The Abyssinian

A glittering historical romance in the tradition of Corelli's Mandolin, in which a young French physician braves the wilds of Abyssinia to cure its king, then returns to France on an equally perilous mission to the court at Versailles. The beginning of this story is a curious fact: In the year 1699, Louis XIV of France sent an embassy to the most mysterious and fabled of oriental sovereigns, the Negus of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). Louis's hope was to lure that country, Christian for centuries, into the political and religious orbit of France. Jean-Baptiste Poncet, gifted apothecary/physician to the pashas of Cairo, is the hero of this baroque and poetic epic that leads through the deserts of Egypt and Sinai and the mountains of Abyssinia to the court of the Negus, thence to Versailles and back again. Along the way he falls madly in love with the French consul's daughter and deals with the intrigues of his fanatical Jesuit traveling companions. Friendship, humor, love, and discovery are the elements of this gorgeous adventure, but there is a more serious theme as well. Poncet discovers the splendors of a great empire and civilization, and, thanks to him, Ethiopia will escape foreign conquest and preserve its fierce pride and mystery into our own times. The Abyssinian has been translated into a dozen languages.