Alphonse de Lamartine
Travels in the Near East (Voyage en Orient, 1832-33)
Part III
Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
- A Visit to the Pasha.
- Rhodes.
- Cyprus.
- Beirut.
- A Visit to Lady Hester Stanhope.
- Joun.
- A Visit to Emir Bashir Shihab II.
- Beiteddine Palace.
A Visit to the Pasha
On the evening of the 20th of August, I went to render my thanks to Youssouf, the Bey of Negroponte and Athens. I entered a Moorish courtyard, the wide galleries on two floors supported by small columns of black marble. An empty fountain stood in the centre of the courtyard; stables surrounded it. I ascended a wooden staircase, at the top of which several spahis stood in line, and was shown into the Bey’s chamber. At the far end of a vast and opulent apartment, decorated with wood panelling which was divided into small compartments painted with flowers and arabesques, and embellished in gold, the Bey was seated, in the Turkish manner, on a large divan covered with Indian fabric; his beard was being attended to by his barber, a handsome young man dressed in a splendid military uniform, with superb weapons attached to his belt; half a score of slaves, in various poses, were scattered around the room. The Bey apologised to me for having been caught in the act of dressing, and asked me to sit on the divan, not far from him. I did so, and the conversation began.
We spoke of the purpose of my journey, the state of Greece, the new borders assigned by the London conference, the negotiations concluded by Stratford Canning (Stratford Canning, 1st Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe was a British diplomat, long-time British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He was a cousin of George Canning, Prime Minister in 1827), all things of which the Bey seemed profoundly ignorant, and on which he questioned me with the keenest interest. (During the London Conference of May, 1832, the Great Powers, Britain, France, and Russia established Greece as a monarchy under the Bavarian Prince Otto, defining the borders, and ending the Greek War of Independence, subsequently ratifying the agreement by the Treaty of Constantinople in July). Soon a slave, carrying a long pipe with a yellow amber tip and a stem covered in pleated silk, approached me with measured steps, looking at the ground. When he had calculated exactly in his mind the precise point where, with its bowl on the floor, the pipe would reach my mouth, he set the bowl on the ground; And, walking in a circle so as not to disturb its placement, he approached me with a half-turn and, bowing, placed the amber stem in my hand within reach of my lips. I bowed in turn to the Pasha, who returned my greeting, and we each began to smoke.
A white Athenian greyhound, its tail and paws painted yellow, was sleeping at the Bey’s feet. I complimented him on the beauty of the animal and asked if he hunted. He told me no, but that his son, then at Negroponte, was passionately fond of the pursuit; he added that he had seen me traversing the streets of Athens with a white greyhound as well, but of a smaller breed, which he had found incomparably beautiful; and that if I had several, he would be overjoyed to possess one similar. I promised him that, on my return to France, I would send him one as a token of remembrance, and in recognition of his kindness to me in Athens. Another slave then brought the coffee in very small Chinese-porcelain cups contained in small nets of gilded silver wire.
This Turkish ruler possessed the character I have since recognised in all the Muslims whom I have had occasion to observe in Syria and Turkey: nobility, gentleness, and the calm and serene resignation that the doctrine of predestination bestows upon these men, and which faith in Providence bestows upon true Christians; the same acceptance of the divine will: the one taken to the point of absurdity and error; the other, a sad and true expression of the universal and merciful wisdom that presides over the destiny of all it has deigned to create. If a conviction could be a virtue, fatalism, or rather providentialism, would be mine! I believe in the complete, ever-active, ever-present action of God’s will; only evil within us prevents this divine will from always producing the good. As soon as our destiny is altered, spoiled, perverted, we can always recognise if we look closely, that it is due to the exercise of our own will, human will, that is to say, a corrupt and perverse one; if we were to act according to the only will which is eternally good, we would always be good and happy ourselves: evil would cease to exist! The dogmas of the Koran are simply a modified form of those of Christianity, the modifications being of a nature however not to completely distort them. The people are full of virtue. I love these people, for they are a people of prayer!
August 22, 1832.
Deep anxiety concerning my daughter’s health — a sad walk to the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the Stadium. I drank from the muddy, foul-smelling stream that is the Ilissus. I scarcely found enough water to dip my finger in; — aridity, bareness, the colour of slag, spreading over all this Athenian countryside. O countryside of Rome, golden tombs of the Scipios, green and sombre fountain of Egeria! How different! And how the skies above Rome surpass the much-vaunted skies of Attica!
August 23, 1832.
We left at night. A beautiful dawn amidst the olive groves of Piraeus, on the way to the sea. The warship Génie, captained by Annibal Cunéo d’Ornano, was waiting for us, and we weighed anchor. In three hours, a fine northerly breeze carried us to a point off Cape Sunium, whose yellow columns we could see marking the horizon, a place still alive with the language of Greek wisdom, of that Plato of whom I would be a disciple if Christ had neither spoken, nor lived, nor suffered, nor brought forgiveness through his dying.
A terrible night spent amidst the Cyclades. The wind dropped at midday; and we enjoyed a beautiful and gentle passage till evening. At nightfall, we encountered a furious squall between the islands of Amorgos and Stampalia (Astypalaia). The ship groaned as if in pain; the waves crashed dully against the stern. A rolling motion threw us from wave to another. I spent the night tending to my child, and walking on deck. A painful night! How often I shudder to think that I have staked so many lives on a single throw of the dice! How happy I would be if a celestial spirit were to bear Julia home to the peaceful shady environs of Saint-Point! My own life, half-consumed, has already lost more than half its value to me, but the life, mine also, shining in those beautiful eyes, beating in that young breast, is a hundred times dearer to me than my own! It is for her sake above all that I fervently prayed to the wind that stirs the waves to spare this being whom I have so imprudently entrusted to it. It granted my wish; the waves subsided, day broke, the islands fled behind us; Rhodes appeared to starboard, in the hazy distance, with Asia Minor on the horizon, the high peaks of the Caraman Coast (Anatolia), white as the snow of the Alps, rising resplendent above the floating clouds of night. So, this is where Asia begins!
The first impression is of a scene that surpasses those of Greece: the air feels gentler; the sea and sky are tinted a calmer, paler blue; nature unfolds in more expansive and majestic masses. I breathe, and feel myself entering a broader and more elevated region! Greece is small — tormented, stripped bare; it is like the skeleton of a dwarf: here the landscape is that of a giant! Dark forests stain the flanks of the Marmaris mountains, and from afar one sees white torrents of foam falling into the deep ravines of Caramania.
Rhodes
Rhodes emerges like a verdant bouquet from the heart of the waves; the light and graceful minarets of its white mosques rise above groves of palm, carob, sycamore, plane, and fig trees; from afar, they draw the voyager’s eye to those delightful retreats, the Turkish cemeteries, where every evening one sees Muslims lying on the grass beside their friends’ graves, smoking and telling stories quietly, like sentinels waiting to be relieved, or like indolent folk who like to lie in their beds and try to sleep before the hour of their final rest. At ten in the morning, our brig finds itself surrounded, suddenly, by five or six Turkish frigates under full sail cruising off Rhodes: one of them approaches within earshot and interrogates us in French. We are greeted politely, and soon drop anchor in the harbour of Rhodes, amidst thirty-six warships commanded by Grand Admiral Halil Pasha (Damat Gürcü Halil Rifat Pasha, of Georgian origin). Two French warships, one a steamship, the Sphinx, commanded by Captain Sarlat, the other also a corvette, the Actéon, commanded by Captain Vaillant (August-Nicolas Vaillant, later Rear-Admiral), are anchored not far from us. The officers come aboard to ask us for news from Europe. In the evening, we thank the commander of the brig Le Génie, Monsieur d’Ornano. He is leaving again, accompanied by the Actéon. We will continue our voyage alone towards Cyprus and Syria.
Two days spent in Rhodes exploring the mainly Turkish city — the oriental character of the bazaars, Moorish shops with carved wood — the Street of the Knights, where each house still bears intact, on its door, the coat of arms of an ancient House of France, Spain, Italy, or Germany. Rhodes possesses fine remnants of its ancient fortifications; the rich vegetation that crowns and envelops them grants them greater grace and beauty than those of Malta — the Knights Hospitaller who allowed themselves to be driven from such a magnificent possession received a mortal blow! Nature seems to have rendered the island an outpost of Asia; a European power that held it would simultaneously control the Archipelago, Greece, Smyrna, the Dardanelles, the Egyptian Sea, and the Syrian Sea. I know of no better maritime military position in the world, no more beautiful sky, no more smiling and fertile land.
The Turks have imprinted upon it the character of inaction and indolence which they carry everywhere: everything is in a state of inertia, and a species of misery. But these people, who create nothing, and renew nothing, neither break nor destroy anything: they at least leave the natural world around them free to act; they respect the trees even in the middle of the streets and houses they inhabit; water and shade, a drowsy murmur and a voluptuous coolness, are their first, their only needs. Thus, as soon as you approach, in Europe or Asia-Minor, a region inhabited by Muslims, you recognise it from afar by the rich, dark veil of greenery that veils it gracefully. Trees, under which one can seat oneself in the shade, gushing fountains beside which one can dream amidst their murmur, in silence, and mosques with slender minarets rise at every step from the heart of a pious land: that is all these people need; they only emerge from their gentle apathy to mount their desert steeds, the first servants of mankind, and to embrace death, fearlessly, in the service of their Prophet and their God. Fatalist dogma has rendered them the bravest people in the world; and though life is pleasant and sweet for them, that which is promised by the Koran, in reward for a life given for the cause, is so much more beautiful, that they need only make a slight effort to leap from this world to the celestial world they envisage before them, radiant with beauty, peace, and love! It is a belief fit for heroes; but a belief that is fading within Islam, and heroism is thus diminishing with the faith that is its foundation: the less people believe in a dogma or an idea, the less willingly they will die a noble death. It is as in Europe: why risk dying if life is better than death; if there is nothing immortal to be gained by sacrificing oneself to duty? Thus, heroism will diminish and fade in Europe, until faith is rekindled and speaks to the human heart more powerfully than the base instinct for life.
Ravishing figures of women are seen in the evening, seated on terraces in the moonlight. They have the eyes of Italian women, but softer, more timid, more filled with tenderness and love — their figures are those of Greek women, but more rounded, more supple, with sweeter, more graceful movements. Their foreheads are broad, smooth, white, polished like that of the most beautiful women in England or Switzerland; but the regular, straight, and broad line of the nose lends more majesty and antique nobility to the face. The Greek sculptors would have been even more perfect had they taken their models of female figures from Asia-Minor! And then, it is so delightful for a European accustomed to the tired features, the strained and contracted expressions, of European women, and especially of salon ladies, to finally see figures as simple, as pure, as calm as marble fresh from the quarry; figures that have but one expression, repose and tenderness, and which the eye reads as quickly and easily as the capital letters in some magnificent deluxe edition!
Society and civilisation are obvious enemies of physical beauty. They create too many impressions and feelings; and as the face involuntarily receives and retains their imprint, it becomes complex and altered in expression; it acquires something confused and uncertain that destroys its simplicity and charm; it is like a language that possesses too many individual words, and can no longer be understood because it is too rich.
August 27, 1832.
At noon, we set sail from Rhodes for Cyprus, on a magnificent evening. My gaze was fixed on Rhodes, as it sank at last into the sea. I longed for that beautiful island like an apparition one wishes to revive; I would settle there, if it were less separate from the world in which destiny and duty compel us to live. What delightful retreats on the slopes of the high mountains, and on those terraces shaded by all the trees of Asia-Minor! I was shown a magnificent house belonging to the former Pasha, surrounded by three large, lavish gardens bathed by abundant fountains, adorned with charming kiosks. They are asking sixteen thousand piastres to purchase that same, that is to say, four thousand francs. Now there is happiness at a bargain price!
August 28, 1832.
The sea is beautiful, but with a heavy swell; there is no wind; immense waves arrive from the west, rolling majestically beneath our stern, and tossing us about for three days and three nights, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. An unbearable torment, this fruitless movement! It is like rolling a boulder in Hell. On the fourth day, we sighted the eastern tip of Cyprus; a day spent coasting along the island; we did not drop anchor in the harbour of Larnaca till the morning of the sixth day since leaving Piraeus.
Monsieur Alphonse Bottu, the French consul in Cyprus, recognised the vessel on which he knew we had embarked. He sent one of his consular representatives aboard to encourage us to disembark and accept his hospitality to which we had no other right than his own kindness and courtesy. I accepted — we disembarked. An excellent and cordial welcome from Monsieur and Madame Bottu. Monsieur Perthier and Monsieur Alexiano Guillois, attached to the consulate, showered us with like courtesies; we paid and received visits — gifts — coffee and Cypriot wine sent by Monsieur Mathéi, one of the Cypriot magnates.
Cyprus
August 31.
Two days spent in Cyprus; the charm of rest after a long voyage and the delights of a most unexpected, amiable and hospitable reception; such are the feelings I experience in Cyprus; but that is all. The island, which has formerly been praised to me as an oasis amongst the Mediterranean islands resembles all the dull, dusty and naked isles of the Archipelago; it is the skeleton of one of those enchanted isles in which antiquity set its most poetic cults. It is true that, eager to reach Asia-Minor itself, I obtained only glimpses of the remote and picturesque scenes with which this island is said to be filled; on my return journey, I intend to spend a month here, and explore the mountains of Cyprus in detail.
The island is fertile throughout, and oranges, olives, grapes, figs, vines, cotton — everything must thrive here, even sugarcane. This land of promise, this beautiful kingdom for a crusading knight or a companion of Bonaparte, once supported up to two million people; now only thirty thousand Greek inhabitants and a few Turks remain. Nothing would be easier than seizing this realm; an adventurer could easily succeed with a handful of soldiers and a few million piastres; it would be worthwhile, if there were a chance of keeping it. But Europe, which so desperately needs colonies, opposes such status being granted; the jealousy of the major powers would come to the aid of the Turks, sow discord throughout the new conquest, and the conqueror would suffer the fate of King Theodore (Freiherr Theodor Stephan von Neuhoff, a German adventurer, briefly crowned himself King Theodor I of Corsica, in 1736) What a pity! It is a beautiful dream; which a mere week might render a reality.
At sea, departing the island of Cyprus, September 2, 1832.
We set sail yesterday at midnight. Our friends from Cyprus, Messieurs Bottu and Perthier, spent the evening with us on the deck of the brig and did not leave until midnight. We carry with us the deepest gratitude for the truly warm welcome we received from Monsieur and Madame Bottu. It is a singular destiny, that of the traveller: he sows affection, memories, and regrets everywhere; he never leaves a shore without the desire and hope of returning to find those whom he knew not a few days before. When he arrives, everything on earth, over which he lets his eyes wander, is a matter of indifference to him; when he departs, he feels that others’ eyes and hearts follow him from the shore he sees receding behind him. He himself fixes his gaze upon it, he leaves something of his own heart there; then the wind carries him toward another horizon where the same scenes, the same impressions, will be renewed. To travel is to multiply, through arrival and departure, welcomes and farewells, impressions that the events of a sedentary life provide only at rare intervals; it is to experience a hundred times a year a little of what one experiences in ordinary life, in knowing, loving, and losing people placed on our path by Providence. Leaving is like dying, every time one departs some distant land to which destiny will not lead one twice. To travel is to summarise a long life in a few years; it is one of the strongest experiences that a man can grant his heart as well as his mind. The philosopher, the politician, the poet, should travel extensively. To change one’s moral horizon is to change one’s thinking.
September 3, 1832.
We wake in the middle of the gulf. We can no longer see the white shores of the island, nor the rounded summit of Mount Olympos (the mountain in Cyprus, not the ‘home of the gods’ of that name in Thessaly). The sea is as calm as a vast lake; a thick, silvery mist lines the horizon on all sides. A weak, idle, breezy gust occasionally dies in our broad sails. A blazing sun scorches the deck planks, which are hosed to cool them. Everyone is lying on the rudders or the rigging, speechless, motionless, foreheads streaming with sweat. The air is stifling; a veritable simoom (the hot, dry desert wind) blows over the sea. It seems as if we are already breathing the humid, burning air of the desert sands, still a few hundred miles away. The days pass thus. We lack the strength to speak, even the strength to read. I sometimes half-open the Bible to look for anything concerning Lebanon, whose peaks will soon meet our gaze. I am reading the story of Herod in the works of Flavius Josephus (the first-century AD Romano-Jewish author of ‘The Jewish War’ and ‘Antiquities of the Jews’).
September 4, 1832.
The same absence of wind; the same blazing sky. The sea steams with heat, and the still waters are veiled in a fog that not a breath of breeze disperses. We scan the horizon for the faint ripples that a few stray gusts trace on its surface: we see one of them slowly approach the brig, bringing a touch of bright colour to the sea again; it swells our mainsails slightly: the ship creaks, and raises a little foam at its bow. Our chests expand; we approach the shore from which the breeze blew. We feel a touch of coolness slide across our foreheads, beneath the damp curls of our hair; and then all returns to calm and the abiding furnace-like heat. The water we drink is lukewarm; no one has the strength to eat. If this state were to continue, none would live long. Fortunately, we only have six weeks of this heat to fear; it ends in mid-October.
September 4th, in the evening.
From five to eight o’clock, a fresh wind from the Gulf of Alexandretta propelled us a few leagues. We must be about halfway between Cyprus and the Syrian coast; perhaps tomorrow, when we wake, we will be in sight of the coast.
September 5, 1832.
When I awoke, I heard the faint murmur of the ship’s wake as the vessel slid forward. I hurried up on deck to see the coast, but nothing was yet visible. The frequent currents in this sea may have carried us far beyond our estimated position; perhaps we are off the low-lying land stretching to Idumea (Edom), or off the shores of Egypt. Impatience is mounting in us all.
Same date, September 5, at two o’clock.
The brig’s captain recognised the peaks of Mount Lebanon. He summoned me, so as to point them out. I searched for them in vain in the fiery mist his finger indicated. I saw nothing but the translucent fog raised by the heat, and, above it, a few layers of dull white cloud. He insisted, I looked again, but in vain. All the sailors smiled and pointed out Lebanon to me; the captain failed to understand why I was unable to see it as he did. ‘Well, where are you looking?’ he said to me, ‘You are seeking it too far away. There, closer, and above.’ I then raised my eyes to the sky, and indeed, there rose the white and gold crest of Mount Sannine, hovering in the firmament above us. The sea mist prevented me from seeing its base and flanks. Only the summit was visible, radiant and serene against the blue of the sky. It was one of the most magnificent and sweetest impressions I have received in all my long voyages.
This was the land toward which all my thoughts at that moment were directed, as a man and as a traveller; it was the sacred land, to which I had travelled from afar seeking the memories of earlier peoples; and then it was the land where in a delightful clime, in the shade of orange and palm trees, beside snow-covered streams, in a house on some cool and verdant hillside, I would lodge all that I held most dear in the world, my wife and my daughter Julia.
I have no doubt that a year or two spent under this beautiful sky will strengthen Julia’s health, which for the past six months has sometimes given me dire premonitions (she had, in fact, contracted tuberculosis). I welcome these mountains of Asia-Minor as a refuge to which God has led her so as to heal her; a secret and profound joy fills my heart; I can no longer take my eyes off Mount Lebanon.
We dine in the shade of a tent pitched on the deck. The breeze continues, picking up again as the sun sets. Every few moments, we run to the bow to gauge the ship’s progress from the sound it makes as it slices through the waves; finally, the wind freshens, the waves break; we are making five knots an hour; the flanks of the high mountains pierce the fog and advance like aerial capes before us. We can make out the deep, dark valleys that widen as they reach the coast; the ravines whiten, the rocks of the ridges rise higher, and appear jagged, the first hills that rise from the vicinity of the sea seem more rounded; little by little, we think to recognise villages clinging to the hillsides, and great monasteries that crown, like Gothic castles, the summits of the intermediate mountains. Every sight we take in brings joy to our hearts; everyone is on deck. Each person points out to their neighbour something they had failed to notice; one of them sees the cedars of Lebanon in a black stain on a mountainside, another a keep atop the mountains near Tripoli; some think they can make out foaming waterfalls on the precipitous slopes.
All long to reach that long-dreamed-of, long-desired shore before nightfall; they tremble lest, just as we are about to arrive, a new calm will lull the ship to sleep for long days on these waves that frustrated us, or that a contrary wind might blow from the coast and drive us back to the Sea of Candia (Crete): this Syrian sea, an immense gulf surrounded by the high peaks of Lebanon and the Taurus Mountains, is treacherous for sailors; if there is not a gale blowing, there is either a flat calm or a strong current; these currents irresistibly carry ships far from their course; and then there are no harbours along the coasts; one must anchor in dangerous road-steads, a great distance from shore; an almost constant swell ploughs these road-steads and drags at anchor cables, we will only be at peace and certain of having arrived when we have disembarked.
While we were amidst these deliberations, wavering between hope and fear, night suddenly falls, not as in our climate, with the gradual onset of twilight, but like a curtain drawn over the sky and the earth. Everything fades, everything disappears on the blackened slopes of Lebanon, and we can see nothing but the stars between which our masts sway. The wind also dies; the sea sleeps; and we each descend into our cabins, uncertain of tomorrow.
I was not asleep; my mind was too agitated. Through the poorly joined planks that separated my room from Julia’s, I could hear the breathing of my sleeping child, and my whole heart was preoccupied by her. I thought that perhaps in the following days I too would be able to sleep more peacefully, mindful of this precious life of hers, which I regretted having risked, so greatly, on the sea — a life a storm could snatch away in its prime. In my thoughts, I prayed to God to forgive my imprudence, and not punish me for having trusted in him too much, for having asked more of him than I had a right to do.
I reassured myself. I told myself: ‘She is a visible angel who protects both her own destiny and ours. Heaven will reward us for her innocence and purity; it will lead us; it will bear us home safely because of her. She will have seen, at the most beautiful period of life, at that age when all impressions are incorporated, so to speak, within us, and become the very elements of our existence, she will have seen all that is beautiful in Nature, in creation; her childhood memories will be of the marvellous monuments, and masterpieces of painting, in Italy. Athens and the Parthenon will be engraved in her memory, like ancestral sites; the beautiful islands of the Archipelago, the Taurus Mountains, the mountains of Lebanon, Jerusalem, the Pyramids, the desert, the tents of the Arabs, the palm trees of Mesopotamia, will provide material for the tales of her old age. God gave her beauty, innocence, genius, and a heart ablaze with generous and sublime feelings; I, for my part, would give her what I could add to those heavenly gifts: the spectacle of the most marvellous, the most enchanting scenes on earth. What a being she will be at twenty! Her life will have been filled with happiness, piety, love, and wonders! Oh! Who will be worthy to complete it with love? I wept, and I prayed with fervour and confidence; for I can never have a strong feeling in my heart without it tending toward the infinite, without it resolving itself into a hymn or an invocation to the One who is the end of all our feelings, who produces them and absorbs them all once more: to God himself!
As I was about to fall asleep, I heard hurried footsteps on the bridge, signalling some manoeuvre: I was astonished, since there had been utter silence for a long while, and the sea produced only a slight ripple, now and then to tell me the brig was still moving. Soon I heard the rattle of the anchor chain being unwound heavily from the capstan; then I felt that sharp jolt that makes the whole ship vibrate when the anchor has reached the solid bed and finally bites into the sand and seagrass. I rose, and opened my narrow window. We had arrived; we were in the roadstead off Beirut. I could see a few lights scattered on the distant shore, and hear dogs barking on the beach. It was the first sound I heard from the coast of Asia; it gladdened my heart. It was midnight. I gave thanks to God and fell into a deep and peaceful sleep. No one else below deck had awakened.
Beirut
September 6, 1832, nine in the morning.
We were anchored before Beirut, one of the most populous cities on the Syrian coast, formerly Berytus, which became a Roman colony under Augustus, who gave it the name Felix Julia (Colonia Iulia Augusta Felix Berytus). This epithet, meaning ‘the Fortunate,’ was bestowed upon it because of the fertility of its surroundings, its incomparable climate, and the magnificence of its location. The city occupies a graceful hill that slopes gently down to the sea; several promontories or rocky outcrops jut out into the waves, bearing Turkish fortifications, to the most picturesque effect; the harbour is enclosed by a strip of land that protects the sea from easterly winds: this entire strip of land, as well as the surrounding hills, are covered with the richest vegetation; mulberry silk trees (Morus alba) are planted everywhere, and raised tier by tier on artificial terraces; carob trees with dark greenery and a majestic dome, fig trees, plane trees, orange trees, pomegranate trees, with a quantity of other trees or shrubs foreign to our climate, spread over all the coast near the sea the harmonious veils of their various foliage; further away, on the lower slopes of the mountains, olive groves tint the landscape with their grey and ashen greenery: a few miles from the city, the high mountains of the Lebanon ranges rise; there, deep gorges open, in which the eye is lost amidst distant shadows; there, wide torrents flow, which become rivers taking various directions, some towards Tyre and Sidon, others towards Tripoli and Latakia; while the uneven peaks, lost in the clouds or whitened by reflected sunlight, resemble our Alps covered in eternal snow.
The quayside at Beirut, constantly lapped by the waves and sometimes covered with foam, was teeming with Arabs, displaying all the splendour of their bright costumes and weapons. There was as much activity there as on the quays of our great maritime cities; several European ships were anchored near us in the harbour, and longboats, laden with goods from Damascus and Baghdad, were constantly shuttling between the shore and these vessels. The city’s houses rose in a confused cluster, the flat roofs of some serving as terraces for others, a few with crenellated balustrades. The houses possessed numerous pointed-arch windows with painted wooden grilles that sealed them tightly like the veils insisted upon by Oriental jealousy, while palm-fronds seemingly sprouting from the stone rose above the rooftops, bringing a touch of greenery to the eyes of the women imprisoned in the harems — all this captivated our gaze and heralded the Orient. We could hear the shrill cries of desert Arabs arguing on the docks, and the harsh, mournful sounds from the camels, groaning in pain as they were forced to bend their knees to receive their loads. Occupied by this spectacle, so new and so striking to our eyes, we gave no thought to disembarking. In this land to be our new home, the French flag, however, flew atop a mast on one of the tallest houses in the city, seeming to invite us to rest in its shade, after our long and arduous voyage. But we had too many people and too much luggage to risk landing before we had reconnoitred the place, and chosen a house, if we could find one. I left my wife, with Julia, and two of my companions, on the brig, and had the dinghy launched in order to explore.
In a few minutes, a beautiful, flat, silvery wave tossed us onto the sand; and a pair of Arabs, their legs bare, carried me in their arms to the entrance of a dark street of fast-flowing traffic that led to the French consulate. The consul, Henri Guys, whom I had seen in Marseille, and for whom I had letters of introduction, had not yet arrived. I found in his place Joseph Hélouis-Jorelle, head of the consulate and dragoman (interpreter, translator and guide) of France in Syria, a young man whose gracious and benevolent countenance predisposed us to him, and whose many kindnesses during our long stay in Syria justified this first impression. He offered us part of the consulate building as our initial refuge, and promised to find us a house in the vicinity of the city, in which we could set up camp. Within a few hours, the longboats of several ships, and the porters of Beirut, under the supervision of the consulate’s Janissaries (Turkish infantry forming the Sultan’s guard) had unloaded our entourage, along with our provisions of all kinds; and before nightfall we were all ashore, temporarily housed, and showered with care and attention by Monsieur and Madame Jorelle.
It is a delightful moment when, after a long and stormy crossing, having barely arrived in an unknown land, you cast your eyes, from a fragrant and cheerful terrace, on the element you are finally quitting for a long time; on the brig, bobbing in the harbour’s choppy waters, that brought you through the storms; on the shaded and peaceful countryside that surrounds you; on all the scenes of life on land that seem so sweet when one has been long deprived of them: there is something of the feeling of convalescence after a long illness in the impression of the first few hours, the first few days spent ashore after a voyage. We enjoyed that feeling all evening. Madame Jorelle, a young and charming woman born in Aleppo, had retained the rich and noble dress of Arab women: the turban, the embroidered jacket, the dagger at her belt. We never tired of admiring this magnificent costume, which further enhanced her distinctly Oriental beauty.
When night fell, we were served a European-style supper in a kiosk, the large, barred windows of which opened onto the port, and in which, amidst the candlelight, a refreshing evening breeze played. I had a case of French wine broken open, and added it to the hospitable feast, and we thus spent our first evening discussing the two countries, France and Lebanon, the one which we had left behind, the other which we were now visiting: a question about France was answered and accompanied by a question about Asia. Julia played with the long braids of hair of some Arab women and Black African slaves, who came to visit us; she admired these new costumes; her mother braided the long curls of her own blond hair, in imitation of those of the ladies of Beirut, and arranged her shawl into a turban on her head. I have seen nothing more ravishing, among all the faces of women that are engraved in my memory, than the figure of Julia wearing an Aleppo turban, with the sculpted gold cap, from which fell fringes of pearls and chains of gold sequins, the braids of her hair hanging over both shoulders, and with that astonished look raised to her mother and to me, and that smile which seemed to say to us: ‘Feast your eyes; see how beautiful I am too!’
After speaking a hundred times about our homeland, and naming all the places and people that a shared memory could bring back to mind; after we had exchanged all the information that might interest us, we spoke of poetry. Madame Jorelle asked me to read some pieces of French poetry, and she herself translated for us some fragments of poetry from Aleppo. I told her that Nature was always more poetic than the poets, and she herself at that moment, at that hour, in that beautiful place, in the moonlight, in that foreign costume, with that oriental pipe in her hand and that diamond-hilted dagger at her belt, was a more beautiful subject for poetry than all that those poets had ever conceived. And when she replied that it would be most agreeable to receive a souvenir of our journey to send to her father in Aleppo, in the form of a few lines written for her. I withdrew for a while, and then recited a few stanzas to her, which had no merit other than the place where they were written and the feeling of gratitude that inspired them:
Qui? Toi? Me demander l’encens de poésie!
Toi, fille d’Orient, née aux vents du désert!
Fleur des jardins d’Alep, que Bulbul eût choisie
Pour languir et chanter sur son calice ouvert! Etc.
Why ask of me the incense poetry scatters!
Daughter of the East, born to the desert breeze!
Flower of Aleppo, you whom the nightingale
Has chosen to sing of, on its flowering branch! Etc.
We could not tear ourselves away from this first scene of Arab life. Finally, for the first time in three months, we were able to rest in out beds, and sleep without fear of the waves. A fierce wind roared across the sea, rattling the walls of the high terrace beneath which we lay, and making us appreciate all the more the value of a peaceful stay after so much turmoil. I considered Julia and my wife to be safe at last from all peril, and for a long while, and spent part of the night planning how to ensure a secure and pleasant stay for them, while I myself would continue my travels through this land on which I had finally set foot.
September 7, 1832.
I rose with the dawn, opened the cedarwood shutter, the only window closure of the bedroom in which one sleeps in this beautiful climate. I cast a first glance at the sea, and the sparkling coastal chain that extends in a curve from Beirut to Cape Batroun, halfway to Tripoli.
Never has a mountain panorama made such an impression on me. Lebanon possesses a character I have seen neither in the Alps nor in the Taurus Mountains: the imposing sublimity of its peaks and contours blends with a grace of detail, and a variety of tints and hues. Mount Lebanon is as solemn as its name suggests; it is the Alps beneath an Asian sky, thrusting airy summits into the profound serenity of the sky’s eternal splendour. It seems as if the eternal heavens rest upon the golden angles of these ridges; the dazzling whiteness with which they imprint them blends seamlessly with that of the snows which remain, till midsummer, on the highest peaks. The range unfolds before the eye for a distance of at least a hundred and sixty miles, from Cape Said, the ancient Sidon, to the vicinity of Latakia, where it begins to decline, Mount Taurus spreading its roots into the plains of Alexandretta (Iskenderun).
Sometimes the mountain chains of Lebanon rise almost perpendicularly from the sea, villages and great monasteries clinging to their precipices; sometimes they swerve from the shore, forming immense gulfs, and leaving verdant stretches, or strips of golden sand, between themselves and the waves. Sails criss-cross these gulfs and enter the numerous harbours that the jagged coastline offers. The sea there is of the bluest and darkest hue; and, though there is almost always a swell, the waves, which are tall and broad, roll in vast sheets over the sands and reflect the mountains like spotless mirrors. These waves produce, all along the coast, a muffled, indistinct but harmonious murmur that rises even beneath the shade of the vines and carob trees, filling the countryside with life and sound.
To my left, was the low coast of Beirut, a continuous extent of small tongues of land covered in vegetation, protected from the sea only by a line of rocks and reefs, most of which are covered in ancient ruins. Further on, hills of red sand, like that of the Egyptian deserts, jut out like a cape and serve as a landmark for sailors; on the summit of this cape, one sees the broad, umbrella-like crowns of an Italian pine forest; and the eye, gliding between the scattered trunks, comes to rest on the flanks of another Lebanese range, and further still the jutting promontory that once bore Tyre (now Sur).
When I turned round, I could see the tall minarets of the mosques, isolated columns, rising into the blue, shimmering morning air; the Moorish fortresses overlooking the city, their cracked walls supporting a forest of climbing plants, wild fig trees, and wallflowers; then the oval crenellations of the defensive walls; then the level plateaus in the countryside planted with mulberry trees, with here and there the flat roofs and white walls of country houses or the cottages of Syrian farmers and labourers; and finally, beyond them, the rounded grassy slopes of the Beirut hills, each bearing picturesque buildings — Greek and Maronite monasteries, mosques, and sacred tombs (santons) — and covered in foliage and cultivated fields like the most fertile hills of Grenoble, or Chambéry (in Savoy). Against this backdrop, always, Mount Lebanon; forming a thousand curves, clustered in gigantic masses, casting its vast shadows or displaying its high sparkling snows, above every part of the landscape.
Same date. September 7, 1832.
I spent the entire day exploring the area around Beirut, and looking for a place to settle and establish a home. I have rented a group of five houses, which can be linked via wooden staircases, galleries, and openings. Each house here consists of little more than a basement that serves as a kitchen, and a bedroom in which the entire family sleeps, however large that family might be. In such a climate, the true home is the flat roof. That is where the women and children spend their days and often their nights. In front of the houses, between the trunks of a few mulberry or olive trees, the Arabs build hearths with three stones, and it is there the wives prepare food. A straw mat is thrown over a pole that stretches from the wall to the tree branches. Under this shelter, all the housework is done. The women and girls squat there all day, busy combing their long hair, braiding it, bleaching their veils, weaving their silks, feeding their chickens, or playing and chatting together, just as in our villages in the south of France, on Sunday mornings, when the girls gather at the doorways of the cottages.
Same date, September 7, in the evening.
The entire day was spent unloading the brig, and carrying our caravan of luggage from the town to our country house (on Mar Mitr hill). Each of us will have our own room. A vast grove of mulberry and orange trees stretches around the five houses together, each of us having some space to walk about in front of our doorways, and cool air to breathe in the shade. I purchased some mats from Egypt, and carpets from Damascus, to serve as our beds and divans. I found some very active and intelligent Arab carpenters who are already at work making doors and window frames for us; and this evening we will already be able to sleep in our new home.
September 8, 1832.
Nothing could be more delightful than waking up after the first night in our own house. We had lunch brought to the largest terrace, and from there could take in the surrounding area in a glance.
The house is ten minutes from the city. You reach it along paths shaded by immense aloes whose spiky figs dangle over the heads of passers-by. You encounter a few ancient arches and a huge square tower, built by the Druze emir, Fakardin (Fahkr al-Din II, the seventeenth century Ottoman governor); a tower that now serves as an observation post for a few sentries of Ibrahim Pasha’s army (Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt, army commander for his father Muhammad Ali the Viceroy of Egypt, was in the process of conquering Syria) who watch over the entire countryside from there. You then slip between the trunks of mulberry trees, and arrive at a group of low houses hidden among the trees, flanked by a grove of lemon and orange trees. These houses are irregular, and the middle one rises gracefully like a pyramidal tower, above the others. The roofs of all these little houses are connected by means of a few wooden ramps, and thus form a fitting ensemble for guests who have just spent many a day below deck on a merchant ship.
About a hundred paces from us, the sea advances inland; and seen from here, above the green crowns of the lemon trees and aloes, it resembles a beautiful inland lake, or a wide river of which only a segment is visible. A few Arab boats are anchored there, gently rocking on its imperceptibly undulating waves. If one climbs to the upper terrace, this beautiful lake transforms into an immense gulf enclosed on one side by the Moorish castle of Beirut, and on the other by the immense dark walls of the mountain range that runs towards Tripoli. But opposite us, the view stretches even further: it begins by traversing a plain of admirably-cultivated fields, lined with trees that completely conceal the ground, and dotted here and there with homes similar to ours, their roofs like so many raised white sails on an ocean of green; the view then narrows near a long, graceful hill, on the summit of which a Greek monastery displays its white walls and blue domes; a few umbrella pines hover, a little higher, above the domes of the monastery itself. The hill descends in steps supported by stone walls, and bears groves of olive and mulberry trees.
The sea washes the last of these steps; the view then recedes, and a second, more distant plain, curving and deepening, allows passage of a river that meanders for a long time among holm-oak woods, and flows into the gulf, its current yellowing the bordering waters. This plain ends only at the golden slopes of the mountains. These mountains do not rise in one go; they commence as enormous hills resembling immense blocks, some rounded, others almost square. A little vegetation covers the summits of these hills, and each one bears either a monastery or a village, reflecting the sunlight and drawing the eye. The slopes of the hills gleam like gold: they are walls of yellowish sandstone, crushed by earthquakes, each fragment reflecting and darting the light.
Above these first mounds, the steps of Lebanon widen; there are plateaus two to five miles across: uneven, hollowed out, furrowed, ploughed by ravines, the deep beds of torrents, and dark gorges in which one’s gaze is lost. Beyond these plateaus, the high mountains begin to rise again almost vertically; however, one can still see the dark patches of cedars and firs that cover them, a few inaccessible convents, and a few villages, their names unknown to me, that seem to lean precariously over the precipitous drops. On the sharpest peak of this second range, trees, which appear gigantic, form a sparse mane to its bald brow. From here, one can distinguish their uneven and jagged crowns, which resemble battlements on the crest of a citadel.
Beyond this second mountain range, the true Lebanon finally rises; one cannot distinguish whether its slopes are steep or gentle, bare or covered in vegetation: the distance is too great. The flanks merge with the transparent air of which they seem to be a part; one sees only the reflection of the ambient sunlight that envelops them, and their fiery crests blending with the purple morning cloud, and hovering like inaccessible islands amidst the waves of the firmament.
If one’s gaze descends from this sublime mountain landscape, it finds nothing but majestic clusters of palm trees planted here and there in the countryside beside the Arab houses; the green undulations of larch-tree crowns, scattered in small clumps across the plain or on the slopes of the hills; and hedges of prickly-pear cacti, or other succulents whose heavy leaves cascade, like stony decorations, over the low walls that support the terraces. The walls themselves are so covered with flowering lichens, ground ivy, wild vines, and bulbous plants bearing flowers of every hue, and clusters of every shape, that one cannot distinguish them from the stones from which the walls are built: they are nothing but ramparts of greenery and flowers.
Finally, quite close to us, right before our eyes, two or three homes similar to our own, half-veiled by the canopies of orange trees in bloom and laden with fruit, offer those lively and picturesque scenes that are the lifeblood of any landscape. The Arab men sit on mats, smoking on the rooftops. A few women lean out of the windows to see us, and hide when they realise we are watching them. Beneath our terrace, two Arab families — fathers, brothers, wives, and children — are eating their meal, in the shade of a small plane tree, at the thresholds of their houses; and a few steps away, beneath another tree, two young Syrian girls of incomparable beauty are adorning themselves in the open air, adorning their hair with white and red flowers. One of them has tresses so long and so thick that they cover her entirely, like the branches of a weeping willow covering its trunk on all sides: only when she shakes her flowing mane are her beautiful forehead and eyes, radiant with naive gaiety, glimpsed, for a moment, beneath this natural veil. She seems to revel in our admiration. I throw her a handful of the small gold coins (bearing the title ‘Al-Ghazi’, ‘warrior’ or ‘conqueror’, seen on coins from many periods) from which Syrian women make necklaces and bracelets by stringing them on a strand of silk. She clasps her hands and places them on her brow to thank me, then goes downstairs to show them to her mother and sister.
September 12, 1832.
Habib-Barbara, a Greek-Syrian living in Beirut, whose house is next to ours, serves as our dragoman, that is to say, interpreter. Having served in this capacity for twenty years at various French consulates, he speaks French and Italian; he is one of the most obliging and intelligent men I have met in my travels. Without his assistance and that of Monsieur Jorelle, we would have found endless difficulty in establishing ourselves in Syria. He provides us with several servants, some Greek others who are Arabs. I first bought six second-string Arab horses and, as the locals do, kept them in the blazing sun in a field in front of the house, their legs hobbled with iron rings and tethered by a stake driven into the ground. I had a tent pitched near the horses for the Arab grooms. These men seemed gentle and intelligent; as for the animals, in two days they knew us and sniffed at us like dogs. Habib-Barbara introduced us to his wife, and a daughter whom he was to see married in a few days: he invited us to the wedding. Curious to observe a Syrian wedding, we accepted, and Julia prepared our gift for the bride. I gave her a small gold watch, which I had brought along for such occasions; she added a small pearl chain.
I mounted my horse to explore the area around Beirut: a superb Arab steed, belonging to Madame Jorelle, with a harness of blue velvet plated with silver; its chest was adorned with bosses of the same sculpted metal, which hung in clusters and resonated against that beautiful animal’s hide. Monsieur Jorelle is selling me one of his horses for my wife’s use; I am also having Arabian saddles and bridles made, for fourteen horses.
About a mile or so from the city, to the east, Emir Fakardin has planted a forest of umbrella pines on a sandy plateau that stretches between the sea and the plain of Baghdad, a beautiful Arab village at the foot of Lebanon. The emir, it is said, planted this magnificent forest to create a bulwark against the hills of red sand that encroach a little further on, threatening to engulf Beirut and its rich plantations. The forest has grown magnificently; the individual tree trunks are sixty to eighty feet tall. Their broad, motionless heads extend to meet one another, casting a vast shadow over an immense space; sandy paths run beneath the pine trunks, offering the softest ground to the horses’ hooves. The rest of the area is covered with a light down of grass, sown with flowers of the most brilliant red; the bulbs of the wild hyacinths are so large that they are not crushed by the horses’ hooves. Through the cottony canopy of these fir trunks, one sees on one side the white and reddish sand dunes that conceal the sea; on the other, the plain of Baghdad and the course of the river traversing it, along with a corner of the gulf, like a small lake, so closely is it framed by the land; then the twelve or fifteen Arab villages scattered across the lower slopes of Mount Lebanon, and finally the clusters of villages on Mount Lebanon itself, which forms the backdrop to this scene. The light is so clear and the air so pure that, from several miles away, one can distinguish the shapes of cedars or carob trees on the mountains, and great eagles gliding on motionless wings through the aether.
This evergreen forest is certainly the most magnificent of all the sites I have seen in my life. The sky, the mountains with their caps of snow, the blue horizon of the sea, the red and funereal horizon of the sandy desert; the meandering lines of the river; the solitary crowns of cypresses; the clusters of palm trees scattered across the countryside; the graceful aspect of the thatched cottages with orange trees and vines cascading over their roofs; the austere aspect of the Maronite monasteries on high, casting broad patches of shadow or broad beams of light on the sculpted slopes of Lebanon; the camel caravans laden with goods from Damascus, passing silently between the trees; bands of poverty-stricken Jews riding on donkeys, holding a pair of children on each arm; women on horseback, wrapped in white veils, riding to the sound of the fife and tambourine, and surrounded by a crowd of children, dressed in red fabrics embroidered with gold, who dance in front of the horses; Arab horsemen running courses with the djerid (javelin) around us, on steeds whose manes literally sweep the sand; groups of Turks, seated in front of a café built of foliage, smoking pipes or praying; a little further on, the endless deserted hills of sand, tinged with gold by the rays of the evening sun, from which the wind raises clouds of burning dust; and finally, the muffled roar of the sea which mingles with the musical sound of the wind in the tops of the fir trees, and with the song of thousands of unknown birds; All this offers to the eye and the mind of the traveller the most sublime, the sweetest, and at the same time the most melancholic mixture of impressions that has ever intoxicated my soul: it is the land of my dreams, I would wish to return to it every day.
September 16, 1832.
We have spent the past few days enjoying the knowledge we have acquired with regard to the people in general, their customs, the various locations nearby, and all the amusing details of settling into an entirely new place. Our five houses have become, with the assistance of our friends and the Arab workmen, a sort of Italian villa like those we so delightfully inhabited in the mountains of Lucca, and on the coasts of Livorno, in other times. Each of us has his own apartment; and a drawing room, preceded by a flower-adorned terrace, is the meeting place. We have placed divans there; we have arranged our ship’s library on shelves; my wife and Julia have frescoed the walls, and have set out their books, their necessities, and all those little feminine objects that adorn marble and mahogany tables in London and Paris, on a cedar table: it is there that we gather during the hottest hours of the day, for in the evening our drawing room is outdoors, on the terrace itself; it is there that we receive visits from all the Europeans, whom the trade with Damascus, of which Beirut is the port, detains in this beautiful country.
The Egyptian governor appointed by Ibrahim Pasha came to offer us, with a grace and cordiality more than European, his protection and services during our stay, and for any journeys we might wish to undertake. I gave him dinner today: he is a man who would not be out of place at any gathering anywhere. An old soldier serving the Pasha of Egypt, he has for his master, and especially for Ibrahim, that blind and trusting confidence in fate, that I remember having seen in the Emperor Napoleon’s generals; but this Turkish devotion has something more touching and noble about it, because it stems from a religious sentiment, and not from personal interest. Ibrahim Pasha is destiny, Allah embodied, for his officers; Napoleon merely represented glory and ambition to his generals.
The governor drank Champagne with pleasure, and adopted all our customs as if he had never known any others; pipes and coffee, indulged in several times, filled the afternoon. I gave him a letter for Ibrahim Pasha, in which I informed him of the arrival of a European traveller in the country under his control, and requested the protection one would expect from a man fighting for the cause of European civilisation. Ibrahim recently passed through with his army; he is now in the desert near Homs, a large city between Aleppo and Damascus; he has left few troops in Syria; the main cities, such as Beirut, Sidon, Jaffa, Acre, and Tripoli, are occupied, with Ibrahim’s agreement, by the soldiers of Emir Bashir (Bashir Shihab II), Grand Prince of the Druze, who rules Lebanon. This prince offered Ibrahim no resistance; he abandoned the Turkish cause, at least outwardly, after Ibrahim’s capture of Acre, and is merging his troops with those of the Pasha. If Ibrahim were to be defeated at Homs, Emir Bashir could cut off his retreat and annihilate the remnants of the Egyptians. This skilful and warlike prince has reigned for forty years over all the mountains of Lebanon. He has united the Druze, the Metualis, the Maronites, the Syrians, and the Arabs into a single people, who live under his rule. He has sons, warriors like himself, whom he sends to govern the cities Ibrahim entrusts to him. One of his sons is encamped a quarter of a mile from here, on the plain bordering Lebanon, with five or six hundred Arab horsemen. We are to see him; he has sent his respects.
An Arab was telling me today about Ibrahim’s entry into the city of Beirut (in 1831). Some distance from the gate, as he crossed a sunken path whose moat was covered with climbing roots and intertwined shrubs, an enormous snake emerged from the undergrowth and glided forward slowly over the sand, advancing to the hooves of Ibrahim’s horse. The horse, terrified, reared up, and some slaves who were following the Pasha on foot rushed forward to kill the serpent. But Ibrahim stopped them with a gesture, and, drawing his sword, cut off the head of the reptile before him and trampled the severed parts under his horse’s hooves. The crowd cried out in admiration, and Ibrahim, a smile on his lips, continued on his way, delighted by the event, a sure omen of victory among the Arabs.
There is no incident in life, no natural phenomenon, the Arab tribes encounter without their attaching to it a prophetic and moral meaning. Is this habit a vague memory of that first, more perfect language that humankind once understood, a language in which all of Nature explained itself by natural means? Does it spring from a greater vividness of imagination, which seeks correlations between things that are not given to mankind to grasp? I know not, but I lean towards the former interpretation: human instincts have not arisen without motive, without purpose, without cause; an instinct for divining the future has tormented all ages and all peoples, especially primitive peoples; meaningful divination must therefore once have existed, and perhaps could exist once more; but divination is a language the key to which must have been lost on exile from that higher state, that Eden of which all peoples have a confused tradition: then, Nature doubtless spoke more clearly and profoundly to the mind; mankind conceived the hidden relationship of all natural existents, and the links between them would then have led to the perception of future facts or events, for the present is always the generative and infallible seed of the future; it is only a matter of vision and understanding.
September 17, 1832.
Life goes on the same. We have found as much helpfulness as kindness among the European consuls in Syria, whom the war has all concentrated in Beirut. The Sardinian consul, Giovanni Bianco; the Austrian consul, Pierre Laurella; and the English consuls, John Farren and Peter Abbott, quickly put me in touch with all the Arabs who can help with my plan to travel inland. It would be impossible to find a warmer welcome or greater hospitality. Some of these gentlemen have lived in Syria for many years and are acquainted with Arab families in Damascus, Aleppo, and Jerusalem, who themselves have connections with the principal Arab sheikhs in the desert we are to traverse. In this way, I am forming in advance a chain of recommendations, relationships and hospitality along the different paths that could lead to Baghdad.
Monsieur Jorelle has provided me with an excellent dragoman or interpreter in the person of Joseph-Antoine Mazoillier (author in 1854 of ‘Les Chevaux Arabes de la Syrie’, ‘The Arab Horses of Syria’), a young Frenchman by origin, though born and raised in Syria, who is very well versed in the scholarly language and the various dialects of the regions we are to travel through. He is now staying with us, and I am entrusting him with the management of the entire Arab section of my house. This Arab section consists of a cook from Aleppo, named Aboulias; a young Syrian from the country, named Elias, who, having already been in the service of the consuls, understands a little Italian and French; a young Syrian girl, also speaking French, who will serve as an interpreter for the women; and finally, half a dozen Greek, Arab, and Syrian grooms from different parts of Syria, intended to take care of our horses, pitch the tents, and serve as our escort on journeys.
The story of our Arab cook, Aboulias, is too singular not to be repeated. As a young, intelligent Christian, he had established a small business in Aleppo trading in local fabrics, which he would sell himself, travelling on a donkey among the tribes of wandering Arabs who camped in the plains around Antioch during the winter. His business prospered; but his status as a non-Muslim caused him some anxiety, so he thought it wise to partner with a Muslim Arab from Aleppo. Business only improved, and after a few years, Aboulias became one of the most respected merchants in the country. But he was in love with a young Greek-Syrian woman; they would only allow him to wed her on condition that he leave Aleppo and settle near Sidon, where his beautiful fiancée’s family lived. The business therefore had to be liquidated, and a quarrel arose between the two partners over the division of their jointly acquired wealth. The Muslim Arab set a trap for poor Aboulias: he planted hidden witnesses who, during an argument with his partner, overheard him blaspheme against Muhammad, a fatal crime for an infidel.
Aboulias, having been led before the Pasha, was condemned to be hanged. The sentence was carried out; but, the rope broke, and the unfortunate Aboulias collapsed at the foot of the gallows and was left for dead in the execution square. However, his fiancée’s parents, having obtained permission from the Pasha for his body to be given to them for burial, in accord with their religion, carried it home. Finding that Aboulias still showed signs of life, they revived him, hid him in a cellar for a few days, and buried an empty coffin so as not to arouse the Turks’ suspicion. But the latter had learned of the deception, and Aboulias was arrested again as he was escaping through the city gates at night. Brought before the Pasha once more, he told him how he had been saved, entirely against his will. The Pasha, citing a passage in the Quran (Koran) that favoured the accused, gave him the choice between being hanged a second time, or converting to Islam. Aboulias chose the latter and practised that religion for a time. When his ordeal was long forgotten and his conversion confirmed, he managed to escape from Aleppo and sail to Cyprus, where he reverted to Christianity again. He married the woman he loved, sought protection from the French, and was able to reappear with impunity in Syria, where he continued to trade with the Druze, Maronites, and Arabs. He was just the man we needed to travel in those lands.
His culinary talent consists of making a fire of thorny bushes or dried camel-dung in the field, and suspending a copper pot from a pole set on two others forked at the top, in which he boils rice and pieces of chicken or mutton. He also heats rounded pebbles in the hearth and, when they are almost red, coats them in dough kneaded from barley flour, and that is our bread.
September 19, 1832.
Today, my wife and Julia were invited by the wife and daughter of a local Arab chieftain to spend the day at the bathhouse (hammam); this is a form of entertainment among women in the East. A visit to the hammam is announced two weeks in advance, like a ball in Europe. Here is the description of this celebration, as my wife delivered it last night:
The bathrooms are a public place, forbidden to men every day until a certain hour, as they are reserved prior to that for the women, or for the entire day when there is a bathing session like the one in question allocated to a bride. The rooms are illuminated by dim light from small stained-glass domes. They are paved with marble in compartments of various colours, worked with great artistry. The walls are also adorned with marble and mosaic tiles, sculpted mouldings, or Moorish columns. The rooms are temperature-controlled: the first ones entered are adjusted to that of the outside air, and the first few baths are lukewarm, the others successively hotter, until the last, where the steam from well-nigh boiling water rises from the basins and fills the air with a stifling heat. Generally, there is no sunken basin in the centre of the rooms; only taps that run continuously, pouring about half an inch of water onto the marble floor. This water then drains away through channels, and is constantly replenished. What is called bathing in the East is not a complete immersion, but a successive sprinkling of water, more or less hot, and the sensation of steam on the skin.
Two hundred women from the town and surrounding area were invited to the hammam that day, including several young European women. Each arrived enveloped in the immense white linen sheet that completely covers the magnificent attire of women when they go out. They were all accompanied by their Black African slaves or free servants. As they arrived, they gathered in groups, and seated themselves on mats and cushions prepared in the first vestibule, their attendants removed the linen sheets, and they appeared in all the rich and picturesque magnificence of their clothes and jewels. These costumes varied greatly in the colour of the fabrics and the number and brilliance of the jewels; but they were formless as regards the cut of the garments.
These latter consist of trousers with wide pleats of striped satin, tied at the waist with a red silk fabric, and fastened above the ankle with a gold or silver bracelet; and a gold brocaded gown, open at the front and tied beneath the breast. The sleeves are gathered below the armpit, and then free from the elbow to the wrist; allowing a silk gauze chemise to pass through, which covers the breast. Over this gown they wear a brightly coloured velvet jacket, lined with fur, ermine or marten, and embroidered in gold along all the seams; its sleeves are also open. The hair is parted above the head; some falls over the neck, the rest is braided into plaits and reaches down to the feet, lengthened by black silk braids that imitate hair. Small twists of gold or silver hang from the ends of these braids, and their weight makes them float about the waist; The women’s heads are further adorned with small chains of pearls, strings of gold sequins, and natural flowers, all mingled and scattered in incredible profusion. It is as if a casket has been poured haphazardly over the head, all glittering and perfumed with jewels and flowers. This barbaric luxury is most picturesque on the young faces of fifteen to twenty years old; on the crown of their heads, some women still wear a cap of chased gold, shaped like an inverted cup; from the centre of this cap protrudes a gold tassel bearing a tuft of pearls, which floats at the back of the head.
Their legs are bare, and their feet shod with yellow morocco leather slippers that they drag as they walk along. Their arms are covered with bracelets of gold, silver, and pearls; their chests, with several necklaces that form a braid of gold or pearls on the exposed breast.
Once all the women were gathered together, a wild music was heard; women, whose upper bodies were wrapped in simple red gauze, uttered high-pitched cries of lamentation, while playing on fifes and tambourines: this music continued all day, and gave the scene of pleasure and celebration a character of tumult and frenzy quite barbaric.
When the bride appeared, accompanied by her mother and young friends, and dressed in such a magnificent costume that her hair, neck, arms, and breasts were entirely concealed beneath a flowing veil of garlands of gold coins and pearls, the bathers seized her and stripped her, garment by garment, of all her clothes. Meanwhile, all the other women were being undressed by their slaves, and the various bathing ceremonies began. They moved, always to the sounds of the same music, always with increasingly bizarre ceremonies and words, from one room to another;
They took steam baths, then ablution baths, then perfumed, soapy waters were poured over the women, and finally the entertainment began. All the women, with various gestures and cries, did what a group of schoolchildren do when taken to swim in a river, splashing each other, plunging their heads into the water, throwing water in each other’s faces; and the blaring music resounded louder each time one of these childish tricks aroused the noisy laughter of the young Arab girls. Finally, they left the bath; the slaves and the attendants braided their mistresses’ damp hair again, retied necklaces and bracelets, clad them in their silk dresses and velvet jackets, spread cushions on mats in the rooms whose floors had been wiped dry, and brought out, from baskets and silk packets, the provisions they had brought. These were pastries and preserves of every kind, in which the Turks and Arabs excel; sorbets, orange blossom preserves, and all those iced drinks that Orientals consume at all times of day. Pipes and hookahs were also brought for the older women; a cloud of fragrant smoke filled and obscured the atmosphere; coffee, served in small cups enclosed in little vases with openwork of gold and silver thread, circulated continuously, and the conversation became animated; Then dancers appeared, who performed Egyptian routines, and the monotonous movements of Arabia, to the same music. The entire day passed in this manner, and it was only at nightfall that the procession of women escorted the young bride back to her mother’s house. This bathing ceremony usually takes place a few days before the wedding.
September 20, 1832.
Our establishment being complete, I am now organising my caravan for the journey into the interior of Syria and Palestine. I have purchased fourteen Arabian horses, some from Lebanon, others from Aleppo and the desert; I have had saddles and bridles made in the local style, rich and adorned with silk fringes and gold and silver thread. The respect one commands from the Arabs is proportional to the luxury one displays; one must dazzle them, to capture their imagination and to travel with complete safety among their tribes. I am having our weapons repaired, and I am buying even finer ones to arm our Carvas (guards). These Carvas are Turks who replace the Janissaries that the Porte (‘The Sublime Porte,’ was a widely used term for the central government and court of the Ottoman Empire, a translation from the Turkish Bâb-ı Âlî, which means ‘the High Gate’ initially that of the Grand Vizier’s complex in Constantinople/Istanbul.) formerly assigned to ambassadors or travellers it wished to protect: they are both soldiers and magistrates; they are roughly equivalent to the gendarmerie corps of the European states. Each consul has one or two such attendants attached to his person; they travel on horseback with him; they announce him in the towns they are to pass through; they inform the sheikh, the pasha, the governor; they see that whichever house in the town or villages they have chosen is emptied and prepared for them; and they protect, through their presence and authority, any caravan to which they have been attached.
The Cavas are dressed in costumes of varying splendour, according to the luxury or importance of the person who employs them. European ambassadors or consuls are the only foreigners who are allocated them by right, but, thanks to the kindness of Monsieur Jorelle and the generosity of the Egyptian governor of Beirut, I have been granted several. I will leave some here for the service of my wife and Julia, and for their safety when they have to go out; and am taking the youngest, most intelligent, and bravest to lead our detachment. These men are gentle, helpful, and attentive, and require almost nothing more than fine weapons, fine horses, and fine clothing; they live, like all the other Arabs in my employ, on barley-flour cakes and fruit; they sleep in the open air, under the mulberry trees in the gardens, or in a tent that I have had erected near the place where the horses are kept.
The Sardinian consul, Monsieur Bianco, whom we see every day, he being a friend known for many a year, facilitates all these domestic arrangements, which will ensure the safety of my wife and child during my absence, and will also contribute to our own safety on the road. I purchase tents, and he lends me his finest one.
September 22, 1832.
The stifling heat of September has delayed our departure for a while. We spend our days receiving visits from and paying visits to all our neighbours, Greeks, Arabs, Maronites, and forming relationships that will make our stay pleasant. We would find in Europe no more kindness and hospitality than we are shown here: these people are accustomed to seeing only Europeans engaged in commerce, arrive in their country, whose every relationship has a self-serving purpose; they could not understand at first why someone would choose to live and travel among them solely to know them and admire their beautiful landscapes, and ruined monuments; they began by suspecting the intention of a mere traveller; and since tradition leads them to believe that treasures are buried beneath all the ruins, they think that we possess the secret of unearthing those same, and that this is the purpose of our expense and our efforts; but once they have been convinced that one is not travelling with that intention, that one is here only to admire the work of God in the most beautiful regions of the world, to study customs, to see and love the people; when, moreover, they are offered gifts without being asked in return for anything other than their friendship; when one has accompanying one, as we do, a doctor and a pharmacy, and one distributes to them free of charge prescriptions, consultations and medicines; when they see that the foreigner is celebrated and well-regarded by the other Franks, has at his disposal a fine ship which carries him at will from one port to another, and refuses to take on any trade goods, they are struck by the idea of a power, grandeur and disinterestedness which contradicts all their systems, and they quickly pass from distrust to admiration, and from admiration to devotion.
Such is their disposition toward us. Our courtyard is continually filled by Arabs from the mountains, Maronite monks, Druze sheikhs, women, children, and the sick, who have come from forty to fifty miles away to see us out, ask our advice, and offer us hospitality if we desired to pass through their lands. Almost all of them arrive with gifts of wine or local fruit. We receive them well, offering them coffee, pipes, and iced sherbet. In exchange for their gifts, I give them presents of European fabrics, various weapons, a watch, and items from a large quantity of small, inexpensive jewellery. They return home, delighted with our welcome, and spread the reputation of Emir Frangi (that is what they call me), the Prince of the Franks. I have no other name in the entire area around Beirut and in the city itself. And since this consideration may be of great use to me in our adventurous journeys in all countries, Monsieur Jorelle and the European consuls are kind enough not to disabuse them, and to let this humble poet pass for a powerful man in Europe.
One cannot imagine how quickly news travels from mouth to mouth in Arabia: already, it is known in Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia, Sidon, and Jerusalem that a foreigner has arrived in Syria and is going to travel through these lands. In a country where there is little change in things, or people’s minds, the smallest event out of the ordinary immediately becomes the subject of conversation; it circulates, at the speed of conversation, from one tribe to another; the sensitive, heightened imagination of the Arabs magnifies and colours everything, and a rumour spreads two hundred and fifty miles about, in a fortnight. This disposition of the people, which Lady Stanhope (Hester Lucy Stanhope, writer, antiquarian, niece of the former Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, and one of the most famous travellers of her age, had settled in the Lebanon, near Sidon, and passed as a prophetess among the Druze. She thus wielded a degree of political influence) once experienced in circumstances almost identical to mine, are too favourable to me for me to complain. I let things be, I tolerate what is said of me, and accept, without disabusing the people of their illusions, the titles, wealth, and virtues with which the Arab imagination has endowed me, ready to relinquish them humbly afterwards, on returning to my true proportions and mediocrity.
September 27, 1832, Fakardin Tower.
We spent the entire day at the wedding of the young Syrian-Greek woman. The ceremony began with a long procession of Greek, Arab, and Syrian women, some on horseback, others on foot, along paths lined with aloes and mulberry trees, to assist the bride during this tiring day. For several days and nights now, a number of the women have not left Habib’s house, constantly uttering cries, songs, and high-pitched, prolonged moans, like the shouts of grape harvesters and haymakers on the hillsides of France during harvest time. This clamour of lamentations, tears, and affected joy must keep the bride awake for several nights before the wedding. The members of the husband’s family, young and old, are doing the same, and have not allowed him any rest for eight days. We have no idea of the reason for this custom.
Led to the gardens of Habib’s house, the women were ushered inside the rooms (diwans) to pay their respects to the young woman, admire her finery, and observe various ceremonies. We, however, remained in the courtyard and from there were invited into a lower room. There, a table was set in the European style, laden with a multitude of candied fruits, honey and sugar cakes, liqueurs, and sorbets; and throughout the evening, this refreshment was replenished once consumed by the numerous visitors. I was able, as an exception, to gain entry to the women’s diwan just as the Greek archbishop was giving the nuptial blessing. The young woman stood beside her fiancé, covered from head to toe in a red gauze veil embroidered with gold. The priest drew back her veil for an instant, and the young man caught a glimpse, for the first time, of the woman to whom he would be united: she was breathtakingly beautiful. The pallor, born of fatigue and emotion, which covered her cheeks, a pallor further enhanced by the reflections from the red veil and the countless ornaments of gold, silver, pearls, and diamonds with which she was adorned, and by the long braids of her black hair that fell all around her waist. Her eyelashes were painted black, as well as her eyebrows and the rims of her eyes; her hands, the tips of her fingers and nails dyed red with henna, and decorated with Moorish patterns and designs — all this gave her ravishing beauty a character of novelty and solemnity that struck us deeply. Her husband barely had time to look at her. He seemed overwhelmed, himself nearing the end of the sleepless nights and weariness with which these bizarre customs exhaust even the strongest love.
The bishop took a crown of natural flowers from one of his priests, and placed it on the young woman’s head, raised it again and placed it on the young man’s hair, raised it again to place it over the bride’s veil, and thus passed it several times from one head to the other. Rings were placed on each of their fingers in turn. They then broke the same piece of bread, and drank consecrated wine from the same cup. After this, the young bride was taken to private apartments where only the women could follow her, to change her attire once more. The groom’s father and friends led him, separately, into the garden, and he was seated at the foot of a tree surrounded by all the men of his family. Then the musicians and dancers arrived, and continued, till sunset, their barbarous symphony, shrill cries and contortions beside the young man, who had fallen asleep at the foot of the tree, and whom his friends tried to wake at every moment, though in vain.
When night fell, he was led alone in a procession to his father’s house. Only after eight days was the new husband allowed to reappear to take his wife home.
The women who had filled Habib’s house with their cries also emerged a little later. Nothing was more picturesque than this immense procession of women and girls in the most splendid and extravagant costumes, covered in sparkling jewels, each surrounded by their attendants and slaves carrying torches of resinous fir to light the way, their luminous line extending along the long, narrow paths by the sea shaded by aloes and orange trees, sometimes in prolonged silence, sometimes uttering resounding cries above the waves or beneath the great plane trees at the foot of Mount Lebanon. We returned to our home, near Habib’s country house, where we could still hear the sounds of the women’s conversations; we went up onto our terrace, and for a long time watched those wandering lights straying in every direction among the trees of the plain.
September 29, 1832.
There is talk of Ibrahim Pasha being defeated. If the Egyptian army were to suffer a setback, the revenge of the Turks, currently oppressed here by the Christians of Lebanon, would be something to be feared, and excesses could occur in isolated rural areas, especially like ours. I have decided to rent a house in the city, as a precaution: I found one this morning that can accommodate us all.
Like all Arab palaces, it consists of a small, dark corridor that opens onto the street through a low doorway; this corridor leads to an inner courtyard paved with marble and surrounded by diwans or open salons. In summer, a tent is erected over this courtyard, and it is there that the Arabs receive visitors. A fountain flows and murmurs in the centre of the courtyard; when there is no running water, there is at least a covered well in one of the corners. From this courtyard, one reaches several large rooms also paved with mosaics or marble slabs, the walls decorated, to waist height, with sculpted marble in niches, pilasters, small fountains, or panelling admirably worked in yellow cedar.
The first section of each of these diwans is one step lower than the second, and this second half of the apartment is protected by an elegantly carved wooden balustrade. Slaves and servants stand in the first section, holding a cup of coffee, a sherbet, or a pipe. In the second room, the masters sit on rugs, leaning on cushions. Generally, at the far end of the room, there is a small wooden staircase hidden by the panelling, leading to a kind of high gallery that occupies the rear of the room. This gallery opens on one side to the street through small pointed-arch windows fitted with grilles, and on the side facing the apartment, it is also screened with wooden grilles, in the fashioning of which the local carpenters display their full artistry in the designs and workmanship. These galleries are very narrow and can only accommodate a divan covered with silk mattresses and cushions. This is where wealthy Turks or Arabs retire for the night; others are content to spread cushions on the floor and sleep fully-clothed, with no other covering than the heavy, beautiful furs they usually wear.
There are five or six similar rooms in my townhouse on the first floor, and as many on the second, besides a large number of small, detached, high-ceilinged rooms for European servants; the Janissaries (guards), the sais (seyis, grooms), and the Arab servants sleep by the street door, or beneath the corridor, or in the courtyard; no effort is made to find them a place or a bed. The common people here have no bed other than the earth, and an Egyptian straw mat. The benevolent climate provides everything necessary, and we ourselves find that there is no more delightful canopy for a bed than the beautiful starry firmament, the light sea breezes bringing a little coolness and encouraging sleep; there is little or no dew, and it suffices to cover one’s eyes with a silk handkerchief to sleep thus in the open air, without any discomfort.
This house is merely a refuge for my wife and child in case Ibrahim Pasha withdraws from the city. I simply collected the keys, and we would only occupy the place if the rest of the country became uninhabitable. Under the guaranteed protection of the European consuls, within a walled city, and next to a port where ships of all nations are constantly at anchor, there can be no imminent danger for travellers. I have rented this town house for a year for a thousand piastres, that is to say, a little more than three hundred francs; the five country houses combined cost me only three thousand piastres, a total of about thirteen hundred francs a year, for six houses, one of which alone, the one in town, would cost at least four or five thousand francs in Europe.
On a strip of land on the west side of the port, there is one of the most delightful dwellings one could wish for in the world: it belongs to a wealthy Turkish merchant. I proposed renting it. He refused to do so, but offered to sell it for thirty thousand piastres, that is to say, for about thirteen thousand francs. It stands in the middle of a very large garden, planted with cedars, orange trees, vines, and fig trees, and watered by a beautiful spring of fresh water; the sea surrounds it on two sides, and foam bathes the foot of the walls. The whole beautiful harbour of Beirut stretches out before one, with its ships at anchor, from which one hears the sound of the wind in their rigging; It adjoins an old Moorish castle that juts out into the sea, which is joined to beautiful green lawns by bridges, and whose high battlements stand out in dark relief against the snowy background of Mount Sannine, revealing through their interstices Ibrahim’s sentinels who walk up and down looking out to sea.
The house is much more beautiful than the one I have just rented. All the walls are covered with admirably carved marble, or with cedar panelling of the richest workmanship; fountains murmur continuously in the centre of the ground-floor rooms, and projecting, grilled balconies, which encircle the upper floors, allow the women to spend, unseen, days and nights in the open air, and to feast their eyes on the magnificent spectacle of the sea, the mountains, and the lively views of the port. The Turk received me very graciously; he lavished sherbet, pipes, and coffee upon me, and personally led me through all the rooms of the house. He had previously sent a Black African eunuch to warn his wives to retire to a pavilion in the garden; but when we arrived at their apartment in the harem, the order had not yet been carried out, and we saw five or six young females, some no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, others twenty to thirty, in the beautiful and graceful attire of Arab women, and in all the disarray of their indoor clothes, rising precipitously from their mats and divans, and fleeing barefoot and bare-legged, some hastily throwing veils over their faces, others carrying small children against their breasts, in all the shame and confusion natural to such a surprise. They slipped into a dark corridor, and the eunuch positioned himself at the door. The Arab merchant seemed neither embarrassed nor distressed by this circumstance, and we inspected all the inner rooms of the harem as we might have done in a European house.
A Visit to Lady Hester Stanhope
Lady Hester Stanhope, a niece of William Pitt the Younger, left England after the death of her uncle, and travelled throughout Europe. Young, beautiful, and wealthy, she was received everywhere with the eagerness and interest that her rank, fortune, intelligence, and beauty was destined to attract; but she consistently refused to unite her fate with any one of her worthiest admirers, and, after a few years spent in the principal capitals of Europe, she embarked with a large entourage for Constantinople. The reason for this expatriation was never known: some attributed it to the death of a young English general killed at that time in Spain (Sir John Moore, who died at Corunna in 1809), eternal sorrow for whom was to keep him forever present in Lady Hester’s heart; others, to a simple taste for adventure that the enterprising and courageous nature of this young woman may have suggested. Be that as it may, she departed; spent a few years in Constantinople; and finally embarked for Syria on an English ship that also carried most of her possessions, and immense amounts of jewellery and gifts of every kind.
The storm assailed the ship in the Gulf of Macri (Fethiye), bordering Caramania, opposite the island of Rhodes. It ran aground on a reef a few miles from shore. The vessel was broken apart in a few moments, and Lady Stanhope’s possessions were swallowed by the waves. She herself narrowly escaped death and was borne on a piece of wreckage to a small, deserted island, where she spent twenty-four hours without food or assistance. Finally, fishermen from Marmoris, searching for the wreckage, found her and escorted her to Rhodes, where she identified herself to the English consul. This deplorable event did not weaken her resolve. She went to Malta, and from there to England. She gathered the remnants of her fortune; she sold part of her estates at a loss; she loaded a second ship with riches and gifts for the lands she was to visit, and she set sail. The journey was a happy one, and she landed at Latakia, the ancient Laodicea, on the Syrian coast between Tripoli and Alexandretta. She settled in the area, learned Arabic, surrounded herself with people who could facilitate her interactions with the various Arab, Druze, and Maronite populations of the country, and prepared herself, as I myself was doing at the time, for future travels of discovery in the least accessible parts of Arabia, Mesopotamia and the desert.
When she was well acquainted with the language, dress, customs and manners of the country, she organised a large caravan, loaded camels with rich gifts for the Arabs, and travelled throughout the whole of Syria. She visited Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Baalbek and Palmyra: it was in this last place that the many wandering Arab tribes who had facilitated her access to these ruins, gathered around her tent numbering forty or fifty thousand, and charmed by her beauty, her grace and her magnificence, proclaimed her Queen of Palmyra, and issued firmans (Ottoman permits) to her, in which it was stated that any European under her protection could visit the desert and the ruins of Baalbek and Palmyra in complete safety provided they agreed to pay a tribute of one thousand piastres. This edict still exists, and would doubtless still be faithfully executed by the Arabs, were they given positive proof of Lady Stanhope’s protection.
Upon her return from Palmyra, she was nearly abducted by a large tribe of other Arabs, enemies of the people of Palmyra. She was warned in time by her entourage and owed her safety and that of her caravan to a forced march through the night and the speed of her horses, which covered an incredible distance in the desert in twenty-four hours. She returned to Damascus, where she resided for a few months under the protection of the Turkish Pasha, to whom the Sublime Porte had strongly recommended her.
After a life of wandering throughout the lands of the Orient, Lady Esther Stanhope finally settled, in solitude, on a hilltop, among the well-nigh inaccessible mountains of Lebanon, near Said, the ancient Sidon. The Pasha of Acre, Abdullah Pasha ibn Ali, who held her in great respect and absolute devotion, granted her the remains of a convent and the village of Joun, inhabited by the Druze. There she built several houses, surrounded by a wall similar to our medieval fortifications; she created a charming garden in the Turkish style: with flowers and fruit-bushes, rows of vines, kiosks adorned with sculptures and painted arabesques, water flowing in marble channels, fountains set amidst the paving stones of the kiosks, and a canopy of orange, fig, and lemon trees. There, Lady Stanhope lived for several years in completely oriental luxury, surrounded by a large number of European or Arab dragomans, a large retinue of women, and Black African slaves, while enjoying a sustained, friendly, and even politically influential relationship with the Porte, with Abdullah Pasha, with Emir Bashir Shihab II, the ruler of Lebanon, and especially with Arab sheikhs from the deserts of Syria and Baghdad.
Her fortune, still considerable, soon diminished due to the disruption in her financial affairs, which suffered from her absence; and was reduced to an income of thirty or forty thousand francs, which in that country was still sufficient for the lifestyle Lady Stanhope was obliged to maintain. Meanwhile, those who had accompanied her from Europe died or moved away; the friendship of the Arabs, which must be constantly maintained through gifts and prestige, cooled; contact became less frequent, and Lady Esther was reduced to the complete isolation in which I myself found her; but it was in that state that the heroic temperament of her character displayed itself, with all the energy, steadfastness, and resolve her spirit commanded. She had no thoughts of returning to England; she had not a single regret for that world or the past; she never wavered despite solitude, misfortune, nor the prospect of old age, and of being forgotten by the living; she remained alone where she still dwells, without books, newspapers, letters from Europe, without friends, without even servants attached to her person, surrounded only by a few Black African women and Black African slave children, and a number of Arab labourers to attend to her garden, her horses, and to ensure her personal safety.
It is generally believed in the country, and my own dealings with her also lead me to believe, that she finds her supernatural strength of spirit and resolve not only in her character, but also in exalted religious ideas, in which European Enlightenment is conflated with certain Eastern beliefs, and especially with the intricacies of astrology. Be that as it may, Lady Stanhope is a great name in the East, and a great source of wonder to Europe. Being so close to her home, I longed to see her: her ideas of solitude and meditation had such apparent sympathy with my own that I was eager to see what we might have in common. But nothing is more difficult for a European than to be admitted to her presence; she refuses all communication with English travellers, with women, and even with members of her own family. I therefore had little hope of meeting her, and had no letter of introduction: knowing, however, that she maintained some distant ties with the Arabs of Palestine and Mesopotamia, and since a recommendation from her to those tribes could be extremely useful to me in my future travels, I decided to send an Arab carrying a letter to her, the contents of which were as follows:
‘Milady, a traveller like yourself, a stranger like you in the Orient, who has come here seeking, like you, only the spectacle of its landscapes, its ruins, and the works of God, I have recently arrived in Syria with my family. I would count among the most interesting days of my journey the one on which I met a woman who is herself one of the wonders of this Orient that I have come to visit.
If you would be so kind as to receive me, let me know the day which suits you, and let me know if I should visit alone, or if I may introduce you to some of the friends who accompany me, and who would value no less than myself the honour of being presented to you.
May this request, Milady, in no way impose upon your politeness is my seeking what may be repugnant to your habit of absolute seclusion. I myself understand too well the price of freedom, and the charm of solitude, not to understand and respect a refusal.
Please accept, etc.’
Joun
I had not long to wait for a reply: on the 30th, at three in the afternoon, Lady Stanhope’s equerry, who is also her physician, arrived at my house under orders to accompany me to Joun, the residence of this extraordinary woman. We set off at four. I was accompanied by the equerry, Doctor Leonardi, and by Amédée de Parseval, a servant, and a guide; we were all on horseback. Half an hour from Beirut, we traversed a magnificent fir grove, originally planted by Emir Fakhr al-Din II on a high promontory, the view from which extends to the west over the stormy Syrian Sea and to the east over the magnificent valley of Lebanon — an admirable vantage point, where the rich vegetation of the West — vines, fig trees, mulberry trees, and pyramidal poplars — mingled with a few tall columns of Eastern palm trees, whose broad leaves, seen against the blue sky, were tossed about like plumes by the wind. A short distance away, one enters a kind of desert of red sand, piled up in enormous, shifting waves like those of the ocean.
It was an evening of strong breezes, and the wind furrowed, rippled, and scored these waves of sand, as it ripples the waves of the sea, and makes them quiver. The sight was new and melancholy, an apparition of the true and vast desert that I was soon to traverse. No trace of men or animals remained in this undulating arena; we were guided only by the roar of the waves on one side, and the gleaming peaks of the Lebanese mountains on the other. We soon found ourselves again on a kind of road or path strewn with enormous blocks of stone. This road, which follows the sea in the direction of Egypt, led us to a ruined house, the remains of an old fortified tower, where we spent the dark hours of the night, lying on rush mats, and wrapped in our cloaks.
As soon as the moon had risen, we remounted our horses. It was one of those nights when the sky is ablaze with stars, when the most perfect serenity seems to reign in those ethereal depths that we contemplate from so far below, but when Nature, all around us, seems to groan and writhe in sinister convulsions. The desolate aspect of the coast, for some miles now, added to this distressing impression. We had left behind us, with the twilight, the beautiful shaded slopes, the verdant valleys of Lebanon. Harsh hills, strewn from top to bottom with black, white, and grey stones, the debris from earthquakes, rose up close to us; to north and south, the sea, stirred since morning by a muffled storm, unfurled heavy and menacing waves, which we saw approaching from afar, casting their shadows before them, to strike the shore, each landing a thunderous blow, and finally extending their broad and bubbling sheets of foam to the edge of the wet sand where we were riding, flooding the feet of our horses each time and threatening to carry us away. The moon, as bright as a winter sun, shed enough rays on the sea to reveal the latter’s fury to us, yet not enough to light our path and reassure the eye as to the perils of the road.
Soon a fiery glow over the peaks of the Lebanese mountains melted the whiter or darker mists of morning, and spread over the whole scene a false, pallid hue, neither day nor night, owning neither to the brilliance of the one nor the serenity of the other: a painful hour for the eye and the mind, a struggle between two opposing principles the distressing image of which Nature sometimes offers, but which one more often finds within one’s own heart. At seven, under an already blazing sun, we left Said, ancient Sidon, which juts out into the sea like a glorious reminder of past dominion, and climbed the bare, jagged chalk hills that, rising imperceptibly from one level to the next, led us to the solitude we had been seeking. Each hillock we climbed revealed a higher one, which we had to circumvent or ascend; mountains followed one another like the links of a tightly bound chain, leaving between them only deep, waterless ravines, bleached white and strewn with patches of greyish rock. These mounts are completely devoid of vegetation and soil. They are the skeletons of hills that water and wind have eroded over the centuries. This was not where I had expected to find the dwelling of a woman who had travelled the world and had the whole universe to choose from.
Finally, from the top of one of these mounts, my eyes fell upon a deeper, wider valley, bordered on all sides by more majestic, but no less barren, mountains. In the middle of this valley, like the base of a broad tower, Mount Joun rose, clothed with rounded boulders which, tapering towards the summit, formed a lofty plateau hundreds of yards wide, crowned with beautiful, graceful, green vegetation. A white wall, flanked by a kiosk at one corner, enclosed this mass of greenery. This was Lady Hester’s residence. We reached it at noon. The house is not what is called a house in Europe, nor is it even what is called a house in the East; it is a confused and bizarre collection of ten or twelve small cottages, each containing only one or two ground-floor rooms, without windows, separated from each other by small courtyards or gardens, an arrangement quite like that of those poorer monasteries one finds high in the mountains of Italy or Spain, belonging to the mendicant orders.
As was her custom, Lady Stanhope did not receive visitors until three or four in the afternoon. We were each led into a kind of narrow cell, without light or furniture. We were served breakfast, and threw ourselves onto our divans, awaiting the awakening of the unseen hostess of this romantic retreat. I was asleep when, at three, there was a knock at my door, and I was told that she was expecting me. I crossed a courtyard, a garden, a pavilion with a jasmine canopy, then two or three dark corridors, and was ushered, by a small Black African child of six or eight, into Lady Hester’s study. Such profound darkness reigned there that I could scarcely make out the noble, grave, gentle, and majestic features of the white figure who, dressed in Oriental costume, rose from the divan and approached, extending her hand to me.
Lady Hester appeared to be about fifty years old (she was fifty-six at the time); she has those features that the years cannot alter: freshness, colour, grace, these fade with youth; but when beauty resides in the very form, in the purity of line, dignity, majesty, and intelligence of a man’s or woman’s face, beauty changes with the different stages of life, but does not pass away — such is Lady Stanhope’s. She wore a white turban on her head, a purple woollen band, across her forehead, falling on either side of her head to her shoulders, a long yellow cashmere shawl, and an immense white silk Turkish gown with flowing sleeves, which clothing enveloped her entire person in simple and majestic folds; and only through the opening at the chest of her first gown could one glimpse a second dress of Persian fabric adorned with a thousand flowers, which rose to her neck, and was fastened there with a pearl clasp. Turkish boots of yellow morocco leather, embroidered with silk, completed this beautiful Oriental costume, which she wore with the freedom and grace of someone who had not worn any other since her youth.
‘You have made a long journey to see a hermit,’ she said to me; ‘you are most welcome. I receive few strangers, barely one or two a year; but your letter pleased me, and I longed to meet someone who, like me, loves God, Nature, and solitude. Something, moreover, told me that our stars were aligned, and that we would be well suited to one another. I am pleased to see my premonition has not deceived me; and the features I see now, and the mere sound of your footsteps as you crossed the corridor, have taught me enough about you that I do not regret having wished to see you. Let us sit down and talk; we are already friends.’ ‘How,’ I asked her, ‘can you so readily bestow the name of friend upon a man whose name and life are completely unknown to you? You do not know who I am.’ ‘That is true,’ she replied. ‘I know neither who you are according to the wider world, nor what you do while you live among others; but I already know who you are before God. Do not take me for a fool, as the world often terms me, but I cannot resist the need to speak to you frankly. There is a science, lost today in your Europe, a science that was born in the East, which has never perished there, that still lives. I possess its secret. I read the stars.
We are all children of one of those celestial fires that presided over our birth, and whose happy or malevolent influence is written in our eyes, on our foreheads, in our features, in the lines on our hands, in the shape of our feet, in our gestures, in our gait. I have only seen you for a few minutes; well, I know you as if I had lived a century with you. Do you wish me to reveal you to yourself? Do you wish me to predict your destiny?’ ‘Beware of that, Milady!’ I replied, smiling. ‘I do not deny what I have scant knowledge of; I will not assert that in visible and invisible Nature, where everything is connected, where everything is linked together, beings of a lower order like men and women are not under the influence of higher beings, like the stars or the angels; but I have no need of their revelation to know myself — a thing of corruption, infirmity, and wretchedness — and as for the secrets of my future destiny, I would believe I was profaning the Divinity that hides them from me if I were to ask them of the Creature. As for the future, I believe only in God, freedom, and virtue.’ ‘That is of no account’ she replied. ‘Believe what you please. As for me, I can clearly see that you were born under the influence of three fortunate, powerful, and virtuous planets, which endowed you with similar qualities, and which are leading you toward a goal that I could, if you wished, indicate to you today. God brings you here to enlighten your soul; you are one of those men of desire and goodwill whom He needs, as instruments, for the marvellous works He will soon accomplish among mankind. Do you believe the reign of the Messiah has arrived?’
‘I was born a Christian, I told her: there is your answer.’ ‘Christian!’ she retorted after a slight sign of irritation; ‘I too am a Christian; but didn’t the one you call Christ say: “I still speak to you in parables, but he who comes after me will speak to you in spirit and truth”? Well! Such is the one we await! The Messiah who has not yet come, who is not far off, whom we will see with our own eyes, and for whose arrival everything is being prepared! What is your answer to that? And how can you deny or refute the very words of your Gospel that I have just quoted to you? What are your reasons for believing in Christ?’ ‘Allow me,’ I replied, ‘Milady, not to enter into such a discussion with you: I do not enter into it with myself. There are two lights for man: one that illuminates the mind, which is subject to discussion and doubt, and which often leads only to error and waywardness; the other that illuminates the heart and never deceives, for it is both evidence and elicits conviction; and, for us wretched mortals, truth is only a conviction. God alone possesses truth in a different way, as pure truth; we possess it only as faith. I believe in Christ because he brought to earth the holiest, most fruitful, and most divine doctrine that has ever shone upon human intelligence. Such a heavenly doctrine cannot be the fruit of deception and falsehood. Christ spoke, as reason speaks: doctrines are known by their morality, as a tree is known by its fruit; the fruits of Christianity (I speak of its future fruits even more than of its already-gathered but corrupted fruits) are infinite, perfect, and divine; therefore, the doctrine itself is divine; therefore, its author is the divine Word, as he called Himself.
That is why I am a Christian, that is my entire religious argument, within myself; with other people I have none: one can only prove to a person what they already believe.’ ‘But then,’ she continued, ‘do you find the social, political, and religious world well-ordered? And do you not feel what everyone feels, the need, the necessity of a revealer, a redeemer, the Messiah we await, and whom we already see in our dreams?’ ‘Oh, that,’ I replied, ‘is another question! No one suffers and complains more than I amidst the universal complaint of Nature, of humankind, and of our societies. No one confesses more openly the enormous social, political, and religious abuse that exists. No one desires more and hopes more for a remedy for the intolerable evils of humanity. No one is more convinced that the remedy can only be a divine one! If you call this waiting for a Messiah, I await that same as you do, and more than you I long for the Messiah’s imminent appearance. As and more than you do, I see in humanity’s wavering beliefs, in the turmoil of its ideas, in the emptiness at its heart, in the depravity of social conditions, in the continual fragility of its political institutions, all the symptoms of upheaval, and consequently of coming, and imminent, renewal. I believe that God always reveals himself at the precise moment when everything human is insufficient, when humanity confesses that it can do nothing for itself.
The world is in that state. I therefore believe in a Messiah close to appearing in our time; but in this Messiah I do not see Christ, who has nothing more to give us in wisdom, virtue, and truth; I see the one whom Christ foretold would come after him. Whether this holy spirit, ever active, ever assisting humanity, ever revealing to it, according to the age and its needs, what it must do and know, is embodied in a person or a doctrine, in a fact or an idea, it matters little, it is all one. Person or doctrine, fact or idea, I believe in that same, I hope and await that same, and more than you, Milady, I invoke that same! You see, then, that we may understand each other, and that our stars are not as divergent as this conversation may have led you to think.’
She smiled; her eyes, sometimes veiled with a touch of temper while I confessed my Christian rationalism, lit up with a tender gaze and an almost supernatural light. ‘Believe what you will,’ she said, ‘you are nonetheless one of those people I have been awaiting, whom Providence sends me, and who have a great part to play in the work that is being prepared. Soon you will return to Europe: Europe is finished, France alone still has a great mission to accomplish; you will participate in it, I do not yet know how; but I can tell you this evening, if you wish, when I have consulted your stars. I do not yet know the names of all: I see more than three now; I distinguish four, perhaps five planets, and, who knows, even more. One of them is certainly Mercury, which gives clarity and colour to intelligence and speech. You must be a poet: that is evident in your eyes and in the upper part of your face; below, you are under the influence of entirely different, almost opposing, planets. There is an influence towards energy and action; there is also something of the Sun,’ she said, suddenly, ‘in the position of your head, and in the way you glance over your left shoulder. Thank God: there are few men born under more than one planet, few whose rising planet is fortunate, and even fewer whose planet, though favourable, is not counterbalanced by the malignant influence of an opposing one. You, on the contrary, have several; and all are in harmony to serve you, and all help each other in your favour. What is your name?’ I told her. ‘I have not heard of you before today!’ she replied, with the accent of truth.
‘There, Milady, is the sum of fame. I have composed a few verses, which have caused my name to be repeated a hundred thousand times by all the literary echoes of Europe; but those echoes are too faint to cross your sea and your mountains, thus, here, I am a completely new man, a man totally unknown, a name never before uttered! I am all the more flattered by the kindness you lavish upon me: I owe it only to you and myself.’ ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘poet or no, I love you and have faith in you; we shall meet again, be certain of it! You will return to the West, but it will not be long before you return to the East: it is your homeland.’ ‘It is, at least,’ I said, ‘the homeland of my imagination.’ ‘Don’t smile’, she replied ‘it is your true homeland, it is the homeland of your ancestors. I am sure of it now: look at your feet!’ ‘I see there,’ I said, ‘only the dust of your paths covering it, which I would be ashamed of in a drawing room in old Europe.’ No, no; that’s not it,’ she replied again, ‘look at your feet. I had not noticed myself till now. You see; the instep of each foot is very high, and between your heel and your toes, when your foot is on the ground, there is enough space for water to pass through without wetting you. These are the feet of the Arab, the feet of the East; you are a son of these lands, and we are approaching the day when each will return to the land of his fathers. We will meet again.’
A Black African slave then entered, and, lying down before her, his forehead on the rug and his hands on his head, spoke a few words to her in Arabic. ‘Go,’ she said to me, ‘your refreshments are served: eat quickly, and return soon. I shall attend you then, and see more clearly amidst the confusion of my thoughts about you and your future. I myself never eat with anyone; I live too frugally. Bread and fruit, when the need arises, are enough for me; I must not subject a guest to my diet.’
I was led, beneath an arbour of jasmine and oleander, to the gate of her garden. The table was set for Monsieur de Parseval and myself: we dined very quickly, but she scarcely waited until we had left the table before sending Doctor Leonardi to tell me that she was expecting me. I hastened there; I found her smoking a long Oriental pipe. She had one brought to me. I was already accustomed to seeing the most elegant and beautiful women of the Orient smoking; I no longer found anything shocking in that graceful and nonchalant posture, nor in the fragrant smoke escaping in light columns from the lips of a beautiful woman, which interrupted the conversation without dampening it. We talked for a long time in this manner, always on our favourite subject, the unique and mysterious theme of this extraordinary woman, a modern-day sorceress, entirely reminiscent of the famous sorceresses of antiquity; a Circe of the deserts.
It seemed to me that Lady Hester’s religious doctrines were a skilful, though confused, mixture of the different religions among which she had condemned herself to live; mysterious like the Druze, whose mystical secrets she, perhaps alone in the world, knew; resigned like the Muslims, and fatalistic like them; awaiting the Messiah with the Jews; and professing the worship of Christ and the practice of his morality of charity with the Christians. Add to this the fantastic colours and supernatural dreams of an imagination tinged with the Orient and inflamed by solitude and meditation, and a few revelations, perhaps, of the Arab astrologers, and you will gain an idea of her sublime and bizarre compound of beliefs, which it is easier to call madness than to analyse and understand. No, the woman is not mad. Madness, which is visible, all-too-obviously, in the eyes, is not visible in her beautiful and direct gaze; madness, which always betrays itself in conversation, whose flow it always involuntarily interrupts with sudden, disordered, and eccentric digressions, is not at all perceptible in the lofty, mystical, cloudy, but sustained, connected, linked, and vigorous conversation of Lady Hester. If I had to give a definitive opinion, I would say it is a deliberate, studied mask of madness, one that is self-aware, she possessing her own reasons for appearing mad. The powerful admiration that her genius has inspired, and continues to inspire, in the Arab populations bordering the mountains proves quite clearly that her supposed madness is merely a means to an end.
The people of this land of wonders, of the rocks and deserts, whose imaginations are more colourful and hazier than the horizon of their sands or their seas, need the word of a Muhammad or a Lady Stanhope! They need the communion of the stars and planets, prophecies, miracles, the ‘second vision’ of genius! Lady Stanhope has understood this through the profound reach of her truly superior intelligence; then perhaps, like all beings endowed with powerful intellectual faculties, she has ended by seducing herself, and has become the first neophyte of the Messianic figure she has created for others. Such is the effect this woman had on me. One cannot judge or classify that figure in a word; it is a statue of immense dimensions and can only be judged from her own perspective. I would not be surprised if one day soon it were to fulfil part of its promised destiny: an empire in Arabia, a throne in Jerusalem! The slightest political upheaval in the region of the Near East it inhabits could stir it even there.
‘I have only one reproach to you on this subject,’ I told her: ‘that you have been too timid as regards events, and have not yet exercised your influence to the extent you could.’ ‘You speak,’ she said, ‘like a man who still believes too much in human will, and not enough in the irresistible power of destiny alone. My influence lies there. I await the future; I do not summon it. I am growing old, my fortune is considerably diminished; I am now alone and abandoned on this desolate hilltop, prey to the first audacious person who attempts to force my doors, surrounded by a band of faithless servants and ungrateful slaves who rob me daily and sometimes threaten my life. Just recently, I owed my salvation only to this dagger, which I was forced to use to defend my breast against that of a Black African slave whom I raised. Yet, amidst all these tribulations, I am happy. I answer everything with the sacred words of the Muslims: Allah Kerim! God is Bountiful! And I await with confidence the future I have spoken of, and the certainty of its reality which I would like to inspire in you, and that you require.’
After smoking several pipes and drinking several cups of coffee, which the Black African slaves brought every fifteen minutes or so, she said: ‘Come, I will lead you to a sanctuary which I allow no outsider to enter: it is my garden.’ We descended a few steps, and I walked with her, in a state of true enchantment, through one of the most beautiful Turkish gardens I have ever seen in the Orient. Dark trellises whose green canopies bore, like thousands of chandeliers, the sparkling grapes of the promised land; kiosks where sculpted arabesques intertwined with jasmine and climbing plants, the vines of Asia-Minor; pools, artificial it is true, to which water flowed from a two miles or more away, murmuring and gushing forth from marble fountains; paths lined with all the fruit trees of England, of Europe, and of those beautiful climes; green lawns dotted with flowering shrubs, and marble compartments enclosing sprays of blossom new to my eyes: such was her garden. We rested in turn in several of the pavilions that adorn it, while Lady Hester’s inexhaustible conversation never lost the mystical tone and elevated subject matter it had displayed that morning. ‘Since destiny,’ she said to me at last, ‘has sent you here, and since such an astonishing affinity between our ruling planets allows me to confide in you what I would conceal from so many of the uninitiated, come; I wish you to see with your own eyes a natural marvel whose purpose is known only to me and my followers: the prophecies of the East foretold it for many centuries, and you will judge for yourselves whether those prophecies have been fulfilled.’
She opened a garden gate that led to a small inner courtyard, in which I glimpsed two magnificent Arabian mares of the finest breed, and of rare perfection of form. ‘Come closer,’ she said, ‘and look at this bay mare; see if Nature has not fulfilled in her what is written about the mare who is to bear the Messiah, that she will be born fully saddled.’ I did indeed see in this beautiful animal a quirk of Nature rare enough to serve the illusions of vulgar credulity among semi-barbaric peoples: the mare had, in the absence of flesh on the withers, a cavity so wide and so deep, imitating the shape of a Turkish saddle so well, that one could truly say that she was born fully saddled; and, apart from the stirrups, one could indeed ride her without feeling the need for an artificial saddle. This mare, magnificent in other respects, seemed accustomed to the admiration and respect that Lady Stanhope and her slaves showed her, and to sense the dignity of her future mission; no one had ever ridden her, and two Arab grooms cared for and watched over her constantly, without losing sight of her for a single moment. Another white mare, in my opinion infinitely more beautiful, shares Lady Stanhope’s respect and care with the Messiah’s mare: no one has ridden her either. Lady Hester didn’t tell me, but hinted that, although the white mare’s destiny was less sacred, it nonetheless had a mysterious and important one also; and I gathered that Lady Stanhope was reserving her to be ridden by herself on the day she would make her entrance, alongside the Messiah, into the reconquered Jerusalem.
After walking these two animals for a while on a lawn outside the fortress walls, and enjoying the suppleness and grace of these superb creatures, we returned, and I renewed my entreaties to Lady Hester to finally allow me to present Monsieur de Parseval, my friend and travelling companion, who had followed me to her house against my will, and who had been waiting in vain since morning for a favour of which she is so sparing. She finally consented, and the three of us returned to spend the evening or night in the small drawing room I have already described. The coffee and pipes reappeared in Oriental abundance; and the drawing room was soon filled with such a cloud of smoke that Lady Stanhope’s face appeared to us only through an atmosphere akin to the magical atmosphere of invocations. She conversed with the same force, the same grace, the same abundance, but infinitely less of the supernatural, on subjects less sacred to her, than she had done with me alone all day.
‘I hope,’ she said to me suddenly, ‘that you are of the aristocracy: I have no doubt of it, seeing you.’ ‘You are mistaken, Milady,’ I told her. ‘I am neither an aristocrat nor a democrat; I have lived long enough to see both sides of humanity’s coin, and to find them equally hollow. Neither aristocrat nor democrat: I am simply a man, and an exclusive supporter of that which can improve and perfect the whole person, whether born at the summit or the foot of the social ladder! I am neither for the common people nor for those in power, but for all humanity; and I believe neither aristocratic nor democratic institutions possess the exclusive virtue of perfecting humanity; this virtue resides only in a divine morality, the fruit of a perfect religion: the true civilisation of peoples is their faith!’ ‘That is true, she replied; but, nonetheless, I am an aristocrat in spite of myself; and you will agree,’ she added, ‘that if there are vices in aristocracy, at least there are noble virtues alongside them to redeem and compensate for them; whereas in democracy I clearly see the vices, the lowest and most envious ones, but search in vain for the nobler virtues.’ ‘That is not so, Milady,’ I said, ‘there are vices and virtues on both sides, but in the upper classes those very vices have a brilliant side, while in the lower classes, on the contrary, these vices show themselves in all their nakedness, and wound moral sensibility more deeply in the gaze that beholds them: the difference is in appearance, not in fact; in reality, vice is more vicious in the rich, educated, and cultured person than in one without land and without bread; for in the one, vice is a matter of choice; in the other, a matter of necessity. So, let us despise vice everywhere, and even more so in the vicious aristocracy, and let us not judge humanity by class, but by the individual: the great would have the vices of the people, if they were of the people, and the lowly would have the vices of the great, if they were great. The scales are balanced; let us not weight them.’
‘Well! Let us move on,’ she said; ‘but leave me to believe you are an aristocrat like myself: it would pain me too much to think you were among those young Frenchmen who stir up popular discontent against all the notables that God, Nature, and society have created, and who tear down the edifice to build, from its ruins, a pedestal for their envious baseness!’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘rest assured; I am not one of those people: I am merely one of those who do not despise what is below them in the social order, while still respecting what is above, but whose desire or dream would be to call all people, regardless of their rank in the arbitrary hierarchy of politics, to the same light, the same freedom, and the same moral perfection. And since you are a religious person, since you believe that God loves all his children equally, and since you await a second Messiah to set all things right, you doubtless think like them and like myself.’ ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but I no longer concern myself with human politics, I have had enough of those: I saw too much during the ten years I spent in the company of my uncle, William Pitt, during which time all the intrigues of Europe echoed around me. I despised politics when I was young, I no longer wish to hear about it anymore; everything that people do on their own account is fruitless: the forms of it are indifferent to me.’ ‘And to myself also,’ I replied. ‘The heart of the matter,’ she continued, ‘is God and virtue!’ ‘I think exactly the same,’ I replied. ‘So let us not talk about it anymore, we are in agreement.’
Turning to less serious matters, and joking about the kind of divination that allowed her to understand a man entirely at first glance and simply by observing his ruling planet, I put her wisdom to the test and questioned her about two or three travellers I knew who had presented themselves to her over the past fifteen years. I was struck by the perfect accuracy of her assessment of two of these men. Among other things, she analysed, with a prodigious perspicacity of intelligence, the character of one of them, whom I myself knew perfectly well; a character difficult to grasp at first glance, grand, but veiled beneath the simplest and most seductive appearance of affability. And what completed my astonishment, and made me admire the inflexible memory of this woman most, was that this traveller had spent only two hours at her home, and that sixteen years had passed between his visit and the account she gave, at my request, of her impressions of the man. Solitude concentrates and strengthens all the faculties of the soul. — Prophets, saints, great individuals, and the poets have understood this perfectly; and their character drives all of them to seek the desert, or isolation among others.
The name of Bonaparte arose, as always, in the conversation. ‘I thought,’ I said, ‘that your support for the man would set a barrier between us.’ ‘I was only a supporter of his in his misfortunes, and I pitied him,’ she replied. ‘And so was I,’ I said; ‘speak of him no more, we are in accord.’
I failed to understand how a religious and moral woman could worship power alone, devoid of religion, morality, or freedom. Bonaparte was undoubtedly a great innovator; he remade the social world, but paid too little attention to the elements from which he was re-composing that same: he moulded his statue out of mud in a spirit of self-interest, instead of carving it from divine and moral sentiments, virtue, and liberty!
The night passed in this way, Lady Hester. freely and unaffectedly, touching upon every topic that a word might bring up or carry away in a chance conversation. I felt that no string was lacking from that firm and lofty intellect, and that every key on the keyboard produced a true, strong, and full sound, except perhaps as regards the metaphysical note, which too much introspection and solitude had distorted, or raised to a pitch too high for mortal understanding. We parted with sincere regret on my part, and with an obliging regret expressed on hers.
‘No goodbyes,’ she said to me: ‘we will see each other often on this journey, and even more often on other journeys that you have not even planned yet. Go and rest, and remember that it is a friend you leave behind in the solitudes of Lebanon.’ She held out her hand to me; I placed mine on my heart, in the Arab manner, and departed.
A Visit to Emir Bashir Shihab II
The next day, at four in the morning, Monsieur de Parseval and I were descending the steep slope that leads from her monastery into the deep valley of a river, named here as the Belus. We forded the waters, sluggish from the summer, and began to climb the high mountains of Lebanon that separate Joun from Deir El Qamar, and the ‘House of Faith’, the palace of Emir Bashir, sovereign prince of the Druze and of all the mountains of Lebanon. Lady Hester had given us her physician to act as our dragoman, and one of her Arab grooms as our guide. After a two hours’ ride, we arrived at a valley deeper, narrower, and more picturesque than any we had traversed. To the right and left rose, in two perpendicular ramparts three to four hundred feet high, twin mountain ranges that seemed to have been recently separated from one another by a blow of the Creator’s hammer, or perhaps by the earthquake that shook Lebanon to its very foundations, when the Son of Man, giving up his soul to God not far from these same mountains, breathed that last sigh which banished the spirit of error, oppression, and falsehood from, and breathed truth, liberty, and life into, a renewed world. The gigantic blocks detached from both sides of the mountains, scattered like pebbles in children’s hands into the valley, formed the horrible, deep, immense, bristling bed of this dry torrent; some of these stones were masses taller and longer than tall houses. Some stood perfectly upright like solid and eternal cubes; others, suspended on their corners, and supported by the pressure of other, unseen rocks, seemed as if they were still descending, ready to roll further yet, presenting the image of ruination in action, incessant collapse, a chaos of stones, an inexhaustible avalanche of boulders — rocks of funereal colours, grey, black, marbled with fire, or an opaque whiteness; petrified waves of a granite river. There was not a drop of water in the deep crevices of this bed scorched by the burning Syrian sun; not a blade of grass, not a stem or climbing plant, either amidst this fractured torrent or on the jagged, arduous slopes on either side of the abyss: it was an ocean of stones, a cataract of rocks, to which the diversity of their forms, the variety of their poses, the strange nature of their collapse, the interplay of shadows and light on their sides and surfaces, seemed to lend them movement and fluidity.
If Dante had needed a model in order to depict, in his Inferno, a further circle, one of stoniness, aridity, ruin, the disintegration of things, the degradation of worlds, the transience of ages, he would only have needed to describe this scenery: it was like a ravine amidst the world’s last hour, when fire will consume everything, and the Earth, revealing its entrails, will be nothing but a mutilated block of calcined stone beneath the feet of the terrible Judge who will visit it. We followed this Valley of Lamentation for two hours, without the scene varying except for the different courses the torrent itself followed between the mountains, and the more or less fearful manner in which the rocks clustered in their foaming bed of stones. That vale will never be erased from my imagination. The land feels primal, a place of terrifying poetry and human woe; the mournful and grandiose accent of the prophecies is felt there in all its savage power. All the images of the biblical imagination are engraved in capital letters on the furrowed face of Lebanon and its golden peaks, its river valleys, and its silent, lifeless valleys. Compared to ourselves, the divine spirit, the superhuman breath that vivified the souls, and inspired the music, of a people to whom God spoke in symbols and images, filled the minds of their sacred bards more fully, and nourished them with a stronger milk. We are but pallid heirs of the ancient lyre; we, who have before our eyes only graceful, gentle, and cultivated scenes of Nature; a Nature civilised and colourless as ourselves.
At noon, we reached the highest section of the mountains we had to cross. We began our descent along the steepest paths, where our horses’ hooves trembled on the loose stones that separated us from the precipice. After an hour’s descent, as we rounded a hill, we caught sight of the fantastic Palace of Beiteddine, near Deir El Qamar. We cried out in surprise and admiration, and involuntarily stopped our horses to contemplate the new, picturesque, Oriental scene that unfolded before our eyes.
Beiteddine Palace
A few steps away, an immense sheet of foaming water gushed from a mill sluice and plunged from a height of fifty to sixty feet onto rocks that shattered it to flying spray; the sound of this waterfall and the coolness it spread through the air, which moistened our burning foreheads, deliciously prepared our senses for the wonder they so longed to view. Beyond this waterfall, which disappeared into abysses whose depths we could not penetrate, a vast. deep valley opened like a funnel, cultivated from foot to summit with mulberry trees, vines, and fig trees, the ground being covered everywhere with the freshest and lightest greenery; several beautiful villages were perched on terraces on the mountain slopes that surround the valley of Deir El Quamar. On one side only, the horizon opened out, revealing, beyond the lower peaks of Lebanon, the Syrian Sea. ‘Ecce mare magnum!’ said King David (see the ‘Vulgate: Psalm 103.25’). ‘There lies the great blue sea with its waves and its roaring, and its immense reptiles!’ King David was at this very place, perhaps, when he uttered his poetic exclamation. Indeed, one can see the Egyptian sea, tinted a blue darker than the sky, and blending in the distance with the horizon through the vaporous, violet mist that veils all the shores of this part of Asia.
At the bottom of this immense valley, the hill of Beit ed Dine, upon which the Emir’s palace stands, rose like a vast tower, flanked by ivy-covered rocks, from whose fissures and battlements hung fans of floating greenery. This hill climbed to the level of the precipitous path where we ourselves hung separated from it by a narrow, roaring abyss. At its summit, and a few steps from us, the Moorish palace of the Emir extended majestically over the entire plateau of Beit ed Dine, with its square towers, pierced with ogives crenellated at the top, its long galleries rising one on top of the other, and presenting rows of light and slender arches like the stems of the palm trees that crowned them with their aerial plumes. These vast courtyards descended in immense steps from the mountaintop to the fortification’s walls. At the far end of the largest of these courtyards, which we could see from our vantage point, the irregular façade of the Palace of Women (Dar el Harim) came into view, adorned with light and graceful colonnades the slender, tapering trunks of which, irregular and uneven in shape, rose to the rooftops and supported, like a parasol, the light painted wooden hangings that served as a portico for the palace. A marble staircase, decorated with balustrades carved in arabesques, led from this portico to the gate of the Palace of Women. This gate, carved from variously coloured wood, framed in marble. and surmounted with Arabic inscriptions, was surrounded by magnificently dressed Black African slaves, armed with silver pistols and with Damascene sabres gleaming with gold and intricate carving.
The vast courtyards facing the palace were themselves filled with a multitude of servants, courtiers, priests, and soldiers, in all the varied and picturesque costumes adopted by the six peoples of Lebanon: the Druze, Christians, Armenians, Greeks, Maronites, and Metualis (the Matawila, Shia Muslims). Five to six hundred Arabian horses were tethered by their feet and heads to taut ropes that crossed the courtyards; they were saddled, bridled, and covered with brightly coloured blankets; and several groups of camels, some lying down, others standing, others kneeling to be loaded or unloaded; while, on the highest terrace of the inner courtyard, several young pages, riding one against another, were hurling djerids (javelins), avoiding them in turn by lying flat on their horses backs, returning at full gallop to their unarmed opponent, and performing, with admirable grace and vigour, all the rapid manoeuvres that military exercise requires. After contemplating this Oriental scene, so new to us, for a few moments, we approached the immense, massive gate of the first courtyard of the palace, guarded by Arabs armed with rifles and with long, light spears, like the stems of long reeds. There, we sent to the prince the letters we had for him.
A few moments later, he sent us his chief physician, Monsieur Bertrand, born in Syria to a French family, who still retained the language and memories of their homeland. He led us to the apartment that the Emir’s hospitality offered, and summoned a few slaves. They led our retinue and horses to another part of the palace.
Our apartments consisted of a pretty courtyard decorated with arabesque pilasters, with a fountain in the centre, flowing into a large marble basin; around this courtyard were three rooms and a diwan, that is to say, an apartment larger than the others, formed by an arcade opening onto the inner courtyard, and which had neither doors nor curtains to close it off: it was a transitional space between the house and the street, serving as a garden for idle Muslims, and whose motionless shade replaced for them that of trees, which they had neither the ingenuity to plant nor the strength to seek out wherever Nature had made them grow. Our rooms, although sited within a magnificent palace, would have seemed too dilapidated even for the poorest of our farm labourers’ cottages: the windows lacked panes, a luxury unknown in the Orient, despite the rigours of winter in these mountains; there were neither beds, nor furniture, nor chairs; nothing but bare, decrepit walls, riddled with holes made by rats and lizard; while the uneven floor was of beaten earth and chopped straw. The slaves brought rush mats, which they spread over this floor, and Damascus carpets, with which they covered the mats; they then brought a small table from Bethlehem, made of wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl: these tables are not six inches in diameter, and no taller; they resemble a section of a column, and can only support a tray, on which the Muslims set the five or six dishes that make up their meal.
Our dinner, placed on this table, consisted of a pilaf, a dish of soured milk mixed with oil, and a few pieces of minced mutton, pounded with boiled rice, used to stuff certain gourds similar to cucumbers. This is indeed the most sought-after and delicious dish one can eat in all the Orient. For drink, pure water is served from earthenware bowls with long spouts, passed from hand to hand, the water being poured into the half-open mouth without the bowl touching the lips. No knives, spoons, or forks are used: one eats with one’s hands; but frequent ablutions make this custom less offensive to Muslims.
We had scarcely finished dinner when the Emir sent word that he was expecting us. We traversed a vast courtyard adorned with fountains, and a portico formed of tall, slender columns rising from the ground and supporting the palace roof. We were ushered into a most beautiful hall, its floor paved with marble, its ceilings and walls painted in vivid colours and elegant arabesques by artists from Constantinople. Jets of water murmured in the corners of the room; and at the far end, behind a colonnade whose intercolumniations were grilled and glazed, one could see an enormous tiger, sleeping with its head resting on its crossed paws. Half the room was occupied by secretaries in long robes, carrying silver writing-tablets tucked into their belts like daggers; richly dressed and armed Arabs; African black slaves and mulattoes awaiting orders from their master; and a few Egyptian officers dressed in European jackets and wearing red Greek cloth caps, the long blue tassels hanging down to their shoulders.
The floor of the other part of this room was about a foot higher, and a wide red velvet divan stretched all around it. The Emir was squatting in the corner of this divan. He was a handsome old man with keen, penetrating eyes, a fresh and lively complexion, and a flowing grey beard. A white robe, cinched with a cashmere belt, covered him entirely, and the gleaming hilt of a long, broad dagger protruded from the folds of this robe at chest level, adorned with a cluster of diamonds the size of oranges. We greeted him in the local manner, placing our hands first on our foreheads, then on our hearts. He returned our greeting graciously and with a smile, and beckoned us to approach and sit beside him on the divan. An interpreter was kneeling between him and ourselves. I started the conversation by expressing my pleasure at visiting the interesting and beautiful country which he governed with such firmness and wisdom. Among other things, I told him that the highest praise I could offer his administration was simply my being there; that the safety of the roads, the richness of the culture, and the order and peace in the cities were eloquent testimonies to the prince’s virtue and skill. He thanked me and then asked me a multitude of questions about Europe, and especially about European politics as regarded the struggle between the Ottoman Turks and the Egyptians. These questions demonstrated both his keen interest in the subject and a knowledge and understanding of affairs uncommon in a prince of the East. Coffee and long pipes were brought in and replenished several times, and the conversation continued for nearly an hour.
I was delighted by his wisdom, insight, and manners, both noble in nature and worthy of this old prince, I rose, after our lengthy talk, to accompany him to the baths, which he wished to show us himself. These consisted of five or six marble-paved rooms with compartments, their vaults and walls plastered with stucco and painted in tempera, with great taste and elegance, by artists from Damascus. Jets of hot, cold, or lukewarm water sprang from the pavement, spreading warmth or coolness throughout the rooms. The last room was a steam bath in which we could not remain a minute. Several handsome white slaves, bare-chested and with their legs wrapped in shawls of unbleached silk, stood in these rooms, ready to perform their duties as bathers. The prince offered us the opportunity to bathe with him; we declined, and left him in the hands of his slaves, who were preparing to undress him.
From there, we went with one of his grooms to visit the courtyards and stables where the Emir’s magnificent Arabian steeds were chained. One must have visited the stables of Damascus, or those of Emir Bashir, to truly understand the Arabian stallion. This superb and graceful animal loses some of his beauty, gentleness, and picturesque form when transplanted from his native land and familiar habits to our cold climates, and the shadow and solitude of our stables. One must see him at the door of a desert Arab’s tent, his head between his legs, shaking his long black mane like a mobile parasol, and sweeping his flanks, polished like copper or silver, with his swirling tail, the tip of which is always dyed purple with henna; one must see him dressed in gleaming saddlecloths, highlighted with gold and pearl embroidery; his head covered with a net of blue or red silk, woven with gold or silver, with sonorous and floating aiguillettes that fall from his forehead to his nostrils, and with which he veils or unveils in turn, with each undulation of his neck, the flaming orbs, immense, intelligent, gentle and proud, of his eyes: you must see him especially, as he was there, amidst a mass of two or three hundred horses, some lying in the dust of the courtyards, others hobbled by iron rings, and attached to long ropes that crossed those courtyards; others running free over the sand, and leaping amongst the lines of camels that opposed their racing; or held by young Black African slaves dressed in scarlet jackets, the stallions resting their heads caressingly on the shoulders of these children. The horses played together, free and unleashed like foals in a meadow, rearing up against one another, or rubbing foreheads together, or mutually licking their beautiful, lustrous, silvery coats; all watching us with anxious and curious attention because of our European clothes and foreign language, but soon becoming familiar, and gracefully offering their necks to the caresses and flattering touches of our hands. It is an incredible thing, the lucid expressiveness of these horses’ faces, when one has not witnessed it. All their thoughts are painted in their eyes and in the convulsive movement of their cheeks, lips, and nostrils, with as much clarity, and character as the impressions of thoughts on a child’s face. When we first approached them, they made faces and grimaces of repugnance and curiosity, all at once. Their reaction was similar to that an impressionable man might have displayed on seeing something unexpected and unsettling. Our speech, in particular, struck and astonished them greatly; and the movement of their ears, pricked back, or stretched forward, testified to their surprise and unease. I especially admired several priceless mares, reserved for the Emir himself. I had my dragoman offer the squire up to ten thousand piastres for one of the prettiest; but no price can persuade an Arab to part with a mare of the first blood, and I was unable to purchase her.
We returned to our apartment at the end of the day, and a supper similar to dinner was brought to us. Several of the Emir’s officers came to visit us on his behalf. Monsieur Bertrand, his chief physician, spent the evening with us. Thanks to the little Italian and French he has retained, we were able to talk about his family history. He gave us the most interesting information concerning the domestic life of the Druze emir. This prince, though sixty-five years old, having recently lost his first wife (Shams al-Madid, who died in 1829), to whom he owed his entire fortune, had just remarried. We regretted not having been able to see his new wife (Hisn Jihan): she is, it is said, remarkably beautiful. She is only fifteen years old; she is a Circassian slave whom the emir purchased from Constantinople, and whom he converted to Christianity before marrying her, since Emir Bashir is himself a Christian, even a Catholic, or rather, as is the rule in tolerant countries, he belongs to all the official religions of his country: he is a Muslim for the Muslims, a Druze for the Druze, a Christian for the Christians. He has mosques and a khalwat (Druze house of worship) there; but for some years now his family religion, the religion of his heart, has been Catholicism. His policies are such, and the fear of his name so well established, that his Christian faith inspires neither distrust nor repugnance among the Muslim Arabs, the Druze, nor even the Metualis who live under his rule. He does justice to all, and all respect him equally.
That evening, after supper, the Emir sent some of his musicians and singers to us, who improvised Arabic verses in our honour. He has among his servants Arabs solely dedicated to these kinds of ceremonies. They fulfil exactly the role troubadours filled in medieval castles, or folk poets in Scotland. Standing behind the cushion of the Emir or his sons while the latter dine, they sing verses in praise of the masters they serve, or of the guests the Emir wishes to honour. Some of these poetic tributes were translated for us by Monsieur Bertrand: they were generally very trite, or so contrived in their ideas that it would be impossible to render them with ideas and imagery appropriate to our European languages. Here is the only somewhat comprehensible verse I can find noted in my album:
‘Your ships have wings, but the Arab’s steed has wings too. Its nostrils, when it flies over our mountains, make the sound of the wind in a ship’s sails. The motion of its swift gallop is like a stone flattening the hearts of the weak; but it gladdens the heart of the Arab. May its back be for you a seat of honour, and often bear you to the Emir’s diwan!’
Among the Emir’s secretaries was one of the greatest poets writing in Arabic (Nasif Al-Yaziji). I was unaware of this, and only learned of it later. When he learned from others in Syria that I myself was a poet in Europe, he wrote me verses always imbued with that affectation, always marred by those plays on words, which are characteristic of the languages of ancient civilisations, but in which one nevertheless senses a great elevation of talent, and an order of ideas far superior to that which we imagine in Europe.
We slept on divan cushions spread out on a mat, to the sound of fountains murmuring all around us in the gardens, courtyards, and halls of this part of the palace. When day broke, I saw through the grilles several Muslims praying in the palace’s main courtyard. They would spread a rug on the ground to avoid touching the dust, stand for a moment, then bow completely, touching the rug several times with their foreheads, their faces always turned toward the mosque; then they would lie flat on the rug; strike the ground with their foreheads; and rise to their feet, and repeat the same rituals many times, assuming the same postures and murmuring prayers. I found not the slightest absurdity in these postures and rituals, however bizarre they may seem to us, in our ignorance. The faces of Muslims are so imbued with the religious sentiment they express through these gestures that I have always deeply respected their acts of prayer: the motive involved sanctifies everything. Wherever the divine idea descends and acts upon human beings, it imprints upon them a superhuman dignity. One might well say: ‘I do not pray like you, but I pray with you to the Lord, the Lord you believe in and wish to acknowledge and honour, just as I wish to acknowledge and honour him myself, in another manner. It is not for me to mock you; it is for God to judge us all.’
We spent the morning visiting the palaces of the Emir’s sons, which are a short distance from his own; a small Catholic church, quite like our modern village churches in France or Italy; and the palace gardens. Emir Bashir has had another country palace built about a mile from Beit ed Dine. It is the sole object of his rides on horseback, and the road there is almost the only one where even an Arabian horse can gallop without danger; everywhere else the paths leading to Beit ed Dine are so steep, clinging to the sheer edges of precipices, that one cannot traverse them without trembling, even at walking pace.
Before leaving Beit ed Dine and Deir El Qamar, I have transcribed various truthful and curious facts, gathered on the spot, concerning the skilful and warlike old man I had visited.
The End of Part III of Lamartine’s ‘Voyage en Orient’