The novelist and critic Louis Bertrand had written a letter of introduction for her to René Doumic, the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, who shortly after published five of her short stories.[1] Subsequently, her first novel, Saada the Moroccan was published by Plon, a Parisian publishing house, using for the first time her pseudonym, Elissa Rhaïs.[2] Saada the Moroccan was a bestseller, eventually running to twenty-six editions.[2] From this time, Rhaïs began to present herself as a Muslim woman who had escaped from a harem, but how instrumental she was in this new persona's construction, or indeed whether she wrote the book and the others that followed at all, has been questioned.[4] It has been suggested that her new identity was created as marketing ploy orchestrated by Louis Bertrand and René Doumic; alternatively that it was an invention of Rhaïs herself.[5]