Kung-fu Hillbilly wrote: ↑Sun Aug 04, 2019 7:26 am
Alfred Raquez (right) at the Colonial Exhibition in Marseille in 1906

William L Gibson and Paul Bruthiaux
May 2019

Raquez gives particular emphasis to Norodom’s “harem”, which numbered in the hundreds, a point of fascination for European readers.

Raquez travelled constantly during his eight years in Southeast Asia and left descriptions of every place he visited, from major entrepôts like Singapore and Bangkok to small towns like Lao Cai and Muang Sing, often published in periodicals affiliated with the French Parti Colonial, both in Paris and in Hanoi.

After his death in 1907, it was revealed that Raquez was the pseudonym of Joseph Gervais, a disgraced lawyer who abandoned his wife and three children when he fled France in 1898 after he was declared bankrupt as a result of running a Ponzi scheme and stealing money from a lay Catholic organisation he had helped to found.

Raquez visited Phnom Penh often and occasionally wrote about those experiences in now neglected descriptions of the city. His earliest sketches date from his first visit in June 1898, not long after he first materialised in Indochina, in the Mekong Delta town of My Tho, seemingly out of thin air.

At its best, Raquez’s style is remarkably modern, often concisely written in single-sentence paragraphs that show him keeping a sharp eye for the telling detail and mostly free of the lurid piling up of details or sentimental formulas of his contemporaries.

The screening in Phnom Penh in June 1898, most likely the first films ever shown in Cambodia, was an event so unusual as to merit a brief mention in the “Faits Divers” section of Le Courrier de Saigon of 22 June, which notes that the “highlight of the evening was the cinematograph”.

full https://mekongreview.com/alfred-raquez/