“Every now and then turbaned figures would go by, following the wall; and not a single female head was to be seen behind the discreet grills of the women’s appartments, the ‘haremlikes’. A dead city, one might have said.
I thought I was perfectly alone; then I experienced a strange feeling, and realised that close to me, from behind thick iron bars at head height, two large green eyes were staring into mine.The eyebrows were brown, and the slight frown brought them so close that they met; the gaze suggested a combination of vigour and openness; it contained so much freshness and youth it could have been taken for a child’s.
The young woman, whose eyes these were, rose, and from her waist upward one could tell she was wrapped in the long, stiff folds of a Turkish-style cape, a ‘feredge’, made of green silk, embroidered with silver. A white veil carefully enveloped her head, revealing only her forehead and her large eyes. The pupils were indeed green: that shade of sea green, which was celebrated in the past by the poets of the Orient. The young woman was Aziyade.”
Aziyadé is Pierre Loti’s first novel, published anonymously in 1879. The book’s theme is a love story in the exotic setting of Turkey from 1876-1877 between a European naval officer and a young woman from the harem of a rich old man, first in Salonika then in Istanbul (Loti writes it Istanbul or Stamboul and sometimes uses the name of Constantinople).
Pierre Loti himself presents the novel as “the story, detailed and embellished with descriptions, of a Turkish romance” (Eyoub à deux, XXIII), but the dramatic death of the beloved abandoned in spite of himself by the hero will bring him to realize the depth of his passion and make him seek death. Pierre Loti thus wrote an exotic version of the romantic myth of tragic love, the lovers both resting in Turkish soil but in different places.
The form of the novel is original, combining both the hero’s diary and the correspondence he exchanges with relatives and which allows us to step back from the plot. Pierre Loti also exploits stylistic fragmentation by using short, juxtaposed paragraphs grouped together in chapters that are themselves short, which creates a sort of counterpoint to the romantic theme of the work.
The novel remains emblematic of the Orientalism which marked nineteenth-century literature and the arts in France.
Click cover image to buy from Amazon