The Story Archive

Lettres persanes

Montesquieu · 1721 CE · Novel · French · Enlightenment

Two Persian gentlemen reach Paris in 1712 and write home for eight years about coffee houses, the Academy, a king who has no gold and manufactures money out of paper, and a magician in Rome who can persuade people that three is one. Running under the reporting is the correspondence from the seraglio one of them left behind at Isfahan, where the eunuchs' letters grow steadily less reassuring the longer he stays away. Published anonymously in Amsterdam, it fixed the foreign observer as the device French satire used for the rest of the century.

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