Théophile Gautier

Constantinople (1852)

Part I: Malta, Syra, Smyrna, The Troad, The Dardanelles

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Translator’s Introduction.
Chapter 1: At Sea.
Chapter 2: Malta.
Chapter 3: Syra (Syros).
Chapter 4: Smyrna (Izmir).
Chapter 5: The Troad, The Dardanelles.

Translator’s Introduction

Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was born in Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrénées region of south-west France, his family moving to Paris in 1814. He was a friend, at school, of the poet Gérard de Nerval, who introduced him to Victor Hugo. Gautier contributed to various journals, including La Presse, throughout his life, which offered opportunities for travel in Spain, Algeria, Italy, Russia, and Egypt. He was a devotee of the ballet, writing a number of scenarios including that of Giselle. At the time of the 1848 Revolution, he expressed strong support for the ideals of the second Republic, a support which he maintained for the rest of his life.

A successor to the first wave of Romantic writers, including Chateaubriand and Lamartine, he directed the Revue de Paris from 1851 to 1856, worked as a journalist for La Presse and Le Moniteur universel, and in 1856 became editor of L’Artiste, in which he published numerous editorials asserting his doctrine of ‘Art for art’s sake’. Saint-Beuve secured him critical acclaim; he became chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1862, and in 1868 was granted the sinecure of librarian to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Napoleon III, having been introduced to her salon.

Gautier remained in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the aftermath of the 1871 Commune, dying of heart disease at the age of sixty-one in 1872.

Though ostensibly a Romantic poet, Gautier may be seen as a forerunner to, or point of reference for, a number of divergent poetic movements including Symbolism and Modernism.

In June of 1852, Gautier travelled to Constantinople, where his common-law wife Ernesta Grisi, an opera singer, and the sister of Carlotta Grisi, the ballet-dancer, was on tour. Estelle, the younger daughter of Theophile and Ernesta, who was four years old, was also there with her mother. It was not the happiest of sojourns, the tour went badly, and Gautier was in financial difficulty. His guide to the city was Oscar Marinitsch, a French-speaking Levantine who had previously accompanied Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp in their travels in the Levant in 1850. Gautier, Ernesta and Estelle returned to France, via Athens and Venice, at the end of September.

This enhanced translation has been designed to offer maximum compatibility with current search engines. Among other modifications, the proper names of people and places, and the titles given to works of art, have been fully researched, modernised, and expanded; comments in parentheses have been added here and there to provide a reference, or clarify meaning; and minor typographic or factual errors, for example incorrect attributions and dates, in the original text, have been eliminated from this new translation.

Map of the Mediterranean, and Turkish Empire - Thomas Allom (English, 1804-1872)

Map of the Mediterranean, and Turkish Empire

Chapter 1: At Sea

‘Those who have drunk, will drink more,’ the proverb declares. One could slightly modify the formula, and say with no less accuracy: ‘Those who have travelled, will travel more.’ The thirst for seeing, like the former, is irritated not quenched by being indulged. Here I am in Constantinople, and already I dream of Cairo and Egypt. My visits to Spain, Italy, North Africa, England, Belgium, Holland, parts of Germany and Switzerland, the Greek isles, and to sundry Scales (ports where the French had trading privileges) on the coast of Asia-Minor, at several times and on various occasions, have only increased my desire for cosmopolitan vagabondage. Travel may prove a dangerous element in our life, since it disturbs us deeply and, if some circumstance or duty prevents our departure, stirs an anxiety similar to that of caged birds when the time for migration arrives. We know we are about to expose ourselves to fatigue, privation, trouble, even peril; it pains us to renounce dearly-loved habits of mind and heart, to leave our family, our friends, our relations for the unknown, and yet we feel that it is impossible to stay, while those who love us refrain from detaining us, and silently shake our hand on the steps of the carriage. Indeed, should we not travel a little on this planet, as it orbits through the immensity of space, until the mysterious author of all transports us to some new world so that we might read another page of his infinite work? Is it not culpable laziness to re-read the same sentences without ever turning the page? What poet would be satisfied to see the reader repeat only a single one of his stanzas? So, every year, unless I am nailed to the spot by the most pressing necessity, I traverse some country in this vast world that seems lessened to me as I travel through it, as it emerges from the vague cosmography of the imagination. Without visiting the Holy Sepulchre specifically, or Santiago de Compostela, or Mecca, I nonetheless make a pious pilgrimage to those places on earth whose beauty renders divinity more visible; on this occasion I will view Turkey, Greece, and a little of that Hellenic Asia where beauty of form unites with Oriental splendour. But let me end this short preface here (the shorter the better), and set out without further delay.

Were I Chinese or Indian, and had just arrived from Nanking or Calcutta, I would describe with care and prolixity the road from Paris to Marseille, the railway to Châlons, the Saône, the Rhone, and Avignon, but you know them as well as I do, and besides, to view a country, one must be a foreigner: contrast offers material for a writer. Who, of the French, would note that in France men give women their arm, a peculiarity which astonishes an inhabitant of the Celestial Empire? Suppose then, that with scarcely a transition, I am in Marseille, and that the Léonidas is about to steam on its way to Constantinople (Istanbul). The South has already declared itself in its cheerful sun which warms the flagstones, and sets hundreds of exotic birds chirping in the cages displayed in the shop-windows of two traders in creatures: macaws rattle through their repertoire with delight, Bengali finches flap their wings, believing themselves at home; marmosets gambol lightly, scratch their armpits, gaze at you with well-nigh human eyes, and extend their little cool hands to you in a friendly manner through the bars, heedless as yet of the consumption that will make them cough beneath their cotton wool covers in cold Parisian salons; even dull tortoises have no difficulty reviving in the invigorating rays; in a mere forty hours I have passed from torrential rain to a sky of the purest blue. I have left winter behind, and embraced a summer ardent and splendid; I wish for an ice-cream; the idea would have made me shiver the day before yesterday on the Boulevard de Gand (Boulevard des Italiens, Paris); I enter the Café Turc (on the corner of La Cannebière and Rue Beauvau, Marseille, opened in 1850). I owe it to myself, since I am leaving for Constantinople; a very beautiful café, indeed. However, I would not mention it, despite its luxurious mirrors, gilding, columns and arches, were it not for a charming room on the mezzanine floor, decorated exclusively with paintings by artists from Marseille: it is a most curious and interesting local museum. The woodwork is divided into panels representing various subjects according to the painter’s fancy. Émile Loubon, whose landscapes dusted with sunlight and depicting vast herds traversing pumice-stone terrain, were admired in Paris, has painted his masterpiece here, and what a masterpiece; a Descent of Buffaloes through a ravine on the outskirts of some city in Africa. The light burns the white earth on which are projected the blue deformed shadows of the foreshortened cattle, who follow the slope, knock-kneed hips swaying, raising their shiny slobbering muzzles to sniff the torrid air; the latecomers urged on by the goad of a haggard, savage and swarthy shepherd. In the background, the chalk-white walls of a city, against an indigo sky, form the horizon. It is strong, free, and open. Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps could do no better. Germain-Fabius Brest, who exhibited a beautiful forest scene at the Salon two years ago, has painted a pair of landscapes charming in their use of colour, delightful products of the imagination: the one, shows a pond, in the midst of a grove of exotic trees reflected in its slumbering waters, on the edge of which are stationed, on their slim legs, phoenicoptera with pink wings (red-winged Pytilia), watching for the passage of a fish or a frog. The other, a path through parkland with an architectural foreground, a flight of steps with columns and balustrades, down which ladies and lords descend, awaited by horses held by servants. To highlight the name of the café, Eugène Lagier has represented a Turk taking a kief (resting) after smoking opium or hashish, and gazing at a crowd of houris, in a bluish mist, who are infinitely more seductive than those of Henri-Frédéric Schopin’s Paradise of Mahomet. There is also a kind of Oriental Conversation, by François Reynaud, the figures in bright, capricious costumes, which is set in front of a white wall half draped in a mantle of greenery and flowers in superb tones, and seascapes by an artist whose name unfortunately escapes me at this instant, but which are most remarkable and could well hang beside those of Jean-Baptiste Isabey, Henri Durand-Brager, Théodore Gudin and Wilhelm Melby. His name, which eluded me while writing the previous line I now recall, by one of those inexplicable oddities of memory; it is Landais (Paul-Louis Bouillon Landais), such is that skilled painter called. I must not not forget two landscapes by Jules-Édouard Magy, solidly drawn and robust in tone, interspersed with animals the like of which Filipo Palizzi would not disavow. It would be desirable if the paintings in this Marseille gallery, lost in the depths of a café, were lithographed and the results published. This example of artful and intelligent decoration should be followed in Paris, where stupidly luxurious mirrors, gilding, and fabrics, are somewhat overdone.

You have doubtless read Joseph Méry’s witty comments regarding Marseille’s sad deterioration and the pitiful state of its fountains, that by means of their architecture seek to make one forget their lack of water. The work of diverting the Durance is finished, and each country-house now boasts a basin and a fountain. There are some which extend their conceit to the point of displaying a waterfall. Marseille will soon be surrounded by a host of miniature parks like those of Versailles, Marly and Saint-Cloud; before long, I fear, this magnificent terrain scorched with light, these beautiful rocks the colour of cork or toast, will be covered with vegetation, and a mass of spinach-green, the joy of owners and the terror of landscapers, will make this sparkling aridity disappear.

The anchor is raised; the paddle-wheels strike the water; we are free of the port; we are voyaging along steep, bare, crumbling coasts, similar to those on the far side of the Mediterranean. Has any other traveller noted that Marseille and its environs seem much more ‘of the South’ than their latitude would appear to suggest. They possess an air of African harshness, seem as hot as Algeria, and the physiognomy of the South is outlined here in a violent manner. Countries situated two or three hundred leagues further south often have a more northerly appearance. These rocks, scored with ravines, whose base plunges into a sea of the darkest blue, sometimes open to allow a glimpse of a distant city surrounded by bastides (fortified towns) which speckle the countryside with a myriad of white dots.

Here and there, we encounter ships with billowing sails, heading towards the port, at which they hope to arrive before nightfall; then all is solitude, the coast vanishes into the distance, the swell of the open sea is apparent; nothing can be seen but sky and water. A few light whitecaps flake the blue pastures of the sea. An ancient poet might have beheld Proteus (a shape-shifting sea god in Greek mythology) herding his flocks there. The sun, unaccompanied by clouds, sinks in the west like a red cannonball, seeming to emit steam as it enters the water. Night falls, without a moon; a salty dew falls on the deck and penetrates clothes with its acrid humidity; cigars slowly turn to ashes, sucked at by lips to which nausea rises at the first slight pitching of the vessel. The passengers retire one by one to accommodate themselves as best they can in the drawers that serve them as beds. Though rocked by the waves more steadily than a child ever was by his nurse, one sleeps no better for it, while one experiences extravagant dreams interrupted by the ship’s bell which strikes the hour, and marks the quarters, for the crew.

At dawn we are on our feet; nothing to see yet but the circle, seven or eight miles in diameter, of which the ship is the centre, which moves with it, and which we consent to call the vast deep, and designate as an image of infinity, I know not why, as the horizon one views from the summit of the smallest tower, or the most commonplace mountain is a hundred times vaster.

It is plain daylight, and to the left the captain points out an island, which is Corsica. I can see, even with binoculars, nothing but a light mist barely discernible against the pale hue of the morning sky. The captain is right. The boat advances: the greyish vapour condenses, hardens; mountains undulate, highlighted in places, yellow touches mark the bare escarpments, blackish patches, forests, and rocks covered with vegetation. Over there to the north, towards that headland, must be Isola Rossa; further on, that chalky whiteness which merges with the land, is Ajaccio. But we pass too far offshore to discern any details, which annoys me greatly. Thus, we rub shoulders all day long but at a distance with that wild and vigorous Corsica, possessed of its poetically ferocious customs and eternal vendettas, which progress will soon render similar to a suburb of Paris, Pantin perhaps or Batignolles. - This would perhaps be the moment to pen a brilliant piece on Napoleon; but I prefer to avoid that ready commonplace, and limit myself to remarking, in passing, the influence that islands had on the destiny of the hero, already almost a man of fable whose legend we see forming before our eyes: an island bears him; fallen from grace, he quits an island, and dies on an island, slain by an island; he rises from the sea, and plunges back into it once more. What myth will the future found on this, when the fleeting reality has vanished, yielding the eternal poem? But we pass the Seven Monks (the Lavezzi Isles), a line of rocky reefs with the appearance of hooded Capuchins; we approach the narrow passage which separates Corsica from Sardinia on the Bonifaccio side.

‘Greece, we know too well, Sardinia, we ignore.’

(See Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Feuilles d’Automne’: XXVII)

An extremely narrow channel divides the two islands, which must have been one before some diluvian cataclysm and volcanic upheaval parted them; the shore of each is distinctly visible: the hills are mountainous and quite steep, but lacking in character; a few scattered houses with yellow walls and tiled roofs dot the shore, which otherwise seems that of a desert island, since no trace of cultivation can be seen; two or three boats with lateen sails flutter like seagulls from one coast to the other.

On the Sardinian side, the main curiosity of the place is pointed out to me, a bizarre aggregation of rocks on the summit of a hill, whose outline, in its angles and sinuosities, has the shape of a gigantic polar bear; I can distinguish, without feigning to, as is frequently necessary with these kinds of prodigies, the spine, legs, and elongated head of the creature: the bearing, the stride, the colour, everything is there. As we approach, the profile is lost, shapes merge or present themselves unfavourably to the eye. The bear turns to a rock again. The passage is traversed. We will follow the entire length of the Sardinian coast that faces Italy, as during the day we have skirted the coast of Corsica facing France. Unfortunately, night is falling, and we will be deprived of the spectacle; Sardinia will pass by like a dream in the shadows. I know of nothing in the world more annoying than to traverse at night a scene one has long desired to view. These misadventures happen frequently, now that the traveller is only an appendage to the journey, and human beings are subjected like inert objects to their means of transport.

On waking, the empty sea is a harsh blue, making the sky seem pale. A few porpoises play in the wake of the ship, swimming with a speed that outstrips the steamboat and seems to defy it; they chase each other, leap above one another, and pass amidst the prow’s foam, then linger behind and vanish after performing a few somersaults. - To starboard of the ship, at some distance, an enormous creature of leaden colour appears, armed with a dorsal fin blackish and pointed like a needle. It dives and fails to reappear: such are, with the distant sight of three or four sails pursuing their route in various directions, the only events of the day. The weather is quite cool; the jib and foremast sails are hoisted, which accelerate our progress by a few knots. In the evening, the island of Marettimo is sighted, off one of the points of that island which the ancients named Trinacria, from its shape, and which is now called Sicily. We shall pass, in the dark once more, this ancient and picturesque shore, and tomorrow, in daylight, will reach Malta.

At around two in the afternoon, below a band of striped cloud, I discern a slightly opaquer streak; it is the island of Gozo. Soon the silhouette is more clearly defined. Huge sheer cliffs, at the foot of which the sea boils tumultuously, rise from the depths of the water, like the summit of a mountain drowned at its base; it is said that these great white rocks can be followed with the eye for several hundred feet beneath the transparent azure by which they are bathed, which produces a somewhat fearful effect for those who skim them in a frail boat, like to hanging above an abyss. Along these escarpments like the walls of a fortress, fishermen suspended from ropes, in the manner of Italians whitewashing their houses, cast their lines, and take their catch. The breaking of a rope, a badly-tied knot, would send them plunging to the bed of the sea. - We advance; slightly less abrupt undulations allow a degree of cultivation: small stone walls, which from a distance look like lines drawn in ink on a topographical map, enclose and separate the fields; the clouds have vanished; a beautiful warm glow gilds the land with a mantle of gold. A pile of white Spanish loaves, a few with rounded domes, beneath a blinding sun, powder the top of a hill or rather a mountain. This is Rabat (Victoria), the island’s capital. The main curiosities of Gozo are the caves in the sea-cliffs, round the entrances to which swirl clouds of aquatic birds that nest there; a reef, on which grows a particular species of highly esteemed mushrooms, the monopoly over which the Knights of Malta held; and the Saltworks of the Clockmaker, a bizarre hydraulic phenomenon, of which the following is a brief explanation. A Maltese clockmaker (Stiefnu l-Arloġġier), having had the idea of creating a saltworks near Żebbuġ, where he owned land close to the shore, had the rock dug out to evaporate the salt water; but the sea, undermining the works, leapt from this well like a waterspout, or like one of those Icelandic geysers, to a height of more than sixty feet, and nearly drowned all the fields about. The opening was stoppered with great difficulty, and from time to time this marine volcano tries to erupt. I have not seen the Clockmaker’s Saltworks. I am simply relating what I have been told.

Gozo and Malta are separated in the same manner as Corsica and Sardinia; a narrow channel parts them, and in primitive times they too must have formed a single island. The aspect of the coast of Malta is similar to that of Gozo: evidently a continuation of the same rock, and the same terrain, the geological stratifications continuing from one island to the other.

The weather is greatly altered since yesterday; the sky acquiring ultramarine tones. The burning breath of neighbouring Africa is apparent. Malta produces oranges; the Indian fig tree and the aloe thrive there; I can see the fortifications of the city of Valetta, marked by two windmills each in the form of a tower with eight sails forming a circle, an odd arrangement common to the whole of the Orient, and it would be worth Charles Hoguet, our Raphael of windmills, making a special trip here, so original are the sails, like the spokes of a rimless wheel. The water turns from blue to green as it approaches the land; we round Dragut Point (Tigné Point). The steamboat makes a half-turn and enters the port’s narrows, passing Fort St. Elmo and Fort Ricasoli.

The fortifications, with their precise angles and sharp edges, lit by a splendid sun, stand out almost geometrically between the dark blue of the sky, and the raw green of the sea. The smallest details of the shore stand out clearly: to the left rises an obelisk in memory of Captain Sir Robert Cavendish Spencer, and the spires of Città Vittoriosa (Burgo) and the town of Senglea, stand forth; to the right, the city of Valetta is arranged in tiers like an amphitheatre; the port, which bears the local name of Marse, extends into the land as a bifurcated notch like the northern end of the Red Sea; English vessels, Sardinian, Neapolitan, Greek, ships of all nations, are at anchor at various distances from the shore, according to their draught. On the quay, on the side of the Valetta citadel, one can distinguish English soldiers in their obligatory red coats and white trousers, and a few carts with large scarlet wheels, recalling the ancient corricoli (two-wheeled carriages with giant wheels) of Naples; all this standing forth against walls of a dazzling whiteness. Though their siting is different, there is in this spread of fortifications, in these British faces mingled with the southern, something that makes one think of Gibraltar; the idea presents itself naturally to all those who have seen the two English possessions, the two keys which open and close the Mediterranean.

We have been seen from shore. A flotilla of little boats heads at full speed towards the steamer; we are surrounded, hemmed in, invaded, a peaceful boarding of sorts takes place; the deck is covered in a moment with a crowd of varied rascals squawking, shouting, yelling, chattering in all sorts of languages and dialects; one would think one was at Babel on the day its builders dispersed. Not knowing to what nation you belong, these comical polyglots try English, Italian, French, Greek, even Turkish, until they have found an idiom in which you can say to them intelligibly: ‘You’re smothering me! To the Devil with you all!’ Domestics and hotel waiters pursue you, harass you, nigh-on assassinate you with their offers of service. They stuff cards into your hands, into your waistcoat, trouser pockets, overcoat pockets, into the brim of your hat; the boatmen drag you right and left, by the arm, the collar of your overcoat, the tail of your frock-coat, almost tearing you apart, a detail about which they care little; they quarrel, and fight over you, vociferating, gesticulating, stamping their feet, struggling like the possessed; but, to be brief, though bruised till as good as dead, no one dies, and this scene of tumult could be titled, like Shakespeare’s play: ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’ The din dies down, the passengers are distributed around in several lots, and each boatman seizes his prey. The boatmen and local domestics are joined by the cigar-merchants, who offer you enormous packs at fabulously low prices: in truth, their cigars are execrable.

I noticed among this motley crowd some rather characteristic types. Brown heads with short glossy black curling hair, and fleshy mouths and sparkling eyes of almost African type on faces essentially Greek, presented themselves frequently, and seemed to me to belong specifically to the Maltese. These heads implanted on necks with visible tendons and solid chests have not been reproduced yet by artists, and would provide fresh models. As for the mode of dress, it is of the simplest: canvas trousers tightened at the hips by a woollen belt, a puffed-out shirt, a red cap tilted over the ear, and neither stockings nor shoes.

While the passengers, in a hurry to disembark, were crowding the ladder, I gazed at the boats gathered beside the ship like little fish around a whale, noting their peculiarities of construction and ornamentation. Intended for the service of the port, where the water is usually calm, these boats lack a rudder; prow and stern are marked by a raised portion resembling the beak of a Venetian gondola to which they have not yet added that key-shaped piece of serrated iron like a violin’s neck; each side of the prow is a crudely-painted open eye, as on the boats of Cadiz and Puerto Real; beside each eye, a hand, extending a pointing finger, seems to indicate the course. Is it a symbol of vigilance, a safeguard against the jettatura, the evil eye? I cannot say exactly; but those eyes thus placed give the boats the vague appearance of fish skimming in a strange manner over the surface of the water. On the back of the prow are painted the arms of England, with the lion and the unicorn, their heraldic supporters, in raw and violent colours, or else a fierce hussar rears an impossible horse, like some fantastic creation of a designer of stained glass. The more modest boats are content with a large but simple pot of flowers.

The crowd thins; I descend into a boat, am rowed ashore, and pass beneath a rather dark portal. A stepped street presents itself to me: I climb, at random, according to my custom of wandering about without a guide in towns previously unknown to me, given a certain instinct for topography which rarely deceives me, and, after a few zigzags, I emerge on Government Square (St. George Square), at the moment when the English are about to sound the retreat.

This ritual deserves particular description: the players on side-drums, bass-drum, and fife, line up silently at one end of the square; I have no desire to ridicule the English army, but I suspect the music of having been borrowed from some Cremona organ: at a sign from the band-leader, the drummers raise their sticks, the bass-drummer his beater, the fifer his instrument, but with movements so dry, so mechanical, so controlled, that they seem produced by springs not muscles. Eight white trouser-legs rise and fall in regular rhythm, and a wild discordant hurricane is unleashed.

The bass-drum grunts like an angry bear, the side-drums sound with a crack, and the fife, having attained an impossible pitch, emits extravagant trills; but the musicians, nonetheless, despite all this fury, hold themselves motionless and inert, frozen figures of northern ice whom the southerly breeze has been unable to melt. Reaching the far end of the square, they turn abruptly and retrace their path, raising the same hullabaloo. - You have doubtless seen those German toys equipped with a handle which plucks a brass wire in a hollow quill and causes a Prussian soldier to emerge from a sentry box to the sound of a shrill little tune; the soldier advances on a slide to the end of the box, turns about and returns to his starting point. Quadruple the number of German toys, and you will have an exact idea of the English ‘retreat’. I would never have believed men could imitate painted wood so precisely. It is a perfect triumph of discipline.

As I descend towards the sea once more, I see through the door of a church the glow of blazing candles. I enter. Hangings of red damask, trimmed with gold, envelop the pillars. On the altar, plated with silver, filigree and rhinestone suns glitter. A handful of lamps cast a mysterious half-light over the side chapels. In front of a gilded Madonna are hung ex-votos of wax and silver; fierce paintings, in the style of Espagnolet (Jusepe de Ribera, Lo Spagnoletto) or Caravaggio, can be vaguely discerned in the candlelight; I feel as if I am in a church in Spain, amidst an atmosphere of convinced and fervent Catholicism.

Little boys, crouched in a row on wooden benches, are gutturally chanting a hymn whose tone is set by an old priest. I retire, more edified by their intent than by the music. Night has fallen, fully. Lanterns shine at the corners of the streets in front of the images of Madonnas and saints. The shops of food merchants and refreshment-sellers are lit by night-lights which shimmer amidst the verdure of the stalls like glow-worms in the grass. Women clad in the faldetta (a combined hood and cape) ascend and descend the stepped streets, mysteriously skimming the walls, like bats in the seductive twilight. I believe, my goodness, I have just now heard the copper discs of a tambourine quiver; a practiced hand taps the belly of a guitar, brushing the strings with a thumb. - Am I in Malta (an English possession), or in Granada, in the Antequerula quarter? It is a long time since I heard this strumming in the open street, and I was beginning to believe, despite the memory of my three voyages to Spain, that it only occurs in romantic vignettes. My heart feels a few years younger, and I board my boat to return to the Léonidas, humming as well as I am able the motif I heard. Tomorrow I will return to see, by the pure light of day, what I have unravelled in the shadows of evening, and I will attempt to give you some idea of the city of Valetta, this seat of the Order of Malta, which played such a brilliant role in history, and which has vanished, like all institutions which no longer serve a purpose, however glorious their past may have been.

Chapter 2: Malta

I have found, once more, in Malta, that beautiful Spanish light, of which even Italy, with its much-vaunted skies, offers only a pale reflection. It is truly bright here, not some more or less pale twilight granted the name of day as in northern climates. The boat drops me at the quay, and I enter the city of Valetta by the Lascaris-Gate, as the inscription written above the archway says. The Greek name and English word, welded together by a hyphen, create an odd effect. The whole destiny of Malta is in those two words; beneath the arch, in the passage, as in the Gate of Justice in Granada, behind a grille, there is a chapel to the Virgin at the rear of which a night light flickers, and whose threshold is obstructed by beggars, who, given the splendour of their rags, would not be out of place among the beggars of the Albaicin; the sun in hot countries gilds and scorches them as desired for the painters’ palette. Through this gate, a motley and cosmopolitan crowd comes and goes; Tunisians, Arabs, Greeks, Turks, Smyrniots, Levantines of every port in their national costume, not to mention the Maltese, English, and Europeans of various countries.

A tall North African, his only clothing a woollen blanket in which he has draped himself majestically, elbows a young English woman dressed as correctly and strictly in the British manner as if she were treading the green grass of Hyde Park or the pavements of Piccadilly; he looks so calm, so sure of himself in his filthy cloak, that he would not wish to change it, I am sure, for the brand new tailcoat of some dandy from the Boulevard de Gand (Boulevard des Italiens) in Paris. The Orientals, even of the lower classes, have a surprising natural dignity; Turks pass by whose entire rags are not worth a sou, but who might be taken for princes in disguise. This aristocratic air their religion endows, causing them to look upon others as dogs: red-painted carts cut through the crowd, crossing paths with strange carriages whose wheels are set far back from the body which projects forward, somehow recalling through the arrangement of the whole, those Louis XIV carriages in Adam Frans van der Meulen’s landscapes. I believe this type of carriage is unique to Malta, not having seen it elsewhere. Their circulation is, moreover, restricted to a few main streets, the others being formed of steps or steep ramps.

The Lascaris Gate opens on a very lively, very animated market, its booths and huts displaying strings of onions, sacks of chickpeas, heaps of tomatoes and cucumbers, bundles of peppers, baskets of red fruit, and all sorts of edible goods picturesquely displayed and adding a deal of local colour. A beautiful fountain with a marble basin surmounted by a large bronze Neptune leaning on a trident, in a cavalier and rococo pose, produces a charming effect in the midst of these shops. Among the cafés, café-bars, and eateries, one comes across an English tavern here and there, its signs advertising single and double porter, Old Scots ale, East India pale ale, gin, whisky, brandy and other vitriolic mixtures for the use of the subjects of Great Britain, which contrast strangely with the lemonades, cherry syrups and iced drinks of the open-air sherbet-sellers. The policemen, armed with a short stick inscribed with the arms of England, tread, like those in London, at a regulated pace through this southern crowd, and ensure that order reigns there. Nothing is more sensible, doubtless; yet these cold and serious looking men, in every sense of the word proper and impassive representatives of the law, produce a singular effect between this luminous sky and this ardent earth. Their profile seems expressly wrought to loom from the mists of High Holborn or Temple Bar.

The city of Valletta, founded in 1566 by the Grand Master (Jean Parisot de Valette) from whom it takes its name, is the capital of Malta; the town of Senglea, and Città Vittoriosa (Burgo), which occupy two points of land on the other side of the port of Marse, with the suburbs of Floriana and Bormla (Cospicua), complete the city, which is surrounded by bastions, ramparts, counterscarps, fortresses and small forts such as to render any siege impossible. At every step one takes, in following one of the streets which circumscribe the city such as the Strada Levante or the Strada Ponente, one finds oneself face to face with a cannon. Gibraltar itself bristles with no greater a number of guns. The disadvantage of these multiple works is that they embrace a wide radius and that a large garrison, something always difficult to maintain and renew far from the mother country, is needed to defend them in the event of attack.

From the summit of these ramparts one sees, as far as the eye can see, the blue and transparent waters, embossed with moiré patterns by the breeze, and dotted with white sails. Red-coated sentinels stand guard at a distance from one another; the heat of the sun is so strong on these glacis that a piece of canvas, stretched over a frame and able to be rotated about a pole, provides shade for each of the soldiers, who, without this precaution, would be roasted on the spot.

Mounting to the second gate, I encounter a church in the Jesuit and Rococo style, like those of Madrid, which offers little of interest within. This gate, reached by a drawbridge, is surmounted by the triumphal coat of arms of England, and its moat, transformed into a garden, is filled with luxuriant southern vegetation of a metallic and varnished green: lemon-trees, orange trees, fig-trees, myrtles, and cypresses, planted pell-mell in bushy and charming disorder. Above the enclosure, beyond the terraces of the houses, a series of white arches open onto the blue of the sky, and frame the promenade of the Piazza Regina, located at the top of the city, from which one enjoys a magnificent view.

The city of Valetta, though built to a regular plan, and all of a piece so to speak, is no less picturesque. The extreme slope of the land compensates for whatever feeling of monotony the precise layout of the streets might engender, and the city climbs the hill, by steps and degrees, which it covers like an amphitheatre. The houses, very tall, like those of Cadiz, so as to enjoy a view of the sea, end in terraces of pozzolana (volcanic ash). They are all built of this white stone of Malta, a kind of tuff very easily worked, and with which one can, without much expense, indulge one’s caprices as regards sculpture and ornamentation. These rectilinear houses stand forth admirably and possess an air of strength and grandeur which they owe to the absence of roofs, cornices, and attics. They pierce the azure of the sky, at right angles, an azure which their whiteness renders more intense; but what grants them their most original character are the projecting balconies, applied to their facades like Arab moucharabiehs or Spanish miradors. These glass cages, decorated with flowers and shrubs, which resemble greenhouses projecting from the houses, rest on consoles and voluted modillions (decorative brackets supporting the cornice), denticulated battlements, twisted foliage, and ornamental chimeras of the most varied and fantastic design.

The balconies happily break the lines of the facades, and, seen from the end of the street, present the happiest of profiles; the shadows cast by their sturdy projections contrast fittingly with the light tone of the facades. The thin twigs of Algiers peas, the red stars of the geraniums, the porcelain flowers of the succulents which overflow from their open windows, enliven with their bright colours the blue and white local tones of the picture. It is in these miradors that the well-to-do women of Malta spend their lives, seeking the slightest breath of sea breeze, or slumped beneath the enervating influence of the sirocco. From the street one sees a white arm leaning on a rail, or a gleam from the corner of an eye, its dark pupil shining, which pleasantly distracts you from your architectural contemplation. Maltese women, have had the good sense to preserve their national costume, at least in the street, a rare thing among women who are guided in their dress rather by fashion than by taste. This garment, called a faldetta, consists of a kind of hooded cloak of a particular cut, the opening of the hood widened or narrowed and held in shape by a small whalebone stick, according to whether the face is to be more or less visible.

The faldetta is uniformly black like a domino, all the advantages of which it possesses, plus a grace denied to those shapeless satin bags of the carnival babble in the Opéra foyer; one hides a cheek and an eye on the side occupied by the person by whom one wishes not to be seen, one throws the faldetta back, or raises it as far as one’s nose, according to circumstance. It is as if a masked ball were transported to the open street. Under this hood of black taffeta, rather similar to the thérèses of our grandmothers, the women usually wear a pink or lilac dress with large flounces. As far as I can judge, whenever a propitious breath makes this mysterious veil flutter, the Maltese women are similar in type to Oriental women with large Arab eyes, pale complexions, and mostly aquiline noses. As I have found myself unable to view a complete face, but only the pupil of this, the nose of that, and the cheek of another, and not a single chin (except at the windows, in vertical foreshortening), because the faldetta covers them, I cannot make a definitive judgment, but deliver my observations for what they are worth.

Traveller’s guides, and individual works on different countries, claim that the Maltese women are of a flirtatious disposition and possess susceptible hearts. I am no Don Juan with the power to assure myself of the truth of this assertion in a stay of only a few hours; but the houses have two or three stories of miradors, the women uniformly wear a headdress, which is the equivalent of the old Venetian mask, and the current Spanish mantilla, the sirocco blows three days out of four, and the temperature is usually twenty-eight degrees or so, guitars are strummed in the streets in the evening, and the confessional boxes in church are very well attended. It is, moreover, difficult to be glacially puritanical when located between Sicily and Africa. This moral freeness is always attributed, in those same serious books, to the corrupt attitudes of the Knights of Malta; but the poor knights have been sleeping for many years in their tombs beneath the mosaic paving of St. John’s Cathedral, and the fault, if there is a fault, is entirely that of the southern sun. All I can say is that they seemed very piquant to me, dressed as they are, and poking their noses out of the window through the opening in their cloaks.

Waking about at random, I came across charming street-corners that would delight the watercolourist. Balconies wrap around corners and form multi-storied turrets, or galleries depending on their size. A life-size Madonna or saint, its head beneath a stone canopy, its feet on an enormous wooden corkscrew-spiral sheath base, presents itself unexpectedly to the adoration of pious people, and the pencils of artists; large lanterns, supported by complicated ironwork brackets, light these devout images and provide pretty motifs for sketches. I did not expect to find crossroads of so Catholic a nature in British Malta. At the foot of most of these statues is written, on a convoluted cartouche, with inscriptions like this placed thereon: ‘Monsignor Ferdinando Mattei, Bishop of Malta’ (or His Most Reverend Excellency Don Francesco Saverio Caruana) ‘grants forty days of indulgence to all those who will say a Pater, an Ave, and a Gloria before the images of the most holy Virgin’ (or of Saint Francis Borgia). Since I have spoken of sacred sculpture, I will add here a rather odd detail that I noticed on the portal of a church.

It bore death’s heads adorned with cravats like butterfly wings. These hieroglyphs, funereal tokens of the brevity of life seemed to me to associate the emblems of the boudoir with the ornaments of the tomb in a new way. One could not be more gallantly sepulchral, and the idea must have been entertained by a charming little courtier of an abbot. If the meaning of this funereal rebus was clear to me, it was not so with regard to a small bas-relief that I saw over the door of several houses, and which represents, with slight variations, a naked woman plunged in flames up to her waist, raising her arms to the sky. A banner is engraved with the word: Valletta. A Maltese, whom I consult, explained to me that the income from the houses thus designated goes to the Confraternity of the Souls of Purgatory after the death of their owners, for whom prayers and masses are said. The naked woman symbolises the soul.

The Grand Master’s Palace, today the seat of government, displays nothing particularly remarkable in terms of architecture. Much of it is of a more recent date, and fails to correspond to the idea that one has of the residence of Philippe de Villiers de l’Ile-Adam, Jean Parisot de Valette, and their successors. However, it has quite a monumental presence, and produces a beautiful effect set on the large square (St. George Square), of which it occupies one of the sides. Two portals with rustic columns break the uniformity of the long façade; an immense mirador, forming a covered gallery, and supported by strong, sculpted corbels, surrounds it at the height of the first floor, and gives the building the Maltese stamp. This local detail highlights the plainness of the architecture. The palace, vulgar in its magnificence, is thus rendered original. The interior, which I chose to visit, offers a series of vast rooms and galleries containing frescoes, representing land and sea battles, sieges, and the boarding of Turkish galleys and galleys of ‘The Religion’ (as the Order of St. John is collectively called), by Matteo da Lecce. There are also paintings by Francesco Trevisani, ‘Espagnolet’ (Jusepe de Ribera), Guido Reni, ‘Calabrese’ (Mattia Preti) and Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio.

The guide walks you through vast apartments, their floors covered in fine mats, with stucco or marble columns, high-warp tapestries after Maerten de Vos or Jean Jouvenet, and ceilings of diamond-shaped or squared wooden panels, adapted, with more or less taste, to the current purpose. The coats of arms and portraits of the Grand Masters here and there recall the former inhabitants of this knightly palace, which is currently an English residence; I was surprised to find there a portrait by Thomas Lawrence, of George III or IV, all in white satin and scarlet, facing a likeness of Louis XVI, quite well painted, though less shimmering with pearly highlights than the English monarch. One of the enormous rooms, when I passed through Malta, was arranged as a ballroom, and from one of the columns hung printed charts of waltzes, polkas and quadrilles; this detail, though quite natural, made me smile; it would cheer the shades of the young knights if they chose to return at night to their old home: old bores alone would be offended, for those soldier monks led a cheerful enough life, and their inns were more like barracks than monasteries. The throne of England, with its canopy, its coat of arms and its mantling, proudly replaces the chair occupied by the Grand Master of the Order, and the portraits in coloured lithographs of the numerous offspring of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, are hung on the astonished walls of this asylum of celibacy, as they must be in every loyal subject’s residence

I would have liked to visit the Armoury museum, to touch those helmets scored by Damascene blades, those cuirasses dented by stones from the catapults, beneath which so many noble hearts once beat, those shields emblazoned with the cross of the Order, in which the Saracen arrows quiveringly implanted themselves; but, after an hour of waiting while a search took place, I was told that the keeper had gone to the country and taken the keys with him. Receiving this proud reply, I thought myself yet in Spain, where, seated before the door of some monument, I waited for the concierge to finish his nap and show himself willing to open the door for me. I was forced to relinquish my idea of viewing those heroic bits of iron, and direct my attention elsewhere.

To complete my tour of what appertained to the knights, I headed towards St. John’s Cathedral, which is the Pantheon of the Order. The façade, with a triangular pediment, flanked by towers ending in stone pinnacles, having for ornament only two pairs of superimposed pillars, and pierced by a window and a door without sculpture or arabesque, scarcely prepares the traveller for the magnificence of its interior. The first thing that arrests the sight is an immense vault painted with frescoes which takes up the whole length of the nave; these frescoes, unfortunately marred by time, or rather by the poor quality of their materials, are by Mattia Preti, called ‘Il Cavalier Calabrese’, one of those excellent minor masters who, if they possess less genius, sometimes possess more talent than the princes of art. The technique, skill, wit, and abundance of resource displayed in this colossal work, which is hardly spoken of, is truly unimaginable.

Each division of the vault contains a subject from the life of St. John, to whom the church is dedicated, and who was the patron of the order. These divisions are supported, at their borders, by groups of captives; Saracens, Turks, Christians, and others; half-naked, or covered with the shattered remains of armour, in humiliated and constrained poses, like some species of barbarian caryatids, befitting the subject. This whole part of the fresco is full of character and vigour, and shines with a strength of colour rare in this kind of painting. These solid tones set off the lighter tones of the vault, and make the ‘skies’ flee to a great depth. I know of no other work so grand except the ceiling by Gian Antonio Fumiani, in the church of San Pantalon, in Venice, representing the life, martyrdom and apotheosis of the saint of that name. But the taste for decadence is less felt in the work of the Calabrian than in that of the Venetian. If one wishes to know this pupil of Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) in depth, then it is Malta, and Saint John’s Cathedral, that one must visit. As a reward for this vast work, Mattia Preti had the honour of being received as a knight of the order, as was Caravaggio.

The pavement of the church is composed of almost four hundred tombs of various knights, inlaid with jasper, porphyry, antica verde, and breccias of all colours, which must surely form the most splendid funeral mosaic; I say ‘must’, because, at the time of my visit, they were covered by those immense esparto-reed mats with which southern church floors are covered; a custom which is explained by the absence of chairs and the habit of kneeling on the ground to perform one’s devotions. I greatly regretted it; but the chapels and the crypt contain enough sepulchral riches to compensate one. The richness of these chapels, copiously decorated with arabesques, volutes, sculptured branches and foliage interspersed with crosses, coats of arms, and fleurs-de-lis, all gilded in ducat-gold, only surprises those who know no more than the churches of France, which are of such severe bareness and Romantic melancholy. The profusion of ornaments here, the gilding, the varied marbles, doubtless seem to the French to be more suited to the decoration of a palace or a ballroom, since our Catholicism is somewhat akin to Protestantism.

The tomb (in the Chapel of Aragon) of Frà Nicola Cotoner, one of those Grand Masters who contributed most to the splendour of the Order, and spent their private fortune in endowing Malta with useful or luxurious monuments, is not in very good taste, but it is rich and composed of precious materials. It consists of a pyramid attached to the wall, surmounted by a ball and cross accompanied by a trumpet-blowing Renown and a little winged spirit holding the Cotoner coat of arms. The bust of the Grand Master occupies the base of the pyramid in the midst of a cluster of trophies, helmets, cannons, mortars, flags, shields, boarding-axes and pikes. Two kneeling slaves, their arms tied behind their backs, one of whom twists around in an attitude of rebellion, support the plinth and form the pedestal. I have described this tomb in detail, because it resembles others in manner, whereby the emblems of faith are mixed with symbols of warfare, as is fitting for an order that is both military and religious. One should also cast a glance at the mausoleum (in the Chapel of France) of the grand master Emmanuel de Rohan, very magnificent and coquettish, and (in the Chapel of Aragon) at that of Don Ramon Perellos y Rocafull, a Spanish grand master, whose ‘canting arms’ (symbolic of the owner’s name, here pears, or ‘peras’ in Spanish) are quartered with Greek crosses, and trios of pears.

I gazed at all these tombs with no other feeling than the respectful sadness that the stone beneath which is concealed a being who lived and thought like oneself always gives to a living and thinking being. But what was my emotion on encountering at the corner of an arch (in the Chapel of the French) a marble signed Pradier (the sculptor Jacques Pradier), in half-Greek, half-French characters, with that irregular sigma which one longs with all one’s heart to treat as an epsilon! The last lines that I had written in France, two hours before my departure, deplored the sudden death of this beloved artist, who might yet have created many a masterpiece. Here I had found, unexpectedly, in Malta one of his most gracefully melancholic statues, wherein he had managed to retain all the charm of youth, despite it being a portrait of the dead, that of the unfortunate Comte de Beaujolais, a work which was so admired at the Salon, some ten years ago. His recent death had been recalled by a tomb now already old, if tombs have an age and the Pyramid of Cheops more years, in truth, than yesterday’s sealed grave in Père-Lachaise (the Paris cemetery). Happy, however, is he who bequeaths his name to the hardest material there is, and assures himself by the beauty of his work of the brief immortality of which human beings can dispose!

A subterranean chapel, somewhat neglected, contains the tombs of Philippe Villiers de l’Ile-Adam, Jean de Valette and other grand masters lying in their armour on armorial pedestals, supported by lions, birds and chimeras; some in bronze, others in marble or some other precious material. This crypt has nothing mysterious or funereal about it. The light of southern countries is too bright to lend itself to the chiaroscuro effects seen in Gothic cathedrals.

Before leaving the church, I must mention a group of Saint John Baptising Christ, by the Maltese sculptor Melchiorre Cafà, which is set above the high altar, and displays great skill, though being a little affected in manner; and a painting of superb ferocity, by Michelangelo da Caravaggio, having as its subject the beheading of that same saint. Through the dust of neglect, and the smoke of time, one can make out astoundingly realistic features, truculent outlines, and a work of extraordinary vigour.

Time is slipping away, and the steamboat declines to linger for latecomers. Let us walk once more along St John’s Street, and picturesque St. Ursula Street, with their steps and platforms, their projecting balconies, the shops that line them, the crowd that perpetually goes up and down their staircases, and Strada-Stretta (Strait Street), which formerly had the privilege of serving as a duelling ground for the Order, whereon no one troubled them; let us glance, from the summit of the ramparts, over the wild countryside divided by stone walls, without shade and without vegetation, devoured by a harsh sun; let us gaze at the sea from the top of Piazza Regina (Republic Square), studded with English tombs; we will cross the Marse by boat, traverse the main street of Senglea, and clamber on board, regretting being unable to take with us a pair of those pretty vases carved out of Maltese tuff, which the inhabitants shape with a knife in the most ingenious and elegant way.

It is half-past four, and the boat weighs anchor at five. An entertaining local display is performed for us as a memento of our all too brief stay in Malta. Small boats surround us burdened with half-naked boys. The Maltese swim like ducks when hatched, and are excellent divers. A silver coin is thrown from the deck into the sea; the water is so clear in the harbour that it can be viewed to a depth of twenty feet or so. The boys watch for the coin to fall, dive after it at once, and it is caught three times out of four, an exercise no less favourable to their health than their purse. You will forgive me for not describing the catacombs; Fort Binġemma; the possible remains of a temple of Hercules (Ras ir-Raħeb); or Calypso’s Cave (Ramla Bay, Gozo), scholars claiming that Malta is Homer’s Ogygia: I have no time to view them, and there is little point in repeating what others have said about them.

Tomorrow morning, I shall view the shores of Greece. I am no fanatic where classicism is concerned, far from it, but the thought troubles me. One always feels a degree of apprehension as regards viewing in its reality a land glimpsed in childhood through the mists of poetic dream.

Chapter 3: Syra (Syros)

It is the following day, and we are in sight of Cape Matapan, a barbarous name which hides the harmony of its ancient name (Taenarum), as a layer of lime coats a fine sculpture. Cape Tenaro is the extreme point of that white mulberry leaf with deep hollows spread on the sea, which is now called the Morea, formerly the Peloponnese. All the passengers were here on deck, gazing at the horizon, in the direction indicated, three or four hours before it became possible to distinguish anything. The magical name of Greece sets the most inert imaginations to work; the bourgeoisie most foreign to the realm of art are themselves moved and remember Chompré’s dictionary (Pierre Chompré’s ‘Dictionnaire Abrégé de la Fable’, 1727.) At last, a faint violet line had appeared above the waves: it was Greece. A mountain raised its hip from the water, like a nymph resting on the sand after bathing, beautiful, pure, elegant, and worthy of this sculpted land. ‘What mountain is that?’ I asked the captain. ‘Taygetus,’ he answered me good-naturedly, as if saying ‘Montmartre’. At the name Taygetus, a fragment of verse from the Georgics instantly sprang to mind:

… virginibus bacchata Lacænis

Taygeta!

Taygetus of the Spartan virgin’s Bacchic rites!

(See Virgil’s ‘Georgics’, Book II, 485)

It fluttered on my lips like a monotonous refrain, filling my thoughts. What better quotation can there be regarding a Greek mountain than a line from Virgil? Although it was mid-June and quite warm, the summit of the mountain was silvered with streaks of snow, and I thought of the pink feet of those beautiful girls of Laconia who roamed Taygetus as Bacchantes, and left their charming prints on the white paths!

Cape Matapan juts out between two deep gulfs, which its ridge separates: the Gulf of Corone (Koroni, or the Gulf of Kalamata) and that of Kolokythia (the Laconian Gulf); it is a point composed of arid and barren land, like all the coasts of Greece. Once passed, on the right, a block of tawny rocks, cracked by dryness, and calcined by heat appears, without a sign of verdure or fertile soil: it is Cerigo (Kythira), the ancient Cythera, the island of myrtles and roses, the beloved abode of Venus, whose name summons dreams of voluptuousness. What would Jean-Antoine Watteau have thought, he of The Embarkation for Cythera with all its blues and pinks, face to face with this harsh shore of crumbling rock, with its severe eroded and shadeless contours, offering a cavern perhaps for the penitent anchorite, but not a single grove in which lovers might embrace: Gérard de Nerval (in his ‘Voyage en Orient’)at least had the dubious pleasure of viewing, on Cythera’s shore, a hanged man wrapped in oilcloth, witness to a careful and considerate execution of justice. The Léonidas passes by too far from land for the passengers to enjoy so charming a detail were all the gallows of the island to be furnished at this very moment.

Did the ancients deceive us, speaking of delightful sites where now there is only a stony isle and bare earth? It is hard to believe that their descriptions, the accuracy of which was easy to verify at the time, are pure fantasy. Without doubt, this soil, rendered less fertile by human activity, was finally exhausted; it died with the civilisation it supported, whose masterpieces, genius, and heroism had likewise been exhausted. What we see is nothing more than its skeleton: the skin, the sinews, all else has fallen to dust. When a country loses its soul, it dies like the body; how can one explain otherwise such complete and general alteration, for what I have said can be applied to almost the whole of Greece; though, these coasts, however desolate they may be, still display beautiful contours and a purity of colour.

We pass between Cerigo (Kythira) and Servi (Cervi, Elafanisos), another pumice island, and round Cape Malea (Maleas) or Saint Angelo’s Cape, and emerge amidst the archipelago; the horizon is populated with sails. Brigs, schooners, caravels (sailboats), and argosils (fishing boats) furrow the blue water in all directions; the weather is admirable; the vessel neither rolls nor pitches. A light breeze swells our foresail somewhat and aids our paddle-wheels a little, that whip at a sea smooth as ice, which the mythological entourages of Amphitrite and Galatea (the two were Nereids in Greek mythology) might swim; a sea unruffled even by the leaping porpoises, those tritons of natural history, that from a distance give the illusion of being sea gods. The land has fled, and reveals itself only as a mist at the edge of the sky. Since there is nothing to see afar, let us examine awhile the new guests who embarked at Malta.

They are Levantines, squatting or lying on a piece of carpet, at the front of the boat, near the bags containing their provisions and the rolled-up mattresses on which they stretch out at night. A Levantine on a journey always takes three things with him: his carpet, his chibouk (tobacco pipe) and his mattress. One of these passengers, quite aged, is dressed in a faded pistachio-coloured pelisse decorated on the back with gold arabesque, although the rest of his costume is very simple, even a little ragged. He has with him a young child with very lively and intelligent dark eyes. Two or three Greeks have established a presence not far from this Levantine. They wear the fustanella (pleated kilt) and a rather elegant white jacket; but, dreadful to say and even more dreadful to contemplate, these noble Hellenes wear cotton caps like the men of Lower Normandy! O Greece! Classical land! Is it your intention to break my heart, and rob me of my last illusions, by appearing to me in the form of two of your sons crowned with a cloth helm and bourgeois locks! It is true that these cotton caps, seen up close, offer some thread trimmings, which mitigated their commonplace ugliness somewhat, and, after all, it is claimed that Paris seduced Helen wearing a Phrygian cap, which is nothing other than a cotton cap dyed purple.

On the deck, Eugène Vivier, the famous horn player, whose witty individuality equals his talent, whom a steamer from Italy had brought, is telling the prodigious story, in the midst of a circle of charmed listeners, of Mastoc Riffardini and his lieutenant Pietro, while a beautiful young girl with blue eyes, going to Athens with her father, lies lazily on a sofa and allows her gaze to wander in the serenity of the air, all the while smiling vaguely at the tale.

On the captain’s assurance that no island would be in sight before six or seven in the evening, we agree to go down to dinner. When we rise from the table, Milos and Antimilos are evident, already bathed in violet hues by the approach of dusk; the view is always the same: sterile escarpments, bare slopes, but what matter? has not a wondrous fruit sprung from this meagre ground? Did not this infertile soil, richer than that of Beauce or Touraine, conceal that masterpiece of art, that purest and most vibrant form, the radiant Venus de Milo, adored by poets and artists; she who has only to rid herself of the dust of centuries to reconquer her altars? For before her pedestal all are pagans; the ages that have elapsed vanish, and one feels ready to sacrifice doves and sparrows. What a civilisation the Greeks must have had for this little island of Milos to have produced such a finished work of art? I am told that, on the island, anyone who will listen is informed that the missing arms, the object of such devout lamentation, were found in the soil near the statue, and were exhumed, but went astray through fatal negligence. I do not in any way vouch for this rumour, which can but revive vain regret; but such is the legend current on Milos.

The sun disappeared behind us, but it was not yet night; the Milky Way streaked the sky in a broad opal band, and the infant Hercules must have been sucking hard at Juno’s breast, for innumerable white dots dotted the nocturnal azure; the stars shone with inconceivable brilliance, and their reflections sparkled in the water forming long streaks of fire; millions of phosphorescent spangles glittered and vanished like glow-worms in the wake of the steamer. This phenomenon, frequent in the warm seas of the Levant, and the tropics, is produced by myriads of microscopic infusoria, and nothing more magically picturesque could be imagined. That night will remain in my memory as one of the most splendid of my life. We sailed between two abysses of lapis lazuli, transected by veins of gold and powdered with diamonds. The moon, being absent, or as yet so thin a crescent that the shape of her silver sickle could hardly be distinguished, relinquished the heavens to this blue and golden night, whose silvery stars she would have rendered pale. Two steamships on an opposite course to our own contributed, with their red and green lanterns, to the general illumination. Almost all spent the night on deck, and it was the chill of morning that drove us to our cabins.

When daylight reappeared, we passed between Serifos and Sifnos. Serifos, which we skirted close to, was the Roman Seriphus, a place of exile under the emperors; Serifos still seems suited to such a lugubrious destination; nothing is barer, drier, or more desolate, at least when seen from the sea. Mountainous hills, tawny and dusty, stud the surface of the island. With binoculars, one can distinguish a few small stone walls, a few blackish spots which must be enclosures and crops; a city or rather a town terraced in an amphitheatre on an escarpment stands out due to its whiteness. All this, without the transparent air and admirable light of Greece, would present a wretched appearance; but the scorched ground takes on, beneath this sunlight, superb tones.

At sea, as in the mountains, one is often mistaken about the distance and dimensions of objects. On the side towards Seriphos lay an islet named Vodi (modern Greek βόδι, an ox) or Vous (ancient Greek βοῦς), which seemed to me to be about twenty feet tall, until a schooner passed by and, skirting it, re-established the scale. The islet, which appeared to me like a large stone projecting from the water, was at least two or three times the height of the schooner.

After Serifos and Sifnos, we passed Anti-Paros and Paros, whose quarries furnished the sublime sculptors of Greece with the eternally sparkling bodies of their divinities, and its architects with the white pillars of their temples. Amidst this archipelago of the Cyclades, the islands succeed one another without interruption, and each turn of the paddle-wheels brings forth a new one. Scarcely has one shore dropped below the horizon than another rises, azure with shadow or gilded with sunlight. To right, to left, you always see some land adorned with a famous or sonorous name, and are astonished that so much history, poetry and legend could have been contained in so small a space. There they are, sitting in a circle on the blue carpet of the sea, all those islands which gave birth to some god, hero, or poet, devoid of their crowns of verdure, but still beautiful, and acting, unconquerably, on the imagination. From each of these arid rocks there came a poem, temple, statue, or medallion, which our civilisation, which believes itself so perfect, lacks the power to equal.

In the morning, we were in front of Syra (Syros). Seen from the harbour, Syra looks much like Algiers, though on a smaller scale, of course. Against a mountainous background of the warmest tone, burnt sienna or topaz, imagine a pyramid, of sparkling whiteness, whose base plunges into the sea and whose summit is occupied by a church, and you will have an exact idea of this city, yesterday but a shapeless heap of hovels, which the passage of the steamboats will soon crown queen of the Cyclades. Windmills with eight or nine sails, varied its sharply defined silhouette; otherwise, not a tree, not a blade of green grass, could be seen as far as the eye could reach. The slender rigging of a large number of vessels, of all shapes and tonnages, tightly packed along the shore, was outlined in black on the white houses of the town; ship’s boats went to and fro with joyful animation: the water, earth, and sky, all streamed with light; life burst forth on all sides. Some of the boats, driven by oars, headed towards our ship, creating a regatta of which we were the focal point.

Soon the deck was covered with a crowd of swarthy fellows, with aquiline noses, blazing eyes, and fierce moustaches, who offered us their services in the same tone in which elsewhere they might demand your purse, or your life; some wore Greek skullcaps (possessing every right to do so), immense wide trousers forming a skirt and cinched with woollen belts, and dark-blue cloth jackets; others, the fustanella (kilt), white jacket and cotton bonnet, or else a small straw hat encircled with a black cord. One of them was superbly costumed and stood as if posing for an album watercolour; he was worthy of the epithet that orators in Homer address to those they wish to flatter: ‘Euknémides Achaioi’ (well-greaved Achaeans) since he wore the most beautiful knemides (padded shin-guards), stitched and embroidered decoratively, and adorned with red silk tassels, that it is possible to imagine; his fustanella, well-pleated and of dazzling cleanliness, flared to a bell shape; a well-fitted belt strangled his wasplike waist; his waistcoat, braided, embroidered, and embellished with filigree buttons, allowed passage for the sleeves of a fine linen shirt, and over the corner of his shoulder a beautiful red jacket, stiff with ornaments and arabesques was elegantly thrown. This triumphant character was none other than a dragoman who served as a guide to travellers on their tour of Greece, and no doubt wished to enhance his attractiveness with this luxurious show of local colour, like the beautiful girls of Procida and Nisida (islands in the Neapolitan archipelago), who only wear their costumes of velvet and gold for the English tourists.

As I set foot on land, the first thing that struck my eye was an inscription in Greek announcing the European and Turkish baths. It has a strange effect, seeing the characters of a language that one thought quite dead, inscribed on walls, a language one knows only through the pages of Claude Lancelot’s Le Jardin des Racines Grecques (‘The Garden of Greek Roots’, 1652). From my eight years of schooling, I had just enough knowledge left to read the street signs and names fluently. So, you see, the time had not been entirely wasted. Thanks to these classical memories, I understood that I was in Hermes Street (Odos tou Hermou), which led to Othonos Square (Miaouli Square). In the middle of this square rises a triumphal arch of timber entwined with branches of dried laurel, which testifies to the recent passage of King Otto (the second son of Ludwig I of Bavaria), a Bavarian monarch of the land of Pelops.

Eugène Vivier, who was with me, declared that he felt the need to civilise this savage island and to teach the natives the true way of creating soap-bubbles full of tobacco smoke; a mark of progress which they seemed unlikely to anticipate, were one to rely on their physiognomy. We entered a café, where Vivier asked, with imperturbable phlegm, for water, soap, paper and a pipe. This request surprised the café owner a little, who surely thought to himself: ‘This traveller is keen on cleanliness, he wishes to wash his hands,’ and quite innocently brought all that was necessary for blowing bubbles. At the first bubble which escaped from the tube, opalised by the white smoke blown into its frail envelope, surprise halted the cups of coffee raised to the lips of his customers. Another transparent globe, forming, like a balloon, an opaque parachute, rose in its turn into the air and displayed all the hues of a prism in the sun; their admiration knew no limits: a large circle formed, as they followed the flying bubbles with interest. Once their enthusiasm had been more than sufficiently aroused, Vivier, who knows how to manage an audience, as if emptying the pockets of a billiard table and replacing the ivory balls on their green cloth, sent a corresponding number of bubbles rolling and caroming at the slightest breath.

‘See how civilised they are becoming’, Vivier said to me, pointing out a moustachioed Greek with a colourful face who was turning a piece of soap about in a glass of water, seized by the fever of imitation, ‘already their severity has softened’.

At the end of a quarter of an hour, one might have thought the café occupied by a band of Indian jugglers: it was a mass of bubbles ascending and descending. An hour later, the whole island was busy blowing soap-water and smoke from paper cones, with all the gravity such a serious occupation deserves. - Why be surprised that the inhabitants of Syra were amused by a spectacle that kept all the onlookers of Paris standing in the open air for six months on the Place de la Bourse?

While my friend was working these wonders, I was examining the interior of the whitewashed café, decorated with a few poorly-coloured pictures of the Rue Saint-Jacques. Most characteristic were two items embroidered in petit-point, representing Turks on horseback, and signed: Sophia Dapola, 1847, a masterpiece by a lodger there.

The quay was lined with shops of all kinds, fishmongers, butchers, and confectioners, as well as cafés, eateries, taverns, tobacconists, and so on, presenting a most animated aspect. It teemed with a motley assortment of sailors, porters, shoppers, and curious people from every country, wearing every style of costume. From the shore one can touch the boats, and the island thus lives in most intimate familiarity with the sea. Nothing is more amusing and more picturesque. Amongst the tarred cabans (pea-jackets, reefers) and breeches, the beautiful Greek costume of a Palikari (soldier) or Armatole (policeman) worn theatrically, gleamed from time to time.

Tired of the noise, in a street parallel to the harbour, I took my seat at a café furnished with outdoor sofas,– for on the island of Syra one lives in the open air – and there was served with lemon ices, infinitely superior to those of Tortoni’s in Paris, and worthy of those of the Café de la Bolsa, in Madrid, which says everything; there I saw a Greek of admirable beauty pass by, in full costume devoid of all French amendment; there is no garment at once more elegant or nobler than the modern Greek costume. The red skullcap with a mane of blue silk; the waistcoat and jacket with hanging sleeves, both braided and embroidered; a belt bristling with weapons; the pleated and piped fustanella like drapery carved by Phidias; and gaiters like those greaves the Homeric heroes wore, form an ensemble full of grace and pride. The Greek costume is of an extremely tight fit, and more than one hussar or fashionable woman would envy their slender waists. The bust flares, emphasising the chest, and giving a lightness to the white kilt that sways when walking. I mentioned just now that this Greek was very handsome: but do not imagine his profile as that of Apollo or Meleager, the nose perpendicular to the forehead as in ancient statues. The present-day Greeks have aquiline noses mostly, and are closer to the Arab or Jewish type than is commonly imagined. It is possible that there still exists in the interior of Greece some group among whom the ancient features are preserved. I speak only of what I have seen.

Syra presents the phenomenon of a city in ruins alongside a city under construction, a rather singular contrast. In the lower city, there is scaffolding everywhere, rubble and plaster clutter the streets, houses spring up before one’s eyes; in the upper city, everything is crumbling and collapsing; life is leaving the head to take refuge in the feet.

I first traversed modern Syra, climbing from alley to alley, for the escarpment begins almost from the edge of the sea. One thing struck me, the small number of women I met. With the exception of a few old women and a few little girls whose respective ages were too advanced or too tender to arouse suspicion, the women hurried past or retreated indoors as I passed. Their clothing is not at all characteristic: a vulgar English cotton dress and a dark scrap of gauze over the hair, that is all. An Oriental seclusion seems already present. One sees none of them in the shops, it is the men who sell goods, shop the markets, and bear provisions about.

A joyful burst of laughter came from a house I passed; a boarding school for little girls to whom it seems I appeared profoundly ridiculous, I know not why.

The schoolmistress was at the door and motioned to me to enter and examine the interior of the school. I saw a fine collection of dark eyes, white teeth, and long braids of hair. Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps would find enough there to make a pretty pendant to his Sortie de l’École Turque (his painting ‘Leaving the Turkish School’, of 1849). I also examined a Greek church, its architecture of great simplicity, the interior decorated with images in the Byzantine style, passing among plaques of goldsmith’s work, and heads and hands of a brown colouring, such as I had already seen at Leghorn (Livorno); a kind of portico forming a partition prevents the faithful from viewing the sanctuary, which contains only an altar covered with a white cloth; we were shown a cross and various ornaments of worship in silver gilt, of crude and barbarous workmanship but sufficient character.

A steep causeway of sorts separates the new Syra from the old. This bridge once crossed, the ascent begins through paved and sloping streets like the beds of torrents. I climbed, beside two or three comrades, between crumbling walls, collapsed hovels, and among shifting stones and pigs that ran about squealing and rubbing their bluish backs against my legs. Through half-open doors, I saw haggard shrews cooking dishes unknown to me over a fire glowing in the shadows; the men, with the looks of brigands from a melodrama, left their hookahs (water-pipes) to watch our little caravan pass by with its less than graceful air.

The slope became so steep that we climbed almost on all fours, through a dark maze of vaulted passageways, and ruined staircases. The houses are stacked one on top of the other, so that the threshold of the upper one is at the level of the terrace of the one below; in order to ascend the mountain, each one seems to have set its foot on the head of the one it precedes, on a path made more for goats than for men. The merit of ancient Syra seems to be that it is readily accessible only to kites and eagles. It is a charming site for nesting birds of prey, but most improbable as one for human habitation.

Panting, and bathed in sweat, we finally reached the narrow platform on which Saint George’s Cathedral stands, a platform paved with tombs, where the aerial dead repose, and there we were amply compensated for our fatigue by a magnificent panorama. Behind us rose the crest of the mountain on which Syra is set; to the right, facing the sea, an immense ravine, rugged and scored in the most savagely Romantic way, plunged to an abyss; at our feet stood the white houses of upper and lower Syra; further away shone the sea with its luminous moiré patterns, the island of Delos, and those of Mykonos, Tinos, and Andros in a line, clothed by the setting sun in pink and pigeon-breast tones that would seem fanciful if employed in a painting.

When we had seen enough of this admirable spectacle, we slid down like an avalanche to the lower town, and ended our evening at a kind of redoubt situated on a headland jutting out into the sea, smoking cigarettes and listening, over a lemonade, to a band of Hungarian musicians performing extracts from Italian opera. A few women, dressed in the French style apart from their hair, were walking together, beside a husband or a lover, on the central reservation surrounded by tables and chairs on which the Palikaris’ fustanellas were spread, as the men drank their coffee, or splashed water from their hookahs.

In front of us, the sea was starry with ships’ lanterns; behind us, the lights of Syra scattered golden spangles over the mountain’s violet dress. It was charming. The rowing boats were waiting for us at the jetty, and a few strokes of the oars bore us back to the Léonidas, weary but delighted. The next day we were to set sail for Smyrna, and I would set foot, for the first time, on the soil of Asia-Minor, that cradle of the world, that happy soil where the sun rises, quitting it with regret so as to light the West.

Chapter 4: Smyrna (Izmir)

At ten in the morning, when the scheduled steamship that touches at Piraeus had picked up the passengers bound for Athens, the Léonidas set off again peacefully over a superb sea, as pure and as calm as Lake Geneva. Since I have mentioned Athens, let me say that it is absurd to have altered the former route, thus obliging one to remain at Syra for twenty-four hours which would be much better employed in visiting the Acropolis and the Parthenon.

Delos, which we were skirting, is part of a singular mythological cosmogony. I know not if any professional geologist has pursued the scientific studies required to unravel what truth there might be in the legend; in the meantime, here is the origin of Delos according to myth: Neptune, with a blow of his trident, made the island emerge from the depths of the sea, to assure Latona, persecuted by Juno, of a place where she could give birth to Apollo and Artemis; Apollo, in recognition, rendered it immobile, as it had previously been a ‘floating’ isle, and fixed it in the midst of the Cyclades. Should we identify the source of this tale as one of those underwater volcanic eruptions producing islands, some of which vanish again after a while, like Julia’s Isle (which appeared temporarily in July 1831 off the coast of Sicily), which returned to the sea from which it had emerged? Should we take the epithet ‘floating’ literally, and assume that Delos was originally a bank of algae, seaweed, fucus-fronds, and tree-trunks, bobbing on the water, then caught in the shallows, and transformed as it dried into habitable land by the sun? Or should we believe that because of its location in the middle of a Pleiad of almost similar islets, Delos must have been variously encountered by the first navigators, deprived of a sure means of direction, which earned it the reputation of a wandering island?

This is not the place to discuss this question ex-professo; I only raise it, leaving it to more learned men to resolve, because it came to my mind as I passed close to that sacred place where Apollo and Diana were born. Delos was, in antiquity, the object of extreme veneration. There was an altar of Apollo, which the god himself had erected at the age of four, employing the horns of goats killed by Artemis on Mount Cynthus, and which was considered one of the wonders of the world. This sacred soil was so venerated, that dogs were not allowed there, and sufferers on the point of death were borne from the island, since it was not permitted to bury anyone in this divine ground, revered even by the barbarians. The Persians, who ravaged the other isles of Greece, landed at Delos in their fleet of a thousand ships, but abstained from all acts of depredation and violence. Today Delos is an arid place, where Latona would have difficulty finding an olive tree to shade her childbed, yet it still justifies its luminous etymology (‘revealed’, ‘made visible’ at Apollo’s birth), and the sun seems to gild it lovingly.

The Cyclades are of so limited an extent that, by skirting them in a steamship, one can trace the reality of their shapes and contours as indicated on the map: Nature itself seems a map on a large scale ornamented in relief and coloured. This produces the strange effect of rendering geography palpable, allowing one to grasp all the details of things as if on an embossed chart, and to traverse in only a small passage of time, that sea which holds so great a place in imagination and history.

Having crossed the channel that separates Tinos from Mykonos, we entered the open sea, devoid of islands. The day passed clear and serene: the perfect placidity of the sea allowed those with a more sensitive stomach to consume a full meal without fear or remorse. After strolling on deck, and setting their watches on the dial in the captain’s cabin, for there is a difference of an hour and a quarter between Constantinople and Paris, all retired to bed so as to be up early in the morning, and see the sun rise on the horizon behind Smyrna, and the city turn pink.

During the night, we stopped for a while at Chios, the ‘island of wine’, as Victor Hugo says in Les Orientales (see ‘L’Enfant’ line 2), so as to take on merchandise. The sound of bales being rolled along the deck and the tramp of the porters’ feet woke me. I climbed to the top of the stairway, but saw nothing but a dark mass over which lights moved, like the sparks that burnt paper emits.

At daybreak we entered Smyrna harbour, a graceful curve at the end of which the city is spread. What first struck my eyes, from a distance, was a great curtain of cypress tress rising above the houses, their black tips mingling with the white summits of the minarets; and a hill, still bathed in shadow and surmounted by an old ruined fortress whose dismantled walls stood forth against the clear sky, rounded like an amphitheatre behind the buildings. Here no longer was the harsh and desolate aspect of the isles of Greece. The face of Asia-Minor appeared fresh and smiling in that pink glow of morning.

Smyrna, from the Harbour - Thomas Allom (English, 1804-1872)

Smyrna, from the Harbour

I confess, to my shame, that as yet I had seen only two of the seven continents of the world, Europe and Africa. It gave me an almost childish joy to view a third, Asia. The same site removed to the coast of Europe would certainly not have given me a like pleasure. When shall I visit America or Polynesia? God alone knows! How many years of our lives are stupidly lost! Should not every education be completed by circumnavigating the world? How is it that there is not a ship at the service of every college, which would take its pupils in the third year, and see them complete their studies in the universal book, the most splendidly written of of all, because it is written by the good Lord himself? Would it not be charming to teach the Odyssey and the Aeneid while accomplishing the voyages of their Greek and Trojan heroes (Ulysses and Aeneas)?

A local boat took us ashore. It was very early, but sea air is appetising, and our little band, composed of Eugène Vivier, Monsieur R… and two young students from the school of Rome travelling from Athens, were unanimous in wishing to dine, before dispersing so as to fulfil our duty as visitors to the city. Unfortunately, in the hotels, the official hour for dining had not yet arrived, and we were obliged to have recourse to a cup of coffee and a bread roll. The establishment in which we ate this frugal meal occupied a kind of jetty made of planking on the shore, from which one could see the ships in the harbour, and beneath which the waves gently lapped; This café had for its only ornaments a stove, on which the black liquid was boiled in a small yellow-copper coffee-pot containing a single cup, and a table on which shone a row of well-cleaned and translucent hookahs, for in Smyrna only the hookah is employed, while the chibouk is in general use in Constantinople (the traditional hookah consists of a long flexible pipe with a mouthpiece, attached to an upright vessel; the traditional chibouk a long solid stem and a bowl, more akin to a western pipe in concept). In these latitudes, the cigar becomes a chimerical object, and smokers must alter their habits.

It would have been a breach of a fine tradition to leave Smyrna without having visited the Caravan Bridge. A Jewish dragoman, owning to a smattering of French and Italian, collected for our use, after a few minutes, a number of donkeys equal to our French ones, the Caravan Bridge being at the end of the city and we not having time to race there on foot. In the East, riding an ass is not considered ridiculous, and the most serious of people lounge along on this peaceful animal, on which Christ himself did not disdain to make his triumphant entry into Jerusalem; these donkeys were adorned with pack-saddles, head-pieces, and cruppers decorated with designs in small shells of different colours, and lacked the pitiful air of our poor Aliborons (Aliboron is the name of a donkey in La Fontaine’s ‘Fables’: The Thieves and the Donkey’ Book I, Fable 13) who feel they are being mocked. We each mounted our beast, and were launched swiftly through the streets, the dragoman in front, the donkey-driver in the rear. Excited by the guttural cries of the latter, a thin, nervous, swarthy lad, forever running about in the dust after his greys, and busily thrashing the dawdlers or the stubborn ones, our donkeys had taken on a rather lively pace. As we raced along, we glanced at the houses, cemeteries, gardens, and passers-by; but this is not the place to describe them; let us hurry on, so as to arrive at the Caravan Bridge; since it is still morning, it is quite possible we will find a convoy leaving from there.

This famous bridge, now unfortunately dishonoured by an ugly balustrade of cast iron, spans a small river a few inches deep, on which half a dozen ducks were swimming familiarly, as if the blind, divine singer had not washed his dusty feet in these waters, still flowing two and a half thousand years later. The stream is the Meles, from which Homer took the epithet of Melesigenes. It is true that some scholars refuse to grant this gutter the name of Meles, but other scholars, even more learned, claim that Homer never existed, which simplifies the matter greatly. I, who am a mere poet, readily admit the legend which prompts reflection and memory, in a place already pleasant in itself. Immense plane trees, beneath which a café is sited, shade one of the banks; on the other, superb cypresses indicate a cemetery. Let this word not awaken lugubrious thoughts in you: pretty tombs of white marble, speckled with golden Turkish letters on sky-blue or apple-green backgrounds and of a form quite different from Christian sepulchres, shine gaily under the trees revealed by a ray of sunshine; there is nothing funereal about the place, which at most stirs, in those who are not accustomed to it, a slight melancholy which is not without its charm.

At the head of the bridge stands a sort of Customs guardhouse, occupied by some of those Zeybeks (irregular militia) whose physiognomy Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps’s Oriental paintings have made familiar to everyone: a tall conical turban, short white linen trousers forming a pocket at the rear, an enormous belt rising from the small of the back almost to the armpits and formidably bristling with the pommels of yatagans (short sabres) and kandjars (daggers); lower legs bare and the colour of Cordoba leather; and a tanned face with aquiline eyes, a hooked nose, and the moustaches of an old grognard (a ‘grumbler’ of Napoleon’s Old Guard). There were a handful of these scoundrels, nonchalantly sprawled on a bench, doubtless very honest, but looking more like bandits than Customs officers.

To breathe our mounts, we seated ourselves beneath the plane trees, where pipes and mastika were brought to us. Mastika is a kind of liqueur imbibed in the Levant, especially the Greek islands, and the best of which comes from Chios. It consists of distilled wine in which a kind of perfumed resin has been melted. The liqueur is drunk mixed with water, which it freshens, and also whitens to the colour of Eau de Cologne; it is the absinthe of the East. This very local drink reminded me of the little glasses of aguardiente that I drank twelve years ago, on the road from Granada to Malaga, on my way with the muleteer Lanza to the bullfight, and dressed in the costume of a majo (a dandy of the lower class), a costume, now consumed by moths, alas, which had a splendid vase of flowers embroidered on the back.

While we were smoking, and sipping our drinks, a string of about fifteen camels, preceded by a donkey with a bell, passed in procession over the bridge, with that singular ambling step also displayed by elephants and giraffes, arching their backs, and undulating their long ostrich-like necks. The strange silhouettes of these deformed animals, which seem created for a special purpose, surprises and disorients one to the last degree. When one encounters in the field these curious beasts exhibited in menageries in France, one feels decidedly far from the Boulevard de Gand (Boulevard des Italiens). We also saw two carefully veiled women accompanied by a North African with a sullen countenance, a eunuch no doubt. The Orient was beginning to take shape before me in an irrefutable way, and the most paradoxical of minds could not have maintained our being still in Paris.

Before entering the city, I planned to visit the ruins of the ancient castle, on the summit of Mount Pagus which the acropolis (Kadifekale) of ancient Smyrna covers. I care little for ruins if beauty is absent and they are reduced to the status of mere piles of rubble. I lack that facility for swooning at will with which travellers more susceptible to retrospective enthusiasm are endowed. But at the top of a mountain, one always gains a beautiful view, and I saw no objection to the ascent of Mount Pagus the paths to which are not strewn with roses, but with stones of all sizes that the donkeys skirt with the sureness of foot which characterises those creatures. The paths are traced vaguely, in the Oriental manner, on the side of the hill, and through the intersection of their well-trodden courses, resemble rather a net than a ribbon. First of all, we were obliged to traverse old abandoned cemeteries gradually returning to the state of being woodland or fields, the tombs gradually obliterated by vegetation, dust, and neglect. Reaching a certain elevation, the view is superb: Smyrna stretches beneath your feet, with its red and white houses, its bright red fluted-tile roofs, its curtains of cypress trees, groves, domes, and minarets like ivory masts, its countryside with its varied crops, and its harbour, a sort of liquid sky but even bluer, all bathed in a fresh and silvery light amidst incredibly transparent air.

The Castle of Smyrna - Thomas Allom (English, 1804-1872)

The Castle of Smyrna

Having admired the panorama sufficiently, we descended by steep slopes and switchback alleys, through districts less macadamised than picturesque. The houses of Smyrna are generally low in height, a ground floor and an overhanging upper floor, that is all. Whitewash, dotted with painted lines, rosettes, palmettes and other arabesques in azure blue brightens their facades and grants them the appearance of fresh, clean English porcelain. Between the windows small plaster bird-boxes sometimes hang, pierced with several holes to invite the swallows to make their nests therein, a touching act of hospitality offered to the birds, which the latter accept with a confidence which is never mislaid in Asia Minor, to which the ideas of the Brahmins regarding respect for the lives of the creatures, those humble brothers and sisters of humankind, seem to have travelled from the depths of a less distant India.

It is to these ideas, no doubt, that the number of stray dogs that infest the public highway is owed, barely tolerating the passers-by who are obliged to give way to them. They can be seen in groups of three or four, lying in a circle in the middle of the street, allowing themselves be trampled underfoot rather than stirring. They must be walked around or stepped over. The lines of Alfred de Musset, in his poem Namouna, concerning beggars ‘whom one might take for gods’ can be applied perfectly, with a slight variation, to the dogs of Smyrna and Constantinople:

‘Ne les dérange pas; ils t’appelleraient homme;

Ne les écrase pas; ils te laisseraient faire.’

‘Don’t trouble them; they might call you Man;

Don’t trample them; that they would let you do.’

(See De Musset: Namouna, Canto I: LXXI)

While walking, I admired some pretty fountain on a street corner with a flared Turkish roof, its verses from the Koran carved in relief, its little columns and ornaments in an Oriental rococo style, or a small cemetery surrounded by walls pierced with barred windows through which one could see chickens pecking between the tombs, cats sleeping in the sun on the marble gravestones, and laundry hung from one cypress to another. In the East, life is not neatly separated from death as with us, rather the two continuously rub shoulders together like old friends: sitting, sleeping, smoking, eating, talking of love, on a tomb, implies no thought of sacrilege or profanation; cows and horses graze in the cemeteries and traverse them at all times; people walk there, and meet there quite as if the dead were not a few feet, or even a few inches deep below, their corpses busily rotting away beneath the larch-wood planks. But let me quit a subject which might seem less than cheerful to my readers, and especially my European readers; though Paris, in the Middle Ages, had its cemeteries and charnel houses; and in London, the city of civilisation par excellence, people are still buried within the grounds of Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s and other churches.

The districts we had passed through were quite deserted, so that figures were somewhat lacking in the landscape. Consequently, we asked the dragoman to lead our caravan through the Bezesten (on Gazazhane Street) the bazaar in an Oriental city being always a most interesting place, because of the contrasting costumes and people of every country, attracted there by the desire to buy and sell, or simply stroll about. The English axiom: ‘Time is money’ lacks meaning in the Orient, where all occupy themselves with doing as little as possible in an admirably conscientious manner, such that they spend the day seated on a mat, motionless.

The Bezesten consists of an infinite number of little streets lined with shops, or rather half-height alcoves, occupied by merchants crouching or lying down, smoking or sleeping, or else rolling a komboloi (in Arabic a ‘misbaha’) through their fingers, a kind of Turkish rosary formed of ninety-nine beads which correspond to ninety-nine names or epithets of Allah. By stretching out a hand, the merchant can reach all the corners of his shop: the buyers stand outside, and the transactions are concluded on the counter-top. There is nothing less luxurious, as one can see, than these shops formed of a square hole in a wall, but they nevertheless contain precious fabrics, fine weapons, magnificent saddles, and masterpieces of gold and silver embroidery.

A Street in Smyrna - Thomas Allom (English, 1804-1872)

A Street in Smyrna

Just as in Constantine (the capital of eastern Algeria), where this detail had previously struck me, the streets of the Bezesten are shaded by boards laid flat on transverse beams, but with spaces between them, otherwise one would no longer be able to see. These interstices allow the sun to filter through, streaking the ground with bright bars and producing the most strange and unexpected effects of chiaroscuro: a man passing through one of these beams displays a point of light on his nose as in a Rembrandt portrait; a woman’s feridgi (a loose sleeveless cloak) lights up like a pink flame, a hookah struck by a ray gleams like a heap of garnets, and the riches of Ali Baba’s cave seem to blaze at the rear of some confectioner’s shop. It is strange that these streets have not been covered with lattices for vines or climbing plants; probably the over-bright sun would scorch them, but tents and canvas awnings, as in Spain, could replace, advantageously, it seems to me, that aerial storey.

Not far from the Bezesten is a mosque composed, as they almost all are, of an agglomeration of small domes flanked by minarets which I can best compare to ships’ masts, their topsails represented by the balconies atop them from which the muezzins invite the faithful to prayer. Near this mosque, there is a fountain for ablutions, formed by a rotunda of columns with barbarous Corinthian capitals, roughly painted blue and connected by a grille of very pretty workmanship, the whole covered with a projecting, upturned roof; the water trickles through a channel in which the Muslims wash their feet up to the knees, and their arms up to the elbows, according to the prescriptions of Muhammad, not to mention a more intimate ablution that the fullness of oriental clothing allows to be accomplished with decency, even in public.

It was the hour of prayer; we climbed the stairs of the mosque to the forecourt, which it would have been risky to cross, since the crowd was considerable, and the enclosure, being overly narrow, could not contain all the faithful. A mountain of babouches (slippers), boots and shoes, was heaped at the door of the temple, and three rows of devotees, aligned beneath a portico with heart-shaped arches followed the liturgy performed within by the mullah, their faces turned towards Mecca. Whatever belief they may hold, those who worship God with a sincere spirit should not be subjected to ridicule; however, the pious evolutions of these good Muslims, executed like the twelve-step military routine a Prussian corporal’s baton might direct, seemed to me, despite that sentiment, tolerably strange.

I told myself that our Catholic ceremonies must seem reciprocally baroque to them, but had difficulty stopping myself from laughing when, leaning forward, nose first, they offered, three rows deep, a sight that would have charmed Molière’s matassins (buffoons, see Molière’s comedic ballet ‘Monsieur de Pourceaugnac’, 1669). Nothing can be grotesque in the eyes of its creator; but I believe that if I were a god, and found my devotees so comical, I would suppress religion.

On leaving the mosque, we visited the Greek church, which was hung with red calico of a rather hideous effect and daubed all over with modern frescoes painted by Italian artists. It looked rather like the salon of Café Momus (in the Rue des Prêtres St Germain l’Auxerrois, it was celebrated by Henri Murger in ‘Scenes de La Vie de Bohème’, and is the setting for Act Two of Puccini’s opera ‘La Bohème’) or a suburban ballroom. A priest, with many gestures and shouts, delivered a sermon from the pulpit in modern Greek, very edifying no doubt, but which I was unable to appreciate. In the outer cloister, I noticed on the wall a commemorative plaque in memory of Clément Boulanger, painter of the Procession of the Corpus Domini (1830, Lille Museum), the Tarasque, and the Fountain of Youth (1839, Narbonne Museum), who died a few years ago on a scientific expedition to the ruins of Ephesus. The grave of a compatriot abroad has something particularly sad about it, either because of selfish self-concern, or because of the thought that the earth of a foreign and barbarous land lies heavier on the bones it covers. I knew Clément Boulanger, and the unexpected sight of his funeral inscription caused me a more painful feeling than many another.

An opera entrance or a church porch is a very convenient place from which to review the fair sex (as the Empire styled them). Though one may see many an old woman wrinkled, yellowed, mummified, and veiled in a black headdress, one is compensated from time to time by some young, pure, fresh face beneath a concoction of butterflies, flowers, and gauze. Sadly, local fashion ends there: a silk dress from Brousse (Bursa) or Lyon, a shawl worn in the European manner, complete the toilette. The elegant ladies wear the hoods of cabriolets from which the wheels have been removed as hats! I also noticed that most of these ladies wore make-up, as the actresses and lorettes (courtesans) of Paris say, that is to say, had created a pastel mask with tints of white, red, blue and black. I have no objection to such a daub when it is applied to a young face and not there merely to hide a woman’s wrinkles.

Prowling on foot through the town, for we had dispensed with the donkeys, we crossed the courtyard of a kind of refuge, founded by Baron de Rothschild (James Meyer de Rothschild, the banker) for the benefit of the Jewish poor. A cradle, suspended from two trees like an Indian hammock, brought a little grace, amidst this asylum of misery, deformity and old age, to some child with an incurable infirmity. He was covered with a piece of gauze to protect him from flies, and his little hand, resting, and damp with the sweat of sleep, alone hung from the cradle, flexing as if to grasp a rattle pursued in a dream.

We thus arrived at the Slave Market, a courtyard surrounded by ruined arcades and dilapidated buildings. There were only two young North African girls for sale there, who squatted sadly on a wretched piece of carpet, guarded by their master, a rascal with a sulky, cunning face. As soon as we set foot on the threshold, a swarm of ragged little children, whose poor parents lived in these ruins, ran to meet us, begging us for alms in screeching voices.

I was moved by the inexpressibly nostalgic expression in the eyes of one of the two girls, and her melancholy, that of an animal so to speak, a captive gazelle. European eyes cannot attain such a look, in which the pain is no longer that of thought, but instinct. She had fine features, recalling the gracefully snub-nosed appearance of the Sphinx, or the caryatids of Egyptian columns; a bluish-black complexion with a bloom at the edge, like Monsieur’s plums (from the title of the Duc d’Orléans, brother to Louis XIV, who was said to have been particularly fond of the Ente plums of south-west France). I would have purchased her, if I had known what to do with her, as Victor Hugo would have bought the little pink pig in the meat-market in Frankfurt (see Hugo’s ‘Le Rhin’, Lettre XXIV). The slave-trader asked two hundred and fifty francs for her, which was not expensive. I had to be content with giving her a few piastres and some sweets, which she received with an age-old gesture, her arm pressed to her body, the palm of her hand turned upside down. Her fingers, which I touched, were cool and soft like those of a monkey.

Weary of charging about, our little troop settled down in front of a café in the Bezesten, to which our circumvolutions had returned us, and we remained there, until the hour of departure, watching a motley procession of Turks, Persians, Syrian and North African Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Tartars, and Jews, in costumes sometimes splendid, often ragged, but always picturesque, parade before our eyes. Never did a more varied kaleidoscope circle before curious eyes, and, in an hour, we saw authentic examples of all the facial types of the Orient, not excluding India represented. I would happily give you a detailed description of each of these characters, were I not afraid of failing to re-board the Léonidas in time; but we will see their like in Constantinople, in which I intend to make a fairly prolonged stay.

Chapter 5: The Troad, The Dardanelles

How sad to leave Smyrna so soon, that city of voluptuous Asian grace! As I hurried back to the boat, my eager eyes caught sight, through half-open doors, of courtyards paved with marble and refreshed by fountains much like the patios of Andalusia, and of verdant gardens, oases of calm and shade embellished with charming young girls in white or pastel-shaded casual clothing, their heads adorned with elegant Greek headdresses, grouped as the painter or poet might desire. My regret at leaving was addressed to the beautiful streets of the city, to the Rue des Roses (Gul Sokak, now 1328 Sokak) and those which adjoin it; for in the Jewish quarter and certain parts of the Turkish quarter all is poverty and disrepair. Justice obliges me not to hide the reverse of the coin.

Despite its great antiquity, for it already existed in the days of Homer, Smyrna contains few remains of its former splendour. For my part, as regards ancient ruins I saw only three or four tall Roman columns rising above the frail modern constructions which surrounded them. These crude pillars, remains of a temple of Jupiter or Fortune, I know not which, produce a fine effect, and must exercise the sagacity of scholars. I merely caught a glimpse of them from my perch on the donkey in passing, which prevents my giving a reasoned opinion.

The coast of Asia Minor is much less barren than that of Europe, and I remained on deck as long as the evening light permitted me to distinguish the outlines of the land.

By next day, when dawn broke, we had passed Metelin (Mytilene), the capital of ancient Lesbos, the island of Sappho, the Cythera of that mode of love from which man is banished, and which still counts today more than one priestess. A flattish coastline stretched, before us, on the right: it was the Troad:

‘Campos ubi Troia fuit,’

‘The fields where Troy once stood,’

(See Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ Book III, line 11)

the very ground itself of epic poetry, the theatre of two immortal epics, the place twice rendered sacred, by Greek and by Latin genius, by Homer and by Virgil. It is a strange feeling to find oneself thus in the midst of a poem and surrounded by mythology. Like Aeneas relating his adventures to Dido from the summit of her lofty bed, I could say from the heights of the deck, and with even greater veracity:

‘Est in conspectu Tenedos…’

‘Tenedos is within sight…’

(See Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, Book II, line 21)

for this is the island from which the serpents sprang that coiled about the unfortunate Laocoön and his sons, and furnished the subject of one of the masterpieces of statuary (The Laocoön group, Vatican Museum); Tenedos, over which Phoebus Apollo reigned in all his power, the god of the silver bow invoked by Chryses (the Trojan priest of Apollo); and, further on, here is the beach which Protesilaus, the first victim of that war which destroyed a whole people, stained with his blood, as with a propitiatory libation. That dubious pile of ruins which can be divined in the distance, may be the remains of the Scaean Gates (the main gates of Troy), from which Hector emerged, wearing that helm with the red crest which frightened little Astyanax (his son), and before which the old men whom Homer depicts saluting Helen’s beauty, sat in the shade; that dark mountain, clothed in a forest mantle which rises on the horizon, is Ida, the scene of the Judgment of Paris, where the three rival goddesses, Hera with arms of snow, bright-eyed Pallas Athene, and Aphrodite of the magic cestus (girdle), posed naked before the fortunate shepherd; and where Anchises knew the intoxication of a celestial marriage, and fathered Aeneas on Venus-Aphrodite. The Greek fleet was ranged along this shore, on which the prows of their black ships rested, half moored upon the sand. Homer’s exactitude is confirmed by every detail of the terrain; a military strategist, Iliad in hand, could follow there, all the events of the siege.

As, recalling my classical studies, I gaze at the Troad, Stalimene, the ancient Lemnos, which received in his fall Hephaestus (the god of metallurgy) hurled from the sky (from the heights of Olympus, by Zeus), rises from the sea and displays its yellowish promontories to my rear. I would like to possess two faces like Janus. Two eyes are really too few, and man is far inferior in this respect to the spider, which possesses eight, according to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Jan Swammerdam. I turn my head away for a moment to cast a glance at that volcanic island where the weapons were forged to test those heroes favoured by the gods, and the golden tripods, living slaves of metal, that served the Olympians in their celestial dwellings, and as I do so the captain pulls me by the sleeve to point out to me a rounded mound, a conical hill, on the Trojan shore, whose regular shape attests to the hand of man. The tumulus covers Antilochus, son of Nestor and Eurydice, the first Greek who killed a Trojan at the commencement of the siege, and who himself perished at the hand of Hector, while parrying a blow that Memnon dealt his father. ‘Does Antilochus truly rest beneath that mound?’ the critical reader will doubtless ask. Tradition affirms it, and why should tradition lie.

As we advance further, I discover two more tumuli, not far from a small village called Yenisehir, recognizable by a row of nine windmills, similar to those of Syra. The first, as we approach from Smyrna, and the one closest to the seashore, is the tomb of Patroclus, the bosom friend, brother-in-arms, and inseparable companion of Achilles. There the gigantic pyre, drenched with the blood of innumerable victims, was erected, which the hero, drunk with grief, burdened with four prize horses, two thoroughbred dogs, and twelve young Trojans sacrificed by his own hand, on behalf of his friend’s shade, and around which the mourning army celebrated funeral games that lasted several days. The second, further inland, is the tomb of Achilles himself. At least, that is the name given to it. According to Homeric tradition, the ashes of Achilles were mixed with those of Patroclus in a golden urn, so that the two great friends, inseparable in life, remained so in death. The gods were moved by the death of the hero. Thetis (the sea-goddess, Achilles’ mother) emerged from the waters accompanied by a plaintive chorus of Nereids; the nine Muses wept, and sang songs of mourning around the funeral bed, and the bravest of the army performed fierce games in honour of the hero. This third tumulus must be that of some other Greek or Trojan leader, probably Hector. In the days of Alexander, the location of the tomb of the Greek hero of the Iliad was still identifiable, for the conqueror of Asia halted here, declaring that Achilles was fortunate to have had such a friend as Patroclus and such a poet as Homer. He himself had only Hephaestion and Quintus Curtius, and yet his exploits surpassed those of the son of Peleus, history having superseded mythology.

While I discourse on Homeric geography, and the heroes of the Iliad, a most innocent and pardonable act of pedantry near the site of Troy, the Léonidas continues its course, though somewhat thwarted by a northerly blowing from the Black Sea, and advances towards the Dardanelles Strait, defended by two fortresses, one on the Asian shore, the other on the European shore. Their crossfire would bar the entrance to the strait, and render access to it if not impossible at least difficult in the extreme for any enemy fleet. In order to complete my account of the Troad, let me say that beyond Yenisehir a river which some say is the Simois, and others the Granicus, empties into the Bosphorus.

The Hellespont, or Sea of Helle, is quite narrow; at its mouth, one might rather think oneself sailing on a great river than a true sea. Its breadth is less than that of the Thames at Gravesend. As the wind was favourable for vessels emerging into the Aegean, we passed amidst a host of ships coursing towards us with all sails set, which from a distance, their sails taut and low in height, took on the shape of women carrying a pail in each hand and waddling as they walked. This comparison, so natural that it occurred to several persons on deck at once, seems absurd to me now that I write it, and will doubtless appear more so to those who read it, and yet it is quite accurate.

The coast of Europe, to which we were closest, consists of steep hills dotted with a few patches of vegetation of rather arid and monotonous appearance; the coast of Asia Minor is far more cheerful and presents, I know not why, an appearance of northern verdure which, according to received ideas, would befit Europe more. At a certain moment, we were so close to the shore, that we discerned five Turkish horsemen following a small path like a thin yellow ribbon stretched along the foot of the cliff. Their relative size gave an idea of the height of the coastline, which was greater than I would have believed. Nearby, Xerxes had the famous bridge built for the passage of his army and whipped the disrespectful sea, which had caused him inconvenience by destroying the work. Judged on the spot, this enterprise, cited in all the moral treatises as the height of human folly, and a madness prompted by pride, seems, on the contrary, a very reasonable one. Sestos and Abydos, made famous in turn by the love between Hero and Leander, are also thought to have been situated at about this point, where the Hellespont is less than a mile wide.

Lord Byron, as we know, without being in love, repeated Leander’s exploit by swimming the strait; but, instead of Hero, raising her torch like a lighthouse on shore, gained only a fever. He took an hour and ten minutes to make the journey, and was prouder of this feat than of having written Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage or The Corsair, a swimmer’s pride, which all who have properly taken a dip in the Piscine Deligny (a floating swimming pool on the Seine) and pretended to the honour of a red bathing costume will understand.

We stopped for a while, but without anchoring, before a town above which floated the flags of the consulates of several nations and was animated by the sails of furiously-turning windmills; outside the town, the beach was dotted with white and green tents where troops were encamped. I cannot give the name of this place, since each person I asked gave me a different one, which is more than usual in a country where the Latin name is superimposed on an original Greek name, and hidden in turn by a Turkish name, the whole whitewashed by the Frankish name for greater clarity; however, I think it was Chanak-Kalessi (Canakkale), which we Europeans have freely translated as the Dardanelles.

The wind, the current, and the narrowness of the strait rendered the water choppy, and leaping waves rocked, somewhat roughly, a boat rowed by several oarsmen that was trying to draw alongside the Léonidas, which had paused to wait for it in the midst of the Bosphorus. The boat was carrying a pasha travelling to Gallipoli at the entrance to the Sea of Marmara. He was a large fellow, with a thick neck, and a broad fat face, but well-formed beneath his plumpness. He was dressed in the hideous uniform of the Nizam (the regular Turkish army), a red fez, a blue frock-coat tightly buttoned; and his extensive retinue crowded about him, his steward, his secretaries, his pipe-holders and other minor officers, not to mention the kavasses (armed guards) and servants. All these people unfolded carpets and unrolled mattresses to squat on; the better-educated seated themselves on the benches, content to grasp a foot in one of their hands, to maintain composure.

The luggage was curious. It consisted of hookahs in red morocco cases, bundles of cherry-wood and jasmine-wood pipes, leather-covered basket-like trunks, embossed with gold around the locks and studded with the prettiest designs, rolls of Persian carpets, and piles of tiles. There were some rather odd folk in this group, among others an obese young boy, blond, chubby, and pink, who looked like an enormous English baby dressed as a Turk, and a thin, sharp-faced, angular Greek with a fox’s muzzle, his body enveloped in a long cinnamon-coloured cloth robe edged with fur, like the dolmans (Turkish robes) in which the actors in Bajazet (the play by Racine) are dressed, in the theatre on the Rue Richelieu (the Comédie-Française); the large pasha was enclosed by them as if in parentheses, and they seemed to enjoy, in various ways, their master’s favour; the costumes of the lower orders had retained their native character: wide belts stuffed with weapons, braided waistcoats and jackets, the latter with brightly-coloured elbows, producing the fine appearance of Arnauts (Albanians serving in the Turkish military), or those Albanian bandits who are the delight of painters, and the despair of manufacturers of waterproofs made of rubber or gutta-percha; thus dressed, the slaves looked like Oriental princes, and their masters like unemployed servants.

As it was Ramadan, neither masters nor slaves touched their chibouks, and were content, to pass the time, sleeping or telling the beads of their rosaries between their fingers.

Of the Sea of Marmara itself, I can give little detail, since it was night when we crossed it, and I was sleeping in the depths of my cabin, tired by a fourteen-hour turn on deck. Above Gallipoli, it widens considerably, narrowing again near Constantinople. The pasha and his suite were deposited at Gallipoli, whose minarets appeared, confusedly, amidst the evening shadows. When day broke, on the Asian side, the Olympus of Bithynia (Mount Uludağ), frozen with eternal snow, rose from the rosy vapours of the morning, with the gleam of a pigeon's throat and a silvery shimmer. The European shore, infinitely less rugged, was speckled with a fringe of white houses and clumps of greenery, above which rose long brick chimneys, the obelisks of industry, whose vermilion brick, from a distance, imitated quite effectively the pink granite of Egypt. If I were not fearful of the accusation that I seek to flaunt a paradox, I would say the whole environment reminded me of the appearance of the Thames, between the Isle of Dogs and Greenwich; the sky, very milky, very opaline, almost white and drowned in a transparent mist, added still more to the illusion; it seemed as if we were voyaging to London aboard the Boulogne steamboat, and to avoid deception, were obliged to fly the flag, red with a silver crescent, that had been hoisted to our masthead on our entry to the Dardanelles.

In the distance the archipelago of the Princes’ Islands, the Hyères Islands (the ‘Golden Isles’ on the Mediterranean coast of France) of Constantinople, which people visit on Sundays for pleasure, turned bluish; a few more minutes, and Stamboul (Istanbul’s old town) appeared to us in all its splendour. Already, on the left, through a silver gauze of fog, the spires of a few minarets sprang forth; the Castle of the Seven Towers, where ambassadors were once imprisoned, bristled with massive turrets linked together by crenellated walls; it bathed in the sea at its foot, leaning against the hill; it is from this fortress that the ancient rampart surrounding the city as far as Eyoub (Eyüp) begins. The Turks call the castle Yedikule, and the Greeks Heptapurgon. Its construction dates back to the Byzantine emperors. It was begun by the Emperor Zeno and completed by the Komneni (and heavily modified in 1458 by Sultan Mehmed II). Seen from the sea, it appeared to be in poor condition, well-nigh falling to ruin; however, it creates a fine effect with its heavy shape, squat towers, and thick walls, its appearance being that of a bastille, a true fortress.

The Léonidas, slowing so as not to arrive too early, skirted the Seraglio headland. The Seraglio displays a series of long whitewashed walls, their crenellations rising against a curtain of terebinths and cypresses; rooms with latticed windows; and kiosks with projecting roofs lacking all symmetry; it is far from being the magnificent dwelling-place of the Thousand and One Nights which prompts, with that single word ‘seraglio’, the laziest of imaginations to dream, and it must be admitted that these wooden boxes with serrated grilles, that enclose the beauties of Georgia, Circassia and Greece, the houris of this Islamic paradise over which the Padishah (sovereign) is god, wholly resemble chicken coops. We confuse, despite ourselves, Arab architecture and Turkish architecture, which are unconnected, and involuntarily make an Alhambra of every seraglio, which is far from the reality. Cold observations of this kind fail to prevent the ancient Seraglio from presenting a most pleasant aspect, with its sparkling whiteness and dark verdure, between the clear sky and the blue water, whose rapid current washes its mysterious walls.

As we passed, an inclined chute was pointed out to me, which springs from an opening in the wall and projects, like the termination of a roller coaster, above the sea. It is through this, it is said, that unfaithful odalisques (concubines) or those who had displeased the master, for some reason or other, were sent sliding into the Bosphorus, wrapped in a bag containing a cat and a snake. How many beauties have drowned in this deep blue water, with its impetuous current! Now the moral code is purer or at least more tolerant, for one no longer hears of these barbaric executions. However, the legend may be false, and I in no way vouch for its authenticity. I give it here without judgement; if it is not true, it at least possesses local colour.

Doubling the tip of the Seraglio, the Léonidas hove to at the entrance to the Golden Horn. A marvellous panorama unfolded before my eyes like the set of an opera based on a fairy-tale. The Golden Horn is a gulf, whose two capes are formed by the old Seraglio and the harbour of Tophane, and which borders the city built in an amphitheatre, its shores stretching as far as the Eaux Douces d’Europe (‘The Sweet Waters of Europe’ are the two stream valleys of the Kağıthane Suyu and Alibeyköy Suyu, located at the top of the inlet of the Golden Horn, Haliç, near the suburb of Eyüp) and the mouth of the Kağıthane Suyu, the small river which flows into it. Its name of Golden Horn doubtless comes from the fact that it represents for the city a veritable cornucopia, by the facility it provides for ships, trade and shipbuilding.

While waiting to disembark, let me make a light pencil sketch of the larger picture I will paint later. On the right, beyond the sea, stands a huge building regularly pierced with several rows of windows and flanked at each corner by a species of turret surmounted by a flagpole: it is a barracks, the most considerable building, but not the most characteristic of Scutari, or Üsküdar the Turkish designation for this Asiatic suburb of Constantinople which spreads, in ascending the coast towards the Black Sea, over the site of ancient Chrysopolis, of which no vestige remains.

A little further on, amidst the water, a dazzling white lighthouse, which is called the Tower of Leander or the Tower of the Maiden, though the place has nothing to do with the legend of the two lovers celebrated by Alfred de Musset (see ‘La Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle’, Chapter V, 1836), stands on a small island of rocks. This tower, of a rather elegant shape, to which the purity of light grants the appearance of being made of alabaster, stands out admirably against the dark azure tone of the sea.

At the entrance to the Golden Horn, Tophane juts forth, with its landing stage, its cannon foundry, and its mosque, with a bold dome and slender minarets, built by Sultan Mehmed II. The palace which houses the Russian embassy raises, proudly, above the red-tiled roofs and clumps of trees, its dominant facade, which attracts the eye and seemingly takes possession of the city in advance, while the palaces of the other embassies content themselves with a more modest appearance. The tower of Galata, a district concerned with Frankish trade, rises amidst the houses, is topped with a pointed cap of verdigris-tinted copper, and dominates the ancient Genoese walls falling to ruin at its feet. Pera (Beyoğlu), the residence of the European community, with its cypress trees and stone houses, which contrast with the Turkish huts made of wood, is at the summit of the hill, and extends to the Great Field of the Dead (the larger cemetery, with a Frankish section).

The tip of the Seraglio forms the other cape, and along this shore the city of Constantinople itself unfolds. Never did a more magnificently rugged line undulate between sky and water: the ground rises from the sea, and the buildings form an amphitheatre, the mosques, topping this ocean of verdure and houses of every colour, raise their round bluish domes, and launch their white minarets, each surrounded by a balcony and ending in a sharp point, into the clear morning sky, granting the city an Oriental and fairy-tale like physiognomy to which the silvery glow which bathes their vaporous contours contributes greatly. An officious neighbour named them for me in order, starting from the Seraglio and ascending towards the base of the Golden Horn: Hagia Sophia, Hagia Irene, Sultan Ahmet (the Blue Mosque), Nuruosmaniye, Sultan Bayezid, Süleymaniye, Şehzade, Sultan Mehmed II (the Fatih Mosque), and Sultan Selim (Yavuz Selim). Amidst all these minarets, behind the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, and rising to a prodigious height, stands the tower of the Seraskier (the Bayezit Tower), from which fires are reported.

Constantinople from the Heights Above Eyup - Thomas Allom (English, 1804-1872)

Constantinople from the Heights Above Eyup

Three boat-bridges link the two shores of the Golden Horn, allowing unceasing communication between the Turkish city and its suburbs with their varied populations. The main street of Galata ends at the first of these points. But let us not anticipate these details, which will be presented in their proper place, and limit ourselves here to the general aspect. As in London, there are no quays in Constantinople, and the city everywhere plunges its feet into the sea; ships of all nations approach the houses without being kept at a respectful distance by granite walkways. Near the bridge, in the middle of the Golden Horn and offshore, were stationed flotillas of English, French, Austrian, and Turkish steamboats: omnibuses of the sea, manned by the watermen of the Bosphorus, that Thames of Constantinople on which all the movement and all the activity of the city are focussed. Myriads of canoes and caiques furrowed the azure waters of the gulf like shoals of fish, and headed towards the Léonidas, anchored some distance from the Customs House, located between Galata and Tophane. In every country of the world, the Customs House has columns and an architrave in the style of the Odéon in Paris. That of Constantinople was careful not to betray the architectonic structure of the genre. Fortunately, the huts which surround it are so dilapidated, so out of plumb, projecting so far forward, while leaning against each other with such an oriental nonchalance, that they correct the classical appearance of the Customs House.

As usual, the deck of the Léonidas was covered in an instant with a polyglot crowd: there arose an incomprehensible din of Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French and English. I was feeling somewhat embarrassed amidst this varied gibberish, despite having studied, before leaving France, Covielle’s Turkish and the ceremony performed in Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (in the play, Covielle is a valet who purports to speak Turkish), when there appeared, in a caique, like an angel of salvation, the person to whom I had been recommended and who speaks as many languages as the famous Mezzofanti (Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, a polyglot who spoke numerous languages); she sent all the scoundrels who surrounded me to the devil, each in his own particular idiom, had me enter her boat, and carried me off to the Customs, where they contented themselves with casting a distracted glance at my meagre trunk, which a hamal (porter) loaded, as if it were light as a feather, on his broad back.

The hamal is a species peculiar to Constantinople: a two-legged camel without a hump, living on cucumbers and water, and bearing enormous weights through impassable streets and up perpendicular ascents, despite the oppressive heat. Instead of hooks, the hamal carries on its shoulders a leather pad on which it sets its burden, under which it walks, bowed down, and taking the weight on its neck, like an ox. Its attire consists of large linen breeches, a jacket of coarse yellowish material, and a fez encircled by a kerchief. Hamals possess an extremely developed torso, and often surprisingly slender legs. It is difficult to conceive how those thin tibias, covered with tanned skin and resembling flutes in their cases, can support loads which would inconvenience a Hercules.

Following the hamal, who had headed towards the lodgings reserved for me, I plunged into a maze of narrow, winding, ignoble and badly-paved streets and alleys, full of holes and quagmires, and clogged with leprous dogs, and donkeys laden with beams or rubble, as the dazzling mirage that Constantinople presents from afar swiftly vanished. Paradise was transformed to a cesspool, poetry turned to prose, and I wondered, with a certain feeling of melancholy, how these ugly hovels could take on such seductive aspects, such a tender and vaporous colour, when distantly viewed. On the heels of my hamal, and clinging to the arm of my guide, I reached the room intended for me, at my Smyrna hostess’s, she being akin to that Copa Syrisca (‘Syrisca the Barmaid’), of the Appendix Virgiliana (a collection of poems once ascribed to Virgil); the place being sited close to the main street of Pera, and lined with insignificant but tasteful buildings, like the third-ranked streets of Marseille or Barcelona.

I had journeyed there from Paris in twelve and a half days, travelling as fast as the post, for it is a principle of mine when I do travel, to speed as swiftly as possible to the furthest point of my itinerary, and then return at leisure. I had promised myself to devote the day to the rest I had well deserved; but curiosity got the better of me, and, after a few mouthfuls swallowed in haste, unable to resist any longer, I began my wanderings and set off, at random, through this city unknown to me, without the aid of a compass to orient myself, as a friend of mine, full of sagacity and prudence, was accustomed to do.

The End of Part I of Gautier’s ‘Constantinople’

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