At an early age, de la Croix was sent by Jean-Baptiste Colbert to the Middle East; during the ten years he spent in Syria, Persia and Turkey he learned Arabic, Persian and Turkish and collected materials which he would use in future writings.
From a short description of his stay we learn of his deep interest in the manners of the "dervish":Having worked six full months on the Shahnama, together with Mulla Kerim, the extreme dedication made me fall into an illness lasting two months – on the brink of death – from which I hardly recovered to find that notwithstanding the twenty volumes of books I had read, I did not yet know the registers of the court, the patents of the king or the rules of the merchants (...) I still had to learn from a certain theological and very difficult book called Masnavi (comprising at least 90,000 verses – the good people of the country have it that it contains the Philosopher's stone).
[3][better source needed]In the same description, Pétis de la Croix tells of a prank played on him by his Agha who during a visit to a Bektashi convent caused him to pose as a shaykh: I said them the fatha (first sura of the Qur'an) over the meat with the usual movements; after the meal I read extensively from the Qur'an and I chose the chapters dealing with morals and not with Mahomet which I explained according to the commentaries I had read.
I also clarified some difficulties they had (...) of course my Agha could not help making a mockery of this; he almost choked laughing and told everyone I had come all the way from France to teach the Asian Muslims the Qur'an.Despite the flourishing of Orientalism in France in the 17th century, and despite the fact that Antoine Galland, Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville and François Pétis de la Croix at one time frequented the Wednesday afternoon discussions – les Mercuriales – of Gilles Ménage together, little has remained of the explicit and detailed references to the Masnavi or Sufism in general one could have expected from Pétis de la Croix – or François Bernier for that matter.
He conducted the negotiations with Tunis and Tripoli in 1685, and those with Morocco in 1687; and in 1692 he was ultimately rewarded with an appointment to the Arabic chair in the Collège de France, which he held until his death in 1713.
The book's publisher Barbin asked Alain-René Lesage to rework de la Croix's translations into marketable French.
[1] His best-known work is his French translation of Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi's Zafarnama, which was published after Pétis de la Croix's death (4 vols., Paris, 1722; Eng.