'Un Franc parmy les Arabes': parcours oriental et découverte de l'Autre chez le chevalier d'Arvieux par Vanezia Parlea (review)

Vanezia Parlea's book is a thoughtful, sophisticated, theoretically informed, and fully researched analysis of the travel memoirs of the chevalier Laurent d'Arvieux. The reader finds much more than a simple story of this traveller's adventures throughout the Mediterranean Ottoman Empire in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Parlea is sensitive to context and attends to other travellers with whom d'Arvieux crossed paths—Jean Thévenot and Antoine Galland especially. She provides fine contrastive analyses of the distinct ways the three travellers recount essentially the same anecdote. Her approach explores such ideas as orientalism and curiosity, and adds dimensionality and rigour to what would otherwise be a paraphrasing of the original story, first written by d'Arvieux himself, then liberally edited and published by Père Jean-Baptiste Labat, of dubious Martiniquais repute. Parlea's scholarship is exacting, and, in spite of its great erudition, is a pleasure to read. Laurent d'Arvieux was a native of Marseilles who, shortly upon arriving in the Levant, embedded himself with a Bedouin tribe near Mount Carmel, and there learned the Arabic language and the cultural habits of the tribe that took him in. The knowledge he acquired then served him well as a diplomat and trader in the Barbary Republics of Tunis and Alger, at the Porte in Constantinople, the seat of the Ottoman Empire, and finally in Aleppo, a major crossroads and trading town at the time, where he completed his service to the French crown as Consul. The world of Versailles, where d'Arvieux also ventured, was as foreign to him as the Levantine world had been to him initially: he would repeatedly and unsuccessfully seek entry into court society. My only reservation about Parlea's study concerns her clear affection for this character. The investment of time spent reading through all the volumes of d'Arvieux's Mémoires, and then delving around them in other travel writings of his contemporaries, as Parlea has done, as well as all of the theoretical work onto which she has mapped his profile, easily explains her enthusiasm. However, a close look at the self-portrait of this traveller reveals a less than perfect individual with a high, and not always justified, opinion of himself, who sought to leave a positive image in his writing, but who betrayed himself and occasionally revealed a complex neurotic, and more interesting, character. D'Arvieux does merit full credit, though, for courageously venturing into a world that wasn't his, embracing it, and thereby making himself persona grata to the Ottomans and useful to Louis XIV. What was particularly remarkable about d'Arvieux was how well he got to know the people, the language, and the culture of the Levant. He comes across as a precocious ethnographer, eager to understand the smallest details of their ways, and readily adaptable to the customs of the places in which he finds himself. Parlea analyses d'Arvieux's fascinating life with great skill.