Every evening a large number of Italians gathered at the house of my
good friend Santoro--lawyers, artists, doctors, and merchants--among
whom I passed many a delightful hour. How the conversation flowed!
Had I only understood stenography, I might easily have collected the
materials for a delightful book out of the various anecdotes and bits
of gossip told there night after night. The doctor, who had just been
called to a patient in the harem; the painter, who was employed upon
a pasha’s portrait somewhere on the Bosphorus; the lawyer, who was
arguing a case before a tribunal; the high official, who had knotted
the threads of an international love-affair,--each separate experience
as they related it formed a complete and highly entertaining sketch
illustrative of Oriental manners and customs. Each fresh arrival is
the signal for something new. “Have you heard the news?” one exclaims
on entering: “the government has just paid the employés’ salaries, due
for over three months, and Galata is flooded with copper money.” Then
another arrives: “What do you suppose happened this morning? The Sultan
got mad at the minister of finance and threw an inkstand at his head!”
A third tells a story of a Turkish president of a tribunal. Provoked,
it seems, by the wretched arguments employed by an unscrupulous French
lawyer in defending a bad cause, he paid him this pretty compliment
before the entire audience: “My dear advocate, it is really quite
useless for you to take so much pains to try to make your case appear
good. ----;” And here he pronounced Cambronne’s word in full: “no
matter how you may turn and twist it, it is still----,” and he said it
again.
The conversation naturally covered geographical ground quite new to me.
They used the same easy familiarity in talking of persons and events in
Tiflis, Trebizond, Teheran, and Damascus as we do when it is a question
of Paris, Vienna, or Geneva, in any one of which places they had
friends or had lately been or were about going themselves. I seemed to
be in the centre of another world, with new horizons opening out on all
sides, and it was difficult to avoid a sinking feeling at the thought
of the time when I would be obliged to take up once more the narrow and
contracted routine of my ordinary life. “How will it ever be possible,”
I would ask myself, “to settle down again to those commonplace
occupations and threadbare topics?” This is the way every one feels
who has spent any time in Constantinople. After leading the life of
that place, all others must necessarily appear flat and colorless.
Existence there is easier, gayer, more youthful than in any other
city in Europe; it is as though one were encamped upon foreign soil,
surrounded by an endless succession of strange and unexpected sights,
an ever-changing, shifting scene which leaves upon one’s mind such a
sense of the instability and uncertainty of all things human that you
end by adopting something of the fatalistic creed of the Mussulman or
else the reckless indifference of the adventurer.
The apathy of that people is something incredible; they live, as a
poet has said, in a sort of intimate familiarity with death, looking
upon life as a pilgrimage too short to attempt, even were it worth
their while anyhow, great undertakings requiring long and sustained
effort; and sooner or later this fatalism attacks the European as
well, inducing him to live in a certain sense from day to day, without
troubling himself more than necessary about the future, and playing
in the world, so far as lies in his power, the simple and reposeful
part of a spectator. Then the constant intercourse with so many
nationalities, whose language you must speak and whose views to a
certain extent you must adopt, does away with many of those fixed rules
and conventionalities which have in our countries become iron-bound
laws governing society, and whose observance or non-observance causes
endless vexations and heartburnings.
The Mussulman population forms of itself a never-ending source of
interest and curiosity, always at hand to be seen and studied, and so
stimulating and enlivening to the imagination as to drive away all
thought of ennui. The very plan of Constantinople helps to this end.
Where in other cities the eye and mind are almost always imprisoned,
as it were, in one street or narrow circuit, there every step presents
a new outlet through which both may roam over immeasurable distances
of space and scenes of entrancing beauty, and, finally, there is the
absolute freedom of that life, governed by no one set of customs. One
can do absolutely as he pleases; nothing is looked upon as out of the
way, and the most astounding performances hardly cause a ripple of
talk, forgotten almost as soon as told in that huge moral anarchy.
Europeans live there in a sort of republican confederacy, enjoying a
freedom from all restraint such as would only be possible in one of
their own cities during some period of disorder. It is like a continual
Carnival, a perpetual Shrove Tuesday, and it is this, even more than
her beauty, which endears Constantinople so greatly to the foreigner,
so that, thinking of her after long absence, one experiences a feeling
almost amounting to home-sickness; while those Europeans who have
made their homes there strike down deep roots and become as devotedly
attached to her as her legitimate sons. The Turks are certainly not far
wrong when they call her “the enchantress of a thousand lovers,” or
say in their proverb that for him who has once drunk of the waters of
Top-Khâneh there is no cure--he is infatuated for life.