How did Hanna Diyab meet Antoine Galland?

Through the collector Paul Lucas. On 17 March 1709 Galland called on Lucas in Paris, whose lodgings held a celebrated cabinet of curiosities, and talked there with “Hanna Maronite d’Halep” (Hanna, a Maronite of Aleppo). On 25 March he wrote in his diary that Hanna had “quelques contes Arabes fort beaux” (some very beautiful Arabic tales) and “me promit de les mettre par ecrit, pour me les communiquer” (promised to write them down and pass them to me) (Le Journal d’Antoine Galland, ed. Frédéric Bauden and Richard Waller, vol. I (Peeters, 2011), pp. 286, 290). Galland had run out of stories in his Arabic manuscript. In a series of storytelling sessions that spring, Diyab supplied more, and Galland added ten of them to his Arabian Nights. Paulo Lemos Horta’s Marvellous Thieves (2017) reconstructs the meeting from Diyab’s memoir and Galland’s diary.