Free Eastern Dreams by Paul Nurse Page B

whatever opportunities appeared to advance himself far beyond his original station. In Noyon, a kindly great-uncle happened to be president of the local
collège
, or grammar-cum-high school. He took on the precocious youngster as a boarding student, where, from four to fourteen, Galland studied “Biblical languages”—Latin, Ancient Greek and Hebrew—until his protector’s death in 1660, as well as his family’s penury, forced Antoine to return home and apprentice to a local trade.
    He might have stayed there, too, if not for an intense hatred of manual labour and a staggering love of learning. “Made for letters,” as Sir Richard Burton notes, Galland abandoned his apprenticeship within a year in hopes of continuing his studies in Paris. Details are sketchy, but it is very possible that one day the fifteen-year-old simply walked away from his trade (a serious move at a time when apprenticeship was akin to indentured labour) and kept going until he reached the capital, where he knew no one but an elderly aunt, at the end of September 1661.
    Galland’s luck held. His kinswoman knew a priestly relative of the late Canon of Noyon, to whom she introduced Antoine. Impressed by the youth’s learning and modest manner, the priest recommended him to the vice-principal of the Collège du Plessis, which accepted Galland as a student. Thereafter he made such scholarly strides that, still in his teens, he began conducting classes in Ancient Greek while beginning Turkish, Persian and Arabic at the Collège Royal (now the Collège de France).
    From all indications, Galland was a dream student, as he was to become a dream scholar. Single-minded beyond measure, hissurviving journals and letters point to a man possessing equal parts ambition, quiet charm and an endless capacity for work. Less than a decade after arriving in Paris, Galland was assigned the responsibility of cataloguing the Sorbonne’s oriental manuscripts, an onerous task he performed with such conscientiousness that he earned himself a reputation as a budding scholar.
    By now just twenty-four, Galland had been studying or teaching for nineteen of those years, and had already exceeded anything he might have expected from his rural origins. But this was the dawn of the new world being created by the Enlightenment, a time when opportunities were opening to those with sufficient talent and ambition, regardless of their background, and more was to come Antoine Galland’s way very soon.
    While working as an assistant Latin instructor, his reputation for diligence and proficiency in eastern languages earned Galland the chance of a lifetime. The Marquis de Nointel had recently been named French ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Turkish sultan Mehmet IV, and was due to leave within the year. Recommended as the new ambassador’s
attaché-secrétaire
, Galland was offered an appointment he quickly accepted.
    It proved the making of him. Along with his secretarial duties, Galland was commissioned by Louis XIV’s government to undertake a detailed study of the Greek Orthodox faith, whose articles had been the subject of curiosity and heated debate among prominent French Catholics. He was further charged with collecting materials and artifacts to augment the private collections of Louis and his brilliant chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. With these tasks in hand, Galland arrived at Constantinople in late 1670 and wasted no time in mastering Romaic (Modern Greek) by frequenting the Greek coffee houses of the Turkish capital. He then proceeded to grapple with the assigned study of Orthodoxy under the guidance of a patriarch of the faith who hadbeen deposed and persecuted by the Turks, compiling two reports he sent personally to the king.
    At other moments, Galland haunted the cafés and bookstalls of Constantinople, practising languages as he ferreted out materials suitable for the royal collections. Although it