Between Paris and the Provinces

The folklorist and literary scholar Jean-Jacques Ampère had dreamed of travel and exploration from an early age. As a young man, he and his childhood friend Prosper Mérimée often fantasized about visiting exotic locales and writing memoirs of their adventures. But this would be costly—if only they could somehow publish a successful travelogue beforehand, they could use the proceeds to finance the trip. According to Mérimée, it was this idea that inspired him to write La Guzla: ou Choix de poésies illyriques, recueillies dans la Dalmatie, la Bosnie, la Croatie et l’Hertzegowine, published anonymously in 1827. The book purported to be a collection of the songs and ballads of Slavic bards called guzlars, and included a well-documented biography of one famous outlaw and bard, Hyacinthe Maglanovitch. Supposedly translated into French by an anonymous Italian traveler, the ballads and Maglanovitch himself were in fact invented by Mérimée, who had carried of the hoax by learning a few Slavic words and borrowing details from books he admired. ¹