as when Diyāb nearly froze to death during the icy winter in Paris, or when he was arrested by the French gendarmerie.
Given Diyāb’s apparently reverential attitude toward Lucas, it is noteworthy that the latter nowhere mentions Diyāb in his own travelogue. The young Syrian cannot even be discerned among the nameless servants and dragomans that Lucas happens to mention on occasion.15 This discrepancy between the two works can be seen in other ways. Diyāb offers a richly detailed account of the logistics of travel, of the food they consumed, and of the different types of clothing he saw. Lucas’s focus is, rather, on sightseeing at ancient ruins, collecting antiquities, and describing his adventures, which include the occasional miracle.16 He excludes from his account the countries of Catholic Europe that so fascinated Diyāb, who describes them along with the parts of the Ottoman Empire that were largely unknown to Aleppans. Thus, although the itinerary described in the two travelogues is generally the same, only a few episodes correspond well enough to be fruitfully compared.17
One such episode is the story of the jerboas that Lucas presented to Louis XIV and his entourage at Versailles. In his account, Lucas offers a drawing of a jerboa,18 and claims to have witnessed a hunt for the animals in the desert in Upper Egypt.19 In Diyāb’s version of the story, we learn that Lucas had in fact acquired the jerboas at a French merchant’s house in Tunis. As he reports the lie his patron told the king, Diyāb gives his readers a glimpse of his own feelings about Lucas’s posturing. He also recounts how Lucas, unable to identify the exotic species for the king, turned to his companion for help. Diyāb knew the animal’s name in both French and Arabic and was able to write these down at Louis XIV’s request.
The jerboas—a subject of great interest to the members of the royal court—served as Diyāb’s entry to the king’s private chambers. As he was paraded through the palace and its various mansions, carrying the cage with the two jerboas to present them to the royal family, Diyāb, dressed in a turban, bouffant pantaloons, and a fancy striped overcoat, and wearing a silver-plated dagger in his belt, came to be regarded as a curiosity in his own right. In Diyāb’s account, it is at this moment that he becomes the protagonist of his own story. By sharing with the French court his knowledge of the Orient, he outdoes his master, the supposed authority. Recollecting these events more than fifty years later, Diyāb reveals to his readers his patron’s unreliability, correcting the record of what Lucas attempts to convey about his own experiences.
A further element of Diyāb’s relationship with Lucas is the medical knowledge he believed he had acquired by association with him. On his journey home, Diyāb used those skills to treat people in exchange for accommodation and food. Dressed as a European, he came to be known in Anatolia as a “Frankish doctor,” (Volume Two, §11.83) modeled on his master. Like Lucas, Diyāb recounts how rumors of his medical skill spread as he traveled through Anatolia, and that the masses flocked to him to receive treatment.20 However, while Lucas regarded himself as a genuine master of various treatments and procedures, Diyāb’s self-portrayal is decidedly less confident. He presents himself as overwhelmed by the difficulties of masquerading as a physician. His humility, confusion, and reliance on God’s guidance stand in clear contrast to the self-confident mastery Lucas ascribes to himself. Setting these two accounts alongside each other, one might read Diyāb’s description of his experience as a traveling doctor as a parody of Lucas’s account. But it is unlikely that Diyāb meant it that way. Whereas Diyāb mentions Lucas’s journaling and the fact that he had sent his book manuscript to the printer after arriving in Paris, it is unlikely that Diyāb read much of Lucas’s book or earlier notes. That said, he would have known Lucas’s perspectives on their shared adventures.
The relationship between Ḥannā Diyāb and Paul Lucas was one of mutual dependence. Lucas was an antiquarian with little knowledge of Arabic and other Southern Mediterranean languages and literary traditions. His dependence on local Eastern Christian guides who could move flexibly within a Western Christian context is indisputable, even if that dependence was not reflected in his own accounts. On the other hand, Lucas seems to have served both as a source of personal protection and, to some extent, as a model for the young man from Aleppo. Diyāb’s interest in Lucas’s professional activities during the long journey to the “lands of the Christians,” as well as his emulation of his medical practices, mean he was not merely an “Oriental” servant to a French traveler, but also a Catholic familiar with global institutions such as the missionary movement and Mediterranean trade.
Oral Storytelling and The Book of Travels as a Frame Narrative
By the time Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, the latter’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights was already enjoying immense popularity in Parisian court society. The prospect of discovering new material to add to his translation must have excited the French Orientalist. Even so, Galland was scrupulous in his choice of what to publish, preferring to rely on written rather than oral sources whenever possible. At his disposal was a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Nights that he had received from Syria some time before meeting Diyāb. Using it and a few other written sources, he had completed eight volumes of his translation, at which point he ran out of stories. His first encounter with Diyāb, which took place on March 25, 1709, at the house of Paul Lucas, a colleague with whom he shared an interest in antiquity and numismatics, seemed promising.21
After this first meeting, Galland recorded in his journal a description of the young man from Aleppo as a learned person who spoke several languages and possessed a knowledge of “Oriental” books. Diyāb told Galland about the existence of other tales, including those collected in The Book of the Ten Viziers,22 and promised to put some stories into writing. In a note written six weeks later, on May 5, Galland reports that Diyāb had “finished the story of the lamp.”23 Titled “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp,” this would come to be the most famous story in the Nights. It was only in November of the following year, however, that Galland explicitly refers to a written version of the story.24 Whether Diyāb had written it down himself while in Paris, dictated it to a commissioned scribe, or even sent it to Galland at a later stage remains an open question. Yet there is good reason to doubt that Diyāb wrote it down himself, at least during his time in Paris in 1709. He makes no mention of writing anything during his meetings with Galland, even though he stresses his ability to write single words, letters, and also, of course, his own Book of Travels. As for the Nights, he mentions only his oral contribution to the collection of stories, and that the old man was very appreciative of his service (Volume Two, §10.9).
From Galland’s Journal we learn that after Diyāb performed or wrote down the story of “Aladdin,” the two met several more times. During their meetings, Galland took notes on stories recounted for him by Diyāb. These stories would become the basis of volumes nine through twelve of the French translation (published between 1712 and 1717), marking a break with Galland’s previous practice of relying exclusively on written sources. One might envision these meetings between Diyāb and Galland as collaborative sessions in which the former used both Arabic and French to convey the stories to the French Orientalist. Of these stories, only the tale of “The Ebony Horse” has an attested written origin beyond Galland’s notes. All the others can be identified only to the extent that they contain well-known motifs from oral folk narratives.25
