¹ Gobineau to his wife, 16 Dec 1869, Lettres brésiliennes .

² Gobineau to Mme de La Tour, 26 Aug 1873, BNUS, MS. 3517.

³ Gobineau to Dom Pedro, Corr. Pedro , p. 461.

⁴ Gobineau to J. Monnerot, April/May 1848, quoted in Boissel, Gobineau , p. 114.

⁵ Gobineau to Mme de La Tour, dated 1 May 1882, BNUS, MS. 3568. Gobineau's vehemence when he refuses to make concessions to popularity or when he defends the thesis of the Essai reminds one of Marquis de Sade's Bastille letters (e.g., letter V, to his wife, in The Complete Novels , ed. and trans. R. Seaver and A. Wainhouse [New York: Grove Press, 1965], pp. 137-140).

⁶ Boissel, l'Orient et l'Iran , p. 280.

⁷ Jean Mistler, "Gobineau le plus grand méconnu du XIXe siècle" in Annales-Conferencia , n. 204, vol. 74 (1967).

⁸ A. B. Duff, "Un fragment inédit des souvenirs de Diane de Guldencrone" in Etudes gobiniennes (1966): 67-68. break

⁹ Gobineau to his sister, July 1867, quoted in Boissel, Gobineau , p. 24.

¹⁰ Essai , in Pl. I, p. 285, n. 1. The same idea will be advanced about the Abyssinians' mixed blood (ibid., p. 450).

¹¹ Letter dated March 1857, in Corr. Prokesch-Osten , p. 139.

¹² Gobineau, a letter to his sister, 25 Nov 1856 (quoted in Boissel, Gobineau , p. 170). See also, letters to Prokesch-Osten, 16 July 1857, p. 154, Corr. Prokesch-Osten , and to his sister (20 Jan 1862), in Ecrits de Perse , p. 390; also Pl. II, pp. xv, 1067-1068.

¹³ The figures are from Michel Lémonon's thesis, Gobineau et L'Allemagne (Université de Strasbourg 1972), discussed by Boissel, Pl. I, pp. 1231-1232.

¹⁴ "Dedicace" to the Essai , in Pl. I, 136.

¹⁵ Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1878), p. 4. In this passage Renan refuses to grant all races la même plénitude et la même richesse and the Semites more than a "clear but limited" conscience, although he extols their moral and spiritual superiority on the previous page. Just as startling an example of schizophrenic attitudes toward other races is found in the "liberal" Michelet's opinion: "Etre nègre, c'est bien moins une race qu'une véritable maladie" ( Histoire du XIXe siècle , Vol. 3 [Paris: M. Lévy, 1875], p. 298).

¹⁶ "In view of these facts, one understands not only why there are no pure Aryans left, but why their very existence is no longer of any use. Since their general role was to achieve the proximity and intermingling of [human] types by connecting them in spite of their distance, they henceforth have no raison d'être." The white race "develops, radiates, expands to accelerate their fusion and dies when its prevalent ethnic component has been completely dissolved in the heterogeneous elements it has rallied, that is to say, when its specific task is accomplished" ( Essai , in Pl. I, p. 1162). continue

On the mythical status of a pure white race, see ibid., pp. 283, 1163.

¹⁶ "In view of these facts, one understands not only why there are no pure Aryans left, but why their very existence is no longer of any use. Since their general role was to achieve the proximity and intermingling of [human] types by connecting them in spite of their distance, they henceforth have no raison d'être." The white race "develops, radiates, expands to accelerate their fusion and dies when its prevalent ethnic component has been completely dissolved in the heterogeneous elements it has rallied, that is to say, when its specific task is accomplished" ( Essai , in Pl. I, p. 1162). continue

On the mythical status of a pure white race, see ibid., pp. 283, 1163.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 195. In contrast, glancing at the contents of the Essai , one may be puzzled to see "semitization" associated with decline (e.g., in the last chapters of Books IV and V, apropos Greece and Rome). This paradox, largely responsible for Gobineau's reputation as an anti-Semite, finds its explanation in Chap. 2 of Book II, where he describes how the strong, rough, white Semites conquered Assyria and found there a thriving black Hamitic civilization as refined as it was sensual . In accordance with the premises of the Essai , the austere Semites, seduced and corrupted by this civilization, intermixed on a large scale and thus lost their original characteristics. In Gobineau's view, the prevalence of the Semites in the Mediterranean-Aegean region made them an instrument of decay inasmuch as they further precipitated general miscegenation. One should keep in mind, however, that any people touched by this process (i.e., all Latins, including Spaniards, Italians, French), became, for Gobineau, as degenerate and corrupting as the Semites themselves.

¹⁸ Essai , in Pl. I, p. 343.

¹⁹ "The source from which sprang the arts . . . is hidden in the blood of black people. . . .Assuredly the black component is indispensable to develop artistic genius in a race" (ibid., pp. 472-473).

²⁰ See Essai , "conclusion générale," ibid., p. 1150.

²¹ After clearly stating the superiority of the black's aesthetic instinct, Gobineau saves face by demonstrating that their deficient intellect precludes the creation of more than crude artistic products (ibid., pp. 473-477).

²² Examples of this appear in Trois ans en Asie, Pl. II, pp. 80-81, and in a letter of 8 May 1855, in Corr. Prokesch-Osten , p. 24. See n. 15, "A Traveling Life." break

²³ Essai , in Pl. I, pp. 1038-1039, 1150.

²⁴ Oeuvres philosophiques , ed. J. Piveteau (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), p. 35.

²⁵ "Une Littérature nouvelle est-elle possible?" La Revue Nouvelle , 5 May 1845 ( Etudes critiques , p. 245).

²⁶ For instance, R. Lytton (alias Owen Meredith), "A Novelty in French Fiction," The Fortnightly Review (1 Sept 1874): 292-307.

²⁷ They have been collected and presented by R. Béziau in Etudes critiques (1842-1847).

²⁸ Dated 16 Jan 1852. See F. Steegmuller's Flaubert and Mme Bovary (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), p. 247.

²⁹ As an example of the first, see (in Etudes critiques , p. 82) Gobineau's remarks on Musset's Confessions , which he finds exaggeratedly dramatic ("It is . . . a very grave literary error to force the expression; one would risk less perhaps in keeping it this side of the truth"); as an example of the second, see Gobineau's letter to Mme de La Tour, 7 July 1874 (BNUS, MS. 3517), and Gaulmier, "Notes sur Gobineau et la sculpture" ( Etudes gobiniennes , 1973, pp. 66 ff.), in which Gobineau attacks as "sterile" the notion that "art is the imitation of nature." His own definition, however, inspired by Victor Cousin and reflecting current ideas ("an aspiration toward the manifestations of the material or ideal world"), is ambiguous and leaves room for realism.

³⁰ Gobineau to Prokesch-Osten, 27 Sept 1872, Corr. Prokesch-Osten , p. 358.

³¹ Dioclétien , in Contes en prose et en vers (Paris: Renduel, 1837), p. 395.

³² Gobineau, a letter to Tocqueville, 7 July 1855, Corr. Tocqueville , p. 232. Gobineau adds, "This is what we shall be like by Sunday." break

³³ "I believe that I have really invented a new kind of form and feeling," in a letter to Prokesch-Osten, 7 Oct 1872, Corr. Prokesch-Osten , p. 361.

³⁴ Le Constitutionnel , 18 May 1874.

³⁵ 1 March 1874, Corr. Prokesch-Osten , p. 377. But in the first paragraph of the second section of Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, pp. 224-226), Gobineau makes it clear that European observers of Persia are blind to their own corruption as well as prisoners of their linguistic ineptitude and cultural prejudices.

³⁶ Introduction to Nouvelles asiatiques, Pl. III, pp. 307-308.

³⁷ Vol. VIII (Paris: Edition Bossange, 1826), p. 187.

³⁸ In addition to J. J. Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (London, 1824, trans. into French by Defauconpret, 1824), which was a direct and explicit source of Nouvelles Asiatiques , and A Journey through Persia  . . . (London, 1812) by the same writer, which Gobineau may have read, other likely sources of the stories are E. Flandin's Souvenirs de voyage en Arménie et en Perse (published in Revue des deux mondes , July 1 and August 1, 1850) and J. P. Ferrier's Caravan Journeys and Wanderings in Persia  . . . (London, 1856; Paris, 1859).

³⁹ From Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 12. Said claims (ibid., pp. 206 ff.) that while manifest Orientalism changed as the knowledge of the Orient expanded, latent Orientalism never changed and kept reorganizing new knowledge along the lines of old prejudices. By including Gobineau as evidence, Said disregards the fact that Gobineau's sojourn in the Middle East resulted in attitudes contrary to the thesis of the Essai (and to the European lust for power)--attitudes clearly stated throughout Trois ans en Asie , for instance ( Pl. II, p. 225).

⁴⁰ Pl. II, 226. break

⁴¹ Letter to Mme de Circourt, 20 May 1862. "Deux correspondances inédites d'A. de Gobineau," ed. J. Gaulmier, in Etudes gobiniennes , 1972, p. 25.

⁴² Letter to Tocqueville, 20 Sept 1857 ( Corr. Tocqueville , pp. 285-286) resurrected in a timely fashion by Boissel, in Gobineau , pp. 176-177.

⁴³ Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, p. 363).

⁴⁴ See Afterword, n. 14.

⁴⁵ Let us just mention the bibliographical section of "Pour en savoir un peu sur la nouvelle française," a succinct panorama by R. Godenne (himself the author of a standard study on the subject), and the works we have found the most useful: P. G. Castex, Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: J. Corti, 1962); R. Thieberger, Le Genre de la Nouvelle dans la littérature allemande (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968); M. Swales, The German Novelle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); E. Gans, Un Pari contre l'histoire: Les premières nouvelles de Mérimée (Paris: Minard, 1962). In America, the influence of the English Gothic tale and of what one might call scientism converged in Poe and Hawthorne, with a native awareness of an uncontrollable natural world, to produce the first bleak modern stories, simultaneously but independently from the European development of the genre. Whether one believes that the short story emerged from the tale (as does R. Marler, "From Tale to Short Story," American Literature , n. 46, March 1974, pp. 153-169) or that the melodramatic and lyrical traditions have always coexisted (as does W. Evans, "Nineteenth-Century American Theory of the Short Story," Orbis Litterarum , n. 34, 1979, pp. 314-330), there seems to have been no room in American literature for stories that would be the equivalent of Gobineau's.

⁴⁶ In an afterthought to Les Deux amis de Bourbonne , in Oeuvres , ed. A. Billy (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), pp. 726-727. break

⁴⁷ See G. Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans . . . Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Newied: Luchterhand, 1971) pp. 374 ff.

⁴⁸ Goethe, Conversations with Eckerman and Soret , trans. J. Oxenford (London: G. Bell, 1875), 29 Jan 1827, p. 209, apropos his own Die Novelle .

⁴⁹ Essai ( Pl. I, p. 270).

⁵⁰ Gaulmier's witticism (from a personal letter to the authors) is not extravagant in view of the handling of French history in the popular Asterix series. The Essai could also provide film scripts in the vein of Excalibur or Raiders of the Lost Ark .

⁵⁰ Gaulmier's witticism (from a personal letter to the authors) is not extravagant in view of the handling of French history in the popular Asterix series. The Essai could also provide film scripts in the vein of Excalibur or Raiders of the Lost Ark .

⁵¹ Die romantische Schule , III, quoted by Castex, in Le Conte fantastique en France , p. 398.

⁵² Ibid., p. 347.

⁵³ Letter to Gobineau, 1 Oct 1872, Corr. Prokesch-Osten , p. 359.

¹ The First Republic started in September 1792 and ended with the establishment of the Directory in 1795.

² Gabriel Ouvrard (1770-1848), a legendarily wealthy and opportunistic speculator during the Revolution, the Consulate, and the First Empire. Balzac's Père Goriot and Irnois are literary examples of smaller businessmen who survived the turmoil thanks more to their low profile than to their brilliance. break

³ As a partisan of the old monarchic order and as a man who boasted an impeccable ancestry, Gobineau visibly enjoys describing the groveling progress of a parvenu under the loathsome Republic.

⁴ By the eighteenth century the meaning of this word had been extended from the Antilles to the American continent, specifically Louisiana, where France deported the surplus from Paris's prisons. On the bizarre attempts to populate Louisiana with both sexes by matching prisoners, see James B. Perkins, France under the Regency (Boston: Houghton, 1892).

⁵ A reminiscence of famous eighteenth-century literary salons such as those of Mme d'Epinay, Mlle de Lespinasse, and Mme Geoffrin, frequented by the Encyclopedists.

⁶ Protagonist in one of Lesage's most famous plays (1709). His name has come to designate a crude, illiterate man who through financial speculation has built a scandalous fortune on public poverty.

⁷ In French, Ferme générale , a number of men contracted by the monarchy to collect taxes for a healthy percentage. Many of the Fermiers généraux became prodigiously rich and powerful.

⁸ Ouvrard was not the only man in his time to make huge profits by selling mediocre leather goods to the army.

⁹ An ancient street connecting the present first and fourth arrondissements. Its name is associated with the wild speculation originated by the banker John Law's schemes under the French Regency between 1717 and 1720. Gobineau had a sentimental connection with that part of Paris: three years before the publication of "Mademoiselle Irnois," he had written an article on Chassériau's paintings in the St. Merri Church, one of which employed the features of his future wife, Clémence Monnerot, in a representation of St. Mary of Egypt ( La Quotidienne , 321, 16 Nov 1844). break

¹⁰ This point, signaling the end of the first installment of "Mademoiselle Irnois" (29 Jan 1847), illustrates Gobineau's skill in using the genre to his advantage. See the same strategy of suspense at pp. 52, 59-60, 68, and others.

¹¹ F. G. Ducray-Duminil (1761-1819) and Charlotte de Bournon Malarme (1753-1820) were prolific authors of romances. Gobineau had written desultory remarks on both in Le Commerce (Nov. 26, 1844). See Etudes critiques , pp. 151-152.

¹² Both tales from Contes de fée by Charles Perrault (1628-1703).

¹³ An allusion to marriages forced on families by Napoleon and, perhaps, on Gobineau's own mother. See Afterword, p. 277-278, and note. The topic itself was, moreover, a current one as evidenced by Vigny's entrance speech at the Académie Française (Jan. 20, 1846) in which he denounced this particular form of despotism. A. Whitride, Alfred de Vigny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933, reprinted 1971), gives a summary of the speech (pp. 158-163).

¹⁴ In French: Mais elle était du monde où les plus belles choses / Ont le pire destin. It is a famous line from F. de Malherbe's Consolation à M. du Périer . . . sur la mort de sa fille (1598).

¹⁵ The Conseil d'Etat , heir to the monarchy's King's Council, was founded by Bonaparte in 1799 and given the double function of preparing bills of law and judging administrative litigation. It counted from thirty to fifty members chosen by the First Consul, mostly jurists. Under Napoleon, it played a major role in drafting the Code Civil or Code Napoléon .

¹⁶ The name, synonymous here with "jack-of-all-trades," originally designated the hero of a collection of stories much reedited in the second half of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth century, the Bibliothèque bleue ou Recueil d'histoires singulières et naïves . break

¹⁷ Six years later, in 1853, Gobineau himself appropriated the title of count. In 1847, he was apparently still content with middle-class status.

¹⁸ J. J. de Cambacérès (1753-1824), who was successively a representative of the nobility in 1789, later a member of various revolutionary governments, finally made Prince of Parma and archchancellor by Napoleon in 1804, played a major part in the preparation of the Code Civil . He was, in the eyes of Gobineau, the prototype of the depraved and unprincipled politician.

¹⁹ This expression, more ironic than it seems at first sight, refers to Oriental sovereigns in popular speech, but more specifically here to the descendants of Genghis Khan in Rachid od Din's Histoire des Mongols de la Perse , which E. M. Quatremère had translated in 1836 and which Gobineau had most certainly read, having himself partially translated J. J. Schmidt's Geschicte der Ost-Mongolen , ca. 1835-36.

²⁰ J. L. Tallien (1767-1820), leader of the Jacobins and a deputy to the Convention, precipitated the fall of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror until he was himself eclipsed from power.

²¹ Cambacérès. See n. 18.

²² Fulcrand, Marquis d'Aigrefeuille, one of Cambacérès's friends and frequent commensals.

²³ In the popular tradition, a malevolent fairy in the shape of a gnarled old woman.

²⁴ Ironic allusion to King Louis-Philippe's turning the National or Civic Guard, which was of revolutionary origin, into supporters of his constitutional monarchy. Gobineau, whose father had been an officer under Louis XVIII and aide-de-camp to the future Charles X, obviously mocks the bourgeois and democratic military of the Orléans monarchy.

²⁵ In Turkish, a written dictate from the sultan. break

²⁶ The repetitiousness of the dialogue in this passage and others owes to the feuilleton technique (still observed today in television soap operas) rather than to the author's awkwardness. It also aptly describes the Irnois' monotonous life.

²⁷ The daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion, who lost all her children to the wrath of Apollo and Artemis and was turned into a stone image of perpetual weeping.

²⁸ The editors of the Pléiade edition annotate Gobineau's lack of logic here, since the Styx is not an Olympian divinity, and allege a possible typographical error ( Pl. I, p. 1213).

²⁹ The word refers to members of the Upper House in the Polish and Hungarian diets, therefore, to despotic regimes.

³⁰ Gobineau puns on the modern meaning of plaisant (that which brings laughter, is funny) and the obsolete one (that which gives pleasure, is pleasant), an untranslatable play of words preventing an exact rendering of the passage.

³¹ In Contes et nouvelles en vers , IV, 1 (1674).

³² A phrase used several times in the Old Testament as well as in Mark, VIII, 18, where Jesus reproaches his disciples' lack of faith following the multiplication of the loaves: "Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?"

³³ Allusion to the Judgment of Paris among Juno, Minerva, and Venus.

³⁴ In French, ondine . Besides appearing frequently in German authors such as Herder, Goethe, Grimm, Hoffmann, all quite familiar to Gobineau, it is the title of a novel by Friedrich H. K. La Motte-Fouqué (1810) much praised by him in an essay on Hoffmann. See Revue de Litérature Comparée , 1966, no. 3, p. 429. The ondine is given a soul when she falls in love with a mortal. See the translation of Ondine by E. Gosse (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1978). break

³⁵ Approximately $400 today. A napoléon was a twenty franc piece bearing Napoleon's effigy.

³⁶ A gold coin originally minted under Louis XIII and worth twenty-four pounds; later synonymous with napoléon.

³⁷ The paradoxical answer to Jesus's question (see n. 32).

¹ The archipelago of the Cyclades, whose islands form a circle in the Aegean Sea southeast of Attica, takes its name from the Greek kuklos , circle. Naxos, the largest and most important of them, enjoys a thriving agricultural economy (citrus, figs, olive oil, wheat, and a renowned white wine). It figures in Greek mythology as the place where Theseus abandoned Ariadne, a story antipodally related to that of Akrivie. In 1204, when the Fourth Crusade broke the Byzantine hegemony over Greece and created feudal states under the rule of Western European nobles, Naxos fell to the Venetians. In 1566, it became part of the Ottoman Empire and was reunited to independent Greece in 1832. It thus constitutes in itself a recapitulation of medieval European history. Its beauty inspired many a nineteenth-century traveler, Chateaubriand ( Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem ) and Nerval ( Voyage en Orient ) among them. In Canto II of Byron's Don Juan , the hero is shipwrecked on the Cyclades (st. 107 ff.) and welcomed by a Greek girl: "Haïdee was Nature's bride and knew not this; / Haïdee was Passion's child, born where the Sun / Showers triple light . . ." (st. 202). In his youth, Gobineau was an ardent reader of Byron. At the time of Gobineau's visit, the island counted roughly 15,000 inhabitants.

² The name's symbolic significance is obvious. P.-L. Rey ( Mademoiselle Irnois et autres nouvelles , p. 361), remarks that in Essai the apparition of the white race is described as "a dawn continue

soaring above the human chaos." The name is to be connected to that of Aurora Pamina ( Les Pléiades ), who catalyzes a second beginning for Prince Jean-Théodore as Akrivie does for Norton.

³ This paragraph and the one that follows reflect a comparative experience of boats acquired by Gobineau during his many travels, not only in the Middle East but to Newfoundland and Brazil. The typically Gobinian point made here is that the overcentralized French administration squelches individual initiative, while the English system allows it.

⁴ Dickens and Tennyson are at the peak of their reputation in England. It is R. Lytton who drew Gobineau's attention to the latter (letter, BNUS, MS. 3527).

⁵ P. Lésétieux ( Pl. II, p. 1229) points out that the qualities attributed by Gobineau to the landscape are the very ones Norton will love in Akrivie. This beautiful metaphor, crowning one of Gobineau's most exquisite descriptions, again links the landscape to the character of Akrivie and the connubial theme of the story.

⁶ "Cossack" or "Russian" trousers were wide enough at the bottom to form folds over the shoe and were sometimes gathered into short boots.

⁷ George Brummell's youth would correspond to the period of the French Directory, ca. 1800, when men's attire did not shun excess. The hats described further along refer, however, to a type called bolivars , in favor around 1820.

⁸ While in Santorin in 1866, Gobineau had actually run into a symbiotic twosome similar to Phrangopoulo and Moncade. They were M. de Corogna and M. de Lenda, the first a barely literate French consular agent, his friend, to the contrary, an amateur geologist and historian. Phrangopoulo (etymologically, "descending from the Franks") is effectively the name of a Santorin family. Moncade is named after a fifteenth-century Spanish adventurer who conquered Naples and who appears in Byron's Don continue

Juan (II, 24): "For here [in Trinidada] the Spanish family Moncada / Were settled long ere Juan's sire was born." For these characters' claim to French ancestry, see n. 14. The volume of business between Naxos and the Hanseatic Cities or even Great Britain around 1860 must have left the two Naxiotes a great deal of leisure.

⁹ Sir Edward Codrington (1770-1851), hero of Trafalgar, led the Franco-Anglo-Russian fleet that defeated Mohammed Ali, viceroy of Egypt and the Turkish sultan's main ally, at the battle of Navarino (1827).

¹⁰ With typical consistency from the former contributor to the Revue provinciale and the journalist who feared for Capodistrias's Greece the dangers of homogeneity ( Deux Etudes sur la Grèce moderne ), Gobineau likes to remind his readers that the Ottoman Empire wisely respected the local autonomy of the Greek islands. Partly because of his fundamental antiuniversalism and anarchism (See Smith, Gobineau H. N. , pp. 78-86), partly because Prokesch-Osten had influenced him into believing that a strong Ottoman Empire was essential for the stability of the Middle East, Gobineau was not in favor of Panhellenism. Neither were the Naxiotes, irked in those days by the overcentralization of which the eparch was a symbol.

¹¹ A great favorite of Gobineau, who read them as a youngster and later owned the 1842 reedition of the original Galland translation (1704). He considered these tales as a "revelation" that was refused to mediocre minds. For their influence on Gobineau's imagination see Boissel, L'Orient et l'Iran (pp. 46-48) and Smith, Gobineau et l'histoire naturelle (pp. 57-58).

¹² With the independence of Greece, the city of Hermoupolis on Syros became the chief town of the Cyclades.

¹³ Horace, Odes II, 10, Ad Licinium: "Auream quisquis mediocritatem Diligit ." Horace advocates the golden mean in one's choice of dwelling. Gobineau puns on "golden." break

¹⁴ As Gobineau points out, these Naxiotes' claim to French ancestry may be exaggerated. In brief, Mario Sanudo, a Venetian judge, encouraged to engage in private enterprise by the Republic's liberalism in matters of colonization, took over the Cyclades in 1207 and made his capital on Naxos. However, anxious to keep his autonomy from Venice, he played his hand with the Franks who occupied the Latin Empire of Constantinople (Romania, Thessaly, Achaia) and did homage to its emperor, Henry of Flanders, who turned Naxos into the Duchy of Aegea (Dodekanesos). Moreover, in 1267 (Treaty of Viterbo), Emperor Balwin II ceded suzerainty over Naxos to the French prince of Achaia, Charles d'Anjou. The thirteenth century saw such a flow of French into Greece that it was referred to as the "New France." The Sanudo fortress on Naxos contains, indeed, the mansion of the Della Rokka family, a branch of the French de la Roche family, which reigned over Athens. Nevertheless, Naxos remained largely Venetian for three and a half centuries. Since the word Frank referred to almost any European nationality, including the Venetian, Phrangopoulo's French ascendance is possible but questionable. See W. Miller, The Latin in the Levant: A History of Frankish Greece (1204-1566) (London: 1908; reprinted Cambridge, 1964), pp. 570-610.

¹⁵ The Portugese Yusef Nassi, who, as a favorite of Turkish Sultan Selim II, was Duke of Naxos from 1566 to 1574.

¹⁶ The Lazarists or Vincentians were founded by Saint Vincent de Paul in 1529, originally to work in rural areas. They later succeeded the Jesuits in teaching and missionary work in the Middle East after the Society of Jesus was dissolved by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. The Ursulines mentioned here were more likely to be the Dominican or Vincentian sisters whom Gobineau as the French plenipotentiary had visited during the eruption of the Santorin volcano to give them official reassurance (letter to his sister, 2 Feb 1866, in BNUS, MS. 3520). Gobineau disdained both the Protestant and the Catholic missionaries (see Boissel, Gobineau , p. 173). break

¹⁷ Gobineau remarks on this in his correspondence from Greece (various letters quoted in Pl. II, pp. 1213-1214 and notes). However, his interest in coats of arms and in the codes of conduct they symbolize lasted all his life. See Ottar Jarl , pp. 140-143.

¹⁸ Gobineau's animal imagery is paradoxically dominated by references to birds, who symbolized for him freedom as well as loyalty, especially when nesting. See Smith, "Un Bestiaire de Gobineau," Etudes gobiniennes , 1976-1978, pp. 155-170.

¹⁹ The Revue des Deux Mondes of January 15, 1846, had published Sainte-Beuve's Mademoiselle Aïssé, a true story that had inspired Abbé Prévost's Histoire d'une Grecque moderne . Moreover, Gobineau's mother-in-law, Mme Monnerot, often told her family the adventures of Aimée Dubuc, a Creole friend of hers who, after being abducted by an Algerian pirate and taken to Constantinople, became Sultan Selim's favorite and the mother of his children. See "Souvenirs inédits de Diane de Guldencrone" in Etudes gobiniennes , 1966, pp. 71-72. The literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries abounds in such predecessors of the contemporary L. Blanch's Wilder Shores of Love (Touchstone, 1970), or in antipodal versions such as the curious Relation Historique de l'Amour de l'Empereur de Maroc pour Madame la Princesse Douairière de Conti (Cologne: P. Marteau, 1707).

²⁰ People from the western mountains of Syria used to sell their girls as slaves to rich Christian and Moslem families in Lebanon and Syria. In turn, people from the Levantine coast emigrated to the Greek islands more willingly than the continental Greeks, who preferred looking toward the thriving commercial centers of Egypt and Turkey and even dreamed of making Constantinople the capital of the Pan-Hellenic Empire--a "great absurd idea" for Gobineau. See n. 10. Such a passage is representative of his position regarding the geographic migration of races: while he nostalgically deplores the islands not having preserved continue

their racial purity, he looks rather benevolently on the present coexistence or symbiosis of different races.

²¹ Refers to Rubens's Marie de Medicis Landing in Marseille (Louvre Museum) on which the queen is shown surrounded by marine divinities.

²² Song of Solomon , VIII, 6: "Set me a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm; for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave."

²³ The famous line from the Aeneid , I, v. 405: Et vera incessu patuit dea : "and her walk revealed a true goddess [Venus]."

²⁴ Lésétieux ( Pl. II, p. 1236) advances the possibility that Gobineau remembered here The Last of the Mohicans , translated into French in 1856, as well as a Baudelaire poem imitating Longfellow, Le Calumet de paix . The American Indian was in fashion in Paris around 1860.

²⁵ See our Afterword, p. 281, for an interpretation of this strange scene. On Gobineau's special and lifelong relationship with dogs and his interest in animals, see Smith, Gobineau et l'histoire naturelle , p. 7.

²⁶ P.-L. Rey ( Univers romanesque , pp. 125-139) analyzes as a Gobinian constant the theme of the starry sky and its relationship to the "ideal sphere" and the "inner light," particularly in Les Pléiades .

²⁷ See Samuel, XI. David is Ruth's great-grandson, not her son.

²⁸ P.-L. Rey ( Mademoiselle Irnois , p. 366) connects this passage with the famous "crystallization" theory in Stendhal's On Love : the attributes we append to the loved one are compared to the scintillating crystals formed by salt on an ordinary twig burrowed at the bottom of the Salzburg salt mine. See H. Martineau edition, Garnier, 1959, pp. 8-9. break

²⁹ Akrivie's physical and psychological description echoes that of the Greek woman of Homeric times (see Essai , IV, chap. 3, in Pl. I, pp. 674-675) in which the mate of the Aryan Greek king, while steeped in the family system, is outspoken and not passively obedient. As Norton will soon discover, there is a subtle distinction here between autonomy and self-assurance, individualism and worth.

³⁰ Gobineau considers ( Essai , VI, chap. 5, in Pl. I, pp. 1064 ff.) that the heavily Celtic and Saxon population of England had been, so to speak, regenerated by the Scandinavian (i.e., pure Aryan) blood and culture brought there by the Vikings. Just as Akrivie is presented as the paragon of the ancient Aryan woman, so is Norton a paragon of those Aryan characteristics described at the outset of Essai (I, chap. 15, in Pl. I, pp. 341-342), namely, "the sense of the useful but in a much broader, elevated, more courageous, more ideal sense" than in other races, that is, a double capacity for practicality and idealism. Gobineau emphasizes the struggle of these two pulls in Norton.

³¹ The cricketers' absurd costumes throw a different light on the Naxiotes' obsolete attire.

³² See n. 16, above.

³³ In 1866, in Athens, Gobineau had started to sculpt and appropriately praises the lustrous Parian marble out of which the Venus de Medici was carved.

³⁴ Unidentified, but in view of his career, which would be hard to imagine, a type probably met by Gobineau on the islands.

³⁵ A word coined by Gobineau.

³⁶ De Lenda, the model for M. de Moncade, had a small museum of local history in his house (see n. 8). Gobineau's condescension may be colored by his own seriousness as a collector of medals and objets d'art both in Greece and in Persia. break

³⁷ Even more recently, in 1863, the French consul, Charles F. Champoiseau, had discovered the Victory of Samothrace.

³⁸ The Antiparos stalactite cave was already a tourist must in the nineteenth century. King Otto I and Lord Byron are among those who inscribed their names on the walls.

³⁹ The long description that follows, with its emphasis on the ridiculousness of amateur speleology and, more generally, of tourism, can be read antipodally. Rey sees in it an example of Gobineau's idealism, of his dislike of real nature as compared to an imagined, culturally re-created one ( Univers romanesque , pp. 77-79, 95 ff.). More compelling to us, and abundantly documented by other texts, is the notion that Gobineau makes fun of nature whenever it is defiled by man's enterprise, as are most popular touristic scenes. The graffiti demonstrate the rape of nature by culture, while the untamed beauty of the volcanic eruption will leave Norton and Akrivie speechless (p. 144). Gobineau's ultimate position on the relationship of man and nature is stated in A Traveling Life , p. 232-233. See n. 11 to that story. For the Aristotelian sources of this mode of perception, see Smith, "Une écologie de l'écriture," in Gobineau et l'histoire naturelle , pp. 155-161 and 173-174. The more than thirty uses of the pronoun on in the French establishes an ironic distance between the author and an anonymous, banal, and dutiful tourist whose perception of nature is ready-made. All in all, Gobineau's characters enjoy the nature they deserve.

⁴⁰ The inscription is real. Marquis J. B. Chabert de Cogolin (1724-1805) was a member of the Academy of Sciences, a specialist of astronomy and hydrography, and a great traveler. Helène de Tascher, the wife of an attaché at the French Legation in Athens, was remotely connected to Gobineau through his wife's family in Martinique.

⁴¹ Between 1861 and 1863, Gobineau drafted a long poem on La Belle au bois dormant , "The Sleeping Beauty." See Paola Berselli Ambri's Poemi inediti di Arthur de Gobineau . break

⁴² The description of the volcano is rooted in Gobineau's own memories as well as in a number of literary sources, of which the most significant is Mme de Stael's Corinne (Bk. XIII, chap. 1), in which the contemplation of Vesuvius seals Oswald's and Corinne's love.

⁴³ The 1866 eruption.

⁴⁴ The two Kameni islets were formed in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The 1866 eruption created the islet of Aphroessa, which Gobineau took as the title of a poem and a collection.

⁴⁵ The oleanders at Akrivie's house are reminiscent of "the house with the pink oleander" where Gobineau spent many pleasant hours in the company of Zoé (the model for Akrivie) and Marie Dragoumis. See Lettres à deux Athéniennes (1868-1881) and A. Alesso, "La Maison au laurier rose," in Etudes gobiniennes , 1971, pp. 220-221.

⁴⁶ Gobineau has depicted the Sydney character in Voyage à Terre-Neuve (pp. 78-80) and created an older fictionalized version of it in La Chasse au caribou (The Caribou Hunt) , under the name of Mr. John ( Pl. II, pp. 906 ff.). There is no reason to doubt he ran into the two others.

⁴⁷ Lady Hester Stanhope (1776-1839), niece of William Pitt. After 1810 she traveled in the Levant and settled down among the Lebanese Druses where, clad in male Oriental dress, she passed as a prophet and hosted distinguished European visitors such as Lamartine and Kinglake. Zanthe or Janthe is another English-woman who left high society around 1830 to live in Greece and Syria, where she ended marrying a sheik. She appears in Ed. About's Greece and the Greeks of the Present Day (New York: Dix, Edwards, 1857), pp. 27 ff. and 291.

⁴⁸ An allusion to Ecclesiastes , IV, 10: "Woe to him that is alone where he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up." break

⁴⁹ Lésétieux ( Pl. II, p. 1241) remarks that if Phrangopoulo exaggerates in the matter of keeping his rank, he leaves out the significant matter of the difference of religions.

⁵⁰ Norton is supposed to be an aristocrat since in reality his namesakes, the Fitzallans, went back to illustrious fourteenth-century counts.

⁵¹ This brisk ending to a leisurely tale is typically Gobinian (see Smith, Gobineau et l'histoire naturelle , pp. 105-106). It particularly resembles the close of Les Pléiades , a long and complex novel that ends with the briefest glimpse of the hero's conjugal happiness ( Pléiades , in Pl. III, p. 302).

¹ The reason for this French name in a German salon remains unknown. Gobineau possibly imagines M. de Hautcastel as a French diplomat, inspired perhaps by Louis de Viel-Castel, his director at the Ministry when he was posted to Germany, July to November 1851. Lésétieux hypothesizes ( Pl. II, p. 1264) that Countess de Castellane, a reputed femme fatale of Balzac's time, may also have been a remote model.

² Gobineau added this short preamble to the finished manuscript. See Introduction, pp. 23-25, on his storytelling techniques, and Afterword, pp. 283-285, on the background to the story.

³ Note the irony of the name: Frederick can hardly be said to live up to his patronym ("Red Flag").

⁴ The Cheveaux-Légers cavalry existed in France until 1789 and continued to exist in the Germanic states until 1914. At the time of the writing of "Adélaïde" (1869), that is during the Second Empire in France, its mention would evoke a traditional monarchic state. break

⁵ We have respected Gobineau's erratic use of the particle, typical of this quickly written work. The name comes perhaps from the city of Hermann, Missouri, center of a region of heavy German immigration in the 1840s, mentioned in an article by Gobineau ( Revue Nouvelle , t. II, 1845, pp. 37-38).

⁶ Allusion to a famous episode in the story of Renaud and the Enchantress Armide in Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered . Its romantic aura reinforces the cruel irony of the "aging cicadas," below.

⁷ A position identical to that of Gobineau, who was consistently anticlerical and too deterministic in his worldview to make a good Catholic but who, like Montaigne, accommodated himself with the Church on grounds of tradition and common sense.

⁸ On the consistent parallel to be made between the behavior of "Adélaïde's" threesome and various kinds of animal behaviors, especially those of aggression and bonding, see Smith, Gobineau et l'histoire naturelle , pp. 101, 117-118. The other chain of metaphors is, of course, military.

⁹ Gobineau's mythology is at fault: far from making it up with Theseus, Ariadne became a priestess of Bacchus, who married her.

¹⁰ The florin, originally minted in Florence in the thirteenth century, was current in all of Europe and maintained itself in Germany until 1871. Like the Chevaux-Légers, it refers to an older and more traditional economy.

¹¹ Franz J. Gall (1758-1828) emigrated to Paris in 1807. As the founder of craniology or cranioscopy (which assigned a precise cranial location for each of 27 mental faculties), he knew a great vogue between 1830 and 1840 and inspired Balzac and other writers.

¹² Probably Joseph ( Genesis , XXXIX, 7-15) resisting the advances of Potiphar's wife. break

¹³ According to Lésétieux ( Pl. II, p. 1269) between 1850 and 1870 military weaponry knew a considerable development, particularly in Prussia under the leadership of Alfred Krupp (1812-1887). The howitzer had been a muzzle loader, but breech-loading mechanisms were being developed to increase its efficiency. While not in large-scale use until about 1870, they were on the drawing boards at the time of this story.

¹⁴ Gobineau refers to the draisienne , a primitive type of bicycle very popular around 1820 and most unstable.

¹⁵ Auguste H. Lafontaine (1756-1831), a German novelist in vogue in France around 1830 and in Germany until the 1860s, considered to be a "family novelist."

¹⁶ Henriette Sontag (1806-1854), an operatic soprano famous in Austria, Germany, and France for singing Weber and Beethoven. After marrying the diplomat Count Rossi, she gave up her career in 1830 but resumed it in the 1850s for appearances in the United States and Mexico.

¹⁷ See n. 24 to "Akrivie Phrangopoulo."

¹⁸ Louis III, or the Pious, landgrave of Thuringe, Count of Saxony, and a hero of the Second Crusade, was an ancestor of the house of Brunswick, one of the models for the setting of "Adélaïde."

¹ Originally Turkish for "older brother," later "master" or "leader" in the Ottoman Empire and used for various dignitaries. Ironically, "Goolam" means "servant or slave."

² A coin, formerly silver, but by Gobineau's time copper and of very low value. break

³ Honorific title that did not have a specific function attached to it.

⁴ Meshed, an important holy city in northeastern Iran, houses a shrine to Imam Riza (the eighth Imam) and the tomb of the Caliph Harun al Rashid. Imam or Imaum: a word that from "leader of the prayers" came to designate a spiritual leader and then the head of a Moslem community.

⁵ A comptroller of finances.

⁶ The Koran (II, 168-173) forbids eating hare as impure flesh.

⁷ In 1855, this Persian coin was worth approximately five francs, that is, about one 1855 dollar.

⁸ Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, p. 339) mentions that the average dowry expected from a fiancé of comfortable family was thirty tomauns or approximately three hundred sixty francs of the time.

⁹ The tomaun (originally Turkish) was worth ten sahebkrans (or fifty francs).

¹⁰ Variously flavored liquor distilled from fermented rice, molasses, dates, figs, or raisins; similar versions are called arack (arrak/arak) in other parts of the Middle East. From Arabic araq , juice.

¹¹ "A heavy, short, double-edged, pointed saber" ( Trois ans en Asie, Pl. II, p. 314).

¹² The Arabic form of this oath, formed from the name of Allah preceded by three different prepositions (Vallah! Billah! Tallah!), is frequently used by Gobineau in this and other Asiatic tales.

¹³ Actually the administrator of a village appointed by its inhabitants.

¹⁴ Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, pp. 313-315) comments on the vagaries and corruption of the military service in Persia. break

¹⁵ A means of corporal punishment then in common use in the Middle East. The culprit's legs are tied to a rod, he is thrown on his back, and the bottoms of his feet are beaten.

¹⁶ Their duties ranged from spreading carpets and setting up camp to general police work and the administration of corporal punishment.

¹⁷ A kind of flat (therefore easily concealed) bottle or flask; an example of Gobineau's frequent redundancies when using Oriental words.

¹⁸ The Caliph Ali, assassinated in 661, is considered by the Shiite Moslems (the majority in Persia) as Mahomet's sole and rightful successor. He and his two sons, Hussan and Hossein, are venerated by the Shiites as the legitimate Imams.

¹⁹ Honorific title ("Priest of the Law") given to various dignitaries.

²⁰ Described in Trois ans en Asie both as "a sort of short silk tunic of light color, embroidered with pearls" ( Pl. II, p. 218) and as "of crude dark wool cloth" (ibid., p. 390).

²¹ In Trois ans en Asie (ibid., p. 319-320), Gobineau colorfully depicts the vicissitudes of a tax collector's life in a country where there were too many parties entitled to collect taxes. They rarely came off as well as Aga Beg and his vekil.

²² Teheran had twelve gates named after the directions they faced, where they led, who used them, or the purpose for which they were used. Shimran was a desirable summer retreat north of the capital.

²³ Head of a regiment.

²⁴ Its numerous versions (among which Franks, Feringhees, Firangis, Franguis ) refer to Western Europeans. As a diplomat, Gobineau ran into difficulties with the French military instructors assigned to the Persian army. break

²⁵ Equivalent of a captain.

²⁶ This particular mullah appears in Religions et Philosophies ( Pl. II, pp. 478-479), where Gobineau mentions the Persians' keen interest in metaphysical speculation, even among those of the humblest condition.

²⁷ Here Aga Beg simplifies to the extreme the doctrine of the Bab, which Gobineau was the first to expose to the Western world in Religions et philosophies (chaps. 7 to 12 and Appendix). Since Babism regards creation as an emanation and therefore as a dilution of the divine essence, it is by definition imperfect. However, the fact that this creation is ultimately reabsorbed into divine unity and perfection absolves matter itself of any responsibility for evil and makes Babism a fairly optimistic doctrine, which is described by Gobineau as "a moderate spiritualism." This all-inclusiveness allowed Babism to be relatively tolerant toward other religions and political systems and quite pragmatic in matters of individual ethics.

²⁸ "Gate of the State" or "of Power" (see n. 22). A nice irony in view of the forthcoming debacle of power.

²⁹ Three nomadic tribes from northern Persia. Gobineau encountered the second between Kazvin and Sultaniyeh in 1856 on his way back to France and the third the same year at the summer station of Gherk-Boulak.

³⁰ Commander of a mounted army.

³¹ Variant of tumbak, a coarse tobacco used in the kalian .

³² Popular word for a mythically rich Byzantium.

³³ See n. 4.

³⁴ The sign of a Ulema, or student of the sacred texts.

³⁵ Two Persian heroes from Firdousi's Shah-Nameh (a history of the kings of Persia) legendary for their strength and bravery. break

³⁶ Gobineau had to handle an official matter involving the swindling of the Persian government by a Frenchman, Captain Rous, who sold the army inoperable rifles.

³⁷ The Turcomans are Sunnite Moslems, followers of these caliphs, who are illegitimate in the eyes of the Shiites.

³⁸ Officer in charge of 100 men in the Persian army, which imitated the Ottoman. Equivalent of a brigadier general.

³⁹ Nomadic and rebellious Shiite tribes in southwestern Iran who claim to be of non-Iranian origin. Gobineau mentions them in Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, pp. 130 ff.).

³⁹ Nomadic and rebellious Shiite tribes in southwestern Iran who claim to be of non-Iranian origin. Gobineau mentions them in Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, pp. 130 ff.).

⁴⁰ Roustam is a legendary Persian hero, celebrated in Firdousi's Shah-Nameh . Iskender is the Arabic name for Alexander the Great, who is given an important place in the historical and legendary traditions of Persia and who is cited in the Koran (XVIII, 59).

⁴¹ One of the five "legal prayers": dawn, noon, midafternoon or asr (when the shadow on the sun dial is twice the length of the needle itself), sunset, night. Gobineau notes in Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, p. 345) that the Persians often omit it. Moslems are allowed to "interiorize" the prayers, a permission sometimes abused.

⁴² After being successively under Arab, Turkish, Mongolian and Tartar rule, the Turcomans became subjects of the Khan of Khiva around 1800.

⁴³ Legendary lovers in Arabian poetry, later celebrated by the Persian poets Nizami and Jami.

⁴⁴ Jonah's legend is told in the Koran (XXXVII, 139-148) and is familiar to the Moslem world.

⁴⁵ The Hebrew word is also used by Moslems at the end of prayers. break

⁴⁶ The harem (literally, "the interior").

⁴⁷ In Religions et philosophies ( Pl. II, pp. 498-499), Gobineau tells the parallel story of Hossein Kouli Aga as an example of westernized Persians distanced both from Europe and from Persia in whom he sees an intimation of what Persians might become.

¹ Though more dramatic, the Contis' financial plight is not unlike Gobineau's previous to his appointment in Persia. By staying in Basel, Gobineau risked seeing his modest salary cut in half at a period when he had emptied his pockets to publish the first part of the Essai at his own expense (1853). The post in Frankfort (1854) saved him from bankruptcy, which the Teheran and, later, the Rio appointments with their larger salaries and indemnities kept at bay until the desperate years of 1870 and 1871.

² A statue of Venus as a war goddess discovered on the site of the Roman theater at Arles in 1621.

³ A famous Venetian woman who eloped to Florence with her young lover Buenaventuri in 1563 and who pretended to have a child by another lover, Duke Francis of Medici, in order to marry him.

⁴ Probably Sicily and Malta.

⁵ The name given in Flanders to the wandering Jew.

⁶ Certainly inspired by travel notes made by Gobineau on his way back from Greece with Dom Pedro in 1876 (BNUS, MS. 3554) in which Gobineau rants against a similar group of travelers and shows equal contempt for the English, the Italians, and one Austrian Jew.

⁷ Bellicose mountaineer type from northern Greece who, after the independence of Greece, continued to dress in the Albanian continue

fashion and to carry their distinctive weapons--a long rifle, a pair of pistols, and a dagger at the belt.

⁸ Coastal range in Epirus, southern Albania, ending on the Adriatic at Cape Acroceraunia.

⁹ Rather than Gobineau's preference for a "cultured" nature (see n. 39 to "Akrivie") this description shows Lucy approaching the Orient burdened by decidedly Western cultural baggage.

¹⁰ Possible allusion to Canto VI, v. 103-111 of Dante's Inferno or to some Eastern thinker or legend. Gobineau admired the author of the Divine Comedy and considered writing a commentary on the Paradiso .

¹¹ The metaphor of a union, a marriage between nature and culture, is to be contrasted with the rape of nature implied in Akrivie's Antiparos cave expedition. See "Akrivie," n. 39.

¹² A barely disguised Baron Anton Prokesch-Osten (1795-1876), Austrian internuncio in Turkey from 1855 to 1871 and a brilliant mediator in Levantine affairs and supporter of the Ottoman Empire. He helped Clémence and Diane de Gobineau, stranded on the Caucasian shores, to sail to Constantinople after the French Embassy had turned its back on the unfortunate and exhausted travelers.

¹³ In discriminating between the ordinarily Asiatic Turks and the descendants of the Janissaries, originally levies of Christian troops, Count P. shows a European prejudice: after 1600, the Janissaries consisted mostly of Moslems who had inherited their positions, and in 1826 their massacre was ordered by Mahmud II.

¹⁴ On its way to Colchis, Jason's ship, the Argo , had, by means of divine intervention, made it safely between the Simplegades, two moving cliffs that crushed anything passing between them. After Jason's passage, they remained fixed in place, forming the entrance to the Black Sea. break

¹⁵ Note that the Essai 's basic premises, illustrated by the first half of this paragraph, are immediately disarmed by the second half, an encapsulation of the Contis' forthcoming education, one that Gobineau himself (and to some extent his wife) underwent during the Oriental episode. Despite the odious descriptions of the black type in Essai , I, chap. 16 and II, chap. 1 ( Pl. I, pp. 339-340, 350-351), Gobineau off and on finds himself seduced by the black race and on his way to Persia remarks in Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, p. 63-64) on the intelligence and skill of the black Laskars and rhapsodizes on "the beauty and the agreeable proportions" of the Somalis, whom he compares to "antic bronzes of the best Greek period" (ibid., pp. 80-81).

¹⁶ Gobineau confuses two episodes of the Medea legend: Medea's witchery did rejuvenate Jason's father, Aeson, and after Jason repudiated her, she killed their common children; however, it was not Aeson but Pelias who, on Medea's advice, was cut in strips and boiled by his daughters in the hope of rejuvenating him.

¹⁷ Circassia (now part of the USSR, formerly part of the Ottoman Empire) was ceded to Russia in 1829 by the Treaty of Adrianople. Russia met fierce resistance, which was followed by the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Moslem Circassians to Turkey, where, contrary to Gobineau's statement, the Sultan gave them land.

¹⁸ Abazia or Abkhazia, situated between the Black Sea and the Greater Caucasus, is a Mohammedan autonomous Soviet Republic, annexed by Russia from Turkey in 1810. Abazians also fled the Russian invasion and took refuge in Anatolia.

¹⁹ A subversive rewording of Boileau's Epitres , V, v, 44 (Classiques Garnier, 1961, p. 124, v. 14-15): "In vain does a fool ride off to deceive his boredom, grief mounts his horse and travels with him."

²⁰ Members of a police corps in the Ottoman army. break

²¹ A malevolent enchanter who appears in Bojardo's Orlando Innamorato , in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso , and in Walter Scott.

²² Also, moucharaby, windows fitted with a latticework of turned wood that isolate the women's apartment from the rest of the house.

²³ Now Erzerum or Erzurum. Formerly Theodosiopolis, an important commercial center in northeast Turkey, in Armenia. In Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, p. 394), Gobineau mentions that on his way out of Persia in 1858 he enjoyed the "eager hospitality" of the host described here.

²⁴ A kaimakam is a grand vizier's lieutenant in the Ottoman Empire. Baiburt is situated between Trebizond and Erzerum.

²⁵ A title in the Ottoman Empire for high-ranking officers or governors of provinces.

²⁶ The first, a liberal political journal founded in 1836; the second, a journal of general interest published from 1864 to 1883, was meant to compete with L'Illustration .

²⁷ Feminine of Khan.

²⁸ Perhaps the Journal des modes et nouveautés , published from 1797 to 1839, but more probably invented by Gobineau and based on various existing models.

²⁹ Gobineau, his family, and their escort traveled in caravan from Buchir to Teheran in 1855 (Pt. I of Trois ans en Asie ), while he did the Erzerum-Tabriz leg with a smaller escort in 1858 ( Trois ans en Asie , "Retour"). All details from this point on are therefore realistic if not always correct in their implications. On the caravan as an ecological simile and the motif of nomadism in Gobineau's works, see Smith, Gobineau et l'histoire naturelle , pp. 139-154.

³⁰ Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, pp. 114-117) explains at length the character and functions of a head muleteer or tcharvadar . break

³¹ Now Shustar in Khuzistan, southwest Iran. Logically, Kerbelai Hossein should be from Kerbela in central Irak, site of the tomb of the Shiite Saint Hossein, grandson of Mohammed.

³² See n. 3 to "Turcomans."

³³ A town in the vicinity of Mount Ararat (16,946 ft.) in Armenia, identified as the place where Noah's ark came to rest.

³⁴ See n. 9 to "Turcomans."

³⁵ In Turkish, "Sir," placed after a first name, a title less prestigious than "beg."

³⁶ A polite Persian way of talking to a man about his wife.

³⁷ See n. 24 to "Turcomans."

³⁸ A double basket hanging on either side of a mule's back.

³⁹ Gobineau seems to mix a Kurdish Yezidi, worshipper of the devil, with a descendant of the Zoroastrian Ghebres, adorers of the sun. See a similar incident in Trois ans ( Pl. II, p. 394).

⁴⁰ Iranian village at the Turko-Persian border.

⁴¹ See n. 37 to "Turcomans."

⁴² The liberal reforms promulgated by the Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhané in 1839 and by the Tanzimat (after 1856) making Turks of all religions equal before the law. They were met by a great deal of resistance, and non-Moslems were often massacred as a result.

⁴³ Ahl al-Kitab , that is, the monotheistic Christian and Jew, were more tolerated by Islam than were polytheists.

⁴⁴ Minister of a prince.

⁴⁵ See n. 19 to "Turcomans."

⁴⁶ Long, loose tunic worn by nomads, and today mostly by the clergy. break

⁴⁷ Transposition of a real character who joined the Gobineaus' caravan, a Syrian (rather than Italian) woman, equally unappealing, although equally seasoned as a traveler and preposterous as a writer ( Trois ans en Asie, Pl. II, p. 182).

⁴⁸ Gobineau is indulging in a bit of self-irony here, as the poet resembles him when young, including the reading of Thomas Moore. Lalla-Rookh includes the story of an adorer of the sun and is one of the sources of Gobineau's first poem, Dilfiza .

⁴⁹ Two provincial cities, the first in Switzerland, the second in Savoy.

⁵⁰ Important market town in the province of Kerman, central Iran.

⁵¹ See n. 31, above.

⁵² The Koran (II, 192 and III, 91) authorizes such a substitution.

⁵³ The story has points of resemblance with another of the Nouvelles Asiatiques , "The Illustrious Magician," in which a young man, mesmerized by an old dervish, abandons everything to follow him.

⁵⁴ Gobineau's spelling of Khazar, one of the ancient names of the Caspian Sea derived from a nomadic, Turkic-speaking tribe, the Khazars, who inhabited its shores.

⁵⁵ Today, Shufu, a caravan center in west Sinkiang Province, China.

⁵⁶ An example of Gobineau's occasionally prophetic view of history. Saiyid Adurraman's opinions correspond to those of Gobineau himself, including the agnostic tendencies expressed at the end.

⁵⁷ Turkish buyurultu , an order given to a subordinate, by extension a pass or a permit. break

⁵⁸ Persian equivalent of the above.

⁵⁹ From the Arabic tadzkirat , a certificate or passport.

⁶⁰ A brass coin of very small value.

⁶¹ An Arabic word meaning "rule" or "regulation."

⁶² In a diplomatic dispatch dated 20 Feb 1862 (in Dépêches diplomatiques , p. 170) Gobineau mentions that the Persian government had started installing telegraph lines.

⁶³ Gobineau paraphrases Peter's words upon seeing a vision of Jesus transfigured and talking with Moses and Elias: "Let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias" (Matthew, xvii, 4; Mark, ix, 5; Luke, ix, 33).

⁶⁴ For instance, Kansu and Shensi provinces.

⁶⁵ A peninsula on the western coast of the Caspian Sea in the Kazakh SSR.

⁶⁶ Meshed, see n. 4 to "Turcomans;" Kum (Qum, Qom), a city in central Iran and a Shiite holy place; Kerbela, see n. 31, above.

⁶⁷ Transcription of an Arabic word meaning "guardian of the order."

⁶⁸ Turkish participants in periodic revolts against the Ottoman Empire, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

⁶⁹ See n. 39 to "Turcomans."

⁷⁰ Clémence de Gobineau used the same words to describe her isolation and malaise in her letters to her mother (see Boissel, Gobineau , p. 167).

⁷¹ Perhaps an inadvertence. Gobineau had written earlier that the poet died before reaching the Persian border. break

¹ From an undated letter to his father (received August 27, 1843) in BNUS, MS. 3518.

² Published on January 29, 30, and 31 and February 13, 14, 18, and 20, 1847, in Le National . Subsequent editions: Tancrède de Visan (NRF, 1920 and 1924); A. Rowbotham (New York & London: Harpers, 1921); J. Mistler with preface by P. Morand (Paris: Livre de poche, 1959); in Nouvelles (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1956 and 1962); A. B. Duff and F. R. Bastide (Paris: Livre de poche, 1961); J. Mistler (Paris: Hachette, 1961); J. Gaulmier in Le Mouchoir rouge et autres nouvelles (Paris: Garnier, 1968); J. Boissel, in Pl. I; P.-L. Rey, Mademoiselle Irnois, Adélaïde et autres nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); German translation by R. Linke (Leipzig: Matthes, 1921) as Fraulein Irnois ; no previous English translation.

³ See Une Vie de femme liée aux événements de l'époque (Paris and Brussels: Editions Erasme, 1959), p. 87.

⁴ Madame Bovary , translated by P. de Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 2.

⁵ Univers romanesque , pp. 122-125.

⁶ Ibid., pp. 349 ff.

⁵ Univers romanesque , pp. 122-125.

⁶ Ibid., pp. 349 ff.

⁷ Letter to Dom Pedro, 18 Oct 1879, in Corr. Pedro , p. 573.

⁸ First published in Souvenirs de voyage: Cephalonie, Naxie et Terre-Neuve (Paris: Plon, 1872) and in subsequent editions of same volume (see n. 9); by J. Gaulmier, in Le Mouchoir rouge (see n. 2).

⁹ First published in Nouvelle Revue Française , no. 60, December 1, 1913, pp. 864-892; republished by Editions NRF (1914, 1924); by Editions de l'Arrière-boutique (1950); in the Livre de poche (1959 and 1961), Pauvert, Hachette, and Garnier editions of the short stories (see n. 2); prefaced by J. Buenzod (Lausanne: Guilde du livre, 1962); German translations by continue

R. Schlosser (Braunschweig and Berlin: Westermanns Monatshefte, 1917) and R. Linke (Leipzig: Matthes, 1921); English translation by E. Marielle, in The Penguin Book of French Short Stories (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968).

¹⁰ For original edition see note 8. Republished by B. Grasset in 1922 and 1927, by "La Pléiade" in 1926 (illustrated by D. Galanis), by Editions du Rocher (Monaco) in 1948 (ed. J. Mistler), in German translated by F. Hahne as Reisefruchte aus Kephalonia . . . .(Leipzig: Reclam, 1905).

¹¹ See Lettres à deux Athéniennes , pp. 107-108.

¹² The phrase is from a letter to Zoé Dragoumis, August 24, 1869, quoted in Pl. II, p. 1210.

¹³ See Rey, Univers romanesque , pp. 325-328.

¹⁴ Dated 6 Aug 1851 (BNUS, MS. 3519).

¹⁵ Etudes critiques , p. 86 (in an article on Musset's prose work).

¹⁶ See De l'Amour , ed. Martineau (Garnier, 1959), chap. 39. "Adélaïde" is also reminiscent of the chapter "Exemples de l'amour en France dans la classe riche" in which Mme de Féline realizes that she is saddled with "une bête pour tête-à-tête; et, ce qui est bien plus affreux, une bête quelquefois ridicule dans le monde."

¹⁷ See Oeuvre complètes (Geneva: Slatkin Reprints, 1970), 6 vols., vol. 3/4, p. 9.

¹⁸ First published by Didier, 1876. Subsequent editions: Perrin, 1913; Crès, 1924; Devambez, 1927; Gallimard, 1939 (preface by C. Serpeille de Gobineau); Club français du livre, 1948; Bibliothèque mondiale, 1956; Bibliolâtres de France, 1957; Pauvert, 1963; Garnier, 1965 (ed. and intro. by J. Gaulmier). Translated as Novelas Asiaticas (Madrid: 1923; as Asiatische Novellen (Vienna: Schroll, 1924); as Der Turkmen Krieg (Leipzig: Matthes, continue

1924); minus "A Traveling Life" as Romances of the East (New York: Appleton, 1878, repr. by Arno Press, 1973) and as Five Oriental Tales (New York: Viking Press, 1925, repr. by Harcourt Brace, 1926, under the title, The Dancing Girl of Shamakha and other Asiatic Tales ); translated by J. Lewis May as Tales of Asia (London: G. Bles, 1947); translated by Pedro Vances under the title La danzarina de Shamakha y otras novelas asiáticas (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1949. "The War with the Turcomans" appears in Nineteenth-Century French Tales (New York: Ungar, 1967).

¹⁹ Quoted along with other enthusiastic endorsements of Gobineau's fiction by twentieth-century writers in Pl. I, p. lv.

²⁰ In Trois ans en Asie ( Pl. II, p. 140) Gobineau quotes a standard Persian joke: Two people meet on the street in Asterabad; one asks, "What's new?" "Nothing in the last two hours," the other answers, "the Turcomans have gone to lunch."

²¹ See n. 38 to our introduction.

²² Pl. III, p. 306.

²³ Les Pléiades, Pl. III, p. 15.

²⁴ See a list of such complaints quoted from his correspondence in Rey's Univers romanesque , p. 78, n. 4; also Trois ans en Asie, Pl. II, pp. 65, 78, 204 ff. break