Pierre Loti found it incompatible with the publication of the 1896 edition of the Three Ladies of the Kasbah, which, like the previous "separate editions" of this news, is truncated by its dialogue between Loti and Plumkett, which framed the new In the collection Fleurs d'ennui . Now, as Loti wrote to his publisher in 1896: "The Epilogue of Plumkett seems to me indispensable to maintain, as it is in Fleurs d'ennui , it is absolutely necessary to explain the incoherence of the" History and judge as it deserves this mocking morality. If one suppresses the Epilogue Plumkett, morality remains simply idiotic. "

It is therefore the true meaning of the novel which, since its first separate publication in 1884, has been distorted, the publisher not having understood the importance of the character of Plumkett.

This second narrator establishes, by his sarcastic conclusion, a distancing of the narrative and its apparent naivete. He contributes to the construction of this character of "Pierre Loti" that Julien Viaud exposes, not as a pseudonym, but as a true independent character-narrator who is only partially confused with his model through what he calls himself " 'About the legend'.
Similarly, H. Plumkett, who signed with Pierre Loti the collection of new "Fleurs d'ennui", is at the same time one of the main characters of Aziyade and the marriage of Loti and the fictional avatar of Lucien Jousselin. A naval officer and writer, he was a great friend and literary advisor to Loti, and participated in his literary tricks, like that letter which was to be at the head of Loti Aziyade's first novel, written by Jousselin, but addressed by William Brown to Plumkett: "Loti is dead. Loti left the dark earth where he had so madly burned his life ... "
Considering that "if one suppresses the Epilogue Plumkett, morality remains merely idiotic," Loti removes, however, what was original in the original epilogue (in Fleurs d'ennui).
His manuscript additions, on the contrary, mark his withdrawal from the narrative. Loti appropriates the morality of this "Eastern tale" by introducing it from this unpublished assertion: "There is a morality, Plumkett, which I am going to take care to deduce myself and to put before your eyes, because You are not very thin. "And concludes the short story about Plumkett's criticism of the storyteller, with Allah, of the tale:" I had perfectly foreseen that your tale would have neither tail nor head (...) I do not reproach you one writes like can. It would be unreasonable to require that you should follow in your narratives, without having any ideas. "
For this reason, Loti reproaches his editor for "cutting into a work that takes place without taking the opinion of the author" appropriates the intervention of Plumkett, no longer as a presence potache, trace of writing In four hands of a collection of short stories, but as a key to the reading of the new and with it of the entire work that precedes it.
Thus, on the horizon of this "Oriental tale," reported by "Pierre Loti" and criticized by "Plumkett," the manuscript modifications of the true author may reveal the presence of a terra inognita, that of a writer who, Invents as much as he tells himself: Julien Viaud.