Ḥannā Diyāb was one of history’s greatest travelers and raconteurs, but he was almost lost to us when he went out for a shave!
, Ḥannā Diyāb, became known to Western scholarship more than a century after his death, when his name was discovered in the diaries of Antoine Galland, the great French Orientalist and translator of the Thousand and One Nights. Since that discovery, Diyāb, a Maronite Christian merchant and storyteller from Aleppo, has become a familiar figure to scholars interested in the textual history of the Nights.
The children of peasants who had come from their villages to the city looking for work were found dead on the roads, covered in manure. Paris was a ghost town. Everyone stayed home, confined to a single room, sitting by the fire, as I myself did. I spent fifteen days shut up in my room, warming myself by the fire.
After the fifteen days of cold had passed, I left my room and went to get a shave. The freezing walk home from the barbershop left me stiff as a statue. It was so cold that the hairs of my mustache began to fall out, and I was certain I was going to die. When I finally arrived at my room and they saw me in my condition, they ran to tell my master. He came to see me and immediately ordered the servants to strip off my clothes.
A short while later, Paris was struck by a famine, which led to a great rise in the cost of food. The city’s administrators were compelled to take a count of the number of people in each home, and, by order of the governor, to issue each person a small ration of bread to keep them from starving. The bakers all had lists of the members of each family, and someone representing the city authorities sat at every bakery, armed with a register of all the families and everyone’s name.
Later, when I went to Marseille, I witnessed the arrival of four galleys sent by His Holiness the pope. They were accompanied by barges loaded with wheat, as Marseille had experienced a famine even more severe than the one in Paris. It was so extreme that people were breaking into homes and stealing all the food they could find. The governor was forced to erect a gallows in every neighborhood, and station soldiers to put an end to breaking and entering.
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