218 | Leaving France, “Turning Turk,” Becoming Ottoman
“Eastern” language of the Anecdotes and Bonneval’s admission that he dressed
and behaved as a Turk and spoke Turkish—were actually components of an
elaborate masquerade. In d’Argens’s telling, the character Bonneval asserted his
Frenchness by promising readers, “I imitate the Turks without being a Muslim.”
These debates may leave the modern reader wondering, was he or wasn’t he
circumcised? After many years’ silence, news of the false memoirs compelled
Bonneval to circulate a counternarrative, first in a 1743 letter to Voltaire and later
in a 1745 conversation with Giacomo Casanova. To each he said essentially the
same: that because of his advanced age—he was fifty-five in 1730—he felt that
going through with the procedure would have been “ridiculous” (as he wrote
Voltaire) or “it would have been dangerous” (as he told Casanova). Either way,
to the two people most certain to turn this private communication into public
news, he claimed that he had skipped the crucial operation that to Europeans
made one a Muslim.
D’Argens’s belief that Bonneval was playacting at Turkishness was shared to
a certain degree by the man himself, who called his life in Istanbul “a masquer-
ade, which I never meant to be carried this far.” Bonneva l ’s smoot h transition to
membership among the Ottoman elite made him a public disgrace to Villeneuve,
as a Christian Frenchman whom the ambassador had neglected to protect from
apostasy. Villeneuve never did warm to the renegade. He thought Bonneval’s
switch proved him untrustworthy, warning the French government in 1734 that
“Monsieur de Bonneval should no longer be regarded as a Frenchman who has
changed his religion in Turkey; but rather as a Muslim who has been raised to
the rank of Pasha, and is playing a leading part in the conduct of affairs.” In
turn, Bonneval—unaware of the secret politicking surrounding him in Bosnia—
never forgave Villeneuve. He ascribed his lost nationality and religion entirely to
the ambassador. “If the Ambassador of France had laid claim to me as French, I
would have been given that instant into his care; but he never wanted to do that,”
groused the count to his brother. “So blame him if I wear the turban.”
The phrase “exchanging the hat for the turban” was a metaphor for turning
Turk across early modern Europe. Hats were associated with Christianity and
Western Europe by Christians and Muslims alike; turbans, to Europeans, in-
voked Islam generally and attachment to the Ottoman Empire specifically. Con-
temporaries were more persuaded of Bonneval’s transformation from European
nobleman to Ottoman dignitary by his publicly altered appearance than by his
privately witnessed religious conversion, even though they occurred together.
During the ceremony of conversion, Bonneval later recalled, “the imam covered
my head with a turban.” This detail ever after symbolized his entire life as an
Ottoman subject. Bonneval perceived the turban no differently from the Haps-
burg army officer’s uniform that he had formerly adopted. To Casanova he ex-
plained, “I had to say that God is God and that Muhammad is his prophet. I said