Jacques Cazotte, His Hero Xailoun, and Hamida the Kaslan: A Unique Feature of Cazotte's "Continuation" of the Arabian Nights and a Newly Discovered Arabic Source That Inspired His Novel on Xailoun

Abstract

Jacques Cazotte (1719-92) was an eighteenth-century French writer who deserves to be ranked among the more distinguished figures of French literature and, according to some critics, even among those occupying the front ranks. He is remembered mainly for his novel Le diable amoureux (The Devil in Love), published in 1772, a work that is known as a Spanish novella because of its special blend of fantasy and romance. Among the scholars quoted below who have written about Cazotte and his roman fantastique, Edward Pease Shaw and Georges Decote-the most important scholar specializing in Cazotte-deserve particular mention. These two have described in detail his life, the intellectual and spiritual contexts of his tempestuous historical period, and his numerous literary works. Cazotte is connected to the Arabian Nights through his work called Suite des Mille et une Nuits (Continuation of the Thousand and One Nights), which claimed to be a continuation of the famous Oriental collection of stories. The earlier editions of this work were also called Continuation des Mille et une and both titles are given at the beginning of identical volumes, sometimes even on opposite title pages, as if one of them is the work's title and the other its explanation. The work is printed in the congenial small format of many contemporary editions of stories and legends. It was first published-as volumes 38-41 of the famous series Cabinet des fees-in four volumes in Paris and Geneva in 1788-89,1 on the eve of the French Revolution just a short time before the guillotine put an end to the authors life on September 25, 1792, in the square known as the Place du Carrousel. In some library catalogues, one finds the work listed under the heading of traduction des Mille et une Nuits, as if it were a translation of the Arabian Nights. Whether or not it may be regarded as such depends on the interpretation of the term continuation/suite in the work's title. In this regard, two trends can be distinguished: (1) In some parts of the work, Cazotte and his informant, Dom Denis Chavis, have pretended to rediscover materials that might have belonged to the Arabian Nights-similar to those tales published, a few years later, by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and his translator Guillaume Stanislas Trebutien. (2) The other parts contain stories not known to be included in any of the different manuscripts or redactions of the Arabian Nights. In these parts, Cazotte and Chavis have rather compiled stories from various manuscripts in the royal library that contained suitable material (Decote, Correspondance 101, 103, 107). A similar phenomenon is known from anthologies by various other authors, both published previously and later, such as Les Mille et un Jours (The Thousand and One Days, 1710-12) by Francois Petis de La Croix (1653-1713); Les Mille et un Quarts d'heure (The Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour, 1712) and other works by Thomas-Simon Gueullette (1683-1766); or Rosenol (Pil of Roses, 1813) by Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856), collected from a variety of written sources which are not the Arabian Nights2 Both trends existed in those days. Even if we prefer to interpret the work as being characterized by the former trend, the latter practice remains in the background and enriches our understanding of the contemporary attitude towards a creative translation of fiction, even allowing for the freedom of inventing or adding new passages (Shaw 80-81, especially n. 277). These aspects of creative writing in the period under consideration are also illustrated by Cazotte's question (Decote, Correspondance 127) whether his stories are inferior to those rendered by the famous scholar and writer Antoine Galland (1646-1715), the first French translator of the Arabian Nights3 For the present contribution, I have used a later edition of Cazotte's tales, published under the interesting title Les veillees du sultan Schahriar avec la sultane Scheherazade (The Nocturnal Conversations of sultan Schahriar with his wife Scheherazade, 1793). …