Chapter VI: Far Niente at Damascus

ON August 27, 1812, Lady Hester had left Deir-el-Kammar, edified on the subject of Eastern hospitality. The Emir Bechir had supplied all the requirements of her table with great magnificence, it is true, but had caused a hint to be conveyed to her, by one of his intimates, that he expected a present of equivalent value. It cost her 2000 piastres, pieces of brocade and gratuities to all the servants, from the major-domo to the meanest scullion, and they formed a tribe! She left disgusted by an invitation which had cost her so dear. As for the horse with which Bechir had presented her, one which the doctor had admired, he was vicious, and Lady Hester got rid of him, to the profit of the janissary.

Bruce, in company with one of the two Bertrands--one does not know which--had started for Aleppo, after having uselessly endeavoured to take his friend. Lady Hester screened her refusal behind her contempt for the Levantine race, neither Turkish nor European, which inhabited this town. The true reason was much more personal: she simply was afraid of catching the Aleppo pimple, that facetious ulcer which chooses as a rule a prominent part of the face, nose or cheek, to lay there its hideous scar. A woman, even though she wears breeches, attaches importance to her face. And this little weakness brings Lady Hester nearer to her poor sex.... She had written to the Pacha of Damascus to inform him of her desire to visit his capital, and he had sent her a page with a most courteous invitation.

Was not Damascus the Porte of the Desert, and had not Lady Hester already the project, still vague as to the means, but certain as to the end, of making a little stay amongst the wandering Bedouin tribes?

The caravan journeyed slowly; the news which the page had brought did not stimulate rapidity; there was revolution at Damascus, where the commandant of the troops had refused to recognise Sayd Soliman, the new pacha. He was shut up in the citadel, and blood was flowing in streams in the streets.

The travellers occupied four days in traversing the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon. Pierre's stories diverted the evenings. In proportion as they climbed, the air was charged with aromatic effluvia and icy breaths. At the summit of their route, they perceived all at once the plain of the Bekaa, which, like a long serpent, unrolls its green rings, writhes and lies down between two mountain barriers. The Litami traced a furrow of sombre tint, and the plain with its fresh herbage was a pleasure to behold. The parallel tops of the two Lebanons were tawny and red; the parched earth was cracking under the midday heat. And to the South, Hermon rose victoriously, like a great sherbet, to the eternal snows on the plateau glittering with light. To the North, a jet of light, which Lady Stanhope recognised as Baalbeck: the temple of the sun was saluting its god.

At last, excellent news arrived from Damascus: the rebel age had been strangled and order was entirely restored. After halts at the village of Djbb-Djenin and Dimas, the travellers stopped at the gardens of Damascus. The gardens of Damascus! Fêtes and orgies of apricot-trees, orange-trees and pomegranate-trees, succumbing beneath the exuberance of the vines, whose heavy and juicy grapes fell so far as the ground. The river with its seven branches chanted the joy of living, and the song of the waters was full of voluptuousness, refreshing and boundless.

The doctor started in advance to prepare the way and to hire a house in the Christian quarter. Then he returned, thoughtful, to meet Lady Hester. Thoughtful! There was occasion for it.

Damascus was still a town closed to Europeans. The fanaticism was freely developed and imposed its laws on the governors too benevolent towards foreigners. The length of the Syrian coasts, the relations of commerce, to which the Arabs attached extreme importance owing to the profit which they derived from it, and the authority of the consuls--whom they believed powerful and supported by their countries--had brought a certain tolerance. But Damascus, forbidden fruit, was concealed far inland, guarded by the double ramparts of the Lebanon, by solid walls, and particularly the desert, which came to die at its feet like a silent sea.

The few travellers who had visited it, and whom Lady Hester had met at Cairo or in the towns of the coast, had strongly dissuaded her from attempting an adventure of which the result might be tragic and which certainly would remain perilous.

"Think," said they to her, "that a man cannot even enter Damascus in European costume without being insulted. Think that the Christians, if they dared to ride on horseback in the streets of the town, would be maltreated to such a degree that death would be the consequence. And you intend, you, a woman, a European, to enter Damascus on horseback and with your face uncovered! But it is madness!"

The pacha's page had on several occasions hinted to the interpreter, one of the two Bertrands, that Lady Hester ought to veil herself to enter Damascus in order to avoid irritating the populace. For, in case of a riot, he knew well that the pacha, whose authority was much disputed, would not be able to afford her protection.

M. Bertrand nearly succumbed with horror on learning from the mouth of her ladyship herself that it was her intention to brave Damascene opinion by exhibiting herself in this costume, and in broad daylight.

Lady Hester was courageous. The unforeseen, even charged with threats, smiled upon her. And, above all, she was able to accomplish something great which no one had ever attempted before her. Pitt's niece had always turned up her nose at whatever people might say.

"Whatever people may say of me in England, I do not care more than that," declared she to the doctor, snapping her fingers. "Whatever horrible things all these crooked-minded persons may think, do not trouble me more than if they spat at the sun. That falls back on their noses and all the harm is for them. They are like midges on the tail of an artillery horse. They murmur, and they come and go, and they buzz all around. The great explosion comes! boom! and all are dispersed."

Only she knew well that the Moslems are not satisfied with buzzing and murmuring, and that they would not recoil before bloodshed to obtain vengeance upon her who dared thus to defy their most sacred customs. But is there not at the bottom of the actions which appear the most heroically disinterested a certain sentiment of the gallery which stimulates vanity and renders it more bold? And if one had told Lady Hester that the fame of her exploits would never reach England, would she not have recoiled at the last moment.

On September 1, at four o'clock in the afternoon, Lady Hester passed the gates of Damascus at the head of eighteen horsemen and some twenty mules heavily loaded. In the narrow streets a considerable crowd gathered. It hurried towards the cavalcade, and all eyes were turned towards the person who appeared to be the chief of it.

The pacha's page was uneasy; M. Bertrand trembled, and the doctor was not in high spirits. A word, a cry, a gesture, and the people who surrounded the escort had only to draw their thick ranks closer, and the travellers would have been delivered to them defenceless. But, deceived by the dazzling costume and the masculine countenance of Lady Hester, some took her for a young bey still beardless; others, believing that they were dreaming, discovered that it was a woman; but before they had recovered from their astonishment, she had already passed. Thus she alighted safe and sound in the Christian quarter.

It is then that her indomitable character asserted itself; she did not rest until her household had been transported into the heart of the Mohammedan quarter. "I intend to take the bull by the horns and to settle down under the minaret of the grand mosque," declared she cavalierly to the doctor, who was very troubled at this new caprice.

Scarcely forty-eight hours after her arrival, furnished with an order from the pacha, she visited, without putting herself to inconvenience, the best residences in the town, and fixed her choice upon a sumptuous habitation near the palace and the bazaars, formerly the residence of a Capugi Bachi (envoy of the Porte for confidential missions, such as strangulations, confiscations and so forth). A narrow passage led to a marble court, where two bronze serpents, coiled around a lemon-tree, diffused water clear as crystal. The apartments were small and sumptuous.

The Christian owner of the empty house, his appetite excited by the sight of Lady Hester's suite, showed long teeth and a bill infinitely longer still. The smallest glass of lemonade was thus marked: "Sherbet for the arrival of the Queen." The doctor was obliged to curb his enthusiasm.

Lady Hester inaugurated very quickly her new Eastern policy, which was to flatter the Turks in order to make allies of them. Thus, the superiors of the Franciscan and Capuchin monasteries came to offer her their services, as they did to all passing travellers. And she caused them to be informed that, living in a Mohammedan quarter, she respected its rules, and begged them not to repeat their visit. The monks complied with this rather cool request.

She received, on the other hand, a French doctor, M. Chaboceau, seventy years of age, deaf as a post, who, entering all the harems, was not a little compromising.

This Chaboceau had known Volney at the time of his residence at Damascus; he had even lodged him. And he energetically asserted that _Volney had not been at Palmyra_. A snowstorm had prevented him from undertaking his journey. This fact is curious, and renders rather piquant the _Méditations sur les mines et les révolutions des empires_. Did Volney content himself with the descriptions of Wood and of Dawkins to inspire his emphatic invocations? "The contemplation of solitudes which has aided him to interrogate the universality of people" may then be subject to some caution.

Thus, by radical measures, by discreet praises uttered before those who were able best to propagate them, by backsheesh skilfully distributed, she gained the good graces of the mob and became very quickly popular. When she mounted her horse, there was an assemblage before her door. Accompanied by little Giorgio, her interpreter, and her janissary Mohammed, she placed herself entirely at the discretion of the inhabitants during her rides through the town. At the beginning, the doctor feared a mishap, but he was reassured on beholding the respect which was caused by her proud and dignified bearing and her agreeable, if reserved, manner. Soon the fierce Damascenes felt themselves conquered. They sprinkled coffee under her horse's feet, in accordance with custom, in order to do her honour. Tempted by the piastres which she distributed as her smiles, they lay in wait for her departure and her return to shout as she passed: "Long life to her!... May she live to return to her own country!"

Admiration increased in the mob, which whispered in confidence that, although she was of English birth, she was descended from the Turks and had Mohammedan blood in her veins. Her paleness accredited the legend. Never had the lily whiteness of her skin and the clearness of her complexion been so much vaunted. Already in Egypt her moonlight face had conquered hearts. For the warm rosy carnation plays no part in Eastern beauty. The Turks regard the red faces of Englishwomen as hideous. In which connection an amusing anecdote was related to Lady Hester:

During the evacuation of Egypt in 1805, the English soldiers forgot some women--as if by chance--whom the Turks seized. Their new lovers washed them and rewashed them, in the hope of removing that horrible brick colour which spoiled their cheeks. The result was worse.... The more they rubbed, the more flamboyant the colours became: tomatoes ready to fry. When they saw that there was nothing to be done, they sent them about their business. "We know and we admire white and black women," said they, "but red women up to the present we have not heard them spoken of."

One day, when she was passing through the _souks_, all the people rose at her approach, as at the passing of the Sultan. Her heart swollen with victorious joy, she advanced slowly, she advanced regretfully, into that fairyland, which was soon going to disappear for always. Shining silks, brocades wrought with salmon-pink roses, veils of Baghdad, cloths of Hama, damask with silver flowers, slippers of red leather, Arab saddles decorated with mother-of-pearl and tawny studs, carpets in warm and palpitating tones.... And, eagerly, she saw pass by, standing out on this strange scene like living chains which bound her to the dream, the tall Bedouins draped in their brown abayes, fierce of aspect and supple as panthers of the jungle, the Jews with their dirty curls and their bent figures, hiding a clandestine booty from the tax-gatherer, the Turks, embroidered and re-embroidered with gold over all the seams, and the Christians, neutral and sad, and the Druses in half-mourning, and the Maronites.... From time to time an Aga broke through the crowd, with protruding chest, full-blown and fat body in his furred pelisse, like a pot of lard surrounded by dust, followed by fifteen slaves carrying his narghileh and his smoking apparatus. Long lines of veiled women under the guardianship of a duenna or of an old eunuch, flight of swans led by a duck.

It was Ramadan. So soon as the sun, in his daily farewell, had stained with blood the sand-dunes outside the town, life took possession of Damascus. Immediately the lamps were lit in the most beautiful mosques, for in this Orient which is all violence, shock and contrast one knows not the delicate charm of the mauve hours in which the twilight is born. Lady Hester sauntered through the crowded by-streets. The waters of the Barada reflected in commas of gold the illuminations of the little cafés which opened on to its steep banks. Songs rose from the _moucharabys_, whose distant lights traced the designs of legends. Behind a mysterious wall viols lamented, those seven-stringed viols which retain for a long time the melancholy notes. The shops of the vendors of eatables were in a wild ferment: plates loaded with cakes dripping with honey and grease, juicy halawys, loaves flat as handkerchiefs, little skewers of birds roasted whole. On the threshold of his kingdom, naked down to the waist, a fat negro rolled without shame forcemeat balls on his belly. Odour of grilled mutton, of fresh pasties, of burned almonds, of ginger, of canella!

Tumult of buyers! Confusion at the crossways! Theatre of Chinese shadows recounting the inevitable story: illness of a lady, her desire to have a Frank doctor, thoughtlessness of the doctor, jealousy of the husband and speedy catastrophe.

In the cafés, the Damascenes, gravely squatting in a heap on rustic carpets, smoke the narghileh or suck in the tiny cups of coffee perfumed with ambergris. If the customers were thirsty, they stopped on his way a water-carrier, a djoullab seller or a vendor of raisins. Sometimes a storyteller presented himself and began a story of "The Thousand and One Nights," in which figured marvellous houris and one-eyed giants. He went, came, gesticulated, varying his voice with an infinite art, transforming the expressions of his face with a skill which the most famous of our actors would not attain. Sometimes they listened to him, sometimes he talked for himself alone, and his pleasure was as keen as though he were playing before the Sultan. Ah! who will restore to Lady Hester those long luminous nights of Ramadan with the charm of new scenes and exotic perfumes never lost later?

One evening, Lady Hester was informed that the pacha awaited her. Rash enterprise for a woman who had a soul less firm. She passed with an assured step--with an assured stride--through the ante-chambers of the palace, where the flames of the torches shone on the weapons of the soldiers and the motionless guards. She entered an immense hall, walking through a double hedge of officers and janissaries in full dress, naked scimitars in their hands. Silence terrible and oppressive. The steel threw flashes of light. And, at the very end, on a sofa of crimson satin, a little man with an air haughty and glacial, who, without rising, signed to her to be seated. Lady Hester was in no way disconcerted, and all these glances of men, ardent and sombre, did not displease her. By her side stood the Jew Malem Rafael--brother of Malem Hazm--and M. Bertrand. Little Giorgio, who had been brought to check the translations of the interpreters, had been stopped at the door because he carried arms, a discourtesy as notorious as to wear boots on an official visit in England.

M. Bertrand was far from being as much at his ease as was his intrepid mistress. He would certainly have preferred to be the other Bertrand, he who was travelling on the road to Aleppo; his teeth chattered with fear, and he was a long time before being able to speak intelligibly.

Lady Hester presented Sayd Soliman Pacha with a very valuable snuff-box, and withdrew at the end of a reasonable time, which seemed mortally long to her interpreter. The pacha sent her a horse shortly afterwards. After all these visits, her stable was beginning to be supplied.

Scarcely had she returned, when her janissary Mohammed said to her:

"Her ladyship's reception has been great."

"Yes, but all that is only vanity," answered she.

"Oh, my lady!" cried he, delighted, "thou bearest on thy forehead the splendour of a king and the humility of a dervish at the bottom of thy heart."

The doctor made the round of the harems of the town to physic the beautiful Turkish women. Every day his house was besieged by blind men imperiously demanding eyes; consumptives, a lung; lame men, a straight leg; hunchbacks, a flat back. Most of the time, these patients desired to catch a glimpse of Lady Hester, and, their curiosity satisfied, they went to throw into the Barada the doctor's powders. But he had sick persons more serious. Ahmed Bey, of one of the most important families of the town, son of Abdallah, ex-Pacha of Damascus, sent for him to attend his son, a little boy of thirteen, ugly, rickety and deformed, and afflicted with an intermittent fever. All the resources of the Damascene medical art had been employed without effect. He had been sewn up in the skin of a sheep which had just been flayed; he had swallowed powdered pearls; he had had his feet covered by still warm pigeons. All without result.

The doctor, who had his neglected cures on his mind, required pressing at first. Then he operated and succeeded in curing the poor child. The father, overjoyed, offered him a complete outfit for the bath; very costly robe of honour to be put on on leaving the water, coffee, pipes and sherbets. These thanks in the Eastern fashion were completed by a rustic fête in the orchards which skirt the Barada.

But the treasure, the jewel of Damascus, was Fatimah, flower of beauty without rival. Her body of pure and graceful outline bore, like a half-opened corolla, the head small and delicate, the face pale and ardent, in which the great shadowy eyes extended themselves mysteriously. And her black hair, of a velvety and bluish black, descended in tresses, entangled with diamonds and gold pesetas, so far as her bare feet. The doctor thought seriously for a moment of renouncing his faith to espouse this adorable creature. Poor doctor! he was not made of the same stuff as a Turkish husband at the head of a riotous harem. Will he consider one day his astonished eyes and his sheeplike and gentle manner? In short, he remained on the border of danger. Lady Hester, on her side, associated with the Turks of rank. One of her friends received her in the midst of his harem: harem of a noble, four wives and three mistresses! None of these women were seated in the master's presence; they stood in a corner of the drawing-room, and did not mount the estrade on which he sat except to fill his pipe and serve his coffee. At dinner, they handed the dishes themselves, never speaking except when their lord asked them a question. "And yet," said Lady Hester, "he is one of the most charming and most agreeable men I know. Towards me he is very gentlemanly and as attentive and courteous as no matter who!" We suspect with what kind of eye these seven women must have regarded the intrusion of this gigantic foreign woman!

As she was visiting the wife of an effendi who had gathered together some fifty ladies to do her honour, the master all at once entered. They veiled themselves hurriedly, and he dispersed them with a brusque gesture. Remaining alone with Lady Hester, he told her that he had informed her dragoman, who shortly afterwards appeared. He kept her to supper in a marble court with groves of orange-trees. Immense gold candelabra bore candles six feet high, and little lamps suspended in clusters from the arcades were mirrored in the water of the basin. Negroes, admirably trained, waited. The effendi talked about astronomy and sent for a bulky book, concerning which he asked a thousand questions.

Strange and very significant picture, that of this Turk forsaking his harem to converse with Lady Hester about the celestial constellations and to talk with her of unknown planets. Did it not seem to her that she was descending from one of those inaccessible stars! And what abyss can be more profound, what distance can be more immeasurable, than that which separates beings kneaded by centuries of civilisation from those in whom the barbarian still sleeps? He, who up to that time had regarded women under the different aspects of a desire unceasingly awakened and unceasingly satisfied, here is he learning in turn respect, admiration, deference, here is he beginning to catch a glimpse of the equality of the sexes and the parity of their complex intelligences!

Little Giorgio, on his knees for four hours, was dead-sleepy. "He kept me until nearly ten o'clock," says the delighted Lady Hester, "an hour after the moment when everyone was obliged to remain in his house under pain of death (new decree of the pacha). All the doors were shut, but all opened for me, and they did not say a word to me."

Lady Hester had, however, another object than that of initiating the Turks into the feminist evolution. She wished to go to Palmyra--Palmyra, the far-off and fabulous town which slept in the heart of the sands, guarded by the burning steppes, without water and without life. "The Syrian desert has only one Palmyra, as the sky has only one sun." Caprice of the tourist and of the woman, adventurous taste for unbeaten tracks? indifference to or even love of danger? latent recollection of Brothers and the prophet Pierre? desire to defy the English travellers who had failed on the journey to Tadmor? And perhaps, plan secret and slowly matured of regulating and of blending together the wandering tribes of the Bedouins, of intriguing with the sheiks, of unravelling again the political skein, a skein short, knotted and entangled with Arab politics?

There are people who do not cease from imposing charity upon the poor; the needy--who cling to their life, dirty, laborious but independent, more than we think--are washed, scrubbed, brushed, nursed, taught, physicked, improved by force. Lady Hester was of the species--more rare happily--which is unable to see men scattered without wishing to group them, to liberate slaves by force and to reform the world. This instinct of domination, this thirst for authority, this imperialism, she was going to satisfy without delay upon the defenceless Arabs. And then the intercourse of a woman, of a queen, bound her. The ruins of Palmyra conjured up too faithfully the name of Zenobia!...

The pacha's two bankers, Malem Yusef and Malem Rafael, to whom she broached this subject, dissuaded her earnestly from it. The journey was excessively dangerous, and the Bedouins would not fail to make her prisoner and exact a very large ransom unless the pacha furnished her with troops. Then a certain Hanah Faknah, who had acted as guide to M. Fiott, offered to conduct her safe and sound to Palmyra. Lady Hester learned soon that he was offering to do much. What was to be done? It was impossible for her to cross the desert under a disguise, for her intentions had been divulged and her slightest movements were noted with extreme attention. She resolved to demand a formidable escort from the pacha. Sayd Soliman then made her understand, in confidence, that the Emir Mahannah, chief of the Bedouins, was in revolt against the Porte, and that the inhabitants of Palmyra were beyond the reach of Turkish justice. New indecision, new uncertainties! Meanwhile, the pacha had a crow to pluck with the cavalry: the famous Delibash, commanded by a young bey, an acquaintance of Lady Hester and son of the deposed governor. Mutiny broke out at Damascus. In the deserts, terrible news, come from Mecca, was whispered: 50,000 Wahabis were threatening the town. The Bedouins had gathered and were ready to rush to their aid. Lady Hester, isolated in her Mohammedan quarter, caught up in the whirlpool of popular anxieties, was not at all uneasy. She thought only of demanding an asylum from her friend the Emir Bechir, the prince of the Mountain, who placed his troops at her disposal. She was flattered by his reception. If, as governor, he had had diabolical inspirations, she proclaimed him, nevertheless, an agreeable and amiable man. How she was to change her opinion hereafter!

The pacha, uneasy at the turn which events were taking, had caused old Muly Ishmael, the grand chief of the Delibash and of the Syrian troops, to be warned. Feared by the pachas, who would never have dared to make a hair of his head fall, he was adored by the Arabs, with whom he had taken refuge on several occasions, at the time when his life was threatened. Scarcely arrived at Damascus, Muly Ishmael demanded a visit from Lady Hester, "for I shall be very jealous of my young chief if he does not come," said he. It was as much an order as a request. Bravely she went there, although somewhat troubled by the terrible rumours which were in circulation in regard to him. She was obliged to cross courts swarming with horses and horsemen, to stride over or avoid hundreds of soldiers sprawling on the ground, to argue and parley with fifty officers, before reaching the old chief, who was talking with the bey, her friend. Muly Ishmael was charming, offering her his house at Hama and an escort of Delibash. Lady Hester, very proud of this conquest, called him the Sir David Dundas of Syria. She remained an hour and was delighted by his courtesy, marked by a cordiality, a grace of manner, rather rare amongst the Turks.

Then the Wahabis vanished in smoke. And, one fine morning, Mahannah-el-Fadel, chief of the tribe of the Anezes, arrived at Damascus to demand back 4000 horses and flocks of sheep which the pacha had requisitioned from him. He asserted that the name of the Meleki (queen) was in the mouth of all the Bedouins of the desert.

During this time, Bruce, who was returning from Aleppo with Mr. Barker, English consul at that town, learned of these fine projects, and, terrified, hurried on, without stopping, to prevent--if there were still time--so great a folly. And the messengers ran along the roads carrying letters full of adjurations and entreaties.

Lady Hester lost her patience at meeting with resistance. "No caravan travels along the route by which I wish to go," declared she, incensed. "And if there were one, nothing would be able to persuade me to join it. They get into a ridiculous fright and arrive with a machine with bars, a _tartavane_, which Mr. Barker declares indispensable. All the consuls in the universe will not force me to go within it. What an absurd idea! In the event of attack, the drivers take themselves off, and one is left to the mercy of two obstinate mules. The speedy horse to whom the Arabs entrust themselves, that is something like; that is better; that is what I require! ..."

The idea of putting Lady Hester in a cage was certainly not ordinary. Happily, Bruce fell ill, and the doctor was despatched to attend and calm him. The road skirted the desert, and, costumed as a Bedouin, with lance on shoulder, Meryon, by way of Yebroud, Kara, Hasia and Homs, reached Hama, where Bruce, already restored to health, soon rejoined him. He brought back with him a young Frenchman of Aleppo, called Beaudin, who spoke Arabic almost as well as a native of the country.

Leaving them to continue their journey, the doctor again took the road from Damascus to Yebroud. Then he made a detour to reach the village of Nebk, where a man was living whose acquaintance Lady Hester keenly desired to make. His name was Lascaris, and his history singular.

Of the Piedmontese family of the Lascaris, of Ventimiglia, he regarded himself as descendant of the Emperor of Trebizond. Without tracing his ancestry back so far, he had an uncle Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, and was himself a chevalier.

Bonaparte having seized the island on his way, Lascaris followed. Receiver of taxes--excellent place in the East--he met at Cairo a young Georgian slave of great beauty. Abducted at the age of fifteen, she had fallen into the harem of Murad Bey. Lascaris married her, for he was a fervent apostle of universal brotherhood--it is probable that, if she had been ugly, he would not have pushed so far and with so much enthusiasm the application of his principles! On the evacuation of Egypt, he brought his wife to Paris; but her manners and her education were too much out of tune in the brilliant society of that time. After some successes with shawls, some exhibitions of Turkish robes, the Parisian women turned their backs upon her to run to other spectacles more novel. Madame Lascaris begged her husband to return to the East. He did not require pressing, for he him self was deceived in his legitimate ambitions. He solicited through his aunt, Josephine's mistress of the robes, an exalted post. He was offered a place as sub-prefect! Deeply wounded, they returned to Constantinople. There an idea of genius occurred to Lascaris; he proposed to go to Georgia to establish there a new system of agriculture. An Armenian, who was on the look out for victims with money, offered himself as treasurer. The trio crossed the Black Sea, landed in the Crimea and were arrested for espionage. The Armenian made off, naturally, with the cash-box, while Lascaris and his wife were sent to St. Petersburg. Their innocence at last recognised, they found themselves with a very low purse. Then, having gradually lost all that remained--for the chevalier had many odd ideas difficult to realise--he endeavoured to furnish the peasants of the environs of Lattakia with European ploughs, the employment of which would double their harvest. The peasants grew angry, and their unappreciated benefactor was obliged to take himself off promptly. He became professor of music at Aleppo.

On November 3, 1812, the doctor arrived at Nebk and cast about for Lascaris's house. Perceiving a little girl of twelve who was sauntering around him, he questioned her. She was the servant of those whom he was looking for, and was called Katinko, or Catherine. But her astonishing resemblance to Lascaris induced the doctor to think that she was rather his daughter. The chevalier appeared on his doorstep, dirty and wretched-looking, wearing an abaye of striped wool, wound round his body after the manner of the garments of Robin Hood, blue breeches in rather a melancholy condition, stockings and the red shoes worn by the peasants. His beard was long and thick. His wife retained little trace of beauty, which had disappeared, alas! not to return; the adorable Georgian girl had changed into the stout matron with masculine ways. They had arrived from Aleppo with bales of red cotton, which they hoped to exchange for money with the villagers of the neighbourhood. The doctor greatly enjoyed the conversation of Lascaris, whom his numerous travels had made a very well-informed and cultured man. He noted in him, however, a certain self-conceit, a certain sentiment of superiority which had no doubt been the sole cause of his disappointments. He appeared very embittered against Napoleon.

Two days afterwards, an urgent message recalled the doctor to Damascus, where Barker had just fallen seriously ill.