[The three lives of the Count de Bonneval, alias Osman Pasha (1675-1747)]

Count Claude-Alexandre de Bonneval (1675-1747), had a unusual existence: he had three consecutive lives: as an Officer in the Royal Guard of Louis XIV, as Major-General with Prince Emmanuel of Savoy and, finally, as Ottoman Pasha in Constantinople. He was a man of multiple facets: soldier and political adviser, swordsman and world traveller, friend of Casanova, Fenelon, Montesquieu and Leibniz. He was also an inveterate transgressor of every rule and, in the end, a renegade apostate. Many explanations have been offered for his astounding life: plain aristocratic frivolity, emotional instability, and possibly, in reference to a permanent quest for new adventures, countries or religions, a touch of transformism. Obviously, Bonneval concealed, behind a flamboyant personality, some sort of psychiatric fragility which might suggest, in retrospect, a "paranoid syndrome" but, certainly, no trace of what is common in psychopathic patients, a weariness of life. Bonneval loved each one of his three lives and the feeling was mutual.