Duplicity and Singularity in André Thevet’s Cosmographie de Levant

Duplicity and Singularity in André Thevet’s Cosmographie de Levant Georges Van Den Abbeele C OSMOGRAPHIE DE LEVANT was the first and most successful book by André Thevet, “ Cosmographe du roy” for the last four Valois monarchs.1 Ostensibly recounting his 1549 voyage to the Eastern Mediterranean and dedicated to François de La Rochefoucauld, Thevet’s inaugural publication seems to have eschewed the polemical reception given his Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1557) and Cosmographie universelle (1575). Charges of plagiarism hurled by his unacknowledged scribes and contributors (François de Belleforest and Mathurin Héret) aggravated Jean de Lery’s denunciation of Thevet’s willful distortion of the truth (“ aussi asseuré menteur qu’imprudent calom niateur” 2) regarding the religious debacles that doomed Villegaignon’s effort to colonize Brazil for France, an enterprise in which both Thevet and De Lery participated, thus giving the latter’s rebuttal an unimpeachable veneer. Perhaps the most powerful repository of French geographical knowledge in the latter half of the sixteenth century, a scholar in the unparalleled position of being able to distribute, delay, or even censure information about foreign lands and peoples, Thevet swift­ ly became the very paragon of the academic charlatan and deceitful writer of travelogues.3Montaigne had no need even to name his target when he wrote in 1580: “ Il nous faudrait des topographes qui nous fis­ sent narration particulière des endroits où ils ont esté. Mais pour avoir cet avantage sur nous d’avoir veu la Palestine, ils veulent jouir de ce privilege de nous conter nouvelles de tout le demeurant du monde.” 4 Still, Montaigne’s lampoon seems to spare the early Cosmographie de Levant from his indictment of the geographer’s fraudulent claims and credits Thevet with at least a good first-hand knowledge of the road to Palestine. Yet, as Frank Lestringant has amply demonstrated in his recent, beautiful edition of the Cosmographie de Levant, that early work is already riddled with all the problems and delusions (including massive plagiarism and almost superstitious gullibility) that would return to haunt his later cosmographical writings. The question I would like to raise then is why this proto-Orientalist text should seem to have escaped the sceptical scrutiny to which his descriptions of the “ New World” were Vol. XXXII, No. 3 25 L ’E sprit C réateur subjected. Why should the absurdly cherubic representation of the Sphinx done in Fontainebleau style or the combat between Pygmies and cranes or the long chapter on werewolves be viewed as more plausible than depictions of cannibals, tobacco, toucans, and tree-dwelling sloths? As Lestringant has shown, the Thevet of the Cosmographie de Levant is already a composite personage, an amalgamation of Thevet traveler to the East and the book’s signatory and of François de Belleforest , a scholar and purveyor of recondite information who never traveled anywhere. This team thus already encapsulates the Renaissance cosmographical antinomy between the values of “ autopsy” or eye­ witness testimony and of a book-learning based on the accumulated wisdom of “ bons auteurs.” 5 But this is still to assume that the Cos­ mographie de Levant is but an embroidered travel narrative. The discur­ sive reality is nonetheless even stranger. As a “ model” for the informa­ tive passages of the book, Thevet himself mentions Caius Julius Solinus’ Polyhistor, itself based in a commentary of Pliny’s Natural History and available in a contemporary edition by Sebastian Münster (Basil, 1538). He also indicates the traditional pilgrimage to Jerusalem by way of Venice and Constantinople as the form of his own itinerary. The book thus mirrors the apparent passage of Thevet through the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean with chapters along the way that stop to describe the “ singularitez” found in each place. Not only, however, are these descriptions often lifted verbatim from Solinus and other sourcebooks, but even some of the passages detailing the traveler’s experiences are taken word for word from previous travelogues to the Holy Land, most especially from Bernhard von Breydenbach.6Even the obligatory descrip­ tion of a storm at sea in chapter eleven borrows from Rabelais’s famous scene in chapter eighteen of Le Quart livre. Thevet’s Cosmographie...