Chapter IX: Constantinople in 1884 (1)

“_13th Sept._ 1884.

“LEFT London in low spirits, aggravated by the announcement of Lord Northbrook having presented a complimentary letter from the Queen to that miserable Tewfik. I am on my way to Constantinople to try and urge the Sultan to take a lead in reform. He must do so now, or he will lose his hold over Islam for ever, but I do not expect to succeed; all is too rotten there for any solid building.

“I arrived late at the Hotel St. Romain, and dined as in old days at Bignon’s with Bitters.[77] Bitters is looking older, and we are all sinking into the grave, whether we have worked or whether we have played. Only Henri the fat waiter is unchanged, the same tremulous mountain of flesh as of yore.

“_14th Sept., Sunday._—After breakfasting with Bitters in the Rue Mazarine, I went to the races of Longchamps and saw Archiduc win a race in fine style, galloping like a machine all the way. A beautiful day, but few people, it being September. The only soul I knew there to speak to, the Duke of Fernan Nuñez. At the Embassy there is no one, even Atlee[78] gone to Dieppe, Lyons in England, and Sheffield and all of them.

“Abdu and Sanua came to dinner—both despondent about affairs in Egypt.

“_15th Sept._—To the Wagrams at Gros Bois. I had intended only to spend the afternoon, but have been asked to stay on. This is a most interesting place. Gros Bois was built and enclosed with a wall by Francis I’s mother, but the present house, or at least the inside of it, is of much later date. The decorations are wholly _Empire_ as befits its owners, and it forms a fine monument of the Bonapartist episode. I was taken over the gallery and state rooms and shown the pictures and relics, Napoleon’s bed from St. Helena and the rest, and driven out afterwards in the great wood which surrounds the house—a delightful day. All is on a large scale, but nothing is kept up. The grass grows where it wills, and there are no flowers in the vases. The servants are ancient, almost decrepit; in the stables are no fine horses. The little Princess would change all this if she could, but her father-in-law will not hear of having a chair altered. He and all the rest of the family are away, only Prince Alexander and his wife and a little son and heir a year old; they are in mourning, as his mother died this summer.

“_16th Sept._—The Prince is the best fellow in the world and the best sportsman. He inherits his love of sport from his father, who, he tells me, goes out shooting every day of the year, hunting the woods with dogs for roe, even during the nesting season, and so doing endless damage to game. Gros Bois is a place, however, which can stand a deal of disturbance, and he took me out for a by-day with two old huntsman keepers and a slow hound. It was an absolutely lovely morning and as hot as July, and waiting in the green rides for roe to pass was delightful. I shot two and missed a third. The second was hunted well by the dogs and crossed a clearing twice before he came within shot, and I got him at last with a snap shot across a ride, the dog close behind. We also killed as many hares, a few rabbits, and a pheasant or two. There are in the wood a number of _faisans venérés_, the sacred pheasants of China, which have bred and multiplied since they first escaped from the _faisanderie_, when the Prussians were here. The Prussians occupied the Château and took a good many things, but on the whole did less damage than might have been expected, the property being recommended to them by the King of Bavaria, whose relative the Prince is. Altogether two most delightful days, and it was like a douche to come back to this wretched little Hotel St. Romain, with its drunken waiters. Dined and sat till late at a café on the Boulevard with Abdu and Jemal-ed-Din.

“_17th Sept._—Anne arrived from England in the early morning; she tells me Malet has been appointed Ambassador at Berlin. Malet did all Lord Granville’s dirty work two years ago, let them suppress his dispatches, ate dirt for them, told stories for them; and this is his fair reward. Though not a man to command, he is a good servant, and if they want a docile one at the end of a telegraph wire, they could not do better than take him. He is not likely to let his imagination run away with him, or make any scholar’s mistakes on points of detail. Bismarck no doubt has asked for him, as a safe man, and because he (Bismarck) was a great friend of Malet’s parents in old days at Frankfort. The only time I ever met Bismarck[79] was at Lady Malet’s, or rather at old Lord Brougham’s, where she was staying, in Dover Street some twenty years ago. Edward Malet was at Frankfort when I first went there in 1860, not actually _attaché_, but doing his father’s work with us in the chancery, always a good boy but a dull one. We neither liked him nor disliked him, Schomberg Kerr and I, and I don’t remember that we ever saw much of him except in the chancery—a mouldy place it was, smelling of apples.

“Breakfasted with Bitters, and played tennis in the afternoon with Leigh, winning three sets out of four. Biboche was there looking aged, and Sérafin.

“_18th Sept._—To the Embassy, and saw Walsham, the first secretary, now in charge.[80] There is a telegram from Gordon at Khartoum which sounds as if he were in great straits and very wild. He says the Government is responsible for all that has happened, that he expects two hundred thousand Turkish soldiers, and wants £300,000; is going to destroy Berber and send Stewart to relieve the garrisons on the White Nile and Dongola. He wants an expedition quick.

“To Vienna by evening train.

“_20th Sept._—Vienna. Called at the Embassy and on Victor Drummond,[81] whom I had not seen since we were at Athens together. With him I found Hadji Petros, King George’s _aide-de-camp_, son of the original of About’s ‘Hadji Stavros’ in the ‘Roi des Montagnes.’ How things have marched since then, and they say people cannot govern themselves.

“Dined at the Embassy. Sir Augustus Paget very amiable. We talked about Egypt. He remembers Nubar when Nubar was Abbas Pasha’s Dragoman, etc. (as already given in my ‘Secret History’). Lady Paget talked about Mrs. Howard and the Stanley family, especially about Lady Amberley and her son.” This was the present Lord Russell, whom I had known from a child, and had met a little while before at Naworth and liked. He had had a strange bringing up of an almost Spartan kind. I remember finding him once lying in the fender when I came to call upon his mother, his head almost under the grate. I asked whether she did not think it dangerous; she answered: ‘It will be useful to him. If a coal falls out it will teach him not to lie there again.’ On the other side of me was the Comtesse De la Torre, an old friend of Gobineau’s, of whom we talked much.”

I had known Count Gobineau well, having made his acquaintance in 1870 through Lytton. It was during the Prussian war, and Gobineau was in extremities for money, the Prussians being in occupation of his country house. He had written to Lytton about some Oriental manuscripts he was desirous of selling, and Lytton, who was at Vienna, had written to me asking me to help him. I had done what I could for him, and had earned much gratitude. After the war I went to stay with him at Trye and we became close friends. I have some thirty or forty of his letters, chiefly on literary subjects, and his own private copy of his celebrated book “Sur l’inégalité des Races Humaines.” This book was, I think, the first to protest against the old doctrine of the essential brotherhood of man, and, as the author of it, Gobineau gained a great posthumous renown in Germany, and became the founder of a school of thought there called _Das Gobinismus_. He was a very agreeable man with much imagination, a bit of a poet and a bit of an artist, besides being an excellent talker on all subjects. He had been French Minister in Persia, and in 1870 was Minister in Brazil, and an intimate friend of the Brazilian Emperor.

“Dufferin was here only yesterday, and we have therefore just missed him, which is most provoking.

“_21st Sept._—By night train to Lançut, Count Alfred Potocki’s country place beyond Crakow, arriving on the 22nd. The Château is only a couple of miles from the station, a very handsome building, partly of the last century, partly older. It is very large, with one of the handsomest suites of rooms I ever saw, the furniture having been brought from Paris, at the time of the great Revolution, by the wife of the Potocki of the day. Lançut was inherited from a Princess Lubomirska, who in turn inherited it from an ancestor of the fourteenth century. These Potockis are allied to, but of a different branch from, the Potocki who with Branicki betrayed Poland to Catherine of Russia. They are very patriotic. Their family has been distinguished in Poland for many centuries, and in the long gallery there are portraits, most of them badly restored, of some dozen of them. Four were Generalissimos or Hetmans of the Polish army, and one, Stanislas, was killed before Vienna in the last siege by the Turks, 1683. The present Count is about sixty, a most distinguished man. Forty years ago he was _attaché_ in London, and has since been Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior at Vienna, and for eight years Governor of Gallicia. The Countess was a Princess Sanguscko from Russian Poland, where she has large estates. There are two sons, Roman, whom we met in Egypt three years ago, and Joseph, who bought our horse Pharaoh, and two daughters; one of them is here, Madame Tyschkiewicz, a charming person, as they all are.

“_23rd Sept._—This is an old-fashioned place. The Countess has two dwarfs, who follow her about wherever she goes, of the size of children of six or seven years old, but really of twenty-two and twenty-five, not misshapen or ugly, children of a Polish peasant on the estate, the father not being particularly small; the dwarfs’ two brothers are tall enough to be in the army. It is the fashion with the nobility to keep these little people; they get three florins a month, everything found, and presents.

“Drove in the afternoon to a horse fair, I with Count Roman in a little carriage with four ponies—three white and a spotted one. It used to be the Polish fashion to have all spotted horses. From the high plain one can see the Russian frontier to the north ten miles away, and to the south the last ripple of the Carpathian Hills. This is a great country for Jews, Gallicia containing nearly eight hundred thousand of them. They wear long gowns, with felt hats and long curls. They are disliked as moneylenders, but have not been persecuted here as they are in Russia. The rest of the population is half Polish, half Ruthenian, three millions of each. The Ruthenians are Slavs; they are Catholic, but use the Greek Ritual and have married priests. In Russian Poland the Ruthenians have been compelled to join the Orthodox Church. The Poles are all Catholic. Roman tells me the estate here is about twenty thousand hectares—forty thousand acres—none of it let, but cultivated under intendants. They are suffering from the same thing here as elsewhere, the low price of wheat. We met and overtook a number of Jews upon the road, nine and ten in a cart. It is a joke here to laugh at the Jews for going about so many together, and to count them with the fingers. This makes them angry, as they think the last one counted will die. At the fair the horses, for common horses, seemed pretty good, better than you would see anywhere else out of England. The ponies of the country are like the Asiatic ponies, and were brought here they say by the Tartars. After this we drove in the forest, a great fir wood, and got home in the dark.

“The young men, Tyschkiewicz and Roman, have been talking about the meeting of the three Emperors; they declare it to have been directed entirely against the anarchists, and to have no relation either to Egypt or to England. When the Russian Emperor came through Warsaw, he received a letter from the Nihilists telling him he had nothing to fear while in Poland, as Poland had suffered too much already, and they would not bring more trouble on its people. Half the Poles in Warsaw were nevertheless arrested as a precaution. The Empress would not leave the Emperor, but followed wherever he went. The Emperor had tried to speak Polish, which is a finable offence at Warsaw.

“_24th Sept._—We went out, Roman and I, to the forest to try and get a roebuck, but saw none but does. There was a part fenced off in which are red and fallow deer, all too tame. A stag followed us about, butting at the carriage. I was asked to shoot two young fallow deer, but missed them, and not sorry. The forest is a great fir wood, with a sprinkling of oak and birch on a sandy soil. We drove the four ponies again in a little carriage like a sledge of the date of Napoleon the First. Joseph has gone away to Antonin, their place in Russian Poland, where we are to follow him to-morrow.

“_25th Sept._—Before going away, went over the house again. It is really magnificent, with splendid Louis-Seize furniture, china, and bronzes. A grand vase with brass mounts by Goutière, a whole service of Oriental china on a large scale, a Sèvres stand valued at a hundred thousand francs, and much else, a dozen rooms _en suite_, a theatre, a chapel and a ball-room, all splendidly furnished. Of pictures some excellent Bouchers, Dutch pieces in Snyders’ style, and a quantity more,—almost all good. I liked especially a woman by Vincent, a small picture, but first rate. The family lives in a corner of the house.

“To Lemberg with Countess Potocka, four hours by train, a handsome country town of four thousand inhabitants. The Diet is sitting, and Roman and his father are members. They have a house here at which we dined, and went afterwards to the Governor Zalewski’s reception.

“_26th Sept._—Father Lubienski called, and told me much about politics. He looks upon the Polish case as hopeless in Russia till there is a war, but it is probable there may be some slight change for the better in consequence of the meeting of the Emperors. The Austrian Government succeeded in conciliating the Poles, so why not the Russian? Only the Russians are altogether inferior intellectually and morally to the Poles.

“Went to see the Museum of Natural History, which is the best of the sort I ever saw. There are no fewer than twenty eagles, and every kind of bird natural to Galicia is represented with nest and young, all well stuffed. The beasts less well, but interesting. The elk is still found in some of the forests, and the aurochs, or bison, just beyond the frontier—but the last is almost extinct. There was a white roe in the collection, shot last year by Count Arthur Potocki. This young man was at dinner last night. He told me about the roe, and about the Branicki stud—which he helps its owner to manage—also of some wonderful trout fishing he had had, twelve hundred killed with the fly in a week, and weighing four hundred pounds. Afterwards we were driven to the top of a hill where there are public gardens with a fine view in the direction of Russia.

“_27th Sept._—Started for Antonine, Father Lubienski seeing us to the station. The fine weather is gone, and we had a disagreeable journey, first by rail crossing the Russian frontier to Czerny Ostrov, a small station in Volhynia, an eight hours’ journey, then by road. We were met by two carriages and four, and drove fifty versts over fearfully muddy roads to Antonine. The country here is like Salisbury Plain or the Pampas, great rolling downs of black earth without a stone or pebble for hundreds of miles, all under plough, no fences, no trees, except where there are plantations of oak or birch. These are rare, but Antonine itself is nearly surrounded by a very handsome oak wood of about eighty years’ growth—fortunately no firs. The house is not a very large one and without pretence, a good squire’s residence with pleasure grounds and gardens of about forty acres. There is a large pond let to Jews at £200 a year for pike. Round this the village stands, and there are a dozen respectable houses like bungalows occupied by the administrators of the estate. This used to be a principality, and is still of thirty-five thousand acres of land in hand, but the greater part now belongs to the peasantry, who, thanks to their enfranchisement by Alexander II, are well off. All the land they cultivated was by that act given them, the Government paying the Lord of the Manor a small price for it. Their land taxes are very low, not more than a tenth of what it is in Galicia. The peasants are Ruthenians by race, but were forcibly converted a hundred years ago to the Greek church, and are now to all intents and purposes Russian. Industry thrives under protection, and the estate sugar mill pays well.

“_28th Sept._—As far as I can make out, all is very well managed in this part of Russia to the advantage of the Russian peasants, but the Polish landlords are vexatiously treated. Poles in Russia are not allowed to buy land, or to make wills, and are liable to confiscation at the pleasure of the Emperor. They are, in fact, outlaws, and it is the avowed policy to get rid of them. For this reason they stick closer to the lands they have, and some of them are still very rich—the richest being the Branickis, and next to them the Sangusckos. The Polish nobles were originally granted their lands when these were uninhabited steppes on the frontier liable to incursions from the Tartars, and the peasantry were their feudal retainers, but of a different race, Ruthenian, living under shelter of their castles. There are still some Catholic villagers, but these are not Ruthenians; they are the descendants of impoverished Polish nobles, and are still proud of their rank. The late Prince Sanguscko, the owner of Antonine, took part in the Polish rising of 1830, and was exiled for ten years to Siberia and to serve as a common soldier against the Circassians. He distinguished himself in the war, and so was restored to his country. Afterwards he made several journeys in the East, and brought back horses and mares from Aleppo, Damascus, and Egypt, to add to his Arab stud already existing at Slavuta since 1803. He died three years ago, leaving half his lands to his daughter, Countess Alfred Potocka, and half his stud to her son Joseph, now our host. The half of the stud was then removed here, and there are now forty-two brood mares.

“We went over the stud to-day. First, the stallions, of which Palatine is about the handsomest horse imaginable. His fault is that he is rather shallow in girth, but his head, neck, and carriage are superb, and he has fine action, a gray with dark mane and tail. Artiste, a bay, fifteen hands two, with beautiful action and carriage and a fine head, came next. And after him Cyprian, a chestnut, of far more substance that either of the other two. They like him, however, here the best and are very likely right. Lastly, there was Pharaoh, looking more beautiful than ever, and he gave me a pang of regret. He is fully appreciated here, and has got some good colts this year of his own gorgeous dark bay colour. Colour, it appears, is a very important point here at the sales, gray being at a discount, and chestnut the favourite. The sales take place in May, but the prices are small. A lovely team of four gray stallions, fifteen hands, is now for sale at two hundred pounds, and a team of gray mares, fourteen two, for a hundred and forty; all young animals and perfectly broken. Twenty years ago Arabs were much more the fashion, but now young Austria goes in for English blood.

“The brood mares are splendid, hardly a bad one among them, and a dozen of the best are absolutely perfect. You could not find such a dozen mares together anywhere in Arabia.

“_29th Sept._—There was Mass this morning in a funny little chapel in the garden. Afterwards we went hunting with slow hounds and greyhounds, and found two foxes in a marsh, which was drawn by black and tan hounds of the dachshund sort, but bigger. Got the old one away, a fine old gray fox, but the greyhounds were on the wrong side, and we had no run. Then we coursed three hares, a greyhound I gave Joseph Potocki running well, but the fastest was a brindled Circassian dog. The hares had no chance. The country is a great open plain, but enclosed here and there with banks and ditches.

“_30th Sept._—Another day among the horses and the brood mares at pasture beside an oak wood, a very beautiful sight. Then to the sugar mill, which brings in a profit of £250 a day for nearly three months every year; that is £20,000, consuming 1,400 acres of beetroot, each acre thus giving about £15, but the land can only grow it once in seven years; still the profit is enormous, and they have other mills elsewhere. The director of the stud, and the late Prince’s secretary, worthy men, dine with us every evening, observing, however, much etiquette with Count Joseph, after the manner of courts.

“_1st Oct._—Again out coursing, and drew a cover for a fox blank, and then had some good runs after hares, getting four. I had a fall at one of the banks. They are dangerous fences to ride fast at as the ditches are ten feet wide.

“_2nd Oct._—We went to-day to see the cellars. There is one bottle of Hungarian wine labelled 1683, and perhaps a thousand bottles of the last century, as well as mead of the same date, which the Poles used to get drunk on. To become intoxicating the honey must have been kept for twenty-five years. There are also many dozens of brandy a hundred years old or more, and all sorts of curious liquors and burgundies, and ancient Spanish wines. The 1683 bottle was reserved to be drunk by the King of Poland.

“Among the letters which came yesterday was one from Primrose; it contained a copy of an apology written by Dr. Kerr to Villayet Ali (the Patna case), a rather lame one. But as Primrose says, ‘it is a very unusual thing to get an apology at all from an Englishman to any native,’ so I suppose we must be content.[82]

“_3rd Oct._—We were to have gone to-day to the Branickis, but a telegram came in the night altering our plan. This sends us straight to Odessa. We started from Szepetovka station, thirty-two miles off, which we did in four hours twenty minutes; this country has fine woods of oak and birch, infested with swine, as in ancient Europe. These are spotted, as are sometimes the cows and as were the mediaeval horses of Poland. At Szepetovka we found that the Odessa express went in the morning, so we stayed the night at the Potocki factory.

“_4th Oct._—To-day we have been travelling by train across ‘the unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine’ as far as Kasjatin. Our way lay through fine forests, for the forest country begins here, and we are close to the great bog of the Dnieper, a marsh as large as Ireland, and one of the largest in the world.

“Further on, the country is open, and closely resembles the ‘campo’ of Buenos Ayres.

“_5th Oct._—All night in the train, very dirty and stuffy. Russian generals with spurs on. Fat women, half undressed, eating apples. Windows nailed up for the winter.

“Found letters at Odessa, one from Rajah Emir Hassan which talks of a Madrasa being opened on my plan at Lucknow. This looks as if the scheme of a general university had been abandoned. Called on Consul-General Perry, who hates Russia and Odessa, and every country but Spain.

“_6th Oct._—To the Odessa Exhibition, and saw the out of doors fair. Here horses were exhibited, Russian trotters—a poor lot, and _soidisant_ Arabs, a poorer. The best horse was a large Russian dray stallion—white, short legged, very strong, and with extraordinary good short limbs.

“_9th Oct._—After a disagreeable passage arrived in the Bosphorus and anchored off the Asiatic shore in quarantine, near a pretty village with two mosques, near enough to see the Mueddin in his tower, and the women who come out in the evening to sit on the beach. The weather is heavenly and consoles us for much. The quarantine is an act of reprisal by the Ottoman Government against Europe. They have been pestered with advice and remonstrance for the last hundred years about sanitary arrangements, and now they are turning the tables. This has its excuse. I remember the fiendlike action of the European Sanitary Board at Alexandria towards the unfortunate Mecca pilgrims at Wej, and how the fat Greek Sinadino boasted that they had been kept for I don’t know how many days without water. Numbers died there, and it was one of the causes of the revolution of 1882.

“_10th Oct._—I have been reading Madame de Crequy’s memoirs, a delightful volume, lent me by Madame Coumarof, wife of a Russian Secretary of Embassy, on her way to her husband’s post, a clever and well informed woman. She believes in dreams and that she will be crucified some day at Kief. She has told me a good bit about the Russian peasantry, which is much what I found in Volhynia; they are well off, eat meat daily, have good houses, and are able to live on their own land. It is difficult to get labour for wages, hence land is cheap, this in great Russia on the Volga.

“Hugh Wyndham came off to within speaking distance of our ship. He brought the news that one of Gordon’s two steamers had gone ashore somewhere near Berber, and the crew with Stewart had been killed by the Arabs. I made Stewart’s acquaintance at Aleppo in 1881. He was a good straightforward man, very enthusiastic about his work, but strangely unsympathetic with the Eastern people he worked amongst. I gave him letters of introduction to some of our desert friends near the Euphrates, and he made a flying journey through the Sebaa and Shammar tribes on a camel, but he distrusted the Bedouins and disliked them. I put the violent line Gordon has taken against them down to his account. I expect Gordon will be killed next—I wish it could be Wolseley or Northbrook; it would disgust people with their unjust wars.

“_12th Oct._—Among our fellow passengers is an American named Howe, of the romantic globe trotting sort, who is in ecstasies at all things, and his fellow traveller, a Swede, Mr. Claes Lagergren, Chamberlain to the Pope. The latter is the more interesting, as with a _doucereux_ ecclesiastical manner he is really well informed and sympathizes with those things in the world which are right. These two have been travelling together through Algeria, Spain, Sweden, and Russia, an oddly assorted pair. Lagergren has been at Damascus and in Egypt. There was also a Mohammedan on board from Kazan, who comes yearly to Constantinople to trade. In the third class are some thirty Jew pilgrims going to Jerusalem, very interesting people, very dirty, very devout. They read their Bibles all day long, and say their prayers turning to the east, and clothed in striped chasubles.

“_14th Oct._—Our five days’ quarantine over, we were landed in the Embassy launch at Therapia, and went to see Hugh, and dined with him at the Embassy. Count Corti was there, an ugly little man but sensible and clever. Anne has had a good deal of conversation with him. I am more than ever sorry to have missed Dufferin, who has left the best reputation behind him in the Embassy, and would probably have been glad to see us. We intend to stay a few days here at Therapia to make acquaintance with the Ambassadors, especially Nélidof, whom I knew so well at Athens.

“_15th Oct._—At Madame Petala’s Hotel, where I was in 1860; spent the morning writing, and then by steamer to Buyukdereh to call on Madame Coumarof, and also on the Russian Ambassador. Nélidof received me very cordially, reminding me of many instances of our old life at Athens, which I had forgotten, jokes I had made, the name of my dog, the paper chases in the olive woods, Lady Dufferin’s visit, and twenty other things which it gave me a pang to remember. He told me that Madame Ozerof had died some years ago at Athens and Ozerof, his former chief, had a post now of Grand Chamberlain at St. Petersburg, but was old and lived with his married daughter in the Crimea, and that he had kept up his intimacy with Haymerlé till the day of his death. Of Haymerlé he said that his end was caused to a certain extent by chagrin. He was a great worker and master of detail, and had made himself so necessary to everybody that at last he had become Prime Minister of Austria. But, once in power, he was unable to cope with the situation. He had married a little _bourgeoise_ of Frankfort, and this had emphasized his own want of birth; and Viennese society had given him the cold shoulder. He was worried into his grave. We talked a little about politics, about the possibility of reforming Mohammedan society, which he naturally does not believe in. He said: ‘What will always prevent any reform is the Caliphate.’ He then talked of a movement there had been in favour of the Konieh branch of the Sultan’s family, being under the impression that these were descended from the Koreysh; but I explained to him that this was a mistake, and that the Konieh people represented only an elder phase of the Turkish Sultanate, the Seljukian, not at all the Caliphate. His ideas, like those of nearly every one, are quite vague on this point. I was very much pleased with my visit.

“Later I met another old friend, Madame de Radowitz, the Prussian Ambassadress, whom I had known at Berne in 1867. She, too, reminded me of things which gave me a pang. The third old acquaintance was Mrs. Goschen. Called with Hugh on Count Corti, who is most agreeable. He remembers Constantinople in Bulwer’s time, and how his Excellency got his island from the Sultan, and sold it afterwards for £20,000 to Ismaïl Pasha. This little transaction was the ruin of Bulwer’s career. There is an _entente cordiale_ between Corti and the English Embassy. We are to lunch with him on Sunday.

“Later to the French Embassy. Monsieur de Noailles is not unlike Lord Salisbury on a small scale. His wife is a Pole by birth, and acquainted with all our Polish friends, has been a beauty, and is still a _femme d’esprit_; has a salon; we found her agreeable and the house agreeable. It is an old Turkish country house, with a single fine room, comfortable and dignified—a great contrast to our own Therapia Embassy, which was built by Sir Henry Elliot, in the Swiss Gothic style one sees at Bombay, an eye-sore to the Bosphorus.

“_17th Oct._—With the Wyndham children to see the Palace of Belabeg on the Asiatic shore; a modern building in very moderate taste, with a vast deal of paint and gilding and marqueterie work and sham marble. It makes one ill to think of the millions it must have cost, and the meanness of the result. The views, however, from the windows are splendid, and in the garden there are two fine tigers and some healthy looking ostriches. We then steamed down the Bosphorus. Nothing in Stamboul is changed, except that a railway has been run through the Seraglio gardens, and the bridge of boats has become an iron one. But at Pera and Galata there are marks of time, gaps where wooden houses have been burned, and a multiplicity of tall new stucco houses.

“At Pera we are at the Hotel Royal. My first care has been to send Stanley’s two letters of introduction to Achmet Vefyk and Khair-ed-Din Pashas. They are away in their villas. Next I called on Hobart Pasha;[83] he told us a great deal about the Sultan, who never goes out now from Yildiz Kiosk, a small palace between Pera and Hissar, and has not been in Stamboul for years. He says he likes him, that he is very intelligent and well intentioned, but the Government is as bad as ever.

“The Sultan won’t hear of anything like independent administration in the Provinces, which Hobart thinks with me would be the best cure for the Empire. He talked a great deal about Halim Pasha, whose cause in Egypt he has been pleading with Gladstone. Halim is supported strongly by the Sultan. The Sultan told Hobart only the other day that if he could do anything towards getting Halim back to Egypt, he would be rendering him a great service. He urges me to see him and has promised to let Halim know I am here. Dufferin, he says, has entirely destroyed English influence by the violent line he has taken against the Sultan, and the strong language he used about him. He had ended by ceasing to have any communication at all with the palace, and had not seen the Sultan for seven months when he was recalled. He escaped from all business: whenever a message came on any matter he used to slip off in his yacht and pretend he was too short-sighted to see the boats they sent out after him. He had a yacht called the ‘Hermione,’ ingeniously arranged so that he could be quite alone in her, managing the sails himself by a system of ropes and pulleys, his own invention. Thus he put off troublesome affairs.

“Henderson, the Consul at Aleppo, who is here, tells us the state of the Provinces is much as it always was, or worse, the Pashas eating up the people. Jamil Pasha at Aleppo has made £300,000 in the four years he has been there. He is a great favourite with the Sultan, sending him horses constantly.

“Just before sunset we rode out on hired ponies to the Okmaidan and saw the Golden Horn in its glory. There is nothing like it, or near to it, in the world.

“_18th Oct._—Whittaker, the Editor of the ‘Levant Herald,’ called. He gave me much the same account of what is going on here. The Sultan is played upon by the palace intriguers, who frighten him with stories of plots. He is a timid man. The other day his horse reared with him in the street, and he will not ride an Arab horse again. He rides, however, ‘pretty well for a Sultan,’ on trained horses, and shoots at a mark in the old Turkish fashion. Khair-ed-Din he calls a wind-bag, and Vefyk a man of crotchets. Of Saïd Pasha, the Vizier, he said: ‘He is an honest man but quite ignorant of European affairs; knowing that he is ignorant he tries to make up by reading, and he is now in a complete muddle. He belongs to the old Turkish school, blindly hating all that is foreign; he is personally honest, but has no power, for the Sultan always interferes.’

“In the afternoon we rode round Stamboul: it is wonderfully shrunk and depopulated since I first remember it, many houses abandoned and the streets empty. The Seraglio point has been turned into a new semi- European quarter of the most wretched kind, with roads and tramways and stucco houses everywhere. The Mohammedan population seems scarcer, turbans have almost disappeared, and it is difficult to distinguish between Nazarene and Moslem. An interesting ride, but sad. Hobart called again in the evening, keen that I should see Halim without delay. Khair- ed-Din’s secretary has also called, fixing my visit to that Highness for Monday morning.

“_19th Oct._—By the half-past nine boat to Therapia. Selim Faris joined us as agreed at Ortakeui (he was afraid of being seen with me), and we travelled on with him. His information was interesting. Of the Sultan he gives much the same account as the rest, that is to say he speaks of him as a good man, sincerely anxious to further the prosperity of Islam, and immensely jealous of his position as Emir el Mumenin and Khalifa, but quite ignorant of the means through which to act, a prey to charlatans and intriguers of every kind, except the European kind. Faris has friends at the palace, and declares that the Sultan shall see me, although he tells me my name is in bad odour there. The Sultan was at one time much pleased at my letters in the ‘Times,’ when I defended the Egyptians before the war, but he was angry at my sticking to Arabi after he himself had abandoned him; and Tewfik’s envoy, Sabit Pasha, is constantly telling him that I am head of a party in England bent on restoring the Arabian Caliphate. The Sultan, he assured me, supported Halim, but there would be danger in making Halim an English candidate. Arabi is quite out of favour. Faris’s paper, the ‘Jowaib,’ was stopped last year because he had been to see Lord Granville in London, but he is forgiven now. He thought the Sultan would take an interest in Indian education, but the whole Turkish State was dying. The Caliphate would some day return to Arabia. The Sultan knew it and was doing all in his power to prevent it, but it must come. He charged me to keep this conversation secret. Lunched with Count Corti, the Italian Ambassador, agreeable but ugly, with the ugliness of Socrates, a great Anglomane and friend of Dufferin’s. He told me he had been at one time favourite Ambassador with the Sultan, who had given him beautiful horses, but he once said something favourable about Dufferin in conversation, and from that time the Sultan would have nothing more to do with him. Dufferin was not generally liked here, Hugh tells me, and seems to have been a fiasco politically. On to the French Embassy in Corti’s steam launch. Everybody here is most amiable to us, I suppose because strangers are rare.

“_20th Oct._—To call on Khair-ed-Din Pasha at Kurujesme. He has a handsome house there, being very rich, a man of about fifty-five, tall, not very agreeable in countenance, and with dyed hair. He received me well, talked sensibly, explaining his ideas with considerable clearness, and has the manner of a man used to State affairs. He had retired, he told me, from these, but the Party he had represented was for progress on Eastern lines, not in imitation of Europe. He asked me to explain to him the British policy in Egypt, which I did, and I asked him in turn to explain to me how it was that with a Sultan, who was admittedly a good man and well meaning, things only got worse in the Empire. At this he laughed, and excused himself from answering, he being he said a Tunisian born, and a stranger. ‘But go to Vefyk Pasha,’ he said. ‘He knows everything, and will tell you.’ He then gave me two volumes of ‘Controversial Theology,’ which he had had translated into French, and one for Stanley. And we talked about India, and the danger there was for the English of a quarrel with Islam. ‘But they don’t mind,’ he said. ‘They say the Mohammedans in India are so happy and so fond of them there is no fear.’ We parted the best of friends.

“Then on to Achmet Vefyk’s. This is the most remarkable Turk I have ever met, and one of the most remarkable men. He reminds me a little of old Ragunath Rao,[84] having the same keen intelligence, power of vivid expression, and bursts of wit. He is equally outspoken. Like the old Rajah, he is a man of the past age. He lives in a little wooden cottage, a kind of hermitage on the hill, to get to which you have to climb an almost impossible path, and he affects an extreme simplicity of life. He was out in his garden when I arrived, and I was shown upstairs to a meanly furnished ante-room, but sunny and cheerful, where I sat on the divan till he came in. He came upstairs slowly, like a man bent with rheumatism, an old man in an old-fashioned dress, a gown and slippers, with a large square fez of the time of Sultan Mahmoud. He took me into an inner room a little better furnished, with some old-fashioned painted chairs, covered with Broussa velvet. He talked about the decay of Turkey. ‘The beginning of our ruin,’ he said, ‘was the Commercial Treaty of 1832. Before that, our people had trades and industries. Now there are one hundred and fifty thousand beggars in Stamboul alone. Look at these chairs, the velvet on them is from a manufactory that supplied all Europe. Now we buy our velvets, when we can afford to buy them, from Lyons. They forced tariffs on us, which gave all the advantage to the foreigner and broke up our trade corporations, which were the life of the people. This is what has principally ruined us. Then we have had bad luck. Our Sultans have been worthless. Formerly we should have deposed them all, till we got a good one—but Europe interferes with our rights now. You must not suppose that the deposition of a Sultan is a lawless act. It is our right. The Sultan Khalifa Emir el Mumenin is not a religious teacher, he is only the chief of the Moslems, and each of us is as good as he, and better if he observes the law better. It is for us to tell the Sultan what he is to do and not to do; and when I was young there were ten thousand men ready to tell him this. Now there are only myself and four or five others—old men; the rest have no courage except to ask for money. You have just been to Khair-ed-Din. He came here as leader of a party of reform—he has made himself rich, and he stops here to get a place or a pension. He will do any dirty work the Sultan may bid him do. I had refused to do that, and I live in this old tumble-down house. The Sultan sends for me every now and then to beg me to be his minister, but I will not be minister unless I have power. When the Russians were at the gates of Constantinople I was made Vizier, and sent to treat with them. The Grand Duke Nicholas wanted the Sultan to come out and pay him a visit, that he might see how large his army was. But the Sultan shut himself up, declaring that they wanted to make him prisoner, and carry him away to Russia. I refused Nicholas point blank, and said he must come first to the Sultan, and I succeeded. The Sultan refused for twenty days, and for twenty days I put the Grand Duke off, on one pretext or another, and in the end I got the Sultan to receive him, and to pay him the return visit. The Grand Duke Nicholas was a man altogether brutal and corrupt.’

“He then talked about India. ‘The English,’ he said, ‘have lost their political senses. Formerly I remember many men who had correct ideas about the East, and he named several, Alison and Lord Napier. Now they seem deprived of reason. What did they mean by sending that young man Bulwer to be Viceroy of India? I remember him here very many years ago, a pretty little young man he was, fond of saying pretty things to the ladies. A man with such a talent for writing poetry, how could he make a Viceroy to sit on the throne of Sultan Akbar?’ I told him about the misfortunes of the Indian Mohammedans, and how they had charged me to speak to the Sultan if possible and enlist his sympathy. But he said: ‘I advise you to be very cautious about this. If the Sultan was a man worthy of his position, it would be well—but in confidence I tell you, and do not repeat this even to Lord Stanley—he is mad. His is a peculiar madness. He is clever and agreeable, and all who see him go away convinced that he agrees with them, and so he does. For three days he pays attention to what he has been told. Then he begins to suspect, and then he sees a new person who tells him the other thing, and all his ideas are changed. He is a man of fixed and violent ideas, which he changes every week.’ ‘He is not then,’ I asked, ‘the good man people say he is?’ ‘Do not believe it. The Sultan is _un misérable et un fou_. He is out of his mind with fear and jealousy. Sometimes, when the fit is on him, he will walk round and round in his palace for four days and nights, never sleeping, hardly sitting down, hardly eating, and all for fear of assassination. If you came to him to tell him such a thing as you propose, he would listen to you and be delighted, then he would suspect a plot, and be in a fever till you had left Stamboul. Already he is probably asking himself why you have come, and when you mean to go. I advise you to be very cautious. People will come to you from him telling you this and that. He has an army of 4,000 spies, and you must not stay long in Constantinople. Besides, if you gave him any such message from India, it is possible he might take it up and make an intrigue of it, and spoil it as he spoiled the movement in Egypt. He cares only for intrigue and for being cleverer than all those he meets, and for outwitting them—intrigue, and saving money, and fear of what is coming. You had better wait. It will come in five or six months. The movement in Bulgaria and East Roumelia will bring on the crisis, and he will be deposed. Then with the new Sultan something might be done, but with this one never. Do not forget that he is a madman and do not trust him.’ I asked him what prince there was who could succeed him. ‘The prince next in succession,’ he said, ‘is calm and reasonable. It is possible we may have better luck with him—but our State is ruined through the men of the present day, who are all corrupt. Look at the young Turkey Party, what fools they are! Which of them cares for anything but folly, pleasure, and money?—and we are all becoming paupers.’

“We talked about Egypt. Vefyk has an old grudge against the Turks of Mehemet Ali, ‘who were every one of them worthless.’ The Egyptians he despises; ‘Arabi may have been an honest man, but he was an ignorant one who did not know what Europe’s power was. A couple of Turkish regiments would have settled the matter at any moment. Arabi thought that he could stand alone, without the support of the Sultan. He was a fool.’ I asked him about Halim. ‘Halim,’ he said, ‘is like them all. He is an intriguer, a man of no sense.’ Then we went on to talk about Stanley, and it was agreed that I should come back with Anne and breakfast with him on Wednesday. In going out he stopped me and said in a mysterious way: ‘I must tell you something which I beg you will not forget. You are going to see Halim Pasha. He is the best sportsman we have in Constantinople, he has killed more bears and more wolves than any other. Remember this, and when he asks you what I said of him, you will be able to answer with a clear conscience that I told you something to his credit.’ And the old man burst into a roar of laughter at his conceit, and so I went away.

“I met Anne outside, who had come by the steamer, and we went on to Prince Halim’s, which is close by—a fine house by the water side. We were received at the door by a man whom I did not recognize, but who turned out to be Ismaïl Jowdat, who had been Prefect of Police for the foreigners at Cairo during the war, and who, having kept order and saved much European life there, was exiled by Malet after Tel-el-Kebir. At the top of the stairs we were met by Halim, who in looks is not remarkable, and who, if he had not said ‘_c’est moi_,’ I should have taken for a servant. He is short and fat, but is younger looking and less obese than Ismaïl, and is more active and alert. His features are rough and without defined expression, his eyes small and restless, and his manner, though far from bad, is without grace or special charm. He is in fact a very plain man, made plainer by his beard being dyed. There is something frank, however, in his way of talking, and it is difficult not to see that he is far more respectable than any of his cousins. He did not ask me about Vefyk, so I was not obliged to make use of Vefyk’s little stratagem, and we talked at once about Egypt.