Who was Paul Lucas?
Paul Lucas was a French traveller and collector from Rouen who scoured the Levant for coins, manuscripts and antiquities for Louis XIV and wrote popular travel books. Hanna Diyab joined him near Aleppo in 1707 on the promise of a post in the king’s Arabic library, followed him to Paris and was presented at Versailles. Lucas had attracted little scholarly attention before Paulo Lemos Horta’s Marvellous Thieves (2017), which argued that he left his mark on the magician of “Aladdin” and the bandits of “Ali Baba.”
“Lucas has received little attention from scholars, but he was the most popular French travel writer of the early eighteenth century.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 59
“Horta does not stop there. He has closely studied Diyab’s earlier association with the collector Paul Lucas, whom he served as a translator and guide in the Middle East. Lucas scoured the Arab lands for treasures to send back to French libraries and collections. Though he posed as an antiquarian, he was more of a picaresque rogue than a scholar, and he was blessed with a fantastical imagination as well as a taste for anecdotes. It seems that some of the incidents and imagery in the orphan tales derive from Diyab’s adventures with this colourful character. Lucas has thus far attracted little scholarly attention.”
More in Horta’s words (1)
“This lie was only the first deception in a relationship in which both Lucas and Diyab assumed a series of masks as they made their way through the fluid world of the Mediterranean.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 57
More from critics and scholars (2)
“In one log, Diyab described how Galland’s buddy, Paul Lucas, had presented him to the court of Louis XIV in Versailles. “Lucas insisted that Diyab dress in stereotypically Oriental fashion,” says Horta.”
“The second chapter [of Marvellous Thieves] further explains how Diyab became acquainted with Galland through an intermediary named Paul Lucas, a French traveler and antiquarian who saw Diyab as linguistically beneficial whilst they met in Aleppo.”
Academic priority
- January 2017Horta, Marvellous Thieves (Harvard University Press)
- 2019Melinda Cohoon, Review of Middle East Studies 53.2
Global mainstream impact
- February 2017Robert Irwin, Literary Review
- 23 May 2019Chris Perez, New York Post