Notes. Title page. The "C·L" monogram and the circular library stamp over it are not part of the printed text and have been left out of the transcription. "Voyage" is rendered here as "Journey"; it is also commonly translated "Travels in Palestine." Michel Lévy Frères, founded in Paris in 1836, became one of the foremost French publishing houses of the 19th century, issuing Balzac, Hugo, Sand, Flaubert, and Baudelaire. After Michel Lévy died in 1875 his brother Calmann took over and renamed the firm Calmann-Lévy — hence "ancienne maison Michel Lévy frères" on this 1884 title page. It still publishes today (part of the Hachette group since 1993), among the oldest houses in France. The author, Gabriel Charmes (Aurillac 1850 – Paris 1886), was a French journalist who specialized in foreign affairs. He entered the influential Journal des Débats in 1872 through his elder brother Francis Charmes — himself a prominent journalist and a future member of the Académie française — and went on to write widely on the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa: Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and Tripolitania, and the Near-Eastern journeys behind this book. (He is also remembered as a champion of the "Jeune École" naval doctrine, which favored cheap torpedo boats over costly battleships.) Charmes traveled the Levant in the years around 1880 and died of tuberculosis in 1886 at just 35, so Voyage en Palestine (1884) belongs to the last years of a short, prolific life. The two titles on the facing "du même auteur" page — L'Avenir de la Turquie and La Tunisie et la Tripolitaine — place this volume within his series of books on the politics and travel of the Ottoman and Mediterranean world.