Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, as related by herself in conversations with her physician, vol. 1 (of 3)

Reflections—Letter from Lady Hester to the Author asking him to return—He revisits Syria—Changes which had taken place in Beyrout—M. Jasper Chasseaud, American consul—Divine service performed by the American missionaries—Letter from Lady Hester to the Author—Her continued hostility to Mrs. —.—The Author takes his family to Sayda—Dress and demeanour of a lady of Sayda—The Author’s reception at Jôon—His family frightened by a deserter—Settles at the convent of Mar Elias—Earthquake of January 1, 1837.

We now arrive at an epoch in Lady Hester Stanhope’s life, when it might be said that her European reputation had reached its height, and her domestic humiliations had sunk her to the lowest ebb. She had been visited in her retirement by so many travellers of all the nations of the Continent, that it might be supposed her singular mode of life was known to almost everybody. M. Lamartine’s account of his interview had spread abroad an undefined sort of wonder about her mystic and singular opinions, and the public read with avidity whatever details they could meet with respecting her.

Six years had now elapsed since our separation; and, although occasionally honoured with a letter from her, I had given up all idea of ever seeing her again, when, being at Nice, where I had furnished a house, with the intention of passing two or three years with my family, I received the following letter.

Lady H. S. to Dr. ——.

(Lady Hester seems to have been interrupted in her writing, and breaks off; but she thus resumes:)

This summons from Lady Hester Stanhope took me a little unexpectedly. I had not much faith in a story like that on which she built her hopes of paying her debts; for I did not think it likely that property left to her could have been purposely concealed from her knowledge, or would be withheld from her by her relations: but, notwithstanding this, I did not hesitate to write immediately, and say I would come as soon as I could arrange my private concerns, which period I limited to the following spring.

Accordingly, having engaged a governess for my daughter, to be at the same time a companion for my wife in the long evenings during my sittings with Lady Hester Stanhope, we left Nice on the 24th of May, 1837, for Marseilles; and agreed there for our passage on board of the Zoave, Captain Robert, a tight brigantine, paying, for the exclusive use of the cabin and our provisions, 1000 francs. We embarked on the 6th of June, being my fifty-fourth birthday, and, after a prosperous voyage, landed at Beyrout on the 1st of July, 1837.

The city of Beyrout had undergone great changes since the conquest of Syria by Ibrahim Pasha; not in the tortuosity of its streets, not in its broken pavement and the filthy entrances to its houses, but in the appearance of its population. Formerly, a few straggling Europeans, or Levantines in European dresses, were seen hanging about the doors of a warehouse or two in the Frank quarter; and occasionally a European woman, the wife of a consul or a merchant, would steal from one house to another, as if afraid, in her way, of insult from a fanatic Turk. Now, the bustle of a crowded mart was visible, and Europeans and their ladies walked about with a freedom which showed that a strong arm kept the haughty Mussulman under control. In 1831, the appearance of a French lady in the streets, wearing a green silk gown, was signalized as a feat of great hardihood; such an assumption of the colour peculiar to the prophet Mahomet’s descendants generally entailing vexations on the wearer: and a gentleman would never have dared to give his arm to a lady out of doors: but now, both the one and the other passed on without any loud remark, although, internally, the grave Mussulmans cherished a feeling of vengeance against those who so openly violated their religious and moral institutions. Emboldened by these changes, I led my family through the bazars, and showed them the busy Christians and Turks, working with their fingers and toes those beautiful silk stuffs, purses, cords, ribbons, &c., which form the admiration of all persons who visit the Levant.

We were lodged at the inn kept by Pareschivà, formerly a servant of Mr. John Maddox, an English gentleman, who had made a stay of two or three years in Syria. This Greek, by his cleanliness and attention, had secured, in an album which he kept for the purpose, so many certificates of good entertainment from travellers who had put up at his inn, that it would have required some courage to raise a dissenting voice: but he maintained, by a continuance of the same attentions to his guests, the reputation he had justly acquired.

The environs of Beyrout had always been studded with small villas and garden-cottages, but some very handsome country-houses had now risen up among them. New houses had also been built in the town; and among them were two, the property of our old acquaintance, M. Jasper Chasseaud, now become American consul, one of which he inhabited. We had the pleasure of complimenting him on his new dignity, and partaking of his hospitality in a splendid saloon, overlooking the shipping and port, and commanding an extensive view of Mount Lebanon. M. Guys, the French consul, and his estimable lady, also entertained us; and, could our stay have been prolonged here, we should have had no great reason to regret the delightful society of Nice.

I hastened to inform Lady Hester Stanhope of our arrival, and, whilst waiting for the camels and mules which she would probably send, I made the necessary preparations for the road. A cook was hired, named Cabôor, who, some twenty or five-and-twenty years before, had been my servant boy. Great was his joy at seeing his old master. He was destined, however, to remain but a short time with us, as I discovered that he had been turned away from Lady Hester Stanhope’s service, a circumstance which, of course, rendered it impossible for me to retain him in mine.

We attended divine service, performed by the American missionaries in the great saloon of M. Chasseaud’s house, and were much edified by the exemplary piety of these good men, who were labouring to spread general information among the Syrians, by giving gratuitous instruction to the children of the inhabitants, by printing useful books of practical knowledge in Arabic, and by leading them, through reading and meditation, to work their own way to salvation; trusting that an acquaintance with the scriptures and with the advantages of civilization will silently effect the pious object they have in view, without those violent attempts at conversion which cause enmity between brethren, and defeat their own end.

M. Guys lent us a handsome green double marquee, and all preparations were made for our departure, when two servants arrived from her ladyship, with her own mules, and the following answer to my letter.

Lady Hester Stanhope to Dr. ——, at Beyrout.

So then, thought I, the past is never to be forgotten; and, hardly have we set foot on the shores of Syria, but war is declared against my wife. Lady Hester Stanhope made no mystery of her likes and dislikes; and Botrôos Metta, in his confabulations with Cabôor (as servants in general talk about their masters and mistresses) dwelt on the rising storm, which probably would soon burst. Cabôor bore no good will to her ladyship. He had picked up a little French, and his reflections on my situation were not deficient in shrewdness. “Ah!” he would exclaim, “it will be just as it was six years ago—my mistress crying, my lady emportée, and my master trying to satisfy both—no easy task! He will have one woman saying one thing in one ear, and the other saying the contrary in the other ear; well! he will be a clever gentleman if he reconciles them!”

As it would not have been proper to leave my family in an inn, I resolved to take them with me at once to Sayda, notwithstanding Lady Hester’s suggestion to the contrary. On the 3rd of July, at sunset, we commenced our journey; for the weather was too hot to travel in the daytime. It was pitch dark; nothing whatever was visible; we could not even see the path before us: but Abdhu, the mule-driver, and Botrôos, led the way, and each person had a driver by his side. We were, therefore, spared the horrors of the surrounding scenery, which M. de Lamartine describes in such imaginative diction. In four hours we reached Khaldy, where the tent was pitched on the seashore; and, after supping on a pâté à la Perigord, with which Madame Guys had kindly provided us, and taking a cup of nice Mocha coffee, we lay down in our clothes, and slept until the morning star made its appearance: then, remounting, we marched four hours more, which brought us to Nebby Yuness, where we breakfasted on coffee and milk and the remains of our provision basket. Here we rested until three in the afternoon, and then proceeded along the seashore to Sayda. When within about a quarter of a mile of the town-gates, we met M. Conti, the French consular agent, and from him learned that the earthquake had so damaged the city, and the French khan in particular, that he could not give us lodging in it, but politely offered us his garden, where, under the shade of the trees, we might pitch our tent. The gardens, or rather orchards of Sayda, occupy a flat strip of land which intervenes between the seashore and the foot of Mount Lebanon, from a quarter to half a mile in width, and stretching a league along the shore. M. Conti’s garden was on the verge of the sands, and near the spot where we met him. His offer was accordingly thankfully accepted; and, turning in at the orchard gate, in about half an hour our camp arrangements were completed, and Cabôor, with his cooking utensils round a gipsy’s fire, was busily occupied in preparing our supper.

The lovely wife of M. Pierre Gerardin, who had also just returned to her home from Beyrout, astride on a kedýsh,[57] in the space of seven hours, alighted from her horse at the garden-gate, when she learned who was within, and paid us a visit. This lady was married to a son of that Gerardin who had treated us with such politic incivility in 1831, and who had since died. She was in the costume of a Syrian lady: her hair hung in strait tresses down her back, and black braids of silk fell intermingled with it, so as seemingly to lengthen it to the bend of her knees. The whole was bespangled with small gold money, called rubiahs, of which there might be two hundred or more; and a band, set with gold money, encircled her head, on a level with her forehead, in the fashion of a diadem: the whole being surmounted by a marone-coloured skull cap, richly embroidered in gold. A cream-coloured gown, open in front, and buttoned only at the waist, disclosed her silk gauze chemise, which overhung her pantaloons of silk brocade, and served as a handkerchief to her neck. Her feet were without stockings, and covered only by a pair of yellow papooches. She was a lively young creature; and, as it is common in the Levant to suppose that European ladies who go in public unveiled must, on that account, have much levity of conduct, she endeavoured to imitate what she fancied to be their manners by an assumed freedom, which certainly shocked the females of our party. Mulberries were brought, and eaten with little pointed wooden picks, not to stain the fingers. When our new friends were gone, we supped or dined, and passed the night beneath the tent, bitten most dreadfully by fleas and musquitoes.

July 4.—In the morning I walked into Sayda to see the house destined for us; but it was inconvenient, and was still in the possession of its tenants, a Turkish family; so that the idea of locating ourselves there was abandoned. Then, leaving my family under the tent, I set off for Jôon, where I arrived about sunset, it being three hours’ ride from Sayda.

Lady Hester Stanhope’s reception of me was kind and warm, but more serious than it had been in 1830; one would have said it was a welcome, as if I had left her a month before, and had just come back, for she proceeded, as she called it, immediately to business. She told me it would have given her pleasure if I had left my family at Beyrout, for she had no house to offer them; and, from the dreadful effects of the earthquake, which, on the 1st of January of this year, had thrown down or cracked a third of the houses throughout Palestine, it would be difficult for me to find one, if I could not content myself with that which had been fixed upon for us at Sayda.

July 5.—This discussion occupied the whole of the next day; when, towards evening, a letter came from my family to say they were in the greatest trouble and fright, and that my presence was required immediately. It was hastily determined, therefore, that I should take them to the convent of St. Elias, (Dayr Mar Elias, as it is called) which had been the first residence of Lady Hester Stanhope when she settled in this country.

July 6.—In the morning I rode down to the tent, and found my whole family in tears, and apparently inconsolable. To understand this, the reader must fancy himself transported from a comfortable and well-furnished home to a distant, half-civilized country, where he does not comprehend a word of the language, and planted under a tent in the outskirts of a city, without bar or bolt, without table or chair, and with nobody for an interpreter of his wants but two servants, one of whom speaks broken French, and even that hardly intelligible, and the other nothing but Arabic. It is true, the ladies of the French vice-consul’s family paid mine a visit, and assured them there was no danger to be apprehended: but, when I had left them, and had gone up into the mountains, the defiles, ravines, and precipices of which were visible from the tent, it required no very gloomy imagination to conjure up horrors of all sorts.

It so happened that, on the night of my quitting them, a deserter, who expected to be severely bastinadoed or shot next morning, made his escape from the barrack prison[58] which overhung the walls of Sayda towards the sea, by letting himself down through a sewer, which emptied itself into the surf. He ran for his life along the seashore, until, seeing a light burning in M. Conti’s garden, and a tent, he crawled through the hedge of prickly pear in the state he was in, and thought he might find pity, and a temporary hiding-place. A rustling and a noise awoke Mrs. ——, and she saw a man, in a nizàm dress, wet and filthy, standing at the opening of the tent. Her screams awoke the children, the governess, the cook, the gardener, and Abdhu, who slept in the gardener’s shed close by. They seized the man, who did not attempt to escape, but told them his story; and as all the lower classes were suffering from the oppressive conscription, and other onerous burthens imposed by Ibrahim Pasha, whose rule they abhorred, they furnished the poor deserter with a little covering, and directed him by a lane, through the gardens, towards the mountains, where he would find holes in the rocks to secrete himself, until he could obtain succour from the peasantry.

It is not extraordinary that such an apparition as this should have frightened them all; for, up to the hour of my return, from ignorance of the language, they had hardly comprehended the circumstances that gave rise to it. Entreaties and tears, even then, made it imperative on me to remove them forthwith; and, as the mules had been kept tethered on the ground in readiness for a removal, they were reloaded; and, threading the romantic lanes which wind through the gardens, where lilac-trees, bananas, vines, orange and lemon trees, of extraordinary height, with passionflowers, and other creeping plants, wantoning among the thick foliage, made a delicious shade, we emerged from them at the foot of the mountain. Then, passing the hamlet of Hellaléah, where, at the doors of their country bastides,[59] the Kheláts and Dubâanys, friends of my younger days, stood watching to hail my return among them, whilst the elders pointed to their children, now grown up, that I might notice them, we made a steep descent into a small torrent bed, and, again ascending a rough and zigzag path, reached the elevation on which stands, on a barren and unproductive cliff, the small monastery of Mar Elias Abra, or St. Elias, of the village of Abra, about an hour’s ride from the gates of Sayda.

Mar Elias had originally been the dwelling of a few monks, who performed the duties of a small chapel attached to it. Being a retired and healthy spot, it was chosen by the Bishop of the Schismatic Greeks (to whose see it now belonged) for his residence, and, in 1813, when Lady Hester Stanhope first went to live there, was inhabited by one of his successors to the see, Macarius, who was also Patriarch of Antioch. At the request of the Emir Beshýr, prince of the Druses, the patriarch[60] had given it up to Lady Hester, who lived there five or six years, until she removed to Dar Jôon. After that time she only occasionally visited it, and, since Miss Williams’s death, had never been there. General Loustaunau[61] occupied one of the rooms, and an old woman, the widow of Metta, the village doctor, with her son, lived in the lodge, and served as porters.

The injuries caused by the earthquake were very extensive. It seems to have begun somewhere near the sea of Tiberiàd, burying the town of that name, Suffad, and some others, in ruins, and throwing down or damaging the greater part of the dwellings in every city or village along the coast as far as Beyrout, which latter place did not suffer. The monastery of Mar Elias was shaken to its very foundations; and, on taking possession of our new residence, the state it was in sufficiently showed how terrible the terrestrial convulsion had been. General Loustaunau described it to me as follows:—He was sitting under the verandah which runs round a part of the small quadrangle, reading his Bible, when his chair gave a tilt under him. He raised his eyes from his book, and saw the side of the building facing him rock. A cloud of dust immediately rose above the roof. He knew it was an earthquake, but was not, or had not time to be, terrified; for, before he could well think about it, it was over, and he found himself unhurt. He never quitted the spot where he was, until his maid, the porter, and the porter’s mother, called to him with loud cries. When they came to examine the mischief that had been done, they found the store-room, which was the corner room of the quadrangle to the north-west, entirely fallen in, burying in its ruins more than two hundred weight of copper utensils. The wall of the room which formerly served as Lady Hester Stanhope’s bed-room, next to the store-room, had peeled from top to bottom—half having fallen, and half being left standing. The kitchen roof had fallen in. In the centre of the quadrangle, the parterre, bordered with oblong freestones, had been raised perpendicularly about two feet, with a zenzeluct tree, the rose-bushes, and a palm-tree on it; and so we found them still, the pavement giving a hollow sound to the tread. The arch of the gate of the stable-yard was lifted out of its curve, and the wood-house was down. The room inhabited formerly by Monsieur Beaudin, then her ladyship’s secretary, and now French vice-consul at Damascus, was a heap of ruins; and numberless rents and partial fissures manifested themselves everywhere. The chapel, General Loustaunau’s room, the saloon, and another large room of equal size, had escaped entirely, together with the bath, and two or three small rooms adjoining. The beams of what had been Lady Hester’s bed-room were now propped up by balks of wood; and thus we had three large rooms at our disposal.

Here then I fixed my family; and hiring two women, Tabithâ and Helôon, a girl, Werdy, and a boy, Habyb, from the village of Abra, which was about ten minutes’ walk from Mar Elias, as servants, there seemed a prospect of great comfort and tranquillity for us all, whilst I could give my undivided attention to Lady Hester’s health and affairs, passing my time alternately between the two places.