The Jesuit and the ‘false princess of China’: a contested exile narrative in 1690s Paris☆

Abstract This article examines the fabrication and contestation of a false exile narrative in early modern France. At its centre was Ina, a young woman found on the streets of Paris in the winter of 1692. Claiming to be a Chinese princess who had ended up penniless in France after a long sequence of misfortunes, she gained the attention of members of the Parisian elite but was subsequently shown to be a fraud by Louis Le Comte, a Jesuit and former missionary in China. Ina had refashioned herself as an exile, pretending to be abandoned in a foreign land, far from her home, family and culture. This was not normally a desirable situation, but in her case, ‘faking’ the status of a lonely royal exile was an innovative strategy through which certain tendencies of the late seventeenth‐century French elites – including religious impulses to charity and fascination with China – were leveraged to improve (temporarily) her standing in French society. However, the concurrence of her imposture with the intensification of the Chinese Rites controversy turned the debate over her authenticity into a proxy for a broader struggle over Jesuit expertise.