Points of Entanglement in French Caribbean Travel Writing (1620-1722)

Front matter

EARLY MODERN CULTURAL STUDIES 1500-1700

Points of Entanglement in French Caribbean Travel Writing (1620-1722)

CHRISTINA KULLBERG

Contents

Century Caribbean

Reading Through the Work of Silencing French New World Baroque

A Brief History of a Successful Colonization The Early French Caribbean Corpus References

Chapter 1

Introduction: Tracing Entanglements in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean

In 1619, Captain Fleury and his crew suffered shipwreck outside Martinique. Among the survivors was an anonymous writer who was set out to account for Fleury’s exploits in the Caribbean Sea and on the South American continent, but accident led him elsewhere. Fleury had abandoned parts of the crew in his search for a new ship. Stranded on the island, the anonymous writer gave a unique account of European intrusion in the archipelago (Anonymous of Carpentras 2002). Instead of writing about the heroic adventures of the captain, he tells about everyday exchanges with the Indigenous peoples on whom he and the rest of the men depended for their survival, about how they learned each other’s languages, about how the Natives made fun of the French way of doing things and commented on their white, starved bodies.! This is the first known account of French interventions in the Caribbean. Soon after, French privateers would initiate territorial claims, leading to the first official French establishment in 1626 on Saint-Christophe (today St. Kitts), parts of which was already settled by the British and inhabited by enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples.

Almost a century later, in 1722, the Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat, who was stationed in Martinique between 1694 and 1706, published

1 The account was never published. Jean-Pierre Moreau found it in the archives of a library in Carpentras in southern France and edited it with the title Un Flibustier francais dans la mer des Antilles (2002). For information about the anonymous writer Captain Fleury and the travels, see Moreau’s introduction.

© The Author(s) 2023 1 C. Kullberg, Points of Entanglement in French Caribbean Travel

Nouveaux voyages aux isles de l'Amérique. His take on island society differs dramatically from the anonymous writer’s. Upon arriving in Martinique, Labat described colonial constructions that did not exist when Fleury and his men ran aground on the islands. There were no Indigenous peoples around. Instead, Labat was received by enslaved persons whose backs were covered with scars from lashes “to which one soon gets used to” (1722 tl, 63). Indeed, he grew extremely accustomed to the violence of slavery. In time, he would himself become an enslaver, involved in the development of new techniques for sugar refinement at Fonds-Saint Jacques, a Dominican convent that had turned into a plantation by the time of Labat’s sojourn. As opposed to previous missionaries, he was not committed to converting Indigenous people to Catholicism but instead focused on keeping order in the colony and converting enslaved persons. His account of his sojourn in Martinique reveals that the ways the Caribbean was represented were in the process of changing. During the years that separate him and the Anonymous of Carpentras, a number of narratives about the islands were written, mostly by missionaries who evangelized among the Indigenous population, documented events, and gathered cultural and natural knowledge about the islands. Labat’s account draws on yet criticizes these texts. Whereas his predecessors constructed knowledge based on direct experience but filtered through Ancient models and embedded in formal conventions, Labat speaks in his own voice, carving out an authoritarian narrative about the islands, which had now been fully occupied, exploited, and increasingly tied to colonial centers in Europe. And whereas they wrote the history of the settlement, with all its violent implications expressed in ambivalent terms, he wrote about Martinique as a French island.

The moment of consolidation of plantation society and the slave trade described by Labat has become the point of origin for French Caribbean thinking and literature. The formation of what Nick Nesbitt (2013) calls Caribbean “immanent critique” (3), from Aimé Césaire and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Kamau Brathwaite, and Wilson Harris, is about thinking through the plantation and the Middle Passage as nexus for reconsidering Caribbean resistance, subjectivity, and creativity.” Pan-Caribbean literary histories have questioned the

? Nesbitt considers the Haitian Revolution as the initial formulation of such immanent critique. This moment, along with other slave uprisings, have been crucial for rethinking the legacies of colonialism from the point of view of the subalterns. See Marlene L. Daut (2015); Laurent Dubois (2004a, b, 2006); John D. Garrigus (2006); Brett Rushforth (2014). See Paul Gilroy (1993), Christopher L: Miller (2008), and David Scott (2004) for the importance of the French Atlantic triangular trade for the articulation of (black) modernity.

compartmentalization of the literatures of the region by (colonial) language and instead suggested that the common history of creolization that stemmed from plantation culture constituted the grounds for a shared literature (Arnold et al. 1994, Torres-Saillant 1996; Dash 1998). The reasons for this emphasis are well grounded. The plantation system was built on the extinction of Indigenous society and arguably marked the most brutal and transformative European intervention in the archipelago. It still affects lives and bodies today through structural racism, class hierarchies, and neo-colonialism, which all can be linked to the history of slavery and to the negation of the past and of being produced by this history. Caribbean expressive forms—music, dance, literature, art—build on that heritage of suffering, survival, and creative inventiveness. Texts from the seventeenth century are intertwined with this history. They tell about the insidious historical and representational ramifications of this violent part of global modernity. They also evoke how writings forged a narrative of French colonial conquest through tangled relationships with Indigenous peoples, diasporic Africans, and other Europeans. In so doing, and often against their own intentions, they also evoke other possible beginnings for French Caribbean literature, which were not primarily dictated by France. This is what Points of Entanglement in French Caribbean Travel Writing (1620-1722) sets out to explore.

This book argues for a literary reexamination of the representation of the period leading up to high colonialism in order to question a colonial scale of literary history, where representations of the past are measured in terms of their importance in and to France. The centrifugal forces of French coloniality and France’s literary history are no doubt more powerful than others, fueled by high cultural prestige in the global field of literatures but also by continuous political command over the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Yet that structure of power was not imposed on the newly established colonies from the outset; rather, it was shaped through and by historical movements in the archipelago. The complexity of this juncture warrants an approach to travel writing as simultaneously determined by the locus of its distribution (France) and of its creation (the islands). And since these travel narratives engage in representing an ongoing process of shaping a society for which they had no model while at the same time being limited by codes for writing as well as by political, economic, and religious interests, their informative value is fraught. They call for layered readings and—the contribution I want to make here—should be considered as part of a (French) Caribbean literary trajectory. Indeed, the problem with relying on the colonial construction of history, forged by the travelogues studied here, is that it makes us unable to estimate the complexity in these narratives. Most importantly, it takes attention away from the exploration of how enslaved and Indigenous peoples actively contributed to shaping early colonial society and, indeed, the representations of it.

Taking a synoptic approach to travel writing in French, from 1620 with the Anonymous of Carpentras up to the publication of Labat’s Nouveaux voyages as a transitional text to the eighteenth century, this book excavates traces of such impacts by examining textual instances where the islands and the peoples of this period unsettle dominant European narratives. The claim here is that the historical, social, and political messiness of the Caribbean seventeenth century makes for complex representations and expressions, generating textual instability despite the travelers’ apparent desires to domesticate the islands. Between the lines of their authoritarian narratives, disruptive elements coming from everyday exchanges in early colonial society enter productively into the construction of knowledge and for sure also into the representations of this world. This book’s contribution is to read these texts în situ in order to interrogate both the formation and the limitations of discourses of power. And while we cannot, from today’s vantage point, create a site in the narratives where Indigenous and enslaved agency could emerge without inserting and overemphasizing our own, it is both possible and necessary to interrogate the narrative effects and echoes of their presences by means of literary attention to the texture of travel writing.

My reading here takes as its point of departure the conjecture between the contextual and the textual. The period leading up to what Christopher L. Miller (2008, 25) has called the “sugar revolution” in 1715 was in many ways a time of crisis. That sense of crisis permeated not only the historical context but also representations of it. Starting with the contextual aspect, the most striking and devastating forms of crisis obviously hit the Indigenous and enslaved populations. For Europeans, who no longer approached the region with newness and wonder, the period was characterized by a lack of social structure and territorial stability. Relations of power were fragmented rather than centralized: settlements were initiated by privateers, and the French monarchy had little influence on the region until the second half of the century. Forced labor existed in the form of indenture and slavery, which involved Indigenous peoples and deported persons from Africa, but there were no large-scale plantations. The islands were sites of struggle between various groups driven by profit, self-interest, or self-preservation, and in the clashes, new societies, cultures, and languages would take form.

Crisis also marked those writing on the islands and the narratives they produced. Travel writing was a hybrid genre in the seventeenth century (Requemora-Gros 2012; Ouellet 2010). It contained a plurality of discourses and was determined by the circumstances of their location of publication—France—as well as by the world they depicted—the islands. Consequently, the representations of the Caribbean were strikingly diverse, almost shifting, written in a variety of styles, and formed during a period when the French language was in the process of being standardized and the construction of knowledge was torn between ancient ideals of bookish knowledge and modern ideals of empiricism. The texts sustained and contributed to constructing discourses of domination. Yet, they did not form a univocal colonial narrative; rather they made up an eclectic library, comprised of natural and moral histories, unpublished accounts by buccaneers and traders, missionary narratives, Jesuit letters about the evangelization of enslaved populations, and works on Caribbean vernacular languages.

Judging both by the contextual and by the textual, the travel narratives and the world they describe were forged in what we may call a liminal time-space where neither politico-economical power nor aestheticepistemic forms were consolidated. But instead of bringing order into such messy and brutal liminality, I propose to make it operative as an incitement to read the texts against the grain of a linear authoritarian colonial historical discourse. Travel writing constructs narratives of interventions with the various groups of peoples that inhabited the region and with the changing nature of the island. They start at a site of amalgamation, pointing backwards to past times and other spaces (Europe, Africa, and the larger Americas) and forward to brutal global modernity, which, in a sense, highlights their Caribbeanness.

Saying this, I am not suggesting that colonial travel writing should be considered a forerunner to the radical and important reconceptualization of subjectivity and identity coming from twentieth-century Caribbean literature. My point is rather that the historical forces put in motion with which travel writing engages warrant an approach that allows for thinking with rather than against liminality. The cue for this argument is taken from the essay “Reversion and Diversion” by Martinican thinker and writer Edouard Glissant (1989). He claims that the Caribbean historical experience builds on an absence of origins and a series of rifts, due to the slave trade, slavery, the extinction of Indigenous peoples, and the mixing that occurred in violent cultural encounters. To understand this history, Glissant argues, the desire for an origin, which he saw expressed, for example, in Pan-African thinking such as in the Négritude-movement, needs to be counter-balanced with an acknowledgment of the fractures and of the impossibility of a reversion to the past or a return to an origin. Setting up a dynamic relationship between return [retour] and detour [ détour], he outlines a different historical trajectory inhabited by ruptures:

We must return to the point from which we started. Diversion [Détour] is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by Reversion [Retour]: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish. (1989, 26)

The Caribbean should not be understood in terms of linearity, with a starting point and a single direction, nor should the region and its cultures and histories be understood as a complete negation. The Middle Passage represented rupture, Glissant contends, but memories in form of traces lived on, taking other shapes and expressions. Caribbean cultures are a non-beginning, as they emerge from clashes and encounters, intertwinements and frictions, intersecting in a “point of entanglement” that Glissant urges the reader to work through and activate in order to actualize the past in the present and see how competing forms of knowledge production and representation coexist, converge, and diverge. These are “forces of creolization,” which Glissant conceptualizes both as a historical process of mixing engendered in the Caribbean context by migratory movements and propelled by colonization, and as a figure of thought that accounts for processes of uncontrollable mixing with unpredictable outcomes (1997, 34). I will use the notion of “point of entanglement” as a critical tool for reading and rethinking textual connections between past and present. Not only does this notion chime with the liminality of the period, the transformational society, and the complexity of travel writing at this time; it also works as ansatzpunkt, to use Erich Auerbach’s (1969) term, to localize sites in the text where ambivalence and tensions are played out.

I will focus on three points of entanglement, starting with the relationship between text and geography. From there I will move to interrogating the travelers’ selves and end with an examination of the presence of other languages and the inclusion of others’ speech. Geography, self-construction, and language are major vectors for domination in the process of settlement and colonization: land is exploited and produced as a social space; the (European) self-mediates power and constructs knowledge over the islands and the peoples; and language is a tool for domination, as the medium through which knowledge is constituted and for policing other languages. Glissant’s notion allows for reconfiguring these vectors as textual conjectures where conflicting interests cross, where differences are at once subjugated and generated. The island geography impacts on the representations. The travelers fabricate a self under influence of the rapidly changing and intermingling Caribbean early colonial society. Languages and inclusions of speech cannot be contained within the frames of monolingual French. Approaching the texts by means of points of entanglement will allow me to draw conclusions about how travel writing made and unmade structures of power and domination in a processual movement working with and against the “forces of creolization” that permeate the seventeenth-century Caribbean.

READING THROUGH THE WORK OF SILENCING

At stake in Points of Entanglement in French Caribbean Travel Writing (1620-1722) is the discourse of silencing that has dominated research on French Caribbean colonization. Before addressing travel writing from this period, I want to ask what silence means in this context, how it has been constructed, and what it does.

The French Caribbean seventeenth century has been overlooked as part of what has been analyzed as a silencing of the colonial grounds of Western, and particularly French, modernity. Nobody wants to know the price paid by others for the sugar we consume in Europe, to rephrase Voltaire’s character in Candide. Following Michel-Ralph Trouillot’s important work on the effacement of the Haitian revolution in the European consciousness Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) and Louis Sala Molin’s Les Misères des Lumières: Sous la raison, Poutrage (2008), Sue Peabody’s ‘There are no Slaves in France’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (1996 and Peabody 2004), Christopher L. Miller’s The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (2008), Madeleine Dobie’s Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (2010), and Sara Melzer’s Colonizer and Colonized: The Hidden Story of Early Modern French Culture

(2012) have, with a focus on the eighteenth century, mapped and discussed various domains where such silencing has played out and what the implications have been for the construction of both historical and literary discourses. First, it is worth noting that these studies center on the eighteenth century when plantation colonialism was established on the islands. Second, the silencing that Trouillot spoke about mainly refers to the impossibility for European thinkers and writers to conceive of what happened in Saint-Domingue because of their racialist gaze and colonial predicament. Quite rightly, scholars have pointed to the fact that rather than silence there is an abundance in documentation around the Haitian Revolution from its beginnings in 1791 to the declaration of independence in 1804 (Daut 2015, 1-3). But the Lesser Antilles, notably Martinique, Guadeloupe and indeed other islands exploited by the French, faced different futures compared to Haiti. From cultural invisibility in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to political assimilation to France in the twentieth century, the lived experience of Martinicans and Guadeloupeans has been marginalized not by fear or denial of Black agency but by indifference it seems, at least from a French (high) colonial point of view.

However, this does not mean that nobody wrote about the islands in the seventeenth century. In fact, there is a relatively large number of French texts on the islands from this period compared to British and Dutch sources since France combined settlement with missionary work, and the missionaries wrote the history of the islands and documented society and nature. While it is indeed true that enslavement was a secondary topic if it was broached at all, the narratives did not silence the settlement and its violent implications. Hypothetically, it would possibly have been less silent around slavery and the eradication of Indigenous cultures in France had these texts been more widely read. Considering the little research that has been devoted to the seventeenth-century Caribbean up

’This study mostly concerns the Lesser Antilles, the long arc of small volcanic islands between the Greater Antilles and the coastal areas of Central and South America. However, I will refer to the Caribbean, comprising the archipelagic region in its entirety. Even though the texts mostly focus on the Lesser Antilles, the peoples involved moved across the entire region. The larger Caribbean context is needed to conceptualize these narratives.

to this day, notably from literary scholars,* I suggest that it is not only enslavement and the slave trade that have been muffled but the entire period. If this history has been subject to silencing, which I believe it has, it is important to note that the source of this silence is less from those who experienced the islands during this period and more about the reception of their texts, not only historically but also in our contemporary moment, particularly from a literary perspective.

In France, twentieth-century research on the American colonial context has long been oriented toward texts from the sixteenth century that described first-hand experiences with Indigenous peoples and that developed cartographies and models for writing the New World. My point is not to criticize these studies for not doing something they never set out to do. Nonetheless, the sixteenth century has been given priority in the French discourse of the Americas, perhaps unconsciously influenced by the imaginary of the “Noble Savage,” so that it has focused almost exclusively on first contacts, whereas more complex cultural intertwinements of establishment, colonialism, and slavery have been ignored. Not even in the seventeenth century did the Caribbean islands “fit into the savage slot,” to borrow from Trouillot’s criticism of how traditional anthropology constructed the Other, leaving the Caribbean as a blind-spot in anthropological research up to the mid-twentieth century (1992). Peter Hulme in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean (1492-1797) (1986), and Anthony Padgen in European Encounters with the New World (1993), followed up by Dobie (2010) and Miller (2008), have convincingly demonstrated that in France, idealized encounters between Europeans and Native Americans turned into a trope repeated over time. One of the problems with this framing of French intrusion in the Americas is that it constructs the image of the initial phases of colonization as dualistic while it was, in fact, as Serge Gruzinski pointed out in his examination of the Mexican colonial context, a brutal process of mixing (1999). The fascination with the first encounter indirectly downplays the violent but also intricate relationships between French, Creoles, other

*Historians have done important work to shed new light on the seventeenth-century French Caribbean; see Jean-Pierre Moreau (1992); Liliane Chauleau (1993); Paul Butel (2002); James Pritchard (2004); Christian Bouyer (2005); Philip Boucher (2008, 2009); Kelly Wisecup (2013); Eric Roulet (2017); Michael Harrigan (2018); Céline Carayon (2019); Frédéric Régent (2007, 2019).

Europeans, Indigenous peoples, and diasporic Africans during the period of settlement.

Interestingly, this contemporary silencing has historical ramifications. Ever since it started, French involvement in the Caribbean was subdued, partly due to a similar desire to ignore the violence to which they contributed, and partly due to the fact that the settlement was far from being a success story. Peabody argues (1996) that conflicting national self-images made France silence its own colonial enterprise, particularly slavery, since it contradicted the idea of the country as the mother of liberty. This narrative has been nuanced in a recent book by Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss (2022), who analyze the presence of forms of enslavement in France during the Ancient Regime by looking at the galley slaves in Marseille and the complexities of conceptions of ethnicity in French society. But it is important to acknowledge that in France in the seventeenth century there was a general lack of interest in the Americas. Focusing on the cultural visibility and impact of colonialism in early modern France, Dobie has argued the absence of influence was, in fact, a strategy of displacement of the colonial heritage (2010, 6). Antillean references tended to be absorbed into the generic category les Indes, which in the seventeenth century referred to anything non-European from the global south. There are some episodes involving important people that prove that the Antilles were not entirely absent from the cultural life of Paris, such as the poet Paul Scarron’s failed project to embark for Cayenne, which was accompanied by his much younger wife Françoise, Ninon de Lenclos, a famous courtisane, and Jean Regnault de Segrais. Scarron was sick and hoped to find remedy in the tropics, seduced by the myth of earthly paradise and the fountain of youth. His wife Françoise, known as l’Indienne and later as M™ de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s favorite mistress, had spent her childhood years on Marie-Galante, off the coast of Guadeloupe, and then in the village Précheur in northern Martinique. But according to one of the most influential voices of the times, M™ de Sévigné, M™ de Maintenon did not want to speak about her years on the islands, as if they had left a “scar in her heart” (Merle 1971, 115). She would nonetheless later buy property there in order to get a noble title, and she is said to have influenced Louis XIV’s centralization of colonial politics and had commercial interests in the plantation industry and in the slave trade.

But stories like these are anecdotal. Rather than placing the Caribbean on the map, they affirm its marginality in regard to French culture around the mid-seventeenth century. There was an interest in objects of curiosity—shells, pearls, hummingbirds, pineapples, and wood. In 1649, the aristocracy of Paris attended the baptism of a young native Caribbean by the name of Marabouis, brought to France by Dominican missionary Pierre Coliard (Roulet 2017, 75). By the end of the seventeenth century a few Antillean novels were published: in 1678, the anonymous Nouvelles de l'Amérique ou le Mercure Américaine came out, and around twenty years later Pierre de Corneille de Blessebois published a libertine novel called Le Zombi du Grand Perou ou la comtesse de Cocagne (see Garraway 2005, 172-191; Antoine 1994, 61-63). About the same time, the translation of French buccaneer Olivier Exquemelin’s Histoire des aventuriers flibustiers de PAmérique (1686), originally published in Dutch, had tremendous success. Generally, however, contemporary readers did not associate pirate stories with the Caribbean but with captivity in the Mediterranean context due to a flow of books about such adventures, which had attracted the French audience for over a century (Requemora- Gros and Linon 2002; Rediker 2004; Moreau 2006). In fact, longdistance travel narratives did not have a given place in Parisian culture, despite the success of the genre. The renewed interest in travelogues among French readers by the middle of the seventeenth century concerned mainly travels to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. One traveled to Jerusalem, Istanbul, and Rome for education and erudition, leaving texts written by travelers with more literary ambitions that could appeal to the Ancient Regime’s cultural life. Travel writings from the islands had other motives that were mainly practical, intimately linked to settlement, mission, and commerce. A few of these texts were, of course, also addressed to a larger, cultivated audience, but it is not by coincidence that there were two times as many travel books from the “Orient” than from the Americas (Gomez-Géraud 2000, 10).

Dobie is thus arguably right to conclude that while the colonies had economic importance, they were not culturally visible during the Ancient Regime (2010, 5-6). However, we should be careful not to over-interpret the meaning of the silence around the Antilles and attribute the politics of silencing to travel writing itself. The historical context also played its part. In fact, not even the prospect of strengthening France as a naval power or making a personal fortune could attract the French to the Americas. The British settlers were three times as many as the French. Only 60,000 to 100,000 persons left from French harbors to the Caribbean during the seventeenth century, a small number compared to the 678,000 Spanish who sailed for the Americas (Bouyer 2005, 24, 35). In 1664 the Dutch had 150 ships securing trade with the Caribbean islands; England had 35 and France, only 18 (Régent 2019, 90). Even the religious orders were reluctant to send missionaries to the islands because of high costs and risks (Roulet 2017, 102). When Jean-Baptiste Colbert became Secretary of State for the Navy and later Comptroller-General of Finances under Louis XIV, he had the ambition to change this situation, but it was not until well into the eighteenth-century that the plantation and the triangular economy would become significantly profitable. Arguably, rather than a strategy of displacement, the French responded to the project of settlement, colonization, and transatlantic trade with skepticism or indifference, an indifference which echoes four centuries later when President Charles de Gaulle referred to the islands as “specks of dust” in the Atlantic (Glissant 1989, vii). It is in this context that we must understand the minor role travelogues telling about France’s establishments had at the time. From a French horizon, they were as ignored as the world they described. We cannot posthumously give them a space in history that they did not have.

The contribution of this book is to look at travelogues from another perspective and not let the French context determine how we understand them. Considering that many of the writers included in this study stayed a longer time on the islands—some of them more than ten years—and were deeply involved, for good and for bad, with all of the peoples living there, they were not mere outsiders to the region they describe. Their longstanding engagement with the archipelago is indeed one of the explanations as to why the narratives were inevitably impacted by this world and its inhabitants, by violent conflicts and everyday exchanges between different cultures, classes, and languages, and between people and the archipelagic nature and geography of the Caribbean. The impetus for shifting focus from France and the transatlantic to the archipelago thus comes from the texts themselves. It would also be historically misleading to solely consider them as “French” texts; travelers mediated the islands to a French audience, but the conditions for writing and the events they described brought them closer to the archipelago than to France.

In other words, I am arguing for a similar reconfiguration of how we navigate the formations of # (national) literature that has been proposed by scholars within the American literary field. Exploring new scales for configuring literary history, researchers have turned toward geographical thinking to rearticulate the constitution of American literature, as in Wai- Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep-Time (2008) and, more recently and inspired by Glissant, Brian

Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens’ (2017) attempt to reconsider American literary history in archipelagic terms (see also Stephens and Martinez-San Miguel 2020). Equally important for this project has been Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s (2007, 2018, 2019) work, which takes the ocean as a point of departure to read new flows between literatures. I do not eschew the fact that the travelogues were written for a European audience, with a colonial intention, but I am interested in moments where the codes of representation dictated by the French context encounter their limitations.