[From the first paragraph:]

Nineteenth-century literature, especially French “exotic” literature, contains many helpful references to the sorts of instruments and sounds that composers of the period were trying to reintroduce or re-create in their own works in the “Ancient Oriental” genre. Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô and Hector Berlioz’s epic opera Les Troyens, works that are exactly contemporaneous, provide one example of this aesthetic parallel. Later in the century, a similarity may also be demonstrated between the instruments mentioned in Pierre Louÿs’ Aphrodite and the delicate sound world which Claude Debussy strove to evoke in his compositions, including the Prélude à “l’après-midi d’un faune” and Les Chansons de Bilitis, the latter consisting of musical interludes inserted into a sequence of prose poems by Louÿs.