[FN#7] These four (supplemental) vols. of the Cabinet des Fees (printed in 1793, though antedated 1788 and 1789) do not form the first edition of Chavis and Cazotte’s so-called Sequel, which was in 1793 added, by way of supplement, to the Cabinet des Fees, having been first published in 1788 (two years after the completion-in thirty-seven volumes-of that great storehouse of supernatural fiction) under the title of “Les Veillees Persanes” or “Les Veillees du Sultan Schahriar avec la Sultane Scheherazade, histoires incroyables, amusantes et morales, traduites par M. Cazotte et D. Chavis, faisant suite aux Mille et Une Nuits.”

[FN#8] I cannot agree with my friend Sir R. F. Burton in his estimate of these tales, which seem to me, even in Caussin de Perceval’s corrector rendering and in his own brilliant and masterly version, very inferior, in style, conduct and diction, to those of “the old Arabian Nights,” whilst I think “Chavis and Cazotte’s Continuation” utterly unworthy of republication, whether in part or “in its entirety.”  Indeed, I confess the latter version seems to me so curiously and perversely and unutterably bad that I cannot conceive how Cazotte can have perpetrated it and can only regard it as a bad joke on his part.  As Caussin de Perceval remarks, it is evident that Shawish (whether from ignorance or carelessness) must, in many instances, have utterly misled his French coadjutor (who had no knowledge of Arabic) as to the meaning of the original, whilst it is much to be regretted that a writer of exquisite genius and one of the first stylists of the 18th century, such as the author of the Diable Amoureux, (a masterpiece to be ranked with Manon Lescaut and Le Neveu de Rameau,) should have stooped to the commission of the flagrant offences against good taste and artistic morality which disfigure well nigh every line of the so-called “Sequel to the 1001 Nights.”  “Far be it” (as the Arabs say) that we should do so cruel a wrong to so well and justly beloved a memory as that of Jacques Cazotte as to attempt to perpetuate the remembrance of a literary crime which one can hardly believe him to have committed in sober earnest!  Rather let us seek to bury in oblivion this his one offence and suffer kind Lethe with its beneficent waters to wash this “adulterous blot " from his else unsullied name.

[FN#9] Lit.  “Servants” (ibad) i.e. of God.

[FN#10] i.e. he who most stands in need of God’s mercy.

[FN#11] Kebikej is the name of the genie set over the insect kingdom.  Scribes occasionally invoke him to preserve their manuscripts from worms.-Note by M. Zotenberg.

[FN#12] Galland calls him “Hanna, c’est ... dire Jean Baptiste,” the Arabic Christian equivalent of which is Youhenna and the Muslim Yehya, “surnomme Diab.”  Diary, October 25, 1709.

[FN#13] At this date Galland had already published the first six (of twelve) volumes of his translation (1704-5) and as far as I can ascertain, in the absence of a reference copy (the British Museum possessing no copy of the original edition), the 7th and 8th volumes were either published or in the press.  Vol. viii. was certainly published before the end of the year 1709, by which time the whole of vol. ix. was ready for printing.