike animals. Oriental animals blur natural boundaries in other, even more problematic ways; while Le Blanc cautions that his tale of a bear who fathers five children by a princess is only a fable, the witnesses to Ripon’s tale of the twins delivered to the human victim of a group of amorous orang-utans were governors and officers, and therefore eminently suited to back up testimony. 111 107

Chambelle, p. 151; Dellon, 1699, p. 98; Ripon, p. 142. Le Blanc, I, p. 68. 109 Bidpay, Livre des Lumieres ou la Conduite des Roys composé par le Sage Pilpay Indien. Traduit en François par David Sahid d’Ispahan Ville Capitale de Perse (Paris: Chez Simeon Piget, 1644). 110 ‘Le pauvre chat maigre retourna dans la chambre de la vieille, à laquelle il compta toute l’affaire. La vieille le dissuada de son dessein…’ Bidpay, pp. 33-34. 111 Le Blanc, I, p. 120; Ripon, p. 79. 108

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If animals could imitate human beings in the Orient, then the reverse could also occur, and human beings degenerate into a state of near-animal brutality, as the examples of anthropophagy demonstrate. This maximum deviation from European alimentary tradition was, as in Léry, most often attributed to the inhabitants of the Americas. However, the topos of cannibalism was transferred to the East in numerous anecdotes which accentuate pathos, as with the tears shed by the victim of cannibal magicians depicted in one of Le Blanc’s tales.112 The indefatigable Mocquet relates that the King of Pegu, bewitched by sorcerers, forbids his subjects to till the land, which results in a vividly depicted famine: Ils furent contraints à la façon des Anthropophages de se manger les uns les autres: & ce qui est prodigieux et effroyable et non jamais ouy auparavant, de tenir mesme boucherie publique de la chair de ceux qu’ils pouvoient attraper à la campagne, le plus fort tuant et massacrant son compagnon pour en faire curee: de maniere qu’ils alloient à la chasse des hommes comme de quelques bestes sauvages, & faisoient des parties & assemblees pour cet effet.113

Indeed, the culminating point of this man-hunt is the tragic tale of a ‘fort belle jeune fille’ who herself ends up as a victim of cannibalism. 114 However, that this was an unknown phenomenon, ‘jamais ouï auparavant’, in the early 1600s, is extremely contentious, and the very fact that Mocquet notes that the slaughter takes place ‘à la façon des anthropophages’ testifies to his own knowledge of the long tradition of such accounts. The ‘boucherie publique’ was in fact a 16th-century topos, popularized in the accounts of the voyages to the Americas of Staden, Thevet or Léry, and often graphically represented in accompanying illustrations, testifying to the fascination with cannibalism. 115 Here, a theme known to fascinate the public in iconographic and 112

Le Blanc, I, p. 145. Mocquet, 1617, pp. 333-334. 114 ‘Un marchand de devers Goa […] se rencontra en une maison où ils n’avoient pas moyen d’acheter seulement une mesure de riz et cependant mouroient de rage de faim; mais ils monstrerent à ce marchand une fort belle jeune fille de la maison, que ses frères et sœurs plus grands vouloient vendre pour esclave […]. En fin ne s’estant peu accorder, le marchand estant sorty de la maison, bien peu apres ils massacrerent cette pauvre fille et la mirent en pieces…’ Mocquet, 1617, pp. 334-335. 115 On cannibalism, see Frank Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage and especially Le Cannibale, grandeur et décadence (Paris: Perrin, 1994). 113

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textual versions manifests itself – in its popular form – in the Orient, which serves purely as a convenient backdrop to the tale, due to its long-imputed quality as a space of excess and brutality.

The Limits of Observation: the Veiled Orient The limits which were imposed on the voyage by its economic requirements, by missions or geographical frontiers meant that even the most travelled of 17th-century voyagers were faced with regions which they had not personally seen. Beyond these limits – whether this was admitted or not by the narrator – the only possible testimony could be furnished by a witness who had penetrated into this unseen region and who then informed the voyager of what lay beyond. This testimony often appears in travel narratives in the form of anecdotes, such as that recounted by Bernier, at the northern limit of his voyage with the Mughal: Un bon vieillard qui […] dans le temps que Jehan-Guire fit une si exacte recherche de tous ceux qui estoient de cette famille, […] s’enfuit avec trois serviteurs au travers de ces Montagnes, […] il se trouva enfin dans un fort beau petit canton, où […] les habitans luy amenerent sur le soir les plus belles de leurs filles, le priant d’en choisir une pour dormir avec elle, parce qu’ils souhaitaient d’avoir de son sang: Que passant delà dans un autre canton […] la courtoisie du soir fut dissemblable de celle de l’autre, en ce que les habitans luy amenerent leurs propres femmes, soûtenans que ceux de l’autre canton estoient des bestes, parce que son sang ne demeureroit dans leur maison.116

In this extract, the progressively more pronounced nature of transgressions is notable, as the testimony of this unnamed witness goes beyond the furthest limit of what is quantifiable. Both geographical (distance) and temporal (past) remoteness correspond to the deviation from sexual norms: progression from the limit of Bernier’s observation, taken up by the old man, results in a progressive deviation according to which the most taboo of restrictions are broken. This contrast between Bernier’s normally sober testimony and the variation at the limits of his travels illustrates a general tendency of testimony to deviate at or beyond the geographical, or temporal limits of a voyage, 116

Bernier, Suite, II, pp. 127-128.

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or in the least well-known of regions ‘seen’ by the voyager. It is usually at this point that the testimony of the narrator-voyager (as detailed and analytical as possible regarding the cultures observed over years in Bernier’s case) is likely to become progressively more fantastic, despite the assurances of the reliability of witnesses. The cultural remoteness of ‘hommes vrayment sauvages’ who live in a state of maximum deviation from European norms, parallels the geographical remoteness of their unverifiable existence in ‘les bois les plus espois & les moins frequentez’ of Madagascar.117 Meanwhile, a certain ‘M. de Quermener’ supposedly recounts the origin of dress and sexual habits in Pegu to Robert Challe: le Grand-Pere du Roi, qui y régne à présent, voyant que le Royaume se dépeuploit, par le peu de commerce que les Hommes avoient avec les Femmes, qu’ils méprisoient pour le crime qui attira le feu du Ciel sur Sodome & Gomore, ordonna que, pour les inciter à un autre usage, les Femmes iroient désormais nues, excepté une pagne […]. Cela se pratique encore aujourd’hui [...]. Ainsi les autres Filles ou Femmes y sont publiques; ce sont de véritables troncs ou égouts de lubricité, toûjours prêts à recevoir l’offrande du premier venu. Depuis que cet ordre s’éxécute, le païs se repeuple, & insensiblement le crime contre nature s’abolit.118

Here, the familiar attribution of supposedly inverted or perverted oriental characteristics such as promiscuity, homosexuality and prostitution, accompanies an anecdote which purports to recount the origin of a tradition. As reliable as L’Estra’s previously-mentioned account of the origin of sati, the considerable deviations it claims are permitted by their unverifiable origin (taking place several generations back in time), as well as the distance of Pegu from the limits of Challe’s voyage. These deviations have in common their occurrence in a space beyond the sight of the voyager, and in which the Oriental is correspondingly at his/her most other. While fantastic anecdotes in the East Indies were situated in regions lying just beyond known geographical or temporal frontiers, other equally impassable frontiers existed in the East and acted as a setting for anecdotes of wealth, power and sexual licence. Bernier testifies to the great fascination that the seraglio held for the male 17th-

117 118

Flacourt, Histoire, 1658, Avant-Propos, non-paginated. Challe, 1721, II, pp. 309-310.

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century reader, regretting his inability to satisfy such a reader’s curiosity: Je souhaiterais à present de vous pouvoir faire promener dans le Serail comme j’ay fait dans le reste de la Forteresse; mais qui est le Voyageur qui en peut parler pour avoir veu?119

Despite this avowal, numerous authors still attempt to bypass the impossibility of testimony. For instance, Poullet claims that Turkish women are similar to their Greek and Jewish sisters: Il n’est pas necessaire de faire sçavoir les moyens qui peuvent donner entrée aux Estrangers dans les apartemens des Turcs, où ils sont tousjours (quoy qu’en secret & avec peril) parfaitement bien receus d’elles. Il suffit de faire observer ceux des Grecques, ou des Juifves; où l’accés est permis aux Chrestiens, & qui ont le mesme usage, & la mesme education dans le mesme pays… 120

A more common strategy was the declaration of reliance on a witness whose testimony would allow the narrator to describe with authority a place which was otherwise inaccessible. As with the geographical or temporal limits of distant voyages, the limits of forbidden palaces and appartements, once transgressed, become the stage for the most excessive of situations, recounted in anecdotes which reveal the extent of the fantasies of male voyagers (or their sources). The cloistering of women, associated with the Islamic societies of the Near East, and particularly of the Ottoman Empire, coincides with the numerous descriptions of their beauty, and indeed, their supremely lubricious nature. Anecdotes such as those of Baudier (who had drawn a link between enfermement, climat and abandon) repeatedly elaborate on their attempts to escape, in disguise, from their imprisonment, so as to meet lovers:121 Quelquefois elles empruntent les robes de leurs esclaves, & en habit desguisé vont ailleurs trouver ceux qu’elles ayment.122

119

Bernier, Suite, I, pp. 59-60. Poullet, p. 118. 121 Baudier, Histoire Generalle du Serrail, 1624, p. 150. 122 Ibid. 120

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Notably, anecdotes consistently repeat the preference Muslim women were supposed to have for Christians, and in particular, Frenchmen. 123 Various intermediaries might be used to engage in affairs, for the Orient was considered a place of intrigue, as La Magdeleine reveals: L’Intrigue fait le tout, car ceux qui sçavent gaigner l’amitié des Eunuques ont facilement celle des Dames.124

But the most frequent intermediary is that ethnic group to which intrigue was most commonly attributed by 17th-century travellers, the Jews. 125 Very often, intrigues with Turkish women were reportedly facilitated by payment to their Jewish slaves who would permit young men – disguised as women and covered with a veil – to enter the seraglio. 126 However, another equally forbidden site was commonly supposed to be the lieu privilégié of this oriental lust, as La Boullaye writes of Persian women: leur naturel est fort inclin à l’amour, mais les maris les gardent de si prés, qu’il leur est difficile de prendre l’occasion de mal faire, si ce n’est en feignant d’aller au bain.127

This is only one of numerous claims that the bains des femmes – a place to which he, or indeed any other male, had no access – was a rendez-vous for these amours.128 In fact, as with the seraglio, travellers’ accounts appear to compensate the lack of testimony by transforming the baths into a place of supposed perversion for femmes paillardes, as La Boullaye describes Persian women.129 The assurances that such accounts should not be repeated for moral reasons does not prevent the enthusiastic description of what could not have been seen directly, although witnesses, could still, apparently, be located:

123

‘Elles s’adressent ordinairement à des estrangers Chrestiens de l’Occident; & si elles peuvent […] des François.’ Ibid. 124 La Magdeleine, pp. 160-161. 125 Boucher, p. 613. 126 Grelot, p. 93; Tournefort, II, p. 94; Du Loir, p. 179. 127 La Boullaye, p. 108. 128 Poullet, p. 121. 129 La Boullaye, p. 108.

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Il n’est donc permis qu’aux petits garçons de sept à huit ans tout au plus d’entrer au bains avec leur mère […]; Cela n’empesche pas toutefois qu’il ne s’en trouve d’assez spirituels pour remarquer toutes les sortes de divertissemens qu’elles y prennent, puis que les femmes vont autant au bain pour le plaisir que pour la nécessité. 130

So, travel writers, once that – in fact, impossible – step over the threshold of the baths was taken, could then furnish elaborate depictions of these women unclothed before both narrator and reader. These had already appeared in the 16th century, in Nicolas de Nicolay’s virtual undressing, in 1568, of the visitors to the baths: Allant aux bains, soyent Turcques, ou Chrestiennes, pour mieux complaire les unes aux autres, s’ornent de tous leurs plus riches habits, & plus pretieuses bagues: où estans despouillées sur le tappis, & entrées dans le bain renversent le vase la bouche dessoubs, & le fond dessus…131

Nicolay then elaborates with the condemnation of their ‘luxurieuse lasciveté femenine’, accompanied by a description of the plaisir of two women bathing together.132 Baudier includes a similar account: Ces Dames […] s’embrassent nuës, s’agitent, & font les autres actions que l’amour recherche, & que la pudeur deffend d’escrire.133

Le Sieur Du Loir in turn compares the Turkish baths, as a place of assembly, to the French bal, but with important distinctions:134 Elles s’y rendent amoureuses les unes des autres, avec plus de passion qu’elles ne le sont des hommes, & que par mille attouchemens lascifs, elles soulagent leurs amours avec tant de plaisir, que j’en ay veu quelques-unes quitter leurs amans qu'elles estoient venu trouver pour aller avec leurs amantes qui se rencontroient dans le mesme lieu. Apres qu’elles ont esté

130

Grelot, p. 235. Nicolas de Nicolay [1517-1583], Les Quatres Premiers Livres de Navigations et Pérégrinations (Lyon: G. Roville, 1568), p. 73. 132 ‘ayans apperceu quelque fille, ou femme d’excellente beauté, ne cesseront tant qu’elles auront trouvé les moeyens de se baigner avec elle, pour la manier, & taster par tout à leur plaisir, tant sont pleines de luxurieuse lasciveté femenine.’ Ibid. 133 Baudier, Histoire Generalle du Serrail, 1624, p. 152. 134 ‘Toutes les dames y vont tousjours parées comme les nôtres vont au bal, parce que ce sont les seuls lieux de leurs assemblées & de visites entre les amies.’ Du Loir, p. 182. 131

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lavées elles se font tresser les cheveux, qui pour l’ordinaire tombent jusques sur les leurs talons.135

That hair (which again could not be freely observed by a European in an Islam-professing country) is supposed to be of such fantastic length, must again reflect more on the attraction of what is hidden than in the observable nature of this evidence. Despite the parallel with the recurrent attribution of the practice to male Orientals, these extracts only elaborate on homosexuality in such enthusiastic detail in the case of its female form. In spite of the condemnation, they instead demonstrate the tension between the fascination of voyagers with what lay beyond their power to observe, and the role of fantasy in compensating the lack of the authoritative information they nonetheless claimed to have. Furthermore, unable to communicate with these veiled, or unseen women, French observers instead emphasize the predominance of the non-verbal sign. Tournefort laments the demonstrations of the ‘femmes débauchées & perduës’ of Constantinople, while a somewhat more appreciative Du Loir recounts:136 Souvent quand elles voyent quelque jeune galand elles feignent de vouloir racommoder leur veste de dessus, & font voir en l’entreouvrant celle qui est dessous, & quelque chose de plus au travers de leur calçons. Les jolies en attachent un lambeau à leur ceinture avec un Khandger, c’est à dire poignard, qu’elles portent plutost par galanterie que par bravoure.137

In Persia, according to Tavernier, a certain ‘signe de l’étrier’ enables the observer to distinguish between an ‘honneste femme’ and a courtesan.138 However, it is quite clear that these means of non-verbal communication – even if they actually were witnessed – were extremely subjective, relying on interpretation already loaded with diverse cultural preconceptions. Nevertheless, despite their occasional galanterie, associating with the women of the Near East was constantly warned against, just as with the distant temptresses further East. Jacques de Villamont warns that Turkish women dispose of their Christian lovers by having 135

Ibid. Tournefort, II, p. 92. 137 Du Loir, p. 185. 138 Tavernier, Six Voyages, I, p. 212. 136

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their slaves strangle, hide and bury them, while the same women, according to Baudier, inevitably use ‘une dague, ou un verre de poison’ for the same purpose.139 Another anecdote illustrates that refusal of their advances is as dangerous as spurning Javan or Malayan women. A Gentil-homme François commits the affront of reneging on a promise to meet a woman in Constantinople, and becomes the victim of a spell which reduces him to an ‘espece de paralysie.’140 As with the Far Eastern poisonings, this spell is treatable, after an old Turkish woman enquires of the victim if he has ‘refusé quelque Dame qui vous prioit d’amour?’141 Ultimately, these anecdotes of seraglios and bains in the Near East parallel anecdotes of transgression in the East Indies. In both cases, the voyager, at the fringes of observation, is reduced to conjecture, and almost glimpsed possibilities reach their zenith, all the time playing on the dual threat and temptation so often superimposed on representation of Orientals. The secluded, vaguely glimpsed women of the Near Orient are described in a multitude of anecdotes which reveal unknown meanings in vaguely-observed signs, unseen beauty behind veils, and fascinating adventures behind the walls of seraglios and baths. Here narratorial reliance on the testimony of others is total and fascination is at a maximum, providing the ideal conditions for the insertion of anecdotes at this observational limit. * These aventures and histoires, extra-diegetic interventions in the course of the voyage, are ultimately an inextricable part of the travel narrative, and they reinforce the polar depictions of Orientals as simultaneously treacherous and tempting, dangerous and delightful. Taking romantic or sexual intrigue, cruelty and fatalism as their primary themes, their content frequently crosses into the realm of fiction, or the roman, a fact of which their authors were conscious and from which they wished to distance themselves to reinforce the factual nature of the travel narrative itself. To ensure that these events would be taken as fact, witnesses were again relied upon to testify that the 139

Villamont, pp. 282(fol.B)-283; Baudier, Histoire Generalle du Serrail, 1624, p. 150. 140 Baudier, Histoire Generalle du Serrail, 1624, pp. 150-151. 141 Ibid., p. 151.

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events recounted, unlikely as they might seem, had actually taken place. These anecdotes were to recur in récits de voyage throughout the 17th century. From the voyages of Pyrard and Mocquet in the early 1600s, through Ripon, Le Blanc in mid-century, Tavernier or L’Estra in the 1670s, and Challe’s 1690s voyage, unpublished until 1721, a thematic similarity is clearly visible. As Tavernier or Challe’s anecdotes demonstrate, the fact that by the end of the century a greater quantity of data on the East Indies existed than at the start of the 1600s, did not prevent the region from being used as a locus for tales as unlikely as those readily recounted by Mocquet. If the Dutch were as frequently depicted in French histoires of the late 17th century as the Portuguese had been nearly a century previously, this mirrors a quantitative increase due to the realities of other Europeans travelling further east, rather than a significant change in the form or themes of the tales themselves. The fictional models or hypotexts on which these anecdotes drew had an inevitable effect on the representation of the Orientals – or indeed the Orient – they recounted. While the form of the roman makes Orientals little more than substitutes for existing character types, the pathos of the long-existing histoires tragico-maritimes polarizes the characters of shorter anecdotes into victims and aggressors. This polarization, however, takes place according to definite, pre-existing representations. An oriental landscape in which Nature is no longer clearly separated from humankind is reflected in human beings who, if they do not themselves behave like animals, are subject to the influence of climate, or to states of mind which can lead them willingly to the worst excesses. Spices and herbs further alter consciousness, or are used by vengeful women to poison Europeans who dare to mix with them. What the narrator has not yet seen is potentially even more astonishing, and the most flimsy of testimonial links allows the projection of a myriad of fantasies and horrors beyond known frontiers. The encounter between Europeans and Orientals was as fertile a source of histoires in the Near East as it was in the Indes orientales, and similar projections created the dramatizations of the existing stereotypes of the Proche Orient. Occasional anecdotes of moral value are superseded by the vast possibilities of romantic intrigue,

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depending on the perceived unknowability for Europeans of the Muslim, and especially the female Muslim, world. The endless interest of these tales compensates for the inaccessibility of their subjects, by attributing communication to signs, beauty to invisibility, and perversion to places to which Frenchmen had no access. The claims of these projections were again accompanied by warnings of the consequences of succumbing to their temptations. However, these anecdotes feature in texts which claim to factually represent the cultures of the Orient, but which inevitably heighten dramatic content.142 The result, as the repeated assurances of a clear distinction between travel narratives and forms of fiction make clear, was in part the perception that the former had been contaminated by fiction. Nonetheless, the adoption of supposedly factual imagery and of numerous hypotexts for these digressions, that is to say, of pre-existing representations of the Orient, demonstrate their roots, or their associations, with flawed cultural encounter or with existing literary heritage. Jacques Chupeau is quite correct to describe the récit de voyage as subject to the ambiguity of the ‘exigences souvent contradictoires de la documentation et du récit’, for this contradiction is defended by numerous authors or narrators themselves. Documentation created and nurtured an Orient which fascinated and which was admirably suited to the requirements of the récit, which, in turn, depending on the dramatic potential of the East, perpetuated its continued textual existence. The innate contradictions of these vastly adaptable depictions, created by problematic encounter, yet simultaneously conforming to the needs of the récit, again further emphasize the problematic nature of the very attempt to engage in cultural representation in the first place. Such a fusion must ultimately demonstrate that the transfer to text could, in fact, potentially distance the reader from the Oriental, rather than bringing him or her any closer. If the depiction of the Orient has already been shown to involve formula and fallacy in its narrative codification and transmission, the move to anecdotal fiction is but a small textual step away. 142

Chapter titles such as Pyrard’s Adventures & accidens divers (I, Chapter XX, p. 294) or Justices diverses faictes pour adulteres, paillardises & autres pechez, (I, Chapter XXII, p. 322) in a text which was supposed to be the Description ‘Contenant la description des pays, les mœurs, loix, façons de vivre’ as part of the full title of all the 17th-century editions in French.

Conclusion From the first moment of the meeting with oriental cultures, the process of encounter was fundamentally flawed by textual attempts to make oriental difference comprehensible to the French reader. In the more than sixty travel narratives which form the core corpus of this study, these attempts have been repeatedly demonstrated to conform to preconceived formulae which in turn simply accentuate cultural difference. The problematic process of representation was further complicated by the conformity of authors to the already extant literary tradition of the travel narrative, which encouraged the selection of elements of representation according to the 17th-century conception and organization of knowledge. Guarantees of objective representation such as the reliance on visual testimony and transparency, or the addition of apparently functional paratexts, were naturally equally prone to conveying pre-existent cultural preconceptions within a narrative that conformed more to readers’ expectations of convention than to reality. According to the preconceptions or requirements of travellers, or the culture, or indeed, sub-cultures, to which they or their readers belonged, Orientals and the Orient assume characteristics which fluctuate, change, are ascribed to some groups of Orientals and not to others, or which even surprise through their absence. The Oriental is ascribed a vast array of characteristics, and varies from being an entity devoid of many recognizable cultural traits, to a symmetrical Other, the ‘mirror’ image of French observers. However, the inescapable influence of historical and political realities tends to make the depictions of Near East and East Indies differ fundamentally in terms of action and inaction. The oriental otherness of the Near East, inseparable from the precedent of centuries of both contact and conflict with Europe, is encapsulated in the image of the Turk or – what was often its synonym – the Muslim, a consistently threatening textual presence.

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This threat is embodied in direct aggression, or, insidiously, through forced conversion to Islam. The less familiar East Indies, lacking this great burden of tradition, knowledge and historical conflict, is attributed vast possibilities of exploitation of its wealth and natural fertility, and differs fundamentally in seeming to permit European intervention. While the possibility of action is much greater in the East Indies than in the Near East, in both cases the unseen inhabitants of the seraglio or their ‘promiscuous’ sisters further east promise male French voyagers an excellent reception. This consistently represents the essential promise of the Orient, partially veiled beneath the domination of Muslims, or of barbaric brahmans or indeed, of the other Europeans beginning to colonize it. Throughout the corpus, the representation of the Oriental has been seen to be extremely malleable and to offer substantial narrative potential for manipulation – conscious or otherwise – according to the preconceptions of individual French travellers, or the needs of the religious or other associations that they belonged to. Whatever cohesion the image of the Oriental actually has lies, to a considerable degree, in this difference: in being attributed, at various points of history, a vast number of traits which are similar and representative only because the – male – narrator does not attribute them to himself. Weakness, fatalism, and excessive emotion and violence are among these characteristics, and it is a measure of their potential for manipulation that such traits were as often attributed to the Orientals who were perceived to be already dominated by Europeans as to those who were, simultaneously, perceived as threatening Europe. The term ‘Oriental’ in the récits de voyage was thus, in large part, a construction adopted, and at the same time, conveyed by the traveller. It is this that, in turn, permits the small step that is the transition from fallacious representation to the insertion of fictional anecdotes and histoires. This is permitted in an otherwise allegedly factual narrative by reassurances of the presence of reliable witnesses and by the utilization of situations, backgrounds, and most especially, of character traits which were already attributed to the inhabitants of the East. The malleability of the Orient makes it an excellent site for the situation of fiction, as it becomes synonymous with the extraordinary occurrences related in, for example, the histoires tragico-maritimes. This, in turn, feeds a symbiotic relationship in which the adventures of fiction mirror those of the voyage, and in

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which voyagers defend themselves – in advance – from the accusation of recounting romanesque tales. The relationship between Orient, aventure and fiction would continue long after the 17th century, providing the material for pièces de théâtre, anecdotes, and sometimes extensive collections of tales. However, this tendency towards fiction is as irreconcilable with neutral cultural representation as the formulae that permit space for both fact and fiction within the one narrative. Such fictional influence could only render accurate depiction even less feasible. In short, the very nature of attempting cultural representation assumes a difference between the observed culture, and that of the observer and reader, from which the creation of the text obtains its validity. The difference which is described is in fact the principal reason for the text’s existence, without which it would be devoid of any of its attractiveness. This is an inherent and inescapable fault of cultural representation, which the insistence on any similarities between observer and observed merely further underlines. The project of depicting the Other is founded on his/her difference. Any assessment of the success of such a text will by definition be limited to the extent, rather than the fact, of its inherent unfeasibility. The research carried out for this book has highlighted a number of areas which further research may profitably build on. The question of the type of knowledge conveyed by curiosité – or its manifestations in following centuries – could clearly be extended beyond the parameters of this study. What exactly constituted a worthy area of study, or what composed a description of the East was, as this study has shown, by no means an unambiguous procedure, and different historical contexts of knowledge and encounter should be illuminated by questioning the curiosité which drove them. In addition, the anecdotes and dramatized tales of the Orient would benefit from a study specially dedicated to their origins, and to the repetition of their narrative and character models. Such a study would aid further understanding of the place of these tales in the creation and promulgation of oriental representations. The obsession with ‘veiled’ or hidden spaces could also be fruitfully analyzed beyond its manifestations in the Orient. The relationship of accounts and tales of dubious value to unknowable and unverifiable spaces and territories must surely merit an overall study not limited to the Orient. Finally,

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the problematic place of the persona of the traveller, constantly claiming difference to a European readership by emphasizing a privileged access to oriental knowledge, yet refusing the moral contamination of the East, could itself be the focus of a substantial further study. Just how this delicate balancing act between cultures, this apparent ability to integrate without assimilation to the East, was obtained, would be the natural extension of this study of cultural representations. The present study demonstrates that 17th-century travellers and their readers retained, from frequent exposure to representations of the Orient, a vast sense of its possibilities. The constant repetition of the topoi of these primary sources proves the continuing importance of previous authors for the acquisition of knowledge, an importance which often stretches to reliance on them. If the features which Martino attributed to the Orient nearly a century ago have changed – and this is debatable – they can be traced directly back to, or beyond, the 17th-century. 1 However, the present study also demonstrates that the récit de voyage was engaged with this tradition, and might question, or call into question, either accepted knowledge about the Orient, or even the beliefs, desires and fears behind it. That this knowledge was engaged with, referred to, discussed, or contradicted so frequently demonstrates the great weight of authority behind accounts which, to a reader centuries later, may appear all too obvious. To avoid an unjust and anachronistic judgement of these texts, this knowledge must, as much as is possible, be considered on its own terms: that is, by constantly considering the imposition of the standards to which it was subject and the audience it was intended for. In the inherent faults of the representations which were the result, perhaps some lessons may be drawn on the heritage, transmission and perpetuation of present-day depictions of concepts such as the exoticism of the Orient, or indeed, the dual threat and promise of the East. The flaws of cultural encounter are still perpetuated and codified, and if references such as the Classics are largely absent from modern cultural encounter with the East, other strategies, like the

1

‘Une terre aux chaudes couleurs avec des habitants étranges et des mœurs singulières.’ Martino, p. 2.

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comparative reference to familiar topoi, persist among its most essential features. While seraglios or the gathering of jewels no longer represent the vast sexual and economic potential of the Orient, literary and other exoticisms continue to benefit from, and play on, its perceived unknowability, and to perpetuate what are often modern transmutations of ancient or early modern topoi. On the other hand, a sense of threat is also very much alive, and continues to be revelatory of the political and economic preoccupations of modern cultures in their representations of the East. The creation, perpetuation and constant malleability of oriental representations continue to be acutely relevant at the start of the 21st century.

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Essays/Articles in Journals: Berriot, François, ‘Islam et liberté de conscience à la Renaissance’, in La Liberté de conscience: XVIe-XVIIe siècles: actes du colloque de Mulhouse et Bâle, 1989 (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 173-190. Bidaux, Michel, ‘Culture et découverte dans les Relations des Jésuites’, XVIIe Siècle, 112 (1976), 3-30. Bouchon, Geneviève, ‘L’Image de l’Inde dans l’Europe de la Renaissance’, Purasartha, 11 (1988), 69-90. Cairnes, John E., ‘Mr Spencer on Social Evolution’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 23 (1875), 63-82; repr. in Herbert Spencer: Contemporary Assessments, coll. Herbert Spencer: Collected Writings, vol. XII, ed. by Michael W. Taylor (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996), 63-82. Chupeau, Jacques, ‘Les Récits de voyages aux lisières du roman’, Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 77, mai-août 1977, 536-553. Defert, Daniel, ‘Colonies perdues, mondes à trouver’, Magazine littéraire, 164, septembre 1980, 29-33. Geertz, Clifford, ‘Anti Anti-Relativism’, American Anthropologist, vol. 86, no. 2, June 1984, 263-278. Greene, John Patrick, ‘French Encounters with Material Culture of the South Pacific’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 26:3, Fall 2002, 225-245. Heinen, Eglal, ‘Le Voyage dans le roman pastoral’, Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises, 56, mai 2004, 337-357. Lestringant, Frank, ‘Récit de quête/récit d’exil: Le retour de la terre promise’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 214, avril-juin 1989, 25-41. Lindsay, Robert O., ‘Les Voyages Fameux: a Seventeenth-Century Travel Account’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 16 (1979), 323-338. Ouellet, Réal, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une relation de voyage’, La Recherche littéraire: objets et méthodes, 1993, 235-246. Pioffet, Marie-Christine, ‘Marc Lescarbot et la littérature géographique de la Renaissance’, XVIIe Siècle, 222, janvier-mars 2004, 91-103. Ponio, Augusto & Solimini, Maria, ‘Sui rapporti fra scienze del linguaggio e scienze della cultura’, Linguistica e Antropologia: Atti del XV Congresso internazionale di studi, Lecce 23-25 maggio 1980 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1983), 41-51. Requemora, Sylvie, ‘Le Voyage dans le théâtre français du XVIIe siècle’, Irish Journal of French Studies, 4 (2004), 17-40. Rougeot, Jacques, ‘Le Journal d’un Voyage de Challe’, Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, novembre-décembre 1979, 1025-1029. Sankey, Margaret, ‘L’Abbé Paulmier méconnu: le mythe et l’histoire des Terres Australes en France aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 38 (2001), 54-68.

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Simon, Pierre-Jean, ‘Ethnocentrisme’, Pluriels Recherches, 1 (1993), 5763. Smith, Jay M., ‘No More Language Games: Words, Beliefs, and the Political Culture of Early Modern France’, American Historical Review, 102, no. 5, (1997), 1413-1440. Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine, ‘Les Yeux fertiles de la mémoire. Exotisme indien et représentations occidentales’, Purasartha, 11 (1988), 931. Theses: Beguin Billecocq, Xavier, ‘Henry de Feynes (1573-1647): Le premier Français en Extrême-Orient’ (doctoral thesis, Université de Provence, 1999). Bonnerot, Olivier, ‘La Perse dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIe siècle. De l’image au mythe’ (doctoral thesis, Université Paris IVSorbonne, 1984). De Clauzade de Mazieux, Anne, ‘Le Théâtre des Jésuites en langue française au Collège de Clermont de 1670 à 1700’ (Mémoire de maîtrise, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1986). Lauthelier, Rachel, ‘Géographie et rhétorique dans les récits de voyage en Orient à l’époque classique’ (doctoral thesis, Université Paris IVSorbonne, 2002). Linon, Sophie-Jenny, ‘Le Genre de la relation de voyage française sur la route maritime des épices’ (doctoral thesis, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1993). Requemora, Sylvie, ‘Littérature et voyage au XVIIe siècle: récit, roman, théâtre’ (doctoral thesis, Université Aix-Marseille, 2000).

Index Secondary sources appearing in footnotes alone have not been indicated.

Aceh, 177, 212 Africa, 44, 48, 65, 159 Alexander, 49, 65 Americas, 12, 47, 49, 50, 64, 127, 159, 164, 175, 178, 184, 223, 256 Arabs, 15, 24, 56, 81, 138, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 154, 167, 208 Atkinson, Geoffroy, 33, 51 Aurangzeb, 31 Avril, Philippe, 23, 26 Babylon, 167 Baghdad, 94, 156 Bali, 87 Bandello, Matteo, 231 Barbary States, 20 Baudelot de Dairval, Charles, 13, 104, 109, 110 Baudier, Michel, 111, 139, 141, 145, 168, 189, 190, 200, 231, 261, 263 Beaulieu, Augustin de, 23, 28, 78, 89, 90, 95, 96, 100 Beauvau, Henry de, 23, 32, 100, 123, 150 Bede, 146 Belleforest, François de, 231 Belon, Pierre, 111, 136 Bénard, Nicolas, 23, 24, 140, 141 Bergeron, Pierre, 28, 87, 101, 103, 104 Bernier, François, 23, 48, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 67, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 93, 94, 96, 110, 142, 207, 210, 215, 216, 218, 232, 243, 250, 257, 258

Besson, Joseph, 23, 25, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 135, 137, 139, 143, 146 Bidpay, 255 Biet, Christian, 232 Bonnerot, Olivier, 33, 156 Boucher, Jean, 23, 24, 108, 120, 128, 144, 161 Bouchon, Geneviève, 88, 182 Bouillon, Godefroy de, 146 Bourges, Jacques de, 23, 26, 61, 104, 140, 141, 153 Brazil, 21, 27, 52, 54, 84, 85, 86, 176, 177, 240 Buddhism, 55, 63, 70, 71 Cambay, 90, 91, 200, 201 Camus, Jean-Pierre, 231 Canada, 81 Cannibals, 49, 84, 85, 159, 256–57 Carnoy, Dominique, 33, 100, 143 Carré, Barthélemy, 22, 23, 29, 150, 166, 179, 184, 185, 227, 235, 236, 237 Carvajal, Gaspar de, 64 Castro, Xavier de, 237 Cauche, François, 23, 28, 72, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223 Centre de Recherche sur la Littérature des Voyages (CRLV), 33 Ceylon, 186n, 198, 212 Chalcedon, 128

296 Challe, Robert, 79, 88, 100, 104, 112, 188, 205, 217, 218, 234, 242, 247, 258, 264 Chambelle, Jean Guidon de, 49, 50, 57, 122, 184, 206, 246, 247 Chapelain, Jean, 12, 22, 51n, 69, 70 Chardin, Jean, 23, 31, 32, 36, 100, 117, 119, 137, 138, 215 Charpentier, François, 180, 181, 194, 219, 220, 221 Chaumont, Alexandre de, 23, 32, 94, 104, 186, 187, 196, 214 Chauveton, Urbain, 177n Chéron, Hélène, 24, 25, 147 China, 15, 19, 20, 25, 26, 135, 175, 189–92, 195, 200, 219, 225, 252 Chinon, Gabriel de, 23, 25, 141, 142, 155, 169 Choisy, François-Timoléon de, 23, 26, 71, 100, 104, 105, 118, 196, 254, 255 Chupeau, Jacques, 229, 265 Cochin China, 203, 254, 255 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 29, 179 Colet, Louis, 164, 222 Colombus, Christopher, 64 Compagnie des Indes orientales, 29, 30, 179 Constantinople, 19, 32, 111, 129, 145, 158, 162, 164, 166, 169, 262, 263 Coppin, Jean, 23, 132, 142, 148, 150 Coulon, le Sieur, 28 Counter-Reformation, 141 Crusades, 80, 127, 151 D’Herbelot, Barthélemy, 133, 145 Dangeau, Louis de Courcillon de, 26, 105 Daulier-Deslandes, André, 23, 31, 105, 124 De L’Isle, le Sieur, 36, 111, 114, 199, 200, 213, 247, 249 De Vergoncey, 23, 131, 141, 145, 151 Dellon, Charles, 23, 29, 36, 85, 125 Democritus, 76 Deshayes de Courmenin, Louis, 23 Doiron, Normand, 34 Doubdan, Jean, 23

Veiled Encounters Du Chastelet des Boys, René, 23, 108n Du Loir, le Sieur, 23, 130, 132, 152, 166, 169, 261, 262 Du Vignau, le Sieur, 233, 250, 252 Duquesne, Henri, 201, 202 Dutch East India Company, 29, 122, 181, 184 Epicurus, 76 Ethiopia, 238 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 71, 72 Faret, Nicolas, 105, 123 Feyerabend, Paul, 55, 70, 71, 72 Feynes, Henry de, 90, 103, 200 Flacourt, Etienne de, 23, 35, 73, 75, 104, 112, 164n, 219, 220, 222, 223 Florida, 176 France Clothing, 81, 82 Colonization, 176–82, 219, 220, 221 Coquetterie, 81, 82, 158 Preference of Orientals for French, 186 Relationship with Ottoman Empire, 131, 150, 166 François I, 21 Frye, Northrop, 240 Furetière, Antoine, 12, 14, 16, 17, 48, 49, 58, 59, 62, 133 Galland, Antoine, 15, 22, 82, 83, 84, 86, 130, 133, 146, 162, 163, 167, 231 Ganges, 68, 76 Gassendi, Pierre, 31 Geertz, Clifford, 39, 40, 41, 61 Genette, Gérard, 37, 121, 122, 230, 234, 239 Gervaise, Nicolas, 23, 26, 62, 63, 71, 121 Goa, 21, 27, 29, 36, 87, 183, 197, 209, 245, 246, 252 Gomez, Madeleine-Angélique Poisson de, 168n

Index Goujon, Jaques, 23 Greece, 129, 130 Greeks, 152 Greene, John Patrick, 91 Grelot, Guillaume-Joseph, 23, 32, 129, 132, 139, 158, 161, 165, 166, 250 Harvey, William, 210 Hazard, Paul, 33 Hellespont, 165 Henri IV, 155, 179 Herodotus, 64, 65 Hinduism, 55, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 243 Hodgen, Margaret, 36 Holy Land, 19, 20, 24, 25, 30, 36, 44, 128, 131, 146, 147, 151, 170 Holy Roman Empire, 131 Homer, 108, 129 Huguenots, 30, 31, 36, 50, 61, 137, 176, 177, 201 India, 19, 20, 30, 32, 54, 56, 69, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 110, 175, 184, 187, 188, 189, 197, 206, 207, 208, 215, 217, 233 Indians, 33, 55, 73, 94, 183, 186, 188, 201, 208, 210, 216, 224, 236 Indonesia, 20 Iphigenia, 74 Islam, 20, 68, 78, 79, 124, 137, 138, 140, 143, 138–45, 148, 161, 162, 163, 208, 222, 243 Islam, Sayed Manzurul, 160 Izmir, 130 Japan, 16, 18, 19, 20, 175, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 192–96, 219, 225, 253 Java, 19, 86, 87, 247, 248 Jesuits, 25–26, 192, 193, 194, 203 Jesus Christ, 136, 138, 145, 148 Jews, 136–37, 138, 140, 143, 148, 259, 260 Journal des Sçavans, 12, 22, 29, 116, 125 Jouvin de Rochefort, Albert, 31

297

Kluckhohn, Clyde, 39, 40 Koran, 79, 140, 141, 142, 144, 163 L’Estoille, Claude de, 22 L’Estra, François de, 23, 28, 29, 184, 185, 186, 188, 198, 201, 205, 212, 213, 230, 234, 235, 236, 242, 243, 247, 251, 258, 264 La Boullaye Le Gouz, François, 23, 30, 52, 56, 57, 64, 65, 67, 92, 107, 111, 114, 117, 120, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 166, 180, 183, 207, 208, 245, 247, 260 La Calprenède, Gautier de Costes de, 12 La Fontaine, Jean de, 255 La Loubère, Simon de, 32, 59, 70, 115, 187, 188, 211, 214 La Magdeleine, le Comte de, 117, 260 Lambert, Pierre, 26 Laneau, Louis, 55, 71 Lauthelier, Rachel, 34, 120 Le Blanc, Vincent, 23, 28, 64, 65, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 111, 185, 186, 187, 212, 227, 240, 248, 251, 255, 256, 264 Le Comte, Louis, 26, 189, 190, 192n, 253 Le Favre, Jacques, 23 Lebanon, 151 Leguat, François, 21, 118, 119, 202, 229, 247, 248 Léry, Jean de, 21, 49, 50, 61, 84, 86, 123, 202, 256, 273 Lestringant, Frank, 36, 50 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 40, 83, 84 Linon-Chipon, Sophie, 33, 106, 115, 209 Lisdam, Henry de, 22, 233 Lombard, Denys, 79 López de Gómara, Francisco, 50 Louis XIV, 95, 179 Lucas, Paul, 104 Lyotard, Jean-François, 126 Macao, 54

298 Madagascar, 19, 20, 28, 35, 44, 54, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 112, 179, 219–24, 258 Malabar, 27, 29, 124, 206 Maldives, 27, 54, 60, 65, 66, 68, 84, 87, 88, 123, 209, 210 Malingre, Claude, 132 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 39 Manuzzi, Nicolò, 217n Marco Polo, 65 Marot, Louis, 31 Martin de Vitré, François, 59, 69n, 74, 75, 204, 247 Martinius, Martin, 200 Martino, Pierre, 33, 133, 270 Mecca, 68, 79 Mocquet, Jean, 23, 27, 33, 74, 92, 93, 96, 103, 104, 183, 209, 213, 227, 234, 238, 239, 240, 241, 246, 247, 250, 252, 256, 264 Mohammed, 24, 68, 79, 124, 133, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 243 Monconys, Balthasar de, 23, 30, 51, 52 Montaigne, Michel de, 38, 75, 86, 190 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 31, 160n, 195, 207n, 218 Moors, 20, 24, 133, 138, 140, 143, 144, 151 Moüette, Germain, 230n Moureau, François, 103, 128 Mughal Empire, 31, 73, 96 Murr, Sylvia, 51 Muslims, 65, 68, 79, 81, 122, 138, 139, 144, 147, 150, 153, 161, 163, 165, 166, 169, 170, 260, 267, See Islam Nau, Michel, 23, 24 Nazareth, 148, 150 Netherlands, 178, 182 Nicolay, Nicolas de, 261 Olearius, Adam, 106, 229 Orthodox Christians, 135, 138

Veiled Encounters Ottoman Empire, 20, 44, 111, 118, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 146, 148, 155, 170, 252, 259, See Turkey Pagden, Anthony, 36, 63, 64, 65 Palestine, 16 Pech, Thierry, 231 Pegu, 197, 199, 247, 256, 258 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de, 22, 101, 103 Persia, 19, 20, 30, 31, 33, 34, 134, 153–57, 157, 163, 236, 262 Persians, 56, 158, 232, 260 Pétis de la Croix, François, 102, 116, 124, 157 Philippe de la Tres-Saincte Trinité, 22, 25, 113, 182, 185, 187, 203, 208, 216 Pintard, René, 51, 52 Pliny, 113 Portugal, 19, 20, 21, 25, 27, 64, 65, 79, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 216, 238, 239, 241, 264 Portuguese, 85, 183, 184, 185, 238, 239, 240, 241, 245, 246 Postel, Guillaume, 21, 131, 151, 152, 160 Poullet, le Sieur, 23, 32, 259 Protestantism, 182, 195, See Huguenots Pyrard, François, 23, 27, 28, 33, 54, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 76, 77, 78, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 103, 104, 120, 123, 177, 178, 199, 210, 229, 264 Pythagoras, 76, 77 Racine, Jean, 167 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, 210 Renegades, 161–63 Requemora, Sylvie, 34, 159 Rhodes, Alexandre de, 23, 25, 54, 75, 104, 193, 203 Richelet, Pierre, 12, 14, 15 Ricoeur, Paul, 37, 101 Ripa, Cesare, 164, 196n Ripon, Élie, 29, 227, 255, 264

Index Rodriguez Island, 202 Roger, Eugène, 23, 146, 148, 149, 163 Rome, 49, 65, 130 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 202 Rubiés, Joan-Pau, 32, 35, 42, 176 Said, Edward, 16, 32, 34, 99, 132, 134, 175, 176 Saint Francis Xavier, 190 Saint Thomas, 185, 186 Saint-Germain, Charles de, 23, 24, 147 Sapir, Edward, 38, 39, 58, 91n, 212 Sati, 74, 216, 217, 218, 242, 247, 251 Sepulveda, Juan Ginés de, 50 Seraglio, 167, 168, 169, 258, 260, 268, 271 Shah Jehan, 250 Siam, 19, 20, 26, 32, 47, 55, 60, 61, 63, 71, 94, 110, 115, 183, 187, 189, 196, 200, 210, 211, 213, 214, 225, 241, 250, 252 Slavery, 205, 206, 213, 223, 239 Souchu de Rennefort, Urbain, 23, 35, 69, 180, 197, 199, 206 Spain, 49, 154, 176, 178, 184 Spivak, Gayatri, 216 Spon, Jacob, 23, 128 Staden, Hans, 84, 256 Strabo, 113 Sumatra, 19, 86, 87 Sundra Islands, 86, 87 Surat, 206 Surius, Bernardin, 23 Syria, 16, 25, 65, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 135, 137, 151 Tachard, Gui, 23, 26 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 94, 114, 120, 122, 134, 137, 153, 156, 157, 159, 160, 181, 195, 212, 227, 229, 230, 241, 243, 244, 247, 251, 262, 264

299 Teltscher, Kate, 32, 188, 242 Theophilus, 146 Thévenot, Jean, 12, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 102, 103, 116, 118, 119, 122, 124, 140, 157, 159, 194, 214, 250 Thévenot, Melchisédech, 110, 178, 179 Thevet, André, 113, 114, 115, 256 Tinguely, Frédéric, 34, 114 Tissanier, Joseph, 23, 25 Tissier, J., 150 Todorov, Tzvetan, 32, 36, 40, 47, 50, 51, 53, 84 Tonkin, 54 Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de, 21, 163, 262 Troy, 129 Tupinamba, 50, 61 Turbet-Delof, Guy, 33 Turkey, 15, 20, 30, 47, 82, 139, 153, 157, 162, 163, 169, 233, 252 Turks, 15, 21, 24, 56, 79, 83, 116, 129, 133, 142, 143, 148, 149, 151–53, 154, 155, 250, 261, 262, 267 Ulysses, 108 Van der Cruysse, Dirk, 29, 34 Van Linschoten, Jan Hughen, 21, 90 Verbiest, Ferdinand, 26 Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). See Dutch East India Company Vietnam, 54 Villamont, Jacques de, 23, 107, 111, 262 Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine, 217 Whorf, Benjamin L., 38, 39, 54, 55, 58, 61, 98 Wicquefort, Abraham de, 106, 198, 229 Wolfzettel, Friedrich, 13, 34