the house in which the ball was given at Brussels by her father, the
Duke of Richmond, on the eve of the battle of Waterloo. She was quite
certain of her facts, and that the house was now gone. She had been
living in the house itself, in the Rue de la Blanchisserie (‘where the
Duke would direct to me “in the wash-house“‘), and cited as a proof that
the ball was given in her own house, the fact that her youngest sister,
who had been sent to bed, stole out, and watched the company arrive
through the banisters. ‘I believe Sir William Fraser asserts,’ said Lady
De Ros, ‘that I am confused and doting now through my great age, but you
know very old people remember the long-ago as if it was to-day, and that
is the case with me. In 1860 I went back to see Brussels, and I could
not find our house then; the whole street was swept away. At last, as I
was walking up and down, I was attracted by the name on a pastry-cook’s
shop: it was a name I remembered in that long-ago time. So I went in and
asked if they knew anything of our house. “Oh, a house in the Rue de la
Blanchisserie,” they said; “it has been pulled down years and years
ago.”’
XXVI
AT HOME AND ABROAD
“Le monde n’est éternel pour personne; laisse le passer, et
t’attache à celui qui l’a fait.”--DIDEROT, “_Sarrasins_.”
“Time there was, but it is gone;
Time there may be--who can tell?
Time there is to act upon,
Help me, Lord, to use it well.”
--LADY WATERFORD’S _Note-Book_.
“Non aver tema, disse il mio Signore:
Fatti sicuro, chè noi siamo a buon punto:
Non stringer, ma rallarga ogni vigore.”
--DANTE, “_Purgatorio_,” Canto ix.
“I hope the hereafter will not lack something to remind us of the
beautiful earth-life--beautiful in spite of its sin and
sorrow.”--WHITTIER’S _Letters_.
When my friend George Jolliffe had passed his diplomatic examination, I
promised him that I would go out and pay him a month’s visit wherever he
was sent to. Thus I came to set out for Constantinople on April 10,
1890. The faithful Hugh Bryans went with me. At Vienna I spent several
days with the Lützows, who showed me the sights in the most agreeable
way. The town was full of grand-dukes or exiled princes--Cumberland,
Parma, Tuscany, &c., all very rich and adding to its prosperity.
* * * * *
_To_ MISS LEYCESTER.
“_British Embassy, Constantinople, April 22, 1890._--We came straight
through from Vienna, through the strange unknown country. There were
vast plains of corn till Belgrade, a poor town hanging shaggy on the
hillside: then we entered low wooded hills like the Sabina. In the
Servian villages of rude huts and ruder fences we could see the swarming
people, men and women in loose folds of white linen, the former with the
air of princes. All seemed remote and unreal, and the shadows, as in
Syrian clearness, fell pure blue upon the dusty hills. By the second
morning we were passing through Roumelia. All had become poorer. The
villages, of wretched huts, stood in wattled enclosures of thorns,
inside which all the domestic animals are driven. Now, the men were seen
in crimson and green, with magnificent mahogany-coloured faces beneath
their turbans, and the women, all closely veiled, moved like masses of
dark drapery; a little mosque appeared, with a delicate and refined
minaret; a little fountain-cistern with a gothic arch in a grove of
thorns; marshes with storks; plains with buffaloes.
“About 3 P.M. the lovely Sea of Marmora gleamed upon the right, with a
variety of inlet bays of solitary beauty, and, in the distance, the
aërial mountains of Asia. Then a succession of battlemented towers rose
on the left from the untrodden plain--the walls of Stamboul! Through
these the train passes. We were far from the station still, but what a
change from our two days’ desolation! We rushed across many shabby
courts, paved either with mud or rough stones. The old houses, with
their projecting lattices, were veiled in a web of flowering wistaria,
and shaded by pink Judas-trees in fullest bloom. Then above us rose the
mosques with their slender minarets and huge storm-blasted cypresses.
St. Sophia itself, Achmet, Suleiman, Mahmoud were passed, with many a
strange gothic fountain or decorated cistern, before we reached the
shed-like station, where George was a most welcome sight, armed with an
Embassy cavass to extricate us from the mass of yelping, screaming
natives.
“Off we went across the creaking, rocking, timber bridge over the Golden
Horn, thronged by the strangest of multitudes. Then up the steep street
of Galata, where the lattices project till they almost obliterate the
sky, and the pavement is made of rough stones set edgeways, up which the
horses scrambled like cats. A road succeeded, a dusty deep-rutted track,
overlooking an old burial-ground without barriers, where, amid the
immemorial cypresses, thousands of battered tombstones remain,
neglected, ruined, but never wilfully destroyed; and so we reached the
handsome palace of the Embassy, with its delightful garden, overlooking
the valley of the Golden Horn.
[Illustration: CEMETERY OF PERA, CONSTANTINOPLE.]
“I have been here two days now, and cannot say how delightful I find it
to be with George, with whom every thought may be exchanged. I live in
the room of an absent attaché, and the life is like that of a college.
Unfortunately, on the first afternoon I caught a dreadful chill in the
boat, and have been very ill ever since, though I dragged myself out
yesterday to take advantage of a rarely procured permit to see the
famous church of St. Irene, where the Council of Constantinople was
held, and where the Christian emperors, Constantine, Arcadius, &c.,
repose, some of them in grand porphyry sarcophagi. I went with two
clergymen, friends of Arthur Stanley, Canon Farrar of Durham, and Dr.
Livingstone, who had been to every other scene of a General Council:
this was the last!”
* * * * *
“_April 27._--I have been suffering terribly from rheumatic fever, but
am better to-day, and have been to St. Sophia. The carriage stopped at
an obscure door on the N.W., where the cavass took off his boots and
fetched some of the Turkish guardians of holiness, who, for a very large
consideration of baksheesh, put slippers over ours. Then we passed the
curtain, and found ourselves at once at the northern extremity of the
great western narthex, like that of St. Mark’s at Venice on a huge
scale, and--almost immediately--from a side-door, in the church itself.
“It is so unspeakably, overwhelmingly, indescribably, entrancingly,
bewilderingly glorious, words can give no idea of it.
“Of the immense space--a St. Mark’s lifted into the heavens, soaring far
above in the mystic involutions of its entwining arches and the delicate
nuances of its grey-golden colouring, never sufficiently defined to be
obtrusive in any special point, only melting and harmonising into a
whole as tender and glorious as the hues on a dove’s back. So also in
the architectural details; all the walls, all the chapels are filled
with the most exquisite and graceful sculptured ornament, but the grand
impression of space is never lessened by any single object leaving its
own identity upon the vision, till the gaze rests far above upon the
pendentives of the mightiest dome, where float the four huge prophetic
seraphim[486] with their many wings folded in repose--with twain they
covered their breasts, with twain they covered their feet, and with
twain they did fly.
“Close to the entrance was a vast fountain gurgling, rushing,
spouting--a fountain of ablutions. Far towards the east, and beneath the
two floating green banners of the Prophet, was the _mimber_ or pulpit of
Friday prayer, and near it a platform for the choir, who face, not the
east, but the Kibla, the holy house of Mecca. Under the shadowy arches
are the cup and cradle of Jesus of Bethlehem, revered as a great
teacher, the latter a hollowed block of red marble; the ‘sweating
column,’ the ‘shining stone,’ and the ‘cold window,’ fresh with the
north wind, where the Sheik Shemseddin, the companion of Mahomet II.
(the Conqueror), expounded the Koran. We may also see the pillar on
which Mahomet the Conqueror left the mark of his bloody hand; for
through the church itself, and the crowds of clergy and virgins who had
taken refuge there, he rode, exclaiming ‘There is no God but God, and
Mohammed is his Prophet,’ and ordaining the violation of sanctuary. Here
and there, but lost in the extreme immensity, are chapels or refuges
where groups of men, or of veiled women apart from them, seem to hold
little services, with private litanies of their own. In some of these,
solitary individuals, wrapped in devotion or penance, were perpetually
smiting the earth with their foreheads: in one an old man was shouting,
yelling, screaming portions of the Koran, flinging the words with
savagest ferocity amongst groups of squatters in fezes and turbans, who
received them quite unconcerned.
“The columns in the church make up the mystic number of forty, typical
to the Eastern mind of all pomp and splendour. The cupola is inscribed
‘God is the light of the heavens and the earth!’ On its Rhodian tiles
are written ‘God hath founded it, and it will not be overthrown: God
will support it in the blush of the dawn.’ Nothing probably remains of
the fourth-century church of Constantine, but the present church is
chiefly that of Justinian, who employed a hundred architects, each with
a hundred masons under him, of whom five thousand worked on the right,
and five thousand on the left, according to the advice given to the
emperor by an angel. The church itself is under the guardianship of an
angel, who appeared to a boy watching the tools of lazy masons, and bade
him hurry them back to their work, saying he would guard his charge till
he came back. But the boy never came back, for the emperor intercepted
him, and sent him off, well provided for, to the Cyclades, that the
angel might be obliged to watch for ever.
“Our driver stuck his cigarette behind his ear and took us to the
Hippodrome, where we saw the great obelisk, raised by Theodosius on a
base with curious reliefs: and the brazen serpents supposed to have been
brought from Delphi, or the remains of them, for the Sultan Murad broke
off one of their heads. Along the side of the square runs the screen of
the Mosque of Ahmed (the state church), enclosing its vast dusty court,
old elm-trees, cloister, and a fountain, around which were groups of
people washing, dressing, and being shaved before entering the
sanctuary.
“We drove by the tomb of the Sultan Mahmoud the Reformer, where we
stared through a metal screen at his sarcophagus, to the finest of the
great mosques or _djami_, the glorious Suleimanyeh, which Solyman the
Magnificent intended to surpass St. Sophia. On its giant dome is the
truly catholic inscription (Sura xxiv. 36), ‘God is the light of heaven
and earth. His light is in the windows on the wall, in which a lamp
burns covered with glass. The glass shines like a star, the lamp is lit
with the oil of a blessed tree. No Eastern, no Western oil; it shines
for whoever wills it.’ On the ever-clean matted floor of this mosque of
glorious proportions numbers of barefooted children were sporting as in
a playground, and very pretty and graceful were the interlacing groups
which they made. The ecclesiastical revenue of Suleimanyeh is 300,000
piastres. Behind is a curious burial-ground, crowded with tombs, chiefly
of women, marked by a sculptured rose, whilst the headstones of the men
are crowned by a turban or fez. In two great sepulchral chapels or
_turbé_ lie Solyman the Magnificent and his immediate family and
successors. The sarcophagi are covered with splendid embroideries and
delicate muslins, those of the sultans being often shrouded by their
favourite wives with their shawls--most precious of their possessions.
At their heads are their tall white turbans, with bunches of peacocks’
feathers on either side. The famous Roxolana lies amongst the group of
ladies.
“But all through the streets of Stamboul the greatest feature is the
little burial-grounds, with their closely packed tombs and their huge
cypresses or tamarind trees, which always give them picturesqueness,
between the houses, at the angles of the streets, everywhere--the dead
forced, as it were, into the very life of the living, and never to be
forgotten for a moment.
“The next great feature--and an odious one--is the swarms of dogs, like
little foxes, which lie about everywhere in the sun, encumbering the
footways, and refusing to move for any one. They are the friends of
cats, but if a strange dog enters their quarter, they demolish him at
once. They never bite a human being, at least they have never been known
to bite more than one, and that was--the Russian ambassador! Successive
travellers have given the idea that they are scavengers, but it is quite
false: a man goes round at night with a cart and takes everything
undesirable away. All night the air resounds with the yells of the dogs.
The English doctor is obliged to poison them by hundreds near the
hospital, or all the patients would die of the noise.
“We ended our first eventful drive at the Mosque of Bajazet, where the
court was now turned into a bazaar, and round the central fountain
glowed a moving mass of colour--white turbans, green turbans of Mecca,
pilgrims, negroes, Armenians, robed women in shot violet silk. Overhead
a perfect roar of wings indicated that the sacred pigeons of the mosque
were moving in vast battalions from one part to another. At the
many-coloured stalls, the beads--especially the green beads--were quite
irresistible. In the _turbé_ of Bajazet, under the head of the Sultan,
is a brick made of all the dust collected off his clothes and shoes
during his lifetime: his mother and his two daughters lie beside him.
“It is a great pleasure having Gerard Lowther here; and the other
attachés, Finlay and Tower, are charming.”
* * * * *
“_May 12._--As I have felt stronger, each day here has been more full of
interest. On alternate mornings I stay quietly in the Embassy garden or
the adjoining cemeteries and have luncheon with my kind hosts, with whom
I have several times been out afterwards to the bazaars, steep, rugged,
stony lanes, arched overhead, and a blaze of colour from their shops and
costumes. Here we have been served with cups of coffee in the inner den
of Marchetto, the tradesman of ‘Paul Patoff,’[487] whilst going through
the wearisome routine of bargaining for old silver, weighing and
reweighing, and only discovering one had concluded a purchase when one
had utterly despaired of it. How forcibly the truth of that verse of
Proverbs strikes one here--‘It is nought, it is nought, saith the buyer,
but when he goeth his way, he boasteth thereof.’ The whole bazaar seems
like an inextricable web to outsiders, yet any one or anything can be
found there in ten minutes by one who knows the place; and, amid all the
bustle and confusion, one sees many a charming picture of an old Turk
with snowy beard and robes, sitting cross-legged at an angle of his
counter, poring over an ancient parchment Koran, and as utterly absorbed
in it as if he were in the Great Desert. How the names Aladdin,
Mustapha, Scheherazade, Zobeide, recalled the large edition of the
‘Arabian Nights’ which was at Hurstmonceaux Rectory in my childhood.
“On other days I have gone off immediately after breakfast with a cavass
from the Embassy--Dimitri--as my guard, making much use of the trams,
from which one sees so much that is curious, and in which one has so
many experiences of Turkish life, from the ladies like bundles of green,
brown, or shot silk, who are huddled behind the curtain at the end of
the carriage, to the child-pasha well provided with copper coins to
quiet the numerous clamourers for baksheesh. Thus I have twice reached
Yedi Kouli, the Seven Towers, where the triple walls of the town make
their farthest angle close to the Sea of Marmora--bluest of blue waters
melting into chrysoprase-green near the shore. Here I was drawing an old
gate in pencil in my little book, heedless of an old Turk who had been
cursing the ‘christian dog’ as a breaker of the second commandment, when
suddenly, with a spring, he flew upon me, and in an instant his long
talons would have torn out my eyes, if Dimitri, throwing himself upon
him, had not hurled him on his back in the gutter, after which he got
up, and went away quite quietly. Another day, after we had made the
circuit of the wonderful walls, I was sitting to draw in the middle of
the white dusty road near the Adrianople gate, and Dimitri had fallen
asleep on a tombstone a few steps behind me, when suddenly he called out
with a rueful voice that he had been robbed, plundered of his watch and
chain, whilst I, rather more in evidence in the sunshine, had escaped.
It is near this gate, the Polyandria of the Greeks, that we saw the
curious mosque, once a church covered with mosaics like St. Mark’s, and
still retaining many of them. One was shown as the Virgin waiting for
her Teskerei, or passport, to go into Egypt!
“All around the walls are tombs: the woods are filled, the hillsides are
powdered, with them. The woods are all of cypress, which is supposed to
neutralise effluvia. When a death occurs, a body is hurried to the grave
as soon as possible, for the soul is always in torment, it is believed,
between the death and burial. Little parcels of food are laid in holes
by the side of the grave, and large headstones are always erected,
stones on which the angels Nebir and Munkir sit to judge the souls of
the dead. We saw many touching little funerals--young girls being
carried to the grave without any coffin or shroud. The blocks of stone
on the road date from the time of Justinian. At an angle of the cemetery
opposite the gate of Silivri a row of head-stones marks the graves of
the heads of Ali Pacha (de Tébelin) and his four sons, cut off in 1827.
Close to this a lane turns off through the tombs and cypresses to the
monastery of Baloukli. Here, from a courtyard, filled, like everything
else, with tombs, we descended a staircase at the head of which an old
priest was squatting as guardian of a number of huge brass alms-dishes.
In the subterranean chapel below are more alms-dishes, and a fountain
with the ‘miraculous fish,’ black on one side, red on the other. On the
29th of May 1455, a monk was engaged in frying them, when a man rushed
in and announced the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. ‘I shall
believe it,’ said the monk, ‘when these fish leap out of the
frying-pan,’ and they leapt out immediately, and have remained
half-cooked to this day! At the little restaurant close to the
monastery, shaded by pink Judas-trees and strewn with white sand, we had
our luncheon, bread, pilaf, galetta, hard eggs, wine, and syrup of
roses.
“Beyond the Adrianople Gate the walls and cemetery descend together to
Eyoub, a hamlet at the head of the Golden Horn, with a very sacred
mosque, which heretics are not allowed to enter, as it contains the
sword of Mahomet, with which the Sultan girds himself on the day of his
installation, and in its court, shaded by noble plane-trees, the tomb of
Eyoub, standard-bearer of the Prophet, near whose resting-place are
grouped a number of royal _turbé_, those of the Valide Sultana, mother
of Selim III., and of Hussein Pacha being the most remarkable. We made a
separate excursion hither, finding the rugged streets round the mosque
occupied by the gay booths of a fair shaded by banksia roses in full
bloom, and the keeper of the sanctuary standing at the gate with a drawn
sword to prevent the entrance of the giaours. But we wandered behind, by
the steep ascent between the eternal burial-grounds, where there was a
grand view down the Golden Horn between the old cypresses, all the
mosques of Stamboul embossed upon an aërial sunset sky.
“On May 3 we met a large party at Dolma Baghtché, one of the great
palaces which are memorials of the extravagance of Abdul Medjid. The
rooms are those in which his son, the savage Abdul Aziz, used to throw
everything that came to hand at those who offended him. They are only
used by the present Sultan for the great reception of Beiram, when all
the great dignitaries of the empire flock to kiss the hem of his
garment. The palace is vast, but decorated like a French café, with
glass banisters to the staircase and numbers of fifth-rate pictures:
nothing but the hall is worth seeing. Close by is the mosque of Abdul
Medjid, with two slender minarets, and beyond it the palace of
Teheragan-Sérai, where the ex-Sultan Murad is kept a prisoner, no one
being allowed to linger either on the road or in a boat in front of the
building. The existing Sultan goes to see him sometimes, but asserts ‘My
brother and every one belonging to him are quite perfectly mad.’
“We all went by carriage with an order to the Seraï or Seraglio near St.
Sophia, which occupies at least two-thirds of the ancient Byzantium,
selected by Constantine for his capital. By an unkempt ascent we reach
the Bab-el-Sélam, or Gate of Safety, which had doors on either side, and
in the intermediate space of which high officials condemned by the Divan
were executed. Passing an avenue of cypresses, we reached a second gate,
the Bab Seadet, or Gate of Happiness, guarded by white eunuchs. It was
here that the sultans used to give up their unpopular ministers to the
popular fury; that Murad III. gave up his favourite falconer, Mehemet,
to be cut to pieces before his eyes; that Mahomet III. gave up his three
chief eunuchs, and Murad IV. his grand-vizier Hafiz, who was killed by
seventeen wounds. Many old aunts and cousins of sultans still reside in
the inner apartments, guarded by numbers of eunuchs, the historic
criminal figures of Turkish history, whose existence is expressly
condemned by the Koran, and who are generally bought or stolen as
children from Syria or Abyssinia. Without name, family, or sex, they
often marry, and even have harems for the sake of feminine friendship.
“The treasury is full of boundless barbaric treasures, uncut emeralds,
&c., and much fine armour and china. The finest single object is the
throne of Selim I., taken from the Shah of Persia, of green enamel
studded with pearls and rubies. In the Salle du Divan is the curious bed
where the sultans received ambassadors, though they only saw him through
the window. We also saw the glorious Bagdad mosque lined with blue
Persian tiles, built by the Sultan Amurath in remembrance of one he had
known at Bagdad. In the garden is the famous cage where, from the time
of Mahomet IV., sultans shut up princes who rebelled against them: Abdul
Aziz was confined there from his deposition to his death. Afterwards, I
sat with Sir George Bowen on the terrace, which has an exquisite view up
the Bosphorus, while immediately below us ran the railway line, which
suggests the fall of Turkey. We were served with sweetmeats of
rose-leaves, and coffee in golden cups studded with diamonds, by an
attendant who bore an embroidered cloth upon his shoulder to conceal the
empty cups which had been used by Christians, and were therefore
unclean. This would sound hospitable on the part of the Sultan if one
forgot to mention that we had each had to pay about fifteen francs to
enter the palace, and that there were about thirty of us.