ABSTRACT
The history of the Francophone phenomenon in Asia, as presented in the previous chapters, naturally leads us to texts written by French authors. For an obvious reason: crossings go both ways. To circumscribe the corpus of crossings to the works of authors of Asian origin is to reduce and limit it. For one of the components of this corpus, especially literature on the East, exists in French works, particularly those from after the eighteenth century whose inspiration, conception, or genesis draw on the Eastern world. Undeniably, there is a long history of French writers representing and being enamored by the East. The tentative move towards a vague, fluid, and ephemeral image of the Orient began in the West in the Middle Ages. This propensity was originally from a Christian perspective, given the importance of the East to the religion. This medieval imaginary distorted and falsified, due to a lack of knowledge of the sciences, and was conceived behind a veil of distant mysticism where the earth merges with the Levant:
this idea, added to the confused connection with the Eastern origins of the religion, naturally pushed the men of the Middle Ages to place the earthly paradise in some country far to the east… India, Tibet appear successively in the legends as the place (Martino 5).
