To Aleppo Gone
IN the summer of 1670, hunting at Chambord, I °Ws XIV commanded a diversion for his court. He proposed to his masters of music and revels a ballet exhibiting Turkish dress and manners, in which interest had been roused by the visit to Versailles of an envoy from the Sublime Porte. To assist them, he lent an equerry of the Marechale de la Motte, governess To the royal children, who had for some years traded in the Levant. The resulting entertain- ment was something of a success: around M. Lully's ballet, M. Moliere spun an amusing 'tort' of a rich bourgeois who wished to rise in polite society, and the authenticity of the Turk- WI costumes was vouched for by the cosmo- Politan M. d'Arvieux.
A book devoted to this early forerunner of ine Hollywood technical adviser might seem dri exercise in footnoting history's footnotes. Mr. Lewis's biography, on the contrary, though ...fragmentary and digressive, is fascinating. ' aurent Arviou (to give him his real name— he tarted it up while dangling after preferment at Versailles) may have left a mark on history bout as significant as the obliging stocking anufacturers whose names appear on theatre rogrammes, but his life was one of those il'; eTlY extraordinary cases which illumine normous, shadowed tracts of the past. The econd son of a Provencal landowner, he was Pprenticed at fifteen to a firm of Marseilles , ousins who traded with the ports of the Levant. He represented them from 1653 to 1665 in Smyrna and Seide, on the Syrian coast, and. Thereafter came and went on official missions !0 different parts of the Ottoman Empire, end- ; as French consul in Aleppo from 1679 to 686. His business career provided an excuse f ..or travelling through Egypt, Palestine and the :Lebanon, his official one for visits to Constantin- , ;)131e, Tunis and Algiers. In retirement, married . " a rich Marseilles heiress, he jotted down 1.%hat he remembered of his journeys, bequeath- ing an almost unique picture of Ottoman cvilisation in its sunset years, before Eugene of 'ram hurled back its tide for. good in 1683 'rum the portals of Vienna. Much of its interest lies in the fact that Y d'Arvieux was a businessman, and wrote as f, ?Ile. That is, he knew what life around the Mediterranean, beneath the brouhahas of religion and politics, was really about. Euro- Peau historians, unfortunately, have mostly fol- _
lowed European novelists in regarding trade as unworthy of their pens; to write about corn- merce, fictitiously or historically, had barely ceased to be demeaning before it became re- actionary. In consequence, you might infer from history books that, from the Crusades to Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, an iron curtain of non-communication divided Christendom from Islamic Asia and Africa. D'Arvieux's career shows that in the seventeenth century the Mediterranean was still what it was before Rome rose—the swarming basin of civilisation into which the trade of three continents poured together as copiously as their rivers.
D'Arvieux's firm was one of scores which maintained connections in Smyrna, Alexan- dretta, Tripoli and Alexandria because they were still the termini of the greatest traffic in the world : the camel-borne argosies which de- livered to the ships of Europe silks and spice from Persia and India, coffee from the Yemen, drugs and gums from Ethiopia, the velvets and satins of Damascus, wax, corn and, oil from the uplands of the Fertile Crescent. Up to the build- ing of the Suez Canal, despite Magellan's voyages and the discovery of America, the main, golden artery of world trade remained the short, teeming route across the Middle Sea from the Levant to the ports of Italy, France and England. Not until the industrial revolu- tion did the trade become anything like two- way—Europe had little to offer Asia save the gold coin which ballasted eastbound bottoms— and it should be remembered that France's and Britain's intrusions in North Africa began as attempts, not to dismantle the Ottoman empire, but to protect its commercial lifeline against its own piratical outlying provinces and each other.
D'Arvieux had cause to know that the Levant trade sustained many more lives than those directly engaged in it. Once he was captured by corsairs off Seide (to escape enslavement, he had to demonstrate to their chief that he was uncircumcised), twice he was sent on missions to Tunis and Algiers whose main purpose was • to convince the beys of those provinces that peace with France would be worth more than plundering her shipping, and throughout his career he had to cope with the system by which the governors of Turkish ports tolerated infidel trading settlements in return for large and frequent sops to conscience. On the whole, he accepted such Orientalisms equably. He seems to have been a perfect expatriate, open-minded, pragmatic and hardy; happy with Arabic food, startled and delighted by Syrian wine and bread (whiter and cleaner than any he knew in France),
unexcited by exotic scenery or superstition (he counted the traditionally uncountable Cedars of Lebanon—there were twenty-three), gregarious, easy-going, sharp-eyed and tactful. More than once on official embassies he was able to retrieve the gaffes of superiors by simple affability and consideration, and with Arabs he got on so well that one or two friends he made even let him see their wives unveiled.
It is this openness and breadth of experience which makes his record unique—the major fault of Mr. Lewis's book is that he darts back and forth untidily from d'Arvieux's story to the accounts of other travellers, including H. V. Morton, considerably more superficial and less interesting. But there is no use looking in d'Arvieux for a modern cosmopolitan. He was a man of his time (he never forgave the Egyptians for treating him as he was accust- omed to treat Jews in Smyrna), a young Provencal Waring on the make. Unable to find the kind of advancement he felt entitled to at home, he used the East as thousands of young men were to use it later: as a back-stair by which to scale a social hierarchy he could never have ascended from within. Once in the Sun-King's favour, he showed little interest in further adventure—his last years were spent contentedly at Versailles, secure at the heart of the classical, enclosed civilisation whose ,fringe he explored so illuminatingly and in- curiously for posterity : the archetypal bourgeois gentilhomme who made the grade by way of the colonies.
RONALD BRYDEN
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