L’Ombre de l’auteur: Pierre Bergeron et l’écriture du voyage à la fin de la Renaissance (review)

This richly contextualized study of the career and work of Pierre Bergeron (d. 1637) focuses on the genres and methods of composition of narratives of travel, especially to the East Indies, in the late Renaissance. Bergeron pursued the upward trajectory of his bourgeois Parisian family by holding two posts, as conseiller référendaire en la Chancellerie du Roi and as secretary to Bernard Potier, seigneur de Blérancourt. Bergeron wrote some occasional poetry and travelled himself, leaving manuscript accounts that were printed long after his death. He put his name on two works, on the colonization of the Canaries (1629) and on recent travellers to Tartary (1634), in which he called for increased French colonial expansion, but his vision gained little traction at the time. Instead, Bergeron was most successful as a ghostwriter, who would turn a written or oral travel report into a publishable narrative that would appeal to the tastes of the gens du monde. He worked most effectively with Jean Mocquet, an apothecary who brought back a written report from his six voyages to Africa and Asia, and with François Pyrard de la Val, who spent ten rough years returning from a shipwreck in the Maldives (1601–11). In each case Bergeron completely effaced his role in the writing process, claiming that the narrative as printed was authentic because it was the unedited account made by the traveller himself. In fact Bergeron rewrote Moquet’s manuscript and turned conversations with the often drunk and minimally literate Pyrard into text by intervening in multiple ways. Bergeron introduced descriptions of exotic locations by drawing on other texts and images (Van Linschoten’s images of Goa, for example), and he made use of a large collection of existing travel narratives, in print and in manuscript, as from ‘a vast thesaurus’, recycling bits among the accounts he composed. He also shaped the narrative by adding moral judgements and by dramatizing the account, supplying biographical detail and personal anecdotes that his target audience of elite Parisians would especially appreciate. Yet in polishing the text Bergeron also needed to maintain the fiction of its ‘rude’ origins. By combining these particular rhetorical skills with those of the polygrapher, he helped create norms for the peregrinatio as a genre. Bergeron exerted quality control too, correcting geographical inaccuracies or rejecting the eccentric theory of one returning traveller, Vincent Le Blanc, that the earth was flat. Bergeron substituted his own authority (left unnamed) for the citation of sources, which might otherwise have smacked of pedantry. On Grégoire Holtz’s account, Bergeron is interesting not because he was exceptional but precisely because he was not. From the Middle Ages until the end of the eighteenth century (when Romantic writers sought inspiration from travel), ghostwriting was common in the production of travel narratives. Beyond its main theses this superlative work of scholarship offers many thought-provoking sidebars — for example, on genres of history writing (and how Spain favoured universal histories), on different forms of writing for hire, or on the significance of ‘&c.’.