Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6) — John Shaqi
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6)
General
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6)
Fairy tales; Tales -- Arab countries
For a few weeks the family remained unmolested, but in those days
"Providence" slept and Fortune did not favour the brave. The
Municipality presently decreed a second arrest, and the venerable
littérateur, aged seventy two, was sent before the revolutionary
tribunal appointed to deal with the pretended offences of August
10. He was subjected to an interrogatory of thirty-six hours,
during which his serenity and presence of mind never abandoned
him and impressed even his accusers. But he was condemned to die
for the all-sufficient reason:--"It is not enough to be a good
son, a good husband, a good father, one must also prove oneself a
good citizen." He spent his last hours wit'. his confessor, wrote
to his wife and children, praying his family not to beweep him,
not to forget him, and never to offend against their God; and
this missive, with a lock of his hair for his beloved daughter,
he finally entrusted to the ghostly father. Upon the scaffold he
turned to the crowd and cried, "I die as I have lived, truthful
and faithful to my God and my King." His venerable head, crowned
with the white honours of age, fell on Sept. 25, 1792.
Cazotte printed many works, some of great length, as the uvres
Morales, which filled 7 vols. 8vo in the complete edition of
1817; and the biographers give a long list of publications,
besides those above-mentioned, romantic, ethical, and spiritual,
in verse and in prose. But he wrote mainly for his own pleasure,
he never sought fame, and consequently his reputation never
equalled his merit. His name, however, still smells sweet,
passing sweet, amid the corruption and the frantic fury of his
day, and the memory of the witty, genial, and virtuous
littérateur still blossoms in the dust.
During my visit to Paris in early 1887, M. Hermann Zotenberg was
kind enough to show me the MS., No. 1723, containing the original
tales of the "New Arabian Nights." As my health did not allow me
sufficient length of stay to complete my translation, Professor
Houdas kindly consented to copy the excerpts required, and to
explain the words and phrases which a deficiency of dictionaries
and vocabularies at an outlandish port-town rendered
unintelligible to me.
In translating a MS., which has never been collated or corrected
and which abounds in errors of omission and commission, I have
been guided by one consideration only, which is, that my first
and chiefest duty to the reader is to make my book readable at
the same time that it lays before him the whole matter which the
text offered or ought to have offered. Hence I have not hesitated
when necessary to change the order of the sentences, to delete
tautological words and phrases, to suppress descriptions which
are needlessly reiterated, and in places to supply the connecting
links without which the chain of narrative is weakened or broken.
These are liberties which must be allowed, unless the
translator's object be to produce a mutilated version of a
mutilation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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