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one-half of the French translation),[1] being unfortunately lost, it appears impossible to ascertain the precise source from which he drew the latter. Opinions differ upon this point, some Orientalists holding (with De Sacy) that the originals of the added tales were found by Galland in the public libraries of Paris (whence, however, no researches have as yet availed to unearth them), and others (with the late Mr. Chenery) that he procured them from the recitation of story-tellers in the bazaars of Smyrna and other towns in the Levant, during his travels there.[2] It was
- ↑ Galland’s MS. consisted (as he himself tells us in his dedication) of four volumes, three only of which are extant, bringing down the work to the 282nd Night, towards the middle of the story of Camaralzaman. Taking the lost volume as equal in size to the three others (which contain about 140 pages each), the remainder of Camaralzaman and the stories of Ganem and the Enchanted Horse, together with one-fifth part of the added tales, would account for the whole of its contents, leaving four-fifths of the interpolations or three-tenths of the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments” unaccounted for, allowance made for the Voyages of Sindbad, which do not belong to the original work and Galland’s copy of which is extant in a separate form, divided into voyages only, the French translator being responsible for the arbitrary division into (twenty-one) nights. It may be observed that, in the Breslau edition, which corresponds more nearly with the MS. used by Galland than any other of the printed texts, the story of the Enchanted Horse immediately succeeds that of Camaralzaman (Kemerezzeman and Budour) and is itself followed, after an interval of some fifty nights, by the story of Ganem.
- ↑ Galland may be presumed to have come by the MS. of Sindbad during his long residence in Asia Minor, but that of the Thousand and One Nights he himself tells us, in his dedicatory epistle to the Marquise d’O, he did not procure from the East (“il a fallu le faire venir de Syrie”) till after his return to France, when he first became aware of the existence of the work.
