This paper examines the presence of Persian in printed French texts of the seventeenth-century. It focuses on a unique copy of Jean Thévenot’s third volume of his Relation d’un voyage (1684), which describes his travels to Mughal India. Held in the Rochegude Collection in Albi, France, this copy includes what appears to be authentic Persian documents—Shah ‘Abbas II’s seal, translated into French, and a handwritten letter. A note on the title page indicates that François Pétis de la Croix, King Louis XIV’s interpreter and owner of the book in 1692, added these documents to Thévenot’s text. This paper, thus, interrogates the inclusion, by a reader and peer familiar with Oriental languages, of Persian realia in a travelogue written in French and meant for a literate European audience who understood little Persian, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish. As the study of Persian emerged in France with the publication (in Amsterdam by the French Carmelite Ange de Saint Joseph) of the first Latin-Italian-Persian dictionary, what does the insertion of Arabic script and of Persian documents within a French text reveal about the knowledge and the exoticism of the Persian language and of Safavid Persia at the end of the seventeenth century? What do these additions say about the author of the Relation, his collaborators—printers and illustrators—, literary executors, and readers? What does the visual quality of the Arabic script in a French text add to or subtract from Thévenot’s overall literary, cultural, and political project? How does the text differ from previous travel narratives attempting to convey and translate languages written with an alphabet other than the Roman alphabet, and for which there was no movable type in France? To what extent are these political documents in Persian translated in the French travelogue under consideration and why? To what extent is the translation of Persian a tool of empire in de la Croix’s copy of Thévenot’s text? Are Thévenot and de la Croix themselves agents of empire? Following Laura Doyle’s approach of inter-imperiality, this paper examines how early modern Eurasian (Safavid, Mughal, and French) empires collide and meet through languages in print.