La Chine dans L’Interdiction de Balzac

Why did the author of L’Interdiction make the Marquis d’Espard a sinologist? Is it because of his father’s taste for chinoiserie or because Balzac dreamed of publishing a Histoire pittoresque de la France? The real reason seems to be more literary. In the works of French missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that Balzac read as a boy, we can find the ideas and images the novelist used to create the characters of d’Espard and Popinot.