Gerboise: l’entrée du terme arabe gerbu’ à la cour de Louis XIV

It is well known among scholars that the term gerboise “jerboa” made it's entrance in standard French in 1712, thanks to Paul Lucas - Louis XIV's special envoy to Orient and Africa - who brought a couple of jerboas to Versailles in 1707. On reading and translating in depth the Vatican manuscript Sbath 254, where the Aleppian Hanna Diyab - Lucas' interpreter - annotated many events of their travels from Aleppo to Versailles, through North Africa, I found some new facts concerning this event in 2014. Comparing the version related by Lucas in his Voyage … with that of Hanna Diyab's travelogue Riḥla …, that may shed new light on the passage of the Arab term ǧerbūʿ to the French gerboise, and Louis XIV's Private life.