of the Orient where only death would follow monotonous life? . . . I felt totally forsaken. I belonged to a nation that had no music to express swelling emotions and agonized feelings." Lebanon In Lebanon, Francophilia is very common among the Christian Maronites who have since the 19th century viewed the French as their "guardian angels", their special protectors and friends in their struggles against the Muslims. In 1860, the French intervened to put a stop to the massacres of the Maronites by the Muslims and the Druze which were being permitted by the Ottoman authorities, earning them the lasting thanks of the Maronites. Starting in the 19th century, much of the Maronite elite was educated at Jesuit schools in France, making the Maronites one of the most ardently Francophile groups in the Ottoman Empire. The Lebanese writer Charles Corm in a series of poems in French published after World War I portrayed the Lebanese as a "Phoenician" people whose Christianity and Francophilia made them part of the West and who had nothing to do either with the Arabs or Islam. Ottoman Empire Orientalism first arose in Early Modern France with Guillaume Postel and the French Embassy to the court of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Later, when Mehmed IV sent the ambassador Müteferrika Süleyman Ağa to the court of Louis XIV in 1669, it caused a sensation that triggered the Turquerie fashion craze in France and then the rest of Western Europe, which lasted until well into the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire granted France special privileges on account of the Franco-Ottoman alliance. French mercantilism was protected, French subjects were exempt from the taxes and tributes normally required of Christian residents of the Empire, no French subjects could be taken into Ottoman slavery and French subjects were granted full freedom of worship. Thus, France became the unofficial protector of all Catholics in the East. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, French influence increased in Anatolia and the Middle East, and the French language and customs penetrated deep into the Ottoman learned classes and aristocracy; French was the preferred second language, rich Ottomans sent their children to school and universities in France and the Western "Enlightenment" was associated with French culture. Modern Turkish continues to have many French loanwords that were adopted in this period, and 5,350 Turkish words are of French origin, according to the Turkish