Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century - W. H. Davenport Adams

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of life; dark, yet very lustrous; liquid, yet clear as stars; they are compared by their poets to the shape of the almond and the bright timidness of the gazelle. The face is delicately oval, and its shape is set off by the gold-fringed turban, the most becoming head-dress in the world; the long, black, silken tresses are braided from the forehead, and hang wavily on each side of the face, falling behind in a glossy cataract, that sparkles with such golden drops as might have glittered upon Danaë, after the Olympian shower. A light tunic of pink or pale blue crape is covered with a long silk robe, open at the bosom, and buttoned thence downward to the delicately slippered little feet, that peep daintily from beneath the full silken trousers. Round the loins, rather than the waist, a cashmere shawl is loosely wrapt as a girdle, and an embroidered jacket, or a large silk robe with loose open sleeves, completes the costume. Nor is the fragrant water-pipe, with its long variegated serpent, and its jewelled mouth-piece, any detraction from the portrait.

      "Picture to yourself one of Eve's brightest daughters, in Eve's own loving land. The woman-dealer has found among the mountains that perfection in a living form which Praxiteles scarcely realized, when inspired fancy wrought out its ideal in marble. Silken scarfs, as richly coloured and as airy as the rainbow, wreathe her round, from the snowy breast to the finely rounded limbs half buried in billowy cushions; the attitude is the very poetry of repose, languid it may be, but glowing life thrills beneath that flower-soft exterior, from the varying cheek and flashing eye, to the henna-dyed taper fingers, that capriciously play with her rosary of beads. The blaze of sunshine is round her kiosk, but she sits in the softened shadow so dear to the painter's eye. And so she dreams away the warm hours in such a calm of thought within, and sight or sound without, that she starts when the gold-fish gleam in the fountain, or the breeze-ruffled roses shed a leaf upon her bosom."—Eliot Warburton, "The Crescent and the Cross," etc. etc.

      As European gentlemen are never admitted to the harem, it is hardly credible that Major Warburton could have had an opportunity of seeing the beauty which he paints in such glowing colours.

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      Not only as a persevering and enlightened traveller, but as a poet, Madame Hommaire de Hell has gained distinction. It is in the former capacity that she claims a place in these pages.

      She was born at Artois, in 1819. While she was still an infant, her mother died; but it was her good fortune to find in the love of an only sister no inadequate substitute for maternal affection. Her father seems to have been one of those individuals whom Fortune tosses to and fro with pertinacious ill-humour; moreover, he had something of the nomad in his temperament, and without any real or sufficient motive, moved from place to place, entailing upon his young family sudden and burdensome journeys. Before Adela was seven years old, she had been carried from Franche-Comté into the Bourbonnais, thence into Auvergne, and thence to Paris. She was afterwards placed in a boarding-school at Saint-Maudé, but her father's death restored her to her sister's guardianship at Saint-Etienne.

      A short time after her arrival in this town, she attracted the attention of Xavier Hommaire de Hell, since so justly celebrated as a traveller and a scientist. He fell passionately in love with her, and though she was but fifteen years of age, and had no fortune, he rested not until his family gave their consent to his marriage.

      To provide for his child-wife he obtained an office in the railway administration, but only temporarily, for already he had made up his mind to seek fortune and reputation in some foreign country. He pushed his solicitations with so much energy that, in the first year of his wedded life, he secured an appointment under the Turkish Government. His wife, to whom a child had just been given, was unable to accompany him. The pain of separation was very great, but both knew that in France there was no present opening for his talents, and both were agreed that their separation should not be for long. And, indeed, before the end of the year, Madame de Hell clasped her babe to her bosom, and set out to join her husband.

      Her poetical faculties were first stimulated by her voyage to the East. Previously she had cherished a deep love for nature, for the music of verse, for nobility of thought, but had made no attempt to define and record her impressions. The isles and shores of the Mediterranean, with their myriad charms and grand historic associations:—

      loosened her genius, so to speak, and stimulated her to clothe her feelings and sentiments in a metrical form. It is not difficult to understand the effect which, on a warm imagination and sensitive temperament, that richly-coloured panorama of "the isles of Greece," and that exquisite prospect of Constantinople and the Golden Horn, would necessarily produce. For some time, as she herself tells us, she lived in a kind of moral and intellectual intoxication; she was absorbed in an ideal world, which bewildered while it delighted her.

      The plague was then dealing heavily with the unfortunate Mussulman populations, but it did not terrify our enthusiastic travellers; as if they bore a charmed life, they went to and fro, seeing whatever was fine or memorable, and yet all unable to satisfy that thirst for beauty which the beautiful around them had excited. Madame de Hell was under the influence of a subtle spell; her quick fancy was profoundly impressed by the picturesque aspects of Oriental life, by its glow of colour and grace of form, so different from the commonplace and monotonous realities of the West. She seemed to be living in the old days of the Khalifs—those days which the authors of the "Thousand and One Stories" have immortalized—to be living, for example, in the "golden prime of good Haroun Al-Raschid"—as she saw before her the motley procession of veiled women, Persians with their pointed bonnets, Hindu jugglers with lithe lissom figures, negro slaves, grey-bearded beggars looking like princes in disguise, and Armenians wrapped in their long furred cloaks. She delighted, accompanied by her husband, to explore the silent recesses of the hilly and almost solitary streets in the less frequented quarters of Stamboul, where a latticed window or a half-open door would suggest a romance of love and mystery, or a vision of some gorgeous palace interior, of

      "Carven cedarn doors,

       Flung inward over spangled floors,

       Broad basëd flights of marble stairs,

       Run up with golden balustrade."

      When Madame de Hell visited the East, it was considered dangerous for Franks to venture into the streets of Constantinople, and they occupied only the suburbs of Pera and Galata, which were exclusively made over to the Christian population, and separated from the Mussulman city by the arm of the sea known as the Golden Horn. And as in those days, which were long before the introduction of Mr. Cook's "personally conducted tours," tourists were few, the presence of a "giaour" in the Mohammedan quarter was an extraordinary event. Those who should have fallen in with our two young adventurers, their eager gaze roving everywhere in quest of new discoveries, strolling hither and thither like two children out for a holiday, would never for one moment have supposed that a terrible pestilence was raging through the city, and nowhere more fatally than in the very districts they had chosen for their explorations. But perhaps the danger from disease was not so imminent as the peril they incurred in penetrating into the chosen territory of Islam. Fortune favoured them, however, or their frank bearing disarmed fanaticism, and they escaped without molestation or even insult.

      As Monsieur and Madame de Hell resided for a year in Constantinople, it is needless to say they remained long enough for the glamour to disappear, in which at first their lively imaginations had invested everything around them. The gorgeous visions vanished, and their eyes were opened

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