Chapter VII: Lady Hester and Lascaris

WHEN the doctor arrived at Damascus, he found everything topsy-turvy. The commotion was extreme. The pacha's troops, already fully equipped, had been sent away, the guides dismissed, the caravan dispersed. Lady Hester announced publicly that she was postponing the journey, and, giving as pretexts Barker's illness, Bruce's weakness, and the advantage of the doctor's presence, decided to take only the road to Hama. She was not to arrive there directly.

Unforeseen events had, in fact, occurred during the doctor's absence. Lady Hester, who had secretly written to Mahannah-el-Fadel, emir of the Anezes, received a visit from his son Nasr. Supple, slight, of insinuating and agreeable manners, the young sheik, his legs and feet bare, wrapped himself with dignity in an old sheepskin and in a ragged robe. But the orange and green keffiye shaded a haughty countenance with a sharp profile. The people of his suite were less elegant. Pierre--decidedly much more the cook than the prophet--composed a monster lunch in which Turkish and Arabic dishes alternated abundantly. The plum puddings particularly aroused the hilarity of the Bedouins, but they could not make up their minds to taste them.

Lady Hester, astonished by the state of Nasr's wardrobe, presented him with a complete costume, of which he scattered immediately the articles about him, throwing down mantles and abayes with a magnificent ease, as though they had been refuse.

The sheik made his hostess clearly understand that, if she persisted in going to Palmyra under the protection of the troops, he would consider her as an enemy, and that she would learn, at her risks and perils, who was sultan of the desert. So much the more that all the Bedouins, from the greatest to the smallest, had their imagination excited and their covetousness attracted by the arrival of the English princess, riding, with spurs of gold, a mare worth forty purses, bringing a book to discover hidden treasures (the engravings of Wood and Dawkins!), and a little packet of herbs to transform stones into precious metals!... Nasr, with much astuteness, added that a person so distinguished ought to trust herself to the honour of the Bedouins, for the Turkish soldiers, ignorant of the tracks, the spots where water was to be found, the places infested by rebels, would throw her into a thousand difficulties, and would be the first to march off when danger threatened with a touching unanimity.

The result of the visit of this adroit diplomatist was that Lady Hester, without the knowledge of anyone, arranged an interview with the Emir Mahannah-el-Fadel. She arrived at Nebk like a whirlwind, carried off Lascaris and his wife, on her way, to serve as interpreters, and at the hamlet of Tell Bise, beyond Homs, she plunged suddenly into the desert. Mahannah had sent her a Bedouin as guide. Alone, she advanced across the boundless plains of sands, entrusting herself, with a rashness without example, to the hordes of marauders whose profession is to despoil unsuspecting travellers.

At last, the camp appeared, and she went straight to the chief's tent. Mahannah was fifty or sixty years old; his piercing eye compensated for a difficulty in hearing, his beard was bushy and also his eyebrows. Dirt and filth begrimed in an extraordinary way his face, stranger to the use of water. He wore a jacket of Damascus satin which had once been red, of which some ransomed merchants had been despoiled.

Lady Hester did not waste time in useless salaams:

"I know that thou art a robber," said she to him, "and I am now in thy power. I have left behind me all those who were protecting me, my soldiers, my friends, to show thee that it is thee and thy tribe whom I have chosen as my defenders."

Fascinated, Mahannah treated her with the greatest respect. For three days Lady Hester travelled with the camp.

What unforgettable recollections were those evening halts around the dull fires! The encampment and its vicinity were swarming with living things. Camels with velvet steps returning from the springs with their moist leathern bottles; children romping with the foals; women tatooed with fantastical flowers going to milk the she-camels or park the kids. The air resounded with the call of the shepherds and the bleating of the sheep, which were returning in disorder. In the shadow you heard the flocks breathing. The horses, which were shackled near the tents, pawed the sand impatiently, and the desert stretched out its limbs with gladness at the approach of night. The Bedouins, all attention, closely encircled the old poets come from the banks of the Euphrates, who chanted the splendour of dead heroes, and the cry of the roving hyenas made the narrow tents appear better.

Mahannah escorted Lady Hester to within a few miles of Hama, and Nasr himself conducted her so far as the house which had been prepared for her. In the middle of December, the rest of the expedition rejoined Lady Hester. The doctor lodged with the Lascaris, and had then all the time and the leisure to observe and know this mysterious personage.

Lamartine, in his introduction to the _Récit du séjour de Fatella Sayeghir chez les Arabes du grand désert_, has traced an astonishing portrait of this Lascaris who, from the end of the Directory, foresaw that Asia alone offered a suitable field for the regenerating ambition of the hero. "It appears that the young warrior of Italy, whose imagination was as luminous as the East, vague as the desert, great as the world, had on this subject confidential conversations with M. de Lascaris, and darted a flash of his mind towards that horizon which was opening to him his destiny. It was only a flash, and I am grieved by it; it is evident that Bonaparte was the man of the East, and not the man of Europe.... In Asia, he would have stirred men by millions, and, a man of simple ideas himself, he would have with two or three ideas erected a monumental civilisation which would have endured a thousand years after him. But the error was committed: Napoleon chose Europe; only he wished to throw an explorer behind him to discover what there would be to do there and to mark out the route to the Indies, if his fortune were to open it to him. M. de Lascaris was this man. Man of genius, of talent and of sagacity, he feigned a sort of monomania to form an excuse for his stay in Syria and his persistent relations with all the Arabs of the desert who arrived at Aleppo."

This judgment is curious, if it is not entirely just, for Lamartine treats with the last contempt the internal work of Napoleon--magnificent administration drawn from the chaos of the Revolution, and which France maintains still--which he calls an "unskilful restoration." As for the Eastern Question, it seems, on the contrary, that the Emperor had had intercourse with it. If he had been the man of Europe, he would have engaged in a merciless hand-to-hand struggle with England; if he had devoted to his Navy a quarter of the attention which he gave to his Army, he would have struck his rival a mortal blow. In place of that, he parries the blows, he forestalls them, he attacks himself, but the mind is elsewhere, farther away, turned no doubt towards the Levant. The Egyptian expedition, despatch of Sebastiani to Constantinople, mission of General Gardane to Teheran, and, above all, efforts constant, perpetual, obstinate to preserve the integrity of the Turkish Empire and bridle the Russian appetite, the Moscow campaign to subdue the Czar, the only troublesome competitor at Constantinople, are they not the tangible proofs of the Eastern desire which the creative and robust imagination of Napoleon did not conceive as a mirage? Did he intend to remake the Roman Empire with its frontiers dispersed over three worlds and perhaps the empire of Alexander with undefined limits. The fall of the eagles has carried away his secret. But at present we are in 1812, on the eve of the Russian expedition. Napoleon has made M. de Nerciat, former attaché to the Gardene mission, and Colonel Boutin start for St. Jean d'Acre and Egypt in order to sound the ground and to prepare the new ways which the victories--he did not imagine the possibility of a defeat--were going to open. Lascaris precedes them then seven or eight years on the desert routes. For what purpose? To prepare the invasion of the Indies? Lamartine affirms it formally and gives Lascaris qualifications and a position of the first importance.

What is certain, is that, if Lascaris were the secret agent of Napoleon, he was a remarkable actor and played his part in so masterly a manner that not only the doctor--after all, but little of a physiognomist--but Lady Hester, who was more difficult to deceive, allowed themselves to be duped completely by it.

It will be amusing to know Lady Hester's opinion on this subject, if only in order to follow the evolution of a woman's judgment.

On returning from her journey to the Emir Mahannah, Lascaris is lauded to the skies. She writes at that time to General Oakes, Governor of Malta:

"I have met here an extraordinary character, Mr. Lascaris, of Ventimiglia. He is a little giddy, but he is a remarkable man who has an astonishing knowledge of the Arabs. He is extremely poor and very energetic. If he falls into the hands of the French, we shall stand some chance of repenting of it in the future. _At present he is altogether English_, and it would be worth the trouble of maintaining him in his excellent inclinations. The chancellery of the Order of Malta and the advocate Torrigiani have all the papers relating to his family and to his _humble demands_: little pension which would assure him a piece of bread; he asks nothing more!"

And General Oakes is solicited to intervene, to represent to the Government all the advantage which there will be in keeping a faithful subject at the gates of the desert where the turbulent Arabs were beginning to shake off the yoke of the pachas.

"Besides," added she, "it would be a great act of humanity towards a _great man_. The French plough the desert with emissaries and envoys. Why should we not do the same thing ...?"

Napoleon's agent kept by the English Government! The story is delicious. What was the value of Lascaris in politics? but in the matter of duplicity he is truly unique. He feigns poverty, for one cannot well imagine a secret mission without substantial subsidies to support it, finds the means to interest Lady Hester in his case and to exhibit himself in a day to such advantage that she dreams of employing him in the interests of her own country.

But great enthusiasms have the brightness and the duration of fires of straw. Some weeks later, Lady Hester begins to think that Lascaris is a hare-brained fellow. If General Oakes is able to obtain some money for him, it will be a charity, for the unfortunate man is on thorns (the old fox continues the little comedy), but he must not be reckoned on; he is mad and will not be good for anything.... The cream of praises is beginning to turn. Finally, Lady Hester, saturated with the stories and jeremiads of Lascaris, gave him a handsome present to compensate him for his journey and invited him to remain with her. His part of interpreter stopped there, and having squeezed the lemon, she threw away the skin. It is an action in which women and statesmen excel. She was not to know the true figure of Lascaris until very much later, when Lamartine's book would have reached the East. What a miscalculation for her who pretended to discover the habits and character of people at first sight! To have been duped, she whom her divining instinct had never deceived! "It was not to Napoleon that he was so much attached," will she then say pensively in recalling the "humble demands"; "it was to him who held the pocket-book." And then, in a lapidary formula, she will endeavour to recover her prestige in the eyes of the sceptical doctor: "Lascar is had the heart of a Roman and the skill in intrigue of a Greek." But there are things which one invents afterwards, like those ambassadors who, in their Memoirs, attribute to themselves the merit of having foreseen the past.

Mahannah-el-Fadel had sent a Bedouin on an embassy to Hama. He demanded a visit from the "Queen's" doctor. Lady Hester hastened to consent, calculating that she would thus gain the emir's friendship and would permit the doctor to discover the route, to hire a lodging at Palmyra, to prepare the expedition--in a word.

The doctor knew that Lascaris was unwell, embittered, of a melancholy disposition. One night, summoned in haste by Madame Lascaris, he had been witness of a violent attack of epilepsy. Accordingly, in order to afford him some distraction, he offered to take him with him on the journey which he was going to make to the heart of the desert. Lascaris accepted and even confided to the doctor that for a long time past he had desired to visit Palmyra, and "had never been able to realise his project." He rejoiced therefore at this good fortune and proposed to abandon the world to plant cabbages in the ruins.

The little caravan, Meryon, Lascaris, the guide Hassan, all three wearing the Bedouin costume: white koumbaz, flowing trousers, clumsy red shoes, skin pelisses, orange and jade keffiye, left Hama on January 2, 1813. It is a date to retain in mind.

The tribes Beni Khaled and Hadydy, encountered by chance on the way, offered them the coffee of hospitality and a place under the open tents. Mahannah was on the point of striking his camp when they joined him, and they marched with him several days. On January 7, the encampment was established near Karyatein, and the snow slowly began to fall. The doctor would have liked to start for Palmyra, as the weather was becoming alarming, and the Bedouins were moving towards the South. But the old chief, stuffed with remedies, meant to be cured entirely. Nasr, speculating on some backsheesh, amused himself by terrorising him. At length, sensible that they might incur the resentment of Lady Hester, the Bedouins consented to their departure. The doctor spent a week at Palmyra, hired three huts in the north-east corner of the Temple of the Sun, and, on his return, was astounded to encounter in the Djebel Abyad, as frequented as Bond Street! some miles from the town, Giorgio, whom Lady Hester in alarm had despatched to look for him, with two guides. Bewildered and shivering with cold, the unfortunate men nearly succumbed to the tempest of snow which was raging over these desolate expanses. On January 26, they joyfully perceived the emir's tents.

Madame Lascaris, Fatalla Sazeghir, a young Christian of Aleppo, serving as dragoman, cicerone, spokesman, and young Catherine, or Katinko, followed them for some hours. Lascaris had conceived a grandiose project: that of transforming these desert wastes into vast khans crammed with merchandise. He had had his wife and his stores sent for immediately, but the cupidity never satisfied and incessantly reviving of his aggressive customers was to prove an insurmountable obstacle to his ingenious ideas. To gain the favours of Mahannah, Madame Lascaris had brought a complete costume, worth a great deal of money, in which in a moment the old man was dressed anew from head to foot. But all his sons, Nasr at their head, arrived, their appetites sharpened, to demand their share. It is better to give willingly what people are able to take by force! But it was clear that Lascaris's stock was to go there in its entirety. In proportion as they were enriched too quickly, they did not know how to keep their presents. Mahannah, being close to the fires, was warm, and threw his pelisse to a friend. A moment later, feeling the cold, he seized in the most natural way in the world a garment which was drying. The owners were obliged to watch their property!

Is not the hospitality accorded to strangers still the best source of the Bedouins' revenues? Hardly has the traveller passed a night in the tent of the sheik than the latter admires the beauty of his shawl. If he opens his trunks, a thousand prying eyes discover that he has spare linen and a store of tobacco. Does he leave his boots at the door, the host finds them better than his own, and, so thinking, slips them on. In short, after a week of this order of things, the traveller is more naked than a worm and less rich than Job!

On January 28, the doctor regained Hama, happy to be able at last to wash his hands and change his linen, which had not happened to him for four weeks. Giorgio had remained to accompany Lascaris to Palmyra, but their visit was very short.

Here there is a curious comparison to make between Dr. Meryon's journal and the recital of Fatalla Sazeghir, published by Lamartine. This Fatalla had a little collection of notes, which Lamartine bought, had translated, and himself put into French. This extraordinary mission of Lascaris is the leading thread which runs through these incongruous and astonishing adventures, like a needle through the complicated web of a piece of Byzantine embroidery.

And here is the substance:

Fatalla and Lascaris, under the name of Sheik Ibrahim (decidedly Europeans have a weakness for this pseudonym), set out for Homs in February 1810, ostensibly to sell their red cotton and their glass-ware, in reality to prepare ways for Napoleon when his armies, on the march for the Indies, should cross the desert. A Bedouin of the name of Hassan conducted them to Palmyra, where they made the acquaintance of Mahannah and Nasr. They remained some time with this tribe, returned to Palmyra, passed the winter at Damascus at the house of M. Chabassau (evidently the eternal Dr. Chaboceau), and in the spring of 1811 tried their chance with the Drayhy--the celebrated destroyer of the Turks--and gained his friendship. There remained the Wahabis, who would certainly oppose the success of the French project. Lascaris drew up against them a treaty of alliance with all the Bedouins of the desert. He scoured the country so far as beyond the Tigris; Fatalla lent his eloquence to the cause, and the treaty was covered with signatures. More than 500,000 Bedouins allied themselves thus to them. In the spring of 1813, a battle which lasted more than forty days was fought at the gates of Hama, between 150,000 Wahabis and 80,000 Bedouins and Turks. The Wahabis were defeated. Then Fatalla accompanied the Drayhy to the terrible Ebu-Sihoud, King of the Wahabis, and contributed to reconcile the two. Lascaris, his mission accomplished, started for Constantinople, where he arrived in April, 1814, just to hear of Napoleon's defeats and the fruitlessness of his efforts. Grievously stricken by this unexpected blow, he reached Cairo under an English passport, and died in misery. Mr. Salt, the English consul, plundered his clothes and his manuscripts.

Lascaris would, then, have performed the greater part of his circuits among the nomads before the arrival of the doctor. Well, during the journey which they accomplished together, the first asserted that he had never seen Palmyra, at a time when, according to Fatalla, he had been there twice in the course of the year 1810. Affair of tactics perhaps to baffle a rival.

But what is of more importance, is that neither Mahannah-el-Fadel nor the principal chiefs encountered recognised the famous Sheik Ibrahim. Ought we, then, to imagine a prodigious watchword given by Lascaris to the entire desert? It is impossible.

Elsewhere improbabilities embellish agreeably the histories of Fatalla. Nasr, he recounts, was killed in 1811 in the wars between the Drayhy and Mahannah. Zaher, son of the Drayhy, brought him down with a lance-thrust, then "cut his body in pieces, placed it in a basket and sent it to Mahannah's camp by a prisoner whose nose he had cut off." Well, a year later, this unfortunate young man, in wonderfully good health, paid a visit to Lady Hester, then at Damascus, to dissuade her from going to Palmyra. Lascaris had a short memory; he had already forgotten the encampment near Karyatein in January, 1813, from which he accompanied Nasr to search for provisions in the village. Both returned, besides, with an empty bag.

It is Nasr again who, in the spring of 1813, escorted Lady Hester to Palmyra and behaved himself in a horrible and brutal manner. Two years later, Mahannah wrote to "the Queen," who was settled at Mar-Elias, to beg her to intervene with the Pacha of Damascus in favour of Nasr, who had wrought great havoc in the full granaries of the Governor of Hama. This dead man clung to life tenaciously! As for the relations of Lascaris with Lady Hester, they are very whimsical and demand some rectifications.

Fatalla pretends that it is in the spring of 1812 that he learned of the arrival of a princess, daughter of the King of England, in Syria, where she was displaying a royal luxury. She had overwhelmed with magnificent presents Mahannah-el-Fadel and had made him escort her to Palmyra, where she had distributed her bounty with profusion and had acquired a formidable party amongst the Bedouins, who had proclaimed her queen. Lascaris felt very much alarmed at this news, believing that he saw in it an intrigue to ruin his plans.

At this period, Lady Hester had scarcely disembarked from Egypt and was on the way to Jerusalem. The Palmyra project, if it existed already, was still informal and secret.

But Fatalla does not confine himself to one error. According to his version, Lascaris received an invitation from Lady Hester to go to her at Hama, as well as his wife, who had remained at St. Jean d'Acre. This invitation annoyed him the more, inasmuch as for three years he had avoided giving her news, leaving her in ignorance of the place of his residence and of his intimacy with the Bedouins. He conveyed to his wife, by special courier, the order to refuse. It was too late; Madame Lascaris, alarmed about this phantom husband, had already accepted. This model household was reunited then under the benevolent auspices of Lady Hester, who, after having essayed in vain by adroit questions to obtain from him some explanation in regard to his relations with the Bedouins, assumed at the end a tone of authority which afforded Lascaris a pretext for a rupture. He sent his wife back to Acre and left Lady Hester, having fallen out completely with her.

It is not after Lady Hester's expedition to Palmyra, but before, that Lascaris places the episode. The proofs accumulate to annul Fatalla's evidence. On November 3, 1812, the doctor visited Lascaris and his martial spouse. In her expedition to Mahannah-el-Fadel, Lady Hester took both husband and wife. And her invitation to Hama cannot reunite the Lascaris, since they were not separated. Then, in January, 1813, there is the arrival in Mahannah's camp of Madame Lascaris, of the famous Fatalla and of the bales of merchandise. As for the tone of authority which Hester assumes in endeavouring to thwart the secret mission which Lascaris had received from Napoleon, the doctor, who wrote his journal methodically every day, shows the improbability of it. And his lack of imagination, that ingenuousness which causes him to record all the incidents of the journey without understanding them, is the surest guarantee of his veracity.

And the Wahabis? And this battle of 1813 at the gates of Hama, in which, according to Fatalla, 150,000 Wahabis and 80,000 Bedouins and Turks were engaged?

Lady Hester did not budge from Hama from December 15 to March 20. In April, she committed tranquilly her little extravagance at Palmyra. Of Wahabis, not a shadow! Of battle, no traces! All the same, 230,000 men do not shuffle out of it like that! And on March 7, the inhabitants of Syria celebrated by great rejoicings the recapture of Mecca from the Wahabis.

If Lascaris had not performed his distant peregrinations before January, 1813--and the comparison between the memoranda of journeys kept by Meryon and Fatalla seem certainly to indicate it--he did not have the necessary time to undertake them afterwards. He is gripped as in a vice between that date and that of his arrival at Constantinople, coinciding with the defeats of the campaign of France. And before? Before 1810? Lascaris was able to travel across the entire world, but Fatalla did not know it and was unable to write his journal.

The young dragoman's recital ought to be pardoned some degree of inaccuracy. It is necessary to subtract the Oriental zero. Five hundred thousand Bedouins are, after all, only five or six thousand. The Tigris and the Euphrates are two rivers very near to each other, and the name of the first looks so well in a history, even when it is a question of the second. A skirmish of some hundreds of men produces much less effect than a pitched battle of 200,000 warriors. There are, besides, passages which are of a striking interest: pictures painted with a large brush of the turmoil of camps, of songs of love and battle, of tribes on the march, of puffs of burning air which bring all the nostalgia, all the violence, of the free life of the desert, and in which the imprint of Lamartine is recognisable.

The whole art of the narrator is to interest, and it must be confessed that Fatalla practised this art wonderfully well. Lascaris's sojourn amongst the wandering Arabs is perhaps, after all, only the journey made with Dr. Aferson to the Emir Mahannah-el-Fadel, and transposed by a secretary with a rich and fertile imagination. It is necessary to remark the similarity of the name of the Bedouin Hassan who, according to the two versions, served them as guide. A Levantine historiographer translated by a poet! The enterprise was truly hazardous. Have successive interpretations altered the original text, or has Lamartine been mystified by a clever story-teller who had already modified the rigid framework of time and facts, which, like a good Oriental, he rendered elastic according to the inclination of his subject. We shall never know, for Lascaris's papers, which alone would have been able to throw light on his real mission and his real travels, have disappeared, snapped up by the English Government.