The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (French: Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse; also known in English as The Saragossa Manuscript) is a frame-tale novel written in French by the Polish Enlightenment author Count (1761–1815). It is narrated from the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and depicts events several decades earlier, during the reign of King Philip V (r. 1700–24, 1724–46).

The novel was adapted into a 1965 Polish-language film, The Saragossa Manuscript (Polish: Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie), by director Wojciech Has, with Zbigniew Cybulski as Alfonse van Worden.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa collects intertwining stories, all of them set in whole or in part in Spain, with a large and colorful cast of Gypsies, thieves, inquisitors, a cabbalist, a geometer, the cabbalist's beautiful sister, two Moorish princesses (Emina and Zubeida) and others that the brave, perhaps foolhardy, Walloon Guard Alphonse van Worden meets, imagines or reads about in the Sierra Morena mountains of 18th-century Spain while en route to Madrid. Recounted to the narrator over the course of sixty-six days, the novel's stories quickly overshadow van Worden's frame story. The bulk of the stories revolve around the Gypsy chief Avadoro, whose story becomes a frame story itself. Eventually the narrative focus moves again toward van Worden's frame story and a conspiracy involving an underground — or perhaps entirely hallucinated — Muslim society, revealing the connections and correspondences between the hundred or so stories told over the novel's sixty-six days.

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