Tale of the Orient Examines Orientalism

Casimir de Cha^teauneuf is a French aesthete of the 1860s, who keeps a wife and vast, prosperous vineyards in the provinces, and a red-haired courtesan and a circle of cultivated friends in Paris. When he wanders into a curio shop in the Palais Royal and discovers a striking Orientalist miniature painting of a young woman with one blue eye and one yellow eye, identified only as “La Poupee” (“The Doll”), all the romantic impulses in his nature combine into a single burning purpose: He must find her.

Casimir’s search begins in Montmartre, where he learns that the portraitist has returned to the Orient, increasingly a place of pilgrimage for French artists and writers. How else, Casimir is told, can a young man escape from the bourgeois morality and prosaic realism of France? There, of course, Casimir too must go.

At this early point in the novel, astute readers will begin to suspect the author is playing tricks with them. The plot is too simple; the characters are two-dimensional. Echoes of Flaubert and Nerval abound. “The Palace of Tears” is as much about Orientalism as it is about Casimir and his mystery woman. In its pages, the eastern notion of kismet harmoniously collides with the western ideal of self-determination. This marriage of east and west finds its controlling image in the opening of the Suez Canal between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, the longed-for meeting of waters accomplished by the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1869. When Casimir fails to locate La Poupee on his first visit to the Orient but is instead robbed by bandits, “stripped of all, except mirage after mirage of the girl’s face, her pellucid voice pealing forth the strobes of a song, je vous aime, je vous aime,” he returns to Paris, as instructed by a seer, to await his kismet. There, he befriends Lesseps, and joins him on a return visit to Constantinople, and thence to Egypt for the opening of the canal.

On the night Casimir purchased the miniature, he began to dream of his soul mate with startling clarity; even in these dreams, set in imaginary cities of domes and minarets, he recognizes her voice and realizes she has been part of his dreams for a lifetime. In the Palace of Tears in Constantinople, where rejected and superfluous women are kept, a young girl also finds a man entering her dreams, a man she seems to know. The Sanskrit convention of the shared dream amply sustains the erotic connection between Casimir and the woman who has captivated him, and contributes to the sense of both danger and inevitability that surrounds their love.

While Casimir’s seems an immediately recognizable figure from French literature, with his cliched longings for the exotic, La Poupee, as a veiled woman, is necessarily less familiar. As a little girl, she was given to the Sultana, a Creole woman from Martinique who had entered the Grand Harem as a slave. When the Sultana received La Poupee--the gift of a “living doll” was an old custom among courtly women--she secretly taught her to read (a forbidden skill for women) and to speak the accented French of her island childhood. These accomplishments contribute to La Poupee’s banishment to the Palace of Tears, but also, in the way of kismet, deliver her from it.

Written with the economy and symmetry of Balzac’s “The Girl with the Golden Eyes,” this tale takes the reader on a journey that is at once familiar and surprising. Although its author relies on the conventions of both French travel literature and Persian fairy tales, she brings a freshness of detail to every (expected) twist in the story, and her sonorous, measured prose draws on these competing traditions. Not a word is out of place. When La Poupee returned to the Palace of Tears after a moonlit meeting with the man of her dreams, the other women begged her to tell them of the only words the lovers exchanged, in that baffling heathen tongue: je vous aime. Heartsick, La Poupee sang the phrase over and over again: “Now, all the women in the hollow chambers of the palace were heard humming, je vous aime, je vous aime. And all the eunuchs from their quarters whispering in their falsetto voices, je vous aime, je vous aime.”

Croutier, whose grandmother was born into a harem in Macedonia, expanded on family stories in her study, “Harem: The World Behind the Veil.” In this slender volume, she lets history fall into the service of romance, as well as a teasing cultural critique.