216 | Leaving France, “Turning Turk,” Becoming Ottoman
betrayed for the Ottoman sultan (the crescent). The fallen crosses were another
warning: even God disapproved of Bonneval’s future. When Bonneval makes the
momentous decision to move to Turkey, he recalls his old horoscope with relish.
The narrative presents him as a willing convert who perceives no doctrinal dif-
ferences between Catholicism and Islam and who cares more about losing honor
than losing faith. His circumcision is the key moment of transformation from
Frenchman into Turk, occasioning a public festival in Istanbul and a celebratory
audience with the sultan.
This fictional account inspired even harsher criticisms of Bonneval. A 1739
reprint of the Memoirs included a new essay, “Silencing the Boastful Renegade,”
intended to “protect the reader against the memoirs which follow.” An astonish-
ing illustration depicts Bonneval about to be circumcised, surrounded by a jubi-
lant crowd of Turks and horn-blowing devils (figure 15.1). One bystander warns,
“A bad Christian will never be a good Turk.” A caption reinforces the ominous
message: “His soul will suffer much more than flesh; this is the price of losing
Jesus Christ.” The essayist further castigates Bonneval’s conversion as a selfish
quest for fame at any cost. He is repulsed by Bonneval’s impious vanity: “What
is a Renegade of his type? It is a man who, always ready to embrace the Religion
most convenient to his interests, sees only himself in that faith.... In vain the
new Musulman appears to triumph.... [H]is heart inflates with joy from the
plaudits of all Constantinople; he should rather be deaf to such devils’ trumpet
blasts.”
The Memoirs were popular, but these slanders of Bonneval’s political-reli-
gious fidelity spurred rebuttals by his supporters. The most significant was an-
other apocryphal autobiography, Venetian and Turkish Anecdotes (1740), by the
marquis d’Argens. In his telling, the character Bonneval declares vigorously that
a man of his moral fiber would never suffer himself to be circumcised. Yet in a
twist worthy of postmodern fiction, the book’s “editor” (actually d’Argens) ex-
presses uncertainty regarding the continued presence of Bonneval’s foreskin. In
the preface he argues that Bonneval’s conversion was an empty ritual. While “no
one can doubt that he had himself circumcised,” he suggests a man might lose his
foreskin yet retain his faith because he had never really lost it:
What becomes of the blackness of his crime if the comte de Bonneval ex-
plained his conduct as only adopting the natural religion... of Adam? His
step [into Islam] is no longer irregular; he no longer ceases to be a Christian
because he never was, except in name.... Thus he would not have stained his
glory when (as one supposes) he had himself circumcised, not having changed
his belief system.D’Argens also tried to prove the real Bonneval’s continued Frenchness by claim-
ing that all the other elements that seemed to make him a Turk—the flowery