Part 8

When, to cut the matter short, he tells us at once that she resembled the immortal goddesses in beauty; and our traveller, with equal felicity, observes, that they were as finely proportioned as any goddess, and that most of their skins were “shiningly white, only adorned with their beautiful hair divided into many tresses, hanging on their shoulders, braided either with pearl or riband, _perfectly representing the figures of the Graces_.” She was here thoroughly convinced, she observes, of the correctness of an old theory of hers, “that if it were the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed”—for, continues she, “I perceived that the ladies of the most delicate skins and finest shapes had the greatest share of my admiration, though their faces were sometimes less beautiful than those of their companions.” The whole scene was highly picturesque. Some of the ladies were engaged in conversation, some were working, some drinking coffee or sherbet, and others, more languid and indolent, were reclining negligently on their cushions, “while their slaves, generally pretty girls of seventeen or eighteen, were employed in braiding their hair in several pretty fancies.”

This spectacle our traveller quitted for the purpose of examining the ruins of Justinian’s church; but after the bath these appeared so remarkably insipid, that, pronouncing them to be a heap of stones, which may be predicated of most ruins, she returned to her apartments, and prepared with regret to accompany her husband over the Balkan into Roumelia. The road throughout a great proportion of this route lay through woods so completely infested by banditti, that no persons but such as could command the attendance of a numerous escort dared venture themselves among them; and, in fact, the janizaries who accompanied ambassadors and all public functionaries exercised towards the peasantry a degree of oppression so intolerable, that, had the whole population resorted to the profession of robbery for a livelihood, it would have by no means been a matter of wonder. On the ambassador’s arrival at a village, his attendant janizaries seized upon all the sheep and poultry within their reach—“lambs just fallen, and geese and turkeys big with egg”—and massacred them all without distinction, while the wretched owners stood aloof, not daring to complain for fear of being beaten. When the pashas travelled through those districts where perhaps the meat and poultry were lean and tough, as in all probability the peasantry treated them, as often as possible, to the grandsires of their flocks and barn doors, the great men, in addition to the provision they devoured, exacted what was expressly denominated “teeth-money,” as a small compensation for their having worn out their teeth in the service of the public. But though Mr. Wortley and Lady Mary seem to have been ambitious of imitating these three-tailed personages in many respects, they would appear throughout their journey to have eaten the poor people’s fowls and mutton gratis.

On arriving at Adrianople, where the sultan was at that time residing with his court, Lady Mary suddenly found herself in a new world, but extremely suited to her taste. Her principal companion was the French ambassadress, an agreeable woman, but extravagantly fond of parade, with whom she went about seeing such sights as the place afforded, which, every object in the city, except her husband, being new, were sufficiently numerous. The sultan, whom she saw for the first time going in solemn procession to the mosque, was a fine, handsome man of about forty, with full black eyes, and an expression of severity in his countenance. This prince, Achmet III., has been said, upon I know not what authority, to have afterward become enamoured of our fair traveller. The report, in all probability, was unfounded; but the reasons which have induced a contemporary biographer[3] to come to this conclusion are particularly various: independently of Turkish prejudices, which, according to his notion of things, would prevent an emperor from conceiving _any such idea_, it was not at all probable, he imagines, that a person possessing a Fatima with such “celestial charms” (as Lady Mary describes), and so many other angelic creatures, should have thought for a moment of an “English lady.” What prejudices the sagacious author alludes to, it is difficult to discover; it would not be those of religion, as the imperial harem, it is well known, is constantly replenished with Circassians and Georgians, Christians and Mohammedans, indiscriminately. This point, therefore, must remain doubtful. With respect to Fatima, whatever may have been her charms, she could have been no bar to the sultan’s admiration of Lady Mary, being the wife, not of the sultan, but of the kihaya. The other “angelical creatures” whose influence he rates so highly may very possibly have restrained the affections of their master from wandering beyond the walls of the seraglio; nevertheless, stranger things have happened than that a prince in the flower of his age, neglecting the legitimate objects of his attachment, should allow a greater scope to his desires than either religion or the common rules of decorum would warrant. The best reason for rejecting this piece of scandal is, not that Lady Mary was an “English woman,” and therefore, as M. Duparc would insinuate, too ugly to rival the slaves of the sultan, but that there is no good authority for admitting it.

Footnote 3:

M. Duparc, in the “Biographie Universelle.”

Leaving this point undetermined, however, for want of evidence, let us proceed to the costume of the “angelical creatures” of whom we have been speaking. But Lady Montague must here take the pen into her own hand; for, in describing the mysteries of the toilet, she possesses a felicitous, luxuriant eloquence, which it would be vain in any thing out of petticoats to endeavour to rival. “The first part of my dress (she had adopted the Turkish habit) is a pair of drawers, very full, that reach to my shoes, and conceal the legs more modestly than your petticoats. They are of a thin rose-coloured damask, brocaded with silver flowers. My shoes are of white kid leather, embroidered with gold. Over this hangs my smock, of a fine white silk gauze, edged with embroidery. This smock has wide sleeves, hanging half-way down the arm, and is closed at the neck with a diamond button; but the shape and colour of the bosom are very well to be distinguished through it. The antery is a waistcoat, made close to the shape, of white and gold damask, with very long sleeves falling back, and fringed with deep gold fringe, and should have diamond or pearl buttons. My caftan, of the same stuff with my drawers, is a robe exactly fitted to my shape, and reaching to my feet, with very long, straight falling sleeves. Over this is my girdle, of about four fingers broad, which all that can afford it have entirely of diamonds or other precious stones; those who will not be at that expense have it of exquisite embroidery or satin; but it must be fastened before with a clasp of diamonds. The curdee is a loose robe they throw off or put on according to the weather, being of a rich brocade (mine is green and gold), either lined with ermine or sables; the sleeves reach very little below the shoulders. The headdress is composed of a cap, called talpack, which is in winter of fine velvet, embroidered with pearl or diamonds, and in summer of a light shining silver stuff. This is fixed on one side of the head, hanging a little way down, with a gold tassel, and bound on, either with a circle of diamonds (as I have seen several), or a rich embroidered handkerchief. On the other side of the head the hair is laid flat; and here the ladies are at liberty to show their fancies, some putting flowers, others a plume of herons’ feathers, and, in short, what they please; but the most general fashion is a large bouquet of jewels, made like natural flowers; that is, the buds of pearl, the roses of different-coloured rubies, the jessamines of diamonds, the jonquils of topazes, &c., so well set and enamelled, ’tis hard to imagine any thing of that kind so beautiful. The hair hangs at its full length behind, divided into tresses braided with pearl or riband, which is always in great quantity. I never saw in my life so many fine heads of hair. In one lady’s I have counted a hundred and ten of the tresses, all natural.”

Our traveller, whose faith in the virtue of her sex was exceedingly slender, informs us, however, that these beautiful creatures were vehemently addicted to intrigue, which they were enabled to carry on much more securely than our Christian ladies, from their fashion of perpetually going abroad in masquerade, that is, thickly veiled, so that no man could know his own wife in the street. This, with the Jews’ shops, which were so many places of rendezvous, enabled the fair sinners almost invariably to avoid detection; and when discovered, a sack and a horse-pond, when the Bosphorus was not within a convenient distance, terminated the affair in a few minutes. Still the risk was comparatively small, and “you may easily imagine,” says Lady Mary—who seems to have thought that women are never virtuous except when kept within the pale of duty by the fear of imminent danger—“you may easily imagine the number of faithful wives very small in a country where they have nothing to fear from a lover’s indiscretion!” Had we met with so profligate an article of faith in the creed of a male traveller, we should have inferred that he had spent the greater part of his life in gambling-houses and their appendages; but since it is a lady—an ambassadress—an illustrious scion of a noble stock, who thus libels the posterity of Eve, we place our finger upon our lips, and keep our inferences to ourselves.

Pope, in a letter to her at Adrianople, accompanying the third volume of his translation of the Iliad, pretends, as a graceful piece of flattery, to imagine that because she had resided some few weeks on the banks of the Hebrus among Asiatic barbarians, and barbarized descendants of the Greeks, she could doubtless throw peculiar light upon various passages of Homer; and the lady, interpreting the joke seriously, replies, that there was not one instrument of music among the Greek or Roman statues which was not to be found in the hands of the Roumeliotes; that young shepherd lads still diverted themselves with making garlands for their favourite lambs; and that, in reality, she found “several little passages” in Homer explained, which she “did not before entirely comprehend the beauty of.”

During her stay at Adrianople she discovered something better, however, than Turkish illustrations of Homer, for it was here that she first observed the practice of inoculation for the small-pox, which she had the hardihood to try upon her own children, and was the first to introduce it into England. Among the Turks, who, in all probability, were not its inventors, it was termed _ingrafting_, and the whole economy of the thing, according to the invariable policy of barbarians, was intrusted to the management of old women. Upon the return of the embassy to England, a Mr. Maitland, the ambassador’s physician, endeavoured, under the patronage of Lady Montague, who ardently desired its extension, to introduce the practice in London; and in 1721, the public attention having been strongly directed to the subject, and the curiosity of professional men awakened, an experiment, sanctioned by the College of Physicians, and authorized by government, was made upon five condemned criminals. With four of these the trial perfectly succeeded, and the fifth, a woman, upon whom no effect was produced, afterward confessed that she had had the small-pox while an infant. The merit of this action of Lady Montague can scarcely be overrated, as, by exciting curiosity and inquiry, it seems unquestionably to have led the way to the discovery of vaccination, that great preservative of life and beauty, and produced at the time immense positive good.[4]

Footnote 4:

A writer in the Annual Register for 1762, thus calculates the amount of the benefit conferred on the British public by Lady Montague:—“If one person in _seven_ die of the small-pox in the natural way, and one in _three hundred and twelve_ by inoculation, as proved at the small-pox hospital, then, as 1,000,000 divided by seven, gives 142,857½, 1,000,000 divided by 312, gives 3,205 46-312. The lives saved in 1,000,000 by inoculation must be 139,652 11-31. In Lord Petre’s family, 18 individuals died of the small-pox in 27 years. The present generation, who have enjoyed all the advantages of inoculation, are adequate judges of the extremely fatal prevalence of the original disease, and of their consequently great obligations to Lady Mary Wortley Montague.”—Sir Richard Steele, in the Plain Dealer, prefers the introduction of this practice to all “those wide endowments and deep foundations of public charity which have made most noise in the world.”

To return, however, to Adrianople: among the most remarkable things which our fair traveller beheld during her residence in the East was Fatima, the wife of the kihaya, or vizier’s lieutenant, a woman “so gloriously beautiful,” to borrow the expression of her panegyrist, that all lovely things appeared to dwindle into insignificance in her presence. The passage in which this lady is described, though in a certain point of view it may be liable to objection, is in every other respect the finest portion of Lady Mary’s travels; exhibiting a remarkable power of affording the imagination of the reader glimpses of corporeal beauties which language is never sufficiently rich and vivid to paint exactly, and betraying at the same time so enthusiastic and unreserved an admiration of another woman’s superior perfections, that we with difficulty recognise in these hurried, ingenuous overflowings of natural eloquence, the female Diogenes of 1740. The whole palace of the kihaya appeared at the moment a fairy creation. Two black eunuchs, meeting the traveller at the door, led her into the harem, between two rows of beautiful female slaves, with their profuse and finely-plaited hair hanging almost to their feet, and dressed in fine light damasks, brocaded with silver. She next passed through a magnificent pavilion, adorned with gilded sashes, now all thrown up to admit the air, and opening into a garden, where there grew a number of large trees, with jessamine and honey-suckles twisted round their trunks, and emitting an exquisite perfume. A fountain of scented water was falling at the lower end of the apartment into three or four basins of white marble, at the same time diffusing an agreeable odour and a refreshing coolness through the air. Over the ceiling the pencil had scattered flowers in gilded baskets. But all these things were forgotten on beholding Fatima. When Lady Mary entered she was sitting on a sofa raised three steps above the floor, and leaning on cushions of white embroidered satin. Two young girls, “lovely as angels,” sat at her feet clothed in the richest costume of the East, and sparkling with jewels. They were her daughters. The mother, however, was so transcendently beautiful, that, in the opinion of Lady Mary, neither these girls, nor any thing that ever was called lovely, either in England or Germany, were capable of exciting the least admiration near her. There is truth in the old saying, that beauty possesses a power which irresistibly subdues the soul. No one ever looked for the first time upon a beautiful form without experiencing a certain awe, or consciousness of being in the presence of a superior nature, which the pagans imagined people felt when some deity overawed them with its Shekinah. That an acquaintance with the intellectual or moral imperfections which too frequently attend on beauty very quickly dissipates this impression, we all know: but at the outset most persons feel like our traveller, who says, “I was so struck with admiration, that I could not for some time speak to her, being wholly taken up in gazing. That surprising harmony of features! that charming result of the whole! that exact proportion of body! that lovely bloom of complexion unsullied by art! the unutterable enchantment of her smile!—But her eyes!—large and black, with the soft languishment of the blue! every turn of her face discovering some new grace.”

Into the details of her dress, in the description of which Lady Mary employs warm colouring, it is not necessary to enter. Fatima, on her part, very quickly divined the taste and temperament of her guest, and after a little conversation, carried on through the medium of a Greek lady who accompanied the traveller, she made a sign to four of her beautiful slaves to entertain the stranger with music and dancing. Those who have read descriptions of the fandango of the Spanish ladies, the chironomia of antiquity, or the performances of the Hindoo dancing girls, or voluptuous _almé_ of Egypt, will perhaps be able to form a just conception of the dance with which the ladies of the harem amuse themselves and their female visiters. “This dance,” says Lady Montague, “was very different from what I had seen before. The tunes so soft!—the motions so languishing!—accompanied with pauses and dying eyes! half falling back, and then recovering themselves in so artful a manner.”

Before her departure from Adrianople, she went to visit the mosque of Sultan Selim I., and being in a Turkish dress was admitted without difficulty; though she supposes, no doubt rightly, that the doorkeepers understood well enough whom they had allowed to enter. The walls were inlaid with Japan china in the form of flowers, the marble pavement was covered with rich Persian carpets, and the whole body of the edifice free from those pews, forms, and chairs which encumber our churches, both Protestant and Catholic, and give the latter, during week-days, the appearance of a lumber-room. About two thousand lamps were suspended in various parts of the building, which, when lighted at night, must show off to great advantage the solemn splendour of the architecture.

The road to Constantinople carried them through the richest meadows, which, as it was then the month of May, were clothed with exceeding beauty, and so thickly sprinkled with flowers and aromatic herbs, that the wheels of the carriages, crushing them as they drove along, literally perfumed the air. At Kutchuk Tchekmedje, where they lodged in what had formerly been a monastery of dervishes, Lady Montague requested the owner, a country schoolmaster, to show her his own apartments, and was surprised, says she, to see him point to a tall cypress-tree in the garden, on the top of which was a place for a bed for himself, and a little lower one for his wife and two children, who slept there every night. I was so much diverted with the fancy, I resolved to examine his nest nearer; but, after going up fifty steps, I found I had still fifty to go up, and then I must climb from branch to branch with some hazard of my neck; I thought it, therefore, the best way to come down again. Navigators in the South Sea have found whole nations who, like this romantic Ottomite, lived perched upon trees, like eagles, descending only when in lack of prey or recreation.

The first objects which struck her on arriving at Constantinople were the cemeteries, which upon the whole seemed to occupy more ground than the city itself. These, however, with their tombs and chapels, have been so frequently described by modern travellers, that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them, curious as they are; though we may remark, in passing, that their fancy of sculpturing a rose on the monuments of unmarried women is a delicate allusion to the purity of the dead. In the month of June they were driven by the heat of the weather to the village of Belgrade, fourteen miles from Constantinople, on the shores of the Black Sea, one of the usual retreats of the European embassies. Here our fair traveller found an earthly representation of the Elysian Fields:

Devenere locos lætos, et amœna vireta Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas. Largior hic campos, æther et lumine vestit Purpureo.

Their house, the site of which, nothing more remaining, is still visited by European travellers, stood in the middle of a grove chiefly of fruit-trees. The walks, carpeted with short soft grass, were shady and cool; and on all sides a perpetual verdure was maintained by numerous fountains of pure, beautiful water. From the house and various other points views were obtained of the Black Sea, with its picturesque verdant shores, while the fresh breezes which blew continually from that quarter sufficiently tempered the heat of summer. The charms of such scenes inspire gayety even in the oppressed. For here the Greeks, forgetting for a moment the yoke of the Ottomite, assembled in great numbers of both sexes every evening, to laugh and sing, and “dance away their time.”

From an absurd request which had been made to her by Lady Rich to purchase her a Greek slave, Lady Montague, having observed that the “Greeks were _subjects_, not _slaves_!” takes occasion to describe to her friend the various kinds of female slaves which were to be found in Turkey. And though brief, her account is not particularly incorrect. But she eagerly seizes upon this opportunity to disparage the relations of all former travellers, treating them collectively as a herd of low people, who had never enjoyed the advantage of conversing with barbarians of quality. She was therefore ignorant that Busbequius, Pietro della Valle, Chardin, and others had lived upon most familiar terms with Turks of the highest consideration in the empire; and that, excepting in what relates to the harem, from which their sex excluded them, they might have afforded her ladyship very important instruction upon several particulars of Turkish manners. Upon cosmetics her authority, of course, is paramount. Neither Della Valle nor Chardin ever daubed their faces with balm of Mecca, and consequently could not pretend to speak of its virtues with the same confidence as Lady Mary, who, as she confesses with indignation, was rendered, by the indiscreet application of it, a perfect monster for three days. Having been presented with a small quantity of the best sort, “I with great joy,” says she, “applied it to my face, expecting some wonderful effect to my advantage. The next morning the change indeed was wonderful; my face was swelled to a very extraordinary size, and all over as red as my Lady H——’s. It remained in this lamentable state three days, during which, you may be sure, I passed my time very ill. I believed it would never be otherwise; and to add to my mortification, Mr. Wortley reproached my indiscretion without ceasing. However, my face is since _in statu_ quo; nay, I am told by the ladies here that it is much mended by the operation, which I confess I cannot perceive in my looking-glass.”