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.