The Chinese princess is usually named Badoura in English editions of The Thousand and One Nights but this volume is a French book which reprints the art that Edmund Dulac created for a retelling of the story by Laurence Housman published in 1913. The English edition was itself a recycled volume, expanded from an earlier Housman/Dulac collection, Stories from the Arabian Nights (1907). The story itself reads like an odd mirroring of some of the versions of Aladdin which end with the triumphant hero marrying a Chinese princess named Badroulbadour. The male character in Princess Badoura is Camaralzaman, the shy son of an Arabian king whose repudiation of women causes his father to throw him into a dungeon. As in Aladdin, a genie helps engineer events to bring the story to a happy resolution.
Some of the art may be recycled but the book design is better than the English editions, with gold frames embracing the tipped-in colour plates. The paintings are consequently reduced in size but this doesn’t harm them too much. One thing the book doesn’t contain is any clue to the writer of the text. I’d guess it was a translation of the Housman version but it could equally be a French retelling taken from another edition altogether.
