Les Mille et un jours, contes persans (English: The Thousand and One Days: Persian Tales) is a short story collection with Middle Eastern settings published between the years 1710 and 1712 by the French orientalist François Pétis de la Croix, probably with unacknowledged help from Alain-René Lesage.
Though the stories were for the most part adapted very freely from a 15th-century Turkish collection called Ferec baʿde şidde ("Relief After Hardship"), in its structure it is modelled on Antoine Galland's Les Mille et une nuits (The Thousand and One Nights), whose immense success it was intended to share.
In fact, this whole account was a tissue of lies, not the least of which was the title of Moclès' supposed translation, which Pétis invented and adopted for his own work in an attempt to cash in on the huge success of Antoine Galland's French version of Les Mille et une nuits (1704–1717).
[4] It is widely agreed (though not by Paul Sebag, Les Mille et un jours' most recent editor) that the writer Alain-René Lesage polished up the prose of Pétis' work before publication, though he was not credited for this in the book itself.
[4]If the framework harks back to Les Mille et une nuits, the constituent tales draw to some extent on various Persian sources,[8] but to a much greater one on a 15th-century Turkish collection called Ferec baʿde şidde ("Relief After Hardship"),[9] which was available to him in a copy brought to the West by Galland in 1679.
[11] Such a cavalier approach to source-material was not unprecedented: Pétis had learned it from Galland's treatment of the Arabic tales which figure in Les Mille et une nuits, and in both works it creates for the reader the impression that he is being immersed in authentic Asiatic folklore.
Alain-René Lesage, who may well have been employed to improve the style of Les Mille et un jours, made use of several of its stories in his own comic plays and in his picaresque novel Gil Blas,[15] as did Charles Collé in his libretto to Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny's opera L'île sonnante (1767–68).