the south of France, he managed to become a medical doctor on the strength of a speed-course at the famous Faculté de Montpellier: an intensive three-month course gave the medical degree providing one did not practice on French national territory. Liberated from his ties to France by the death of Gassendi in 1655, he set out on his twelve-year journey to the East, at 36 years of age: Palestine, Egypt, one year in Cairo, Arabia, and an attempt to enter Ethiopia which was frustrated by civil war in the interior. In 1658 he debarked at Surat in India, in Gujarat state. Attached at first and for a short while to the retinue of Dara Shikoh—the history of whose downfall he was to record. He worked as a personal doctor for Dara Shikoh. he was installed as a medical doctor at the court of Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughal emperors. A tour of inspection by Aurangzeb (1664–65) gave Bernier the opportunity to describe Kashmir, the first and for a long time the only European to do so. In: "Voyages de F. Bernier (angevin) contenant la description des Etats du Grand Mogol, de l'Indoustan, du royaume de Kachemire" (David-Paul Maret ed., Amsterdam, 1699). He subsequently visited the other extreme of the empire in Bengal. European medical training was highly esteemed amongst the Mughal and gave him access to all ranks of the court, even on medically required occasions to the Emperor's harem. After his return from Kashmir, he traveled around on his own, meeting with Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in Bengal and—while preparing for a journey to Persia at Surat—with Jean Chardin, that other great traveler in the Orient (1666). He returned once more to Surat (1668) to write a memoir on Indian commerce for the use of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (who recently had founded La Compagnie des Indes Orientales). In 1669 Bernier left India for Paris, to stay. In 1671 he almost was jailed for writing in defense of the ideas of René Descartes, against whom a judicial arrest had been issued—an exploit he followed with an "Abrégé de la Philosophie de Gassendi", also not a subject to arouse official approval (1674). Meanwhile, he was a favored guest at some of the great literary salons, for example that of Marguerite de la Sablière, who introduced him to Jean de La Fontaine; or at that of Ninon de Lenclos. (His much-debated 1684 essay