B 1,315,106

ARTES
LIBRARY
18171
S
SCIENTIA
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
& FLUNIBUS UNUM
TUEBOR
SI-QUÆRIS PENINSULAM AMCENAM –
CIRCUMSPICE
A
TRIP TO BARBARY
BY
A ROUNDABOUT ROUTE.
Henr
BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.
A
Um
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE ST., STRAND.
1866.
[The Right of Translation is reserved.]
DT
279
S16
LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
febr
Hunt
4-14-41
42467
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
PAGE
I.-A FALSE START
II.-AU SULTAN .
III.—STATE OF THE CASE
IV.-AT LYONS
V.-MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE
VI.-ONE'S BOAT IS ON THE SHORE
VII.-MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES.-THE ARETHUSA
1
15
22
54
71
102
113
•
VIII.-MONSEIGNEUR
IX.-EL DJEZZAÏR
•
135
143
X.-ALGIERS IN ECSTASY
162
XI.—THE FEAST OF BAÏRAM
183
•
XII.-BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK.
. 201
XIII.-BOU FARIK.—AGRICULTURAL SHOW
220
XIV.-ON THINGS IN GENERAL, AND THE BOMBARDMENT
OF ALGIERS IN PARTICULAR.
247
XV.—AT ORLÉANSVILLE.—POSTING UP THE LEDGER
275
•
XVI. OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA
299
vi
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
XVII.-ORAN.-HOW A BARBARY LION HAS BEEN TURNED
INTO A FRENCH POODLE
XVIII.-CÆSAR AT ORAN
XIX.-ENVIRONS OF ORAN
XX.-FRENCH OCCUPATION.—A DEBIT AND CREDIT AC-
COUNT
PAGE
316
334
354
376
1
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
I.
A FALSE START.
Lord Batemanne was a Noble Lord,
A Noble Lord of hyghe degree;
He shypped hymselfe all aboarde of a shyppe,
Some foraigne countries for to see.
He sayléd Easte, he sayléd Weste,
Untille he cum to Barbarye,
When the Dey of Algeirs putte hym in prisinne,
Untille of lyfe he grewe wearye.*
*
The loving ballad of Lord Bateman.
It was in the present year, and, (if I remember right,) on a
lovely spring morning, and, (unless I am mistaken,) in the middle
of a common sewer, that the notion of taking a trip to Barbary
* In some editions you may read :-
"Until he came to famed Turkeye,
Where he was cotched and put in prison,” &c., &c.
6
B
2
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
first entered my head. You remember the day when the
Prince of Wales "inaugurated”—that, I believe, is the proper
term to use at present-the great sanitary work with which the
names of Bazalgette and Thwaites will be imperishably con-
nected, and when we poor newspaper scribes were put to such
terrible straits to get anything in the way of fine writing out
of the Main Drainage. Many cultivated and sentimental
writers made, the next morning, their first appearance in print
as mudlarks; and the amount of erudition poured forth in
long primer respecting the "ædility" of the Augustan age and
the architecture of the Cloaca Maxima spoke volumes in favour
of the industry of the gentlemen of the press and the accessi-
bility of the "Encyclopedia Britannica."
It is not, ordinarily, in the bowels of the earth that resolu-
tions are formed: although I once had the honour to be
acquainted with a most atrocious scoundrel, who told me that he
made up his mind to lead a good life while being whirled in a
Parliamentary train through the Box Tunnel. On emerging
into daylight, however, he repented the wrong way, and became
a greater scoundrel than ever. It was in the sewer, neverthe-
less, that I said, "I will start for Algiers on the 16th of April,
and abide in Africa forty days," and I arrived at this determina-
tion in manner following.
Most men have a class of friends or acquaintances whom
they meet, and meet only, on particular and exceptional
A FALSE START.
3
occasions. There are people you know who only turn up
at funerals; others whom you have only met in the pit
of the Opera; others whom you are sure to come across
at Ascot races; others from whom you may be severed for
years, but whose beaming countenances you are sure to see
whenever you are bidden to a public dinner. I am favoured
with the friendship of a select body of gentlemen with whom I
seldom come in contact save when Royalty is about. Nor they
nor I are courtiers,—far from it; but our periodical meetings
are almost invariably connected with the movements of the
rulers of the earth. If Royalty presides over, or “inaugurates”
anything, to the flourishing of trumpets and the chanting of
the Hallelujah Chorus; if Royalty reviews its armies or its
fleets, or makes a progress through its provinces, or visits one
of its chief cities; if Royalty is crowned, or Royalty is married,
you may be tolerably certain that my friends and the writer of
this are not far off. And when Royalty dies, as it must do
sometimes, and it is expedient to bury It, there are we also,
taking stock of Garter King-at-Arms, and noting the Dead
March in Saul. Royalty doesn't ask us to dinner-we do not
even partake of beer with the golden footmen in the buttery;
we kiss no hands, we make no bows, we wear no stars and no
collars, save the ordinary linen ones of civil life, and the Court
Circular makes no allusion to our appearance at Court. In
fact, I have a dim kind of suspicion that Royalty looks, not
B 2
4
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
unfrequently, on our presence as a nuisance, and on ourselves
as impertinent intruders: licensed spies and chartered eaves-
droppers, as it were. But a power that is greater than Royalty,
the public:-the greedy, despotic, peremptory public-insist
that we shall go to Court at stated times, and record what we
have seen there. The public refuse to be satisfied with the
court newsman's meagre mention of how Royalty has walked
on the slopes, taken driving or riding exercise, or accorded an
audience to the new Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Pleni-
potentiary from the Queen of Madagascar. We are compelled
to obey the behests of the public, because the public enable us
to earn our bread; and Royalty, which likewise derives its
livelihood from the Public Treasury, is fain, nolens volens, to
tolerate the presence of the public representatives at its
stateliest ceremonials. For were Royalty to keep itself so very
private and confidential that the public were not permitted to
gain any inkling of its doings, that same Public—an arrogant,
exigent, unreasoning animal at the best-might come, some fine
morning, to the conclusion that it would be a cheap and sensible
thing to do without Royalty altogether.
We were all in the Sewer: a friendly knot, obscure and
happy:-by the tacit consent of the great in the receipt of a kind
of moral fern-seed which enabled us to walk invisible. Round
about us, in the Sewer, were all manner of famous people.
Princes and philosophers, antiquaries and ambassadors, engineers
A FALSE START.
10
5
and Indian Nabobs, Fellows of the Royal Society and French
savants, peers and professors, and aldermen, but without the
aldermanesses; for there were no ladies present, else Tom
Ingoldsby's picture of the procession at the Coronation would
have been complete: the "Boord o' Works" being in full
strength, with King Thwaites at their head.
The admirable ventilation of the Sewer, and the odour of the
fresh sawdust with which its brick pavement was strewn, were
not unfavourable to the growth of appetite, and I was beginning
to think about lunch, when the cheery voice of one of my
confrères, Mr. Lignumvita (the last time I had met him was at
Cardinal Wiseman's funeral, and the time before that at the
marriage of the Prince of Wales), became audible.
"Going to the Dublin Exhibition ?"
"I think not," I replied. "Exhibition openings have become
cut-and-dried ceremonials, and somewhat monotonous. Police
to clear the way. Members of the Executive Committee two
and two, contractors, foreign exhibitors, a flourish of trumpets, the
Old Hundredth, God save the Queen, and then a loyal rush
to touch the arm-chair where Royalty has reposed while the
Chairman of the Commissioners read the address. The only
thing left to describe is the Exhibition itself, and I don't know
anything about raw produce, hardware, ceramic manufactures,
and textile fabrics. No; I think I shall leave the Dublin
Exhibition alone."
6
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
"Going out in the 'Great Eastern' with the Atlantic Cable?"
"I have the highest admiration and reverence for the marvel
of naval architecture designed by the illustrious and lamented
Brunel; but of the 'Great Eastern' I may say quantum suff.: I
have had enough of her, and to spare. I was on board the
great ship—and so were you, Lignumvita-during that terrible
explosion in the Channel during her trip to Portland. I can
see the dead men with the flesh scalded off their bones, in my
mind's eye, now. My cabin and my portmanteau were both
blown up, and I never saw any salvage. The burnt child
dreads the fire. I am superstitious.
Her lines must have
been laid on a Friday. No more Great Easterns for me.
Besides, I have been to America already; and I am not quite
certain about a complimentary dinner being given to me at
the Fifth Avenue Hotel by the Loyal League, with Benjamin
Franklin Butler in the chair, and Colonel Lafayette Baker in
the vice. I think the Americans have had enough of British
correspondents."
"Where is your next trip to be, then? You must be getting
rusty ?"
"Do you think I am the Wandering Jew, that I must be
always on the move? Am I never to retire into private life?
Why, I have only been at home four months."
<<
Quite long enough; it is time to be off again."
They say the Russian Epidemic is really the Plague. I
A FALSE START.
7
think I should like a run to St. Petersburg to see whether it is
really the Old Original, or only the Cholera or some Typhoid
affair brought on by a diet of rye-bread, pickled cucumbers,
and grass. Besides, I left a quarter of a pound of scented
tea in a tin-foil package, and a picture of Saint Sergius, in
some lodgings at Wassili-Ostrow nine years ago, and I should
like to call for them."
"The epidemic is on the wane. You had better go to the
opening of the Suez Canal.”
"I don't believe it will ever be opened, and I don't see
Egypt. The P. and O. steamers are too luxurious, and spoil
a man. Malta has been worn threadbare. Alexandria and
Cairo are as stale as the Sphynx. Dust, sand, ophthalmia,
donkey-boys, the Nile, Shepherd's Hotel, and M. de Lesseps
talking about the perfidy of Albion. The land of Egypt has
no charms for me."
"Well; there is Algiers; the Emperor positively leaves Paris
in a week's time, and purposes remaining in Africa a month or
six weeks."
66
•
Algiers!" I repeated excitedly; "that sounds better. I
should like to go to Algiers. I have read Charles Sumner on
'White Slavery in the Barbary States.' I have read Ormsby's
book on Algeria, and a capital book it is. And Jules Gérard,
and Bonbonnel, and Fromentin, and Ernest Feydeau, and
General Daumas, to say nothing of Miss Amelia B. Edwards's
8
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
"Life of Cervantes," and the Arabian Nights' Entertain-
ments. Algiers must be a capital place. Lions and Bedouins,
absinthe and dromedaries, camels and kouscoussou; two
opposite poles of civilisation :-Mahomet and the Mossoo. But
is the Emperor really going?"
((
They say his departure is irrevocably fixed for the eighteenth."
"Then, please the pigs, and my proprietors, I will be in Paris
by the sixteenth, and be off to Marseilles as rapidly as though I
were the Overland Mail."
Just then there was a tremendous rush out of the Sewer into
a shed to hear Mr. Bazalgette (in the presence of Royalty)
deliver a lecture on nasty smells; and then we all went to
lunch, and after that the train took us back to Charing Cross,
and our friendly knot was dissolved. Good-bye, Lignumvitæ,
good-bye old companions and gossips: when shall we meet
again, I wonder? Perhaps not until John Bright is executed
for High Treason on Tower Hill (the porter of the Carlton
Club officiating as Man in the Mask), or Victor Emmanuel
is crowned King of Italy in St. Peter's, Rome, by Pope Inno-
cent the Fiftieth (now Dr. Manning, sometime Anglican Arch-
deacon of Chichester), or the Sultan Abdul Aziz invites the
European sovereigns to a hot pork-sausage and whisky-punch
supper at the old Seraglio. It is a strange age, and stranger
things even than these may come about.
The pigs that is to say, the Destinies-made no opposition
A FALSE START.
9
to my departure, and my proprietors were rather pleased than
otherwise at the idea of my proceeding to Algeria, a feeling in
which, in a greatly increased degree, I shared. It is such a
charming thing to be going away on a long journey-to know
that you are about to put so many degrees of latitude,—a sea,
an ocean, a continent, between yourself and the "shameless ter-
giversation of the noble Lord," and the "high-handed measures
of the parish authorities of St. Pancras," with dissertations upon
which, or, worse still, with the consciousness that he will have
to write dissertations upon them, the breakfast-tables of every
man who has any connection, even to the humblest, with public
affairs is embittered. Little does the noble and tergiversating
Lord trouble you when you are in your berth in a "norther,"
trying chloroform or walnut catsup as a remedy for sea-sickness.
Scant is your heed for the wrongs of casual paupers or the
dietary of workhouse infirmaries when you are lounging under
quarter deck awning, bathing your eyes in the tints of a Medi-
terranean sunset, and wondering which of those two purple
strips of headland is Majorca and which Minorca. You don't
care about the latest news. You don't want to know how the
world wags. Let it wag its head off, and leave you in peace.
Of all travelling compatriots to be avoided abroad, is
the Englishman who is provided with the latest copies
of the English papers. He comes towards you, friendly
soul-confound him!-with beaming face, and offers you
10
A TRIP TO BARBARY.Į
the Second Edition-he always has the Second Edition-
of the last Times or Post obtainable. Often, determined
to be thoroughly "posted up" in intelligence, he has the
Globe. What do you want with the Times or Post or
Globe? The dingiest Börsenhalle, the flimsiest Courrier, the
most attenuated Gaçeta, will serve your turn. On écrit de
Londres "—is quite enough until you get to some hotel where
they take Galignani; and then, at your leisure, you can dawdle
through that pleasant hodge-podge of British and Continental
politics, that impartial salmagundi of all the opinions of the press
at home-Conservative, Liberal, and Radical-the whole con-
veying to your mind the conviction that "whatsoever king
shall reign," Monsieur A. W. Galignani will be the "Vicar
of Bray still," and own allegiance to him who is uppermost.
Galignani is an all-sufficing journal for me abroad.
I was
recommended to a gentleman at Algiers, who told me that he
took the Saturday Review regularly, and that it was very
much at my service. I called on him no more.
I didn't care
about the Saturday in Africa. I can more fully appreciate the
longing for home news of a worthy friend I had once, who
was Recorder of the Red River Settlement, and who (he was of
a sporting turn) declared that he should have died of ennui but
for the arrival, every three months, of a file of Bell's Life. "I
received a dozen of them at a time," he remarked, “I read
a number every morning, and I used to make my Indian
A FALSE START.
11
servant damp it for me half-an-hour before breakfast to give
it a feeling of freshness. By these means it always appeared
like Sunday morning."
So I took the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway on the
night of Easter Sunday, for choosing which day for my de-
parture I should incur most terrible anathemas among the
"unco' guid" in Scotland, and the next morning I found myself
in Paris. My Algerian kit was all duly prepared, and I pur-
chased a volume of the Guides Joanne, particularly referring
to Barbary; but my start was to be a false one, after all. The
Emperor didn't go, as the official papers had vehemently pro-
mised that he should go, and the non-official, that is to say, the
opposition press, ever anxious to put a spoke in the govern-
mental wheel, began to twit the organs of authority with being
false prophets, and to predict on their part that his Majesty
wouldn't go to Algeria at all. This last Easter Paris was
crazy about the proximate production of "L'Africaine," which
for all the puffs preliminary and posthumous which heralded
and followed it, and all the superb and scientific instrumentation
which it doubtless contains, appears to me on the whole to have
been a thundering fiasco. So at least it seems when judged by
the standard which old Dragonetti the violoncellist was wont to
set up.
"He one dam bad opera," he used to say, speaking of
some work which had failed to take the town. "De little
blackguard boy, he no not can sing him in de street."
People
12
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
in Paris seemed to be as sceptical concerning the production
of "L'Africaine," as about Cæsar's starting for Africa. The
first night of Meyerbeer's chef-d'œuvre was postponed, they said,
until the completion of the new grand Opera House, or until
the Greek Kalends. The scenery had all been burnt through
the oversetting of a can of turpentine in a heap of shavings.
Mademoiselle X. had declined to play any part in which she
could not wear cream-coloured tights, and the Africaine herself
was unable to make up her mind as to whether she should
stain her face and arms with walnut juice or with Spanish
liquorice. Madame Meyerbeer had had "a few words" with
Madame Scribe relative to the respective superiority of the
libretto and the score, and the "ladies' battle" had not been
put down without the intervention of the Sapeurs Pompiers on
duty in the Rue Lepelletier. Finally the illustrious maestro
Rossini had told M. Blaise de Bury, in strict confidence, that
L'Africaine," "ne valait pas quinze sous," whereupon
M. Fétis had gone stark staring mad, and had been conveyed to
the Maison de Santé of Dr. Blanche. These were the kind of
cancans with which we were amused in the great metropolis of
gossip and scanmag, and where every inhabitant vomits, every
day of his life, thrice three black crows. To the writer the
gossip was not amusing-it was agony: for everybody—by whom
I mean the quidnuncs who gather every night round the marble
tables under the crystal roof of the Grand Hotel Court-yard-
(6
A FALSE START.
13
were unanimous on one point-that the Emperor would not
think of stirring from Paris until "L'Africaine" had made her
curtsey before the footlights of the Academy of Music. "He
won't go, sir," said to me old Colonel Chubbstick, who entered
Paris an ensign in a marching regiment with the late Duke of
Wellington in July, 1815, and has remained in the Champs
Elysées, where he first encamped, ever since. "He won't
"He won't go, and
he never meant going. The Empress is dead against it. The
Ministers won't let him go. Fould is furious in opposition. I
tell you, sir, that there are seven marabouts in green turbans
who have all sworn on the tomb of the Prophet to stab him
directly he lands at Algiers. He will be killed, sir, and Abd-el-
Kader will be at once proclaimed Sultan of Tunis, Fez, Algeria,
and Morocco. We should have the Sallee Rovers bombarding
Malta in less than a month. No, sir, he will stay at home. He
can't move.
I know the marabouts well. Wasn't there that
black fellow who killed Kleber, and was impaled for it? They've
got his skin at the Jardin des Plantes. He was a Marabout.
But there are other conspirators to be feared. Do you know
that the police have turned up nine new ramifications of the
'Marianne' within the last week, that fifty-two domiciliary
visits have taken place in the Faubourg St. Antoine, and that
three hundredweight of the 'Propos de Labienus' were seized
the day before yesterday at the Octroi, concealed in Strasbourg
pies? I'll be hanged if he goes to Algeria, and he'll be shot if
14
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
he does." This was all the consolation I got from Colonel
Chubbstick; but I am bound to state that when it was defini-
tively known that Cæsar was really going, and that he would
start on a certain day and at a certain hour, the Colonel was
heard to declare to three intimates at the Café du Helder, that
he was always sure about his going, that he was bound to go,
and that the Empress had gone on her knees to her lord, and
entreated him not to defer his journey. "Never mind me,"
cried her Majesty; "never mind the Prince Imperial: think of
France;" and that the people who doubted his going were a
confounded set of mischief-making busybodies. I need scarcely
say that consistency is not one of the characteristics of your
gossip who deals in circumstantial and dogmatic assertion.
II
AU SULTAN.
"When the Sultan goes to Ispahan,
Laraälee !
He leaves his wives at Teheran,
Laraälee!
And they invite a strange young man
To come to tea at their divan,
While the Sultan is at Ispahan,
Laraälee !
When the Sultan comes from Ispahan,
Laraälee!
He's told of all the rigs they ran,
Laraälee !
Whereat his wives he strangles, an'
D decapitates that strange young man,
Who took so unworthy and unmanly an advantage of
his Majesty's absence at Ispahan,--
Laraälee!"
Les Orientales: a little altered.
AND this could not have been a sultan after all, for the
Sovereign of Ispahan and Teheran is surely Shah of Persia.
Nor could the gentleman in the Rue de Rivoli, before whose
16
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
oriental-kiosque looking shop I halted, attracted by the sign
"Au Sultan," have been the Sultan either, for to judge by
his voice, his features, and his attire, he was manifestly a
Jew.
Fousse acheter tes cholies choses à pon marché qui vient
d'Alchérie,” said the gentleman, in persuasive tones.
I see him now, in his golden prime, not the good Caliph
Haroun al Raschid, not in the great pavilion of the Caliphat,
where,--
Right to the carven cedarn doors,
Flung inward over spangled floors,
Broad based flights of marble stairs
Ran up with golden balustrade,
but a most splendid Sheeny, standing at the door of a little shop
crammed with curiosities.
I see him now, that radiant Smouch, arrayed like Solomon
in all his glory, and full of recollections of the Arabian Nights.
He told me his name was Ismaïl-bou-Maza. He informed me
that his wares were seventy-five per cent. cheaper than those
vended by the rival Sultans on the boulevards. He offered me
a burnouse, warranted Algerian, for forty francs. He would
have sold me, I think, so obliging was he, a dish of kabobs, a
caïque, an odalisque, or a Sheikh-ul-Islam. You see I had
been cramming hard at couleur locale during my enforced stay
in Paris, waiting for Cæsar to go away.
AU SULTAN.
17
I see him now,-his hookèd beak, his coal black beard, his
twisted turban, his embroidered caftan, the folded shawl of
many hues round his loins, his baggy silk breeches, his clean
white hose, and shiny shoes. I began to hate him, for that he
had been to Algeria, and that I was kept waiting on the brink
of Barbary in a state of dire uncertainty. I say that I hated
him, and regarded him as a Humbug who had no right to wear
that sumptuous masquerade dress. The Israelites of Stamboul
wear seedy gaberdines and have foul yellow kerchiefs twisted
round their heads; the Polish Jews are a red-headed, ragged
bearded crew, deplorably pockmarked, and wrapped in greasy
schoubs lined with catskin. But this was a handsome, shapely
fellow of full inches-healthy, cleanly, bright-l'œil vif, le
poing sur la hanche, le nez au vent, le pied campé. He did
not look in the least like a child of an oppressed race. He was
a Humbug, clearly, and I would have nothing to do with his
cholies choses.
According to the veracious Arab mythologist, El Jahrez,
commonly called 'Amr-ihn-Bahr, there are forty troops of Djinns,
or evil spirits, each troop numbering six hundred thousand
Djinnee. There are the Derhans, demoniacal animals, riding on
ostriches, and the Pharrars and the Ghaddars; but chief among
the Sheytans, children of Iblis, are the Kuturbs and the Ghoules.
The Ghoule is a lady-fiend; and, in addition to her traditional
partiality for human flesh as an article of food, she is con-
C
18
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
stitutionally “opposed to travel," and makes continual war on
travellers by sea and land, biting them, tripping them up, and
telling them all manner of naughty fibs, to deter them from
voyaging. Yes, I see it all. I have fallen under the malignant
influence of a Ghoule; and it is she who has laid so many
stumbling-blocks in the way of the Feringhee Sultan.
I was kept mooning about Paris for many days. I returned
to London, and then, excited by a rather false alarm of the
Emperor's starting-he was really to go this time, on the 22nd
-I rushed back to Paris. I exerted my "influence," and
learnt from a friend that a high officer of state had declared to
somebody else that his Majesty would positively quit Paris by
the Lyons railway on the 23rd. But he didn't, and I believed
in the machinations of the Ghoule-Sheytan, daughter of Iblis,
more firmly than ever.
There was not the slightest excuse for my taking a holiday.
It was the wrong time of the year for recreation, and, although
April, excessively hot. I was brimming over with suppressed
industry; but how could I sit to work? Imagine a war-
steamer, duly victualled and manned. She has had her com-
passes swung, she has taken her powder on board, her fires are
lighted, her steam is up, her engines pant to be free. Her
captain only waits for the little word "go;" but the telegraph
is silent, and the little word does not come.
I am sure had I taken to betting, or blind hooky, or other
AU SULTAN.
19
vicious courses during this probation of enforced idleness, it
would have been Cæsar and the Ghoule's fault, and not mine.
As it was, I forsook the paths of virtue, giving way to gluttony
by dining twice in the Rue Montorgueil, at Philippe's, and to the
most frightful disrespect for the Mosaic ordinances, by going
to see Verdi's Macbeth at the Théâtre Lyrique on Sunday
evening. Then, to crown my misdeeds, I went on the turf.
It was only to the extent of accepting the invitation of a kind
Mexican friend to make one of a party of Hidalgos to the
Bois de Boulogne races; but what right had I on a racecourse
when I should have been ploughing the briny main, or wading
through the sandy deserts of Africa?
We went to the races in a four-in-hand, a faultless English
drag, tooled in the most approved English style by a gentle-
man who spoke Spanish like a Spaniard and English like an
Englishman, and who by birth, education, and residence, be-
longed to both those nations. The four blood-horses, the
sable-clad grooms with their cockaded hats-for the Spanish-
Englishman on the box had borne Queen Victoria's commission
-with their folded arms, white cravats, and impassible faces,
the whole exterior of the turn-out was, from a strap-buckle to
an axle, thoroughly English; yet the crowds which thronged the
Bois may have wondered somewhat at the spectacle of so many
swarthy gentlemen with black moustaches, and smoking paper
cigaritos on the roof of that "coach d'un Milord Anglais."
C 2
20
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
We saw the races and all the grand folks to boot. The
Prince Imperial came, and then the Empress, and lastly Cæsar
himself. I stood close by him in the paddock, as he walked
gravely and slowly round inspecting the horses which were to
start for the Grand Prix. He looked in capital health, and
was loudly cheered; but why wasn't he in Africa?
I could stand it no longer, and determined to set off for
Lyons. If Cæsar won't move, I argued, I will, at least. It
was on the memorable Friday night when "L'Africaine" was
really brought out at the Grand Opera. Paris had been in-
vaded since the previous day by the musical critics attached
to the English press. There was a grand gathering of these
gentlemen, my worthy confrères, although in another depart-
ment of journalism, at the Café Cardinal. We all dined there
in great glee: the critics in full evening dress, your servant
in travelling suit and wideawake. The wines were exquisite.
There was a mayonnaise which brought tears into one's eyes,
and joy into one's heart. Life without a mayonnaise de
saumon would be indeed a dreary waste. That pale and
thoughtful head waiter with the blacking-brush whiskers
thought so, evidently. "Encore un tout petit brin," he whis-
pered to me softly,-after a second help, too. Who was to
withstand his seduction, or reject the proffered spoonful? A
mortal man? Scarcely.
They took a stirrup-cup-was it in Clos Vougeot?—ere they
AU SULTAN.
21
parted. "To the success of the 'Africaine!"" cried beaming
Sutherland. We drank it religiously, critics and non-critics.
"To the African travellers," cried good-natured 'Gus, filling
the glass again. They drank that. I blushed and ordered a
cab. And so we parted, they to see the new Opera, I to see
the new and strange land. It was the pleasantest of dinners,
although we were all in such a tremendous hurry—they to be
in time for their stalls in the Rue Lepelletier, I to make my
way via Lyons to the foot of Mount Atlas. A gay dinner!
Charles Lewis G, founder of the feast and staunchest of
Conservatives, your health.
So, into the railway, and the roar and the rattle of the
night, and at last, after troubled dreams of being poisoned by
a mayonnaise de saumon by Mademoiselle Sax, at the base of
a upas-tree, in strict accordance with the law of Java, (Vasco
de Gama dancing a saraband, meanwhile, with Ismaïl-bou-Maza
from the Rue de Rivoli,) the testy Frenchman in the pink silk
night-cap, who throughout the night had objected to the
window being opened, let down the sash. The hot air rushed
out like a troop of goblins, the raw keen morning breeze flew
in straight and sharp as an arrow from a Tartar's bow, and we
were at Lyons.
III.
STATE OF THE CASE.
"What I want," said Mr. Gradgrind, "is Facts."
Hard Times.
AND you shall have them, Mr. Gradgrind. Let us clear the
course, warn the public, and chase the little dogs off it; and ere
we start for the Barbary state, essay to measure the length and
breadth of the ground. "Photographs," the Federals assert,
giving you a carte de visite of a poor wretch in the last stage
of atrophy as the ordinary type of a soldier just released from
the Libby Prison :-" Photographs cannot lie." By a parity of
reasoning figures cannot err. Let us, then, be statistical for a
few moments, and examine the state of the case in Africa.
The French colony of Algeria is situated opposite the coast
of France, and is comprised within the 32nd and 37th degrees
of north latitude. The French possessions are bounded on the
north by the Mediterranean Sea; on the east by the Regency
of Tunis; on the west by the Empire of Morocco; and on the
south by the Great Desert of Sahara. After that is Nomans-
STATE OF THE CASE.
23
land-Terra Incognita—the great blank of Central Africa, in a
word. "And this country," Sir John Mandeville would say, "is
all full of divells." We do not know much more about Africa at
the present writing. The total area of Algeria may be stated,
approximatively, at 390,000 kilometres. Its greatest length
along the coast is 1000 kilometres. The climate is, as a rule,
mild and salubrious, although during May, June, and July, the
heat is often intense. In uncultivated districts agues and
marsh fevers are rife, but they can be extirpated precisely as
the frogs of the marshes and the adders of the jungles can be
extirpated. The plague has been unknown in Algeria since
the expulsion of the Turks. The mosquitoes are not half so
troublesome as those in America and the West Indies. The
fleas are numerous and indefatigable, but cheerful,—and will
hearken to reason; that is to say, to the arguments of soap,
water, and the scrubbing-brush, which, since the French occu-
pation, and especially since the establishment of the Second
Empire, have been freely introduced. The lower classes of the
natives wash rarely, and do not change their clothes more than
once a year, if so frequently. They are consequently more-flea-
bitless than the Christians. The direst local nuisance in Algeria
is the sirocco, or hot wind, blowing in from the Desert, and is
laden with "lily-white sand." The mean temperature on the
coast during January, February, and March, is 12° above zero ;
in April, May, and June, it may rise to 16° or 18°; in July it is
24
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
ordinarily from 20° to 30°; and in the last months of the year
it falls to 15° or 16°-all Réaumur. In the interior the tem-
perature is higher, save on the high table-lands of Kabylia,
where (as on the Mexican plateaux) it is often very cold, and
you may wear woollen clothes all the year round.
The coast abounds with excellent harbours, such as the bays
of Oran, Arzef, Algiers, Bougia, Stova (comprising the port of
Philippeville), and Bona. The islands on the littoral are very
few.
Rachgoun, near the mouth of the river Tafna; the
Habibas Isles, to the east of Cape Figalo; and Colombi, east of
Tinès, are nearly all that can be mentioned.
Algeria is divided into three distinct parts (Gallia est omnia
divisa in partes tres): 1st, the Tell; 2nd, the Highlands;
3rd, the Sahara.
The Tell (Tellus) is comprised between the seashore (Sahel)
and the northern slope of the Highlands. The Highlands are
neither more nor less than the summits of the Atlas range of
mountains; the Sahara or Bled-el-Djerid (Plain of Dates)
extends from the southern slope of the Atlas towards the
Great Desert. There are three chains of mountains traversing
Algeria from west to east-the Little Atlas, the Middle Atlas,
and the Big Atlas. I do not consider it expedient to worry you
with the Arabic names of particular mountains and peaks,
which you would never remember, and which (the mountains
themselves) you will probably never see.
STATE OF THE CASE,
25
From a vegetable point of view, Algeria may be divided into
three belts or zones. In the first, fringing the coast, you meet
with little beyond shrubs rarely exceeding ten or twelve feet in
height. The second belt, between the Sahel and the Tell, is
more thickly wooded; and in the third enormous forests cover
the slopes of the mountains stretching from Morocco east-
ward. In the province of Constantine the wooded districts.
come nearer to the coast; and in the neighbourhood of Phi-
lippeville there are enormous cork forests now being worked
by English enterprise (the London and Lisbon Cork Company).
Fire is the great scourge of all the sylvan regions: the same
scourge which ravages the "oak openings" of Canada and the
States; only, there, conflagrations are generally due to flying
sparks from the funnels of locomotives; whereas in Algeria
it is the Arabs who fire the forests in order to encourage the
French in their attempts at colonisation. I don't know whether
incendiarism is inculcated by Al Koran; but it is certain that
the true believers are inveterate followers of Irving. Alto-
gether (I am using throughout the decimal system) there are
1,300,000 hectares of wooded land in the three provinces.
Want of camels and communication renders the major part of
this lumber unavailable. A camel will carry almost anything;
still, you cannot load the "ship of the desert" with logs, staves,
and deals (the Canadian £. s. d.) as though he were a voyageur's
barge from Ottawa. And there is no St. Lawrence to float your
26
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
lumber down. Consequently, Algeria is a country in which the
houses are mainly built of stone, or of a peculiar cement of
rubble and lime called pisi, which becomes in time a good deal
harder, they say, than some stone.
I won't trouble you with the Linnæan nomenclature, and
indeed I should get into pretty trouble were I to begin to talk
about the Juniperus phoenicea or the Callitris quadrivalvis.
I will just mention that the principal trees in Algeria are the
cypress, the beautiful Barbary Thúya, the cedar, the pine, and
the maritime pine (Turner's), the oak, the cork-tree, the chest-
nut, the mulberry, the platane, the poplar, the willow, the
date palm, the desert palm, the laurel, the tamarind, the
orange, the walnut. In the Garden of Acclimatisation at
Algiers I have seen the banana, the cocoa-nut, the tallow- and
an attempt at the bread-fruit tree. After all, I think I might
as well quote Spenser:
And forth they pass, with pleasure forward led,
Joying to hear the birds' sweet harmony,
Which, therein shrouded from the tempest dread,
Seemed in their song to scorn the cruel sky.
Much can they praise the trees so straight and high,
The sailing pine; the poplar never dry;
The builder-oak, sole king of forests all :
The aspen good for staves; the cypress funeral;
The laurel meed of mighty conquerors
And poets sage; the fir that weepeth still;
The willow worn of forlorn paramours;
STATE OF THE CASE.
27
The yew, obedient to the bender's will;
The birch for shafts; the sallow for the mill;
The myrtle, sweet-bleeding in the bitter wound;
The warlike beech; the ash for nothing ill;
The fruitful olive, and the plantain round;
The carver-holm; the maple seldom inward sound.
But it is full of sugar, nevertheless, that "seldom inward
sound" maple. "He who hath a sweet tooth shall ofttimes
find it decayed." Was Edmund ever in Africa, I wonder.
Setting aside the birch and the beech, which I never saw in
Africa, these two stanzas from the "Fairy Queen" afford an
admirable summary of the Fauna of Algeria. But shall I tell
you the reason of my thus dilating on the Sylva Sylvarum ?
There was a little Spaniard at Milliana, who was a "wood-
monger," as Captain Fluellen told Ancient Pistol he should be,
and I bought nothing of him but cudgels. I had a great many
friends in London and Paris who expected that, on my return
home, I should bring each and every one of them a “trifle
from Africa,”—a thing more easily expected than accomplished.
You need be as wealthy as Soliman-ben-Daoud (Mr. Ruskin's
"Jewish Merchant," and the Arab Croesus) to make all your
acquaintance a present of a souvenir from Barbary in the
shape of a burnouse, a yataghan, a pair of damascened pistols,
an arabesque lantern, a silver-mounted mirror, or even a
chibouk or a pair of 'broidered babouches. The happy expedient
occurred to me at Milliana of laying in a stock of walking-
28
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
sticks of the country for distribution in Europe. The little
Spaniard was a most expert stick-maker, and he bound up for
me a fascicular bundle of canes of which a Roman lictor might
have been proud. I stuck an ivory-handled umbrella in the
midst in lieu of an axe. So, there was an olive for A., and an
orange for B., a Thúya for C., and a desert palm for D., and so
on to the end of the alphabet. Algerian tourist of the future
don't despise my little hint about walking-sticks. They will
even serve as presents for the fair sex; for in this wonderful
epoch of "frisky matrons" and "down the road" young ladies,
do I not hear of the fashionable bathers at Brighton and
Biarritz tripping over the sands with gold-headed canes re-
sembling the bamboos which the flunkies of the great bear
proudly on their golden splashboards? A wonderful epoch!
Why, at Margate they have adopted the "Zouave costume"
as a bathing dress, and the ladies and gentlemen can mingle
as freely in the water as though they were on the parade, and
absolutely dance quadrilles in the water. Cavalier seul and
the Ladies' chain in the briny ocean! They do it, and there
is no handwriting visible on the wall of the bathing machines.
But Facts, cries Mr. Gradgrind impatiently, Facts. Let me
tell you, then, Mr. G., that I omitted to mention the wild
cherry as one of the principal trees to be met with in Algeria;
that the mulberry is copiously cultivated with a view to the
sustentation of silk worms; and the production of olive oil and
STATE OF THE CASE.
29
The
the pickling of olives themselves as condiment are carried on
to a large extent. The Algerian oranges are of two kinds.
Those of Blidah are large, soft, and luscious, like the Cuban
oranges. Those of the Mitidja are smaller, compacter, and
stronger little cricket-ball oranges, like the St. Michaels.
Before the Conquest the vine was only cultivated for the sale
of grapes to eat, but the European colonists have tried vine-
growing for wine-making purposes with great success.
soil is said to be eminently favourable for the imitation of some
of the best crûs of the Côte d'Or. Medea, Mostagenim, Mas-
kara, and Cleman are surrounded by vineyards which, in 1854,
produced 11,800 hectolitres of wine and 18,000 quintaux
of edible grapes. By this time it is calculated the yield has
doubled. Several very satisfactory experiments have been made
in the manufacture of vins de liqueur-like the rich strong
dessert wines of Spain and Portugal. The French, however,
are more ambitious to produce wines resembling their national
clarets and burgundies.
Touching cereals: everybody knows that Algeria was once
the granary of Rome, and that Rome was a corn consumer
whom a thrifty housekeeper would sooner keep a week than a
fortnight. Prior to the Conquest the Arabs only grew hard bar-
ley, beans, maize, or Indian corn, and beetsessa, or millet, with a
kind of wheat. The French have introduced the culture of fine
wheat, rye, and oats. The Europeans continue, however, to
30
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
grow the hard wheat, which is much used in the manufacture
of vermicelli and other "pastes" for soup. In 1854, Mr.
Gradgrind, the grand total of grain produced in Algeria amounted
to 9,371,640 hectolitres, grown on 761,470 hectares of land, and
representing a money value of 137,743,847 francs, or about five
millions and a half sterling. Thus you see that if the Emperor
Napoleon has, as some people sneeringly say, won a white
elephant in a raffle, there is plenty of provender to feed the
monster withal. Remember, too, that these statistics were cal-
culated ten years ago.
""
In 1848 Algeria, "cette terre fromenteuse par excellence,"
was compelled, for all its corn-growing capacity, to import
twenty-three millions of francs worth of grain and flour. Since
1851, when the Custom House absurdities were slightly relaxed,
Algeria was able to feed herself, and to begin to export corn.
In 1855 this exportation rose to a value of seventy-four millions
of francs. According to M. Cardin, if Free Trade became fully
recognised, and all the resources of Algeria developed, the three
provinces ought to produce and export twenty times more corn
than they do at present; to say nothing of the cotton, the indigo,
the oil, and the dye-woods, which should properly make her, as a
Minister of War once prophesied she would be, the "India of
France." Algeria is not far from the coast of Spain. They
build the prettiest châteaux there you can possibly conceive.
The greener market gardening stuff of Algeria is amazingly
STATE OF THE CASE.
31
abundant, and of the biggest growth I ever saw. The asparagus
is tremendous. The melons might strike envy into the heart of
M. Alphonse Karr, as the cabbages would delight any good
housewife in a porter's lodge who desired the leafiest vegetables
for her pot au feu. With every other kind of vegetable known
in Europe, and with a great many to be met with only in
tropical climates, the tables at the hotels in Algeria are
always plentifully supplied. Both vegetables and fruit seem to
be very cheap-thirty or forty per cent. cheaper than they are
in France. The Arabs, however, though to a great extent
vegetarians, are not great consumers of green stuff. They are
now addicted to dried pulse; and are rarely seen to eat boiled
vegetables. With an enormous surplus of green meat on its hands
the colony naturally throws itself into export market gardening.
The celerity of communication now existing by means of rail-
ways and steamers favours this trade, and seventy hours do not
take much from the good quality of vegetables. Half the mon-
strous asparagus you see at Chevet's and Pohl's and Chabot's
comes from Algeria.
Let us now turn to the article of tobacco, of which not so
much as a "screw of bird's-eye" or a "penny Pickwick,” manu-
factured or unmanufactured, was exported in 1840. The ex-
ports of the weed had reached, in 1864, the value of 5,500,000
francs: more than a million sterling. The Algerian tobacco is
light, aromatic, and agreeable: not so vapid as Latakia, but
32
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
with all its delightful fragrance, and a pungent quality recalling,
now the best kind of Bessabarian, and now that capital tobacco
grown in the Lebanon. It certainly equals Maryland, of which
next to Caporal the French are, for pipe-smoking purposes,
most fond. In Algeria, however, it is unfashionable among the
European colonists to smoke a pipe. The settlement is a mili-
tary one, and the garrison must needs puff cigars. They do
puff them, with a vengeance. Given a permanent force of
eighty thousand men. Allow each man six cigars per diem-
a very moderate computation: that will give you a quota of
240,000 cigars a day, or 87,600,000 cigars to be supplied every
year. The tobacco manufacture is, of course, a government
monopoly. Cigars are wonderfully cheap, and a common soldier
gets them at the rate of three for a penny, and a discount off;
nor does a staff officer think it beneath his dignity to smoke
halfpenny cigars. Were there a large English or American
commercial or banking community at Algiers, you might expect
to find genuine Havanas at high prices; as it is, your only
choice lies between the light and fragrant Algerines at a sou
a-piece, and the abominable productions of the French régie,
which may be obtained as at high a price as you please, and
which are simply unsmokable.
Touching live stock, the statists put down the number of
horned beasts at one million, and of sheep at ten millions. The
first calculation is probably below the mark, the Kabyles, who
STATE OF THE CASE.
33
are the great proprietors of cattle, entertaining as great an
aversion as did Rob Roy of old to having their cows counted,
while the Sheikhs even of the plains systematically falsify the
returns of live stock exacted from them by the Bureaux Arabes.
It is difficult to get out of the Arab head the notion that if he
tells you how much property he possesses, you, the Frank, will
want to take some of it away. He can't bury his cows and
oxen in the ground as he does his money; so he says that he
hasn't got any, or that those browsing about the douar belong to
his uncle or his father-in-law. The Arab abhors statistics. He
won't be tabulated if he could help it; and were you to go to
Algeria, Dr. Colenso, you would find a deeply rooted objection
among the people to the reckoning, or "footing up," as the
Americans call it, of anything animate or inanimate. I call
your attention to this curious fact, Dr. C., for the reason that
it might assist you in your researches when you come to inquire
into the causes of the terrible trouble into which King David
got for "numbering the people,”"—a task which is undertaken
by every Christian government about once in every ten years.
The mineral wealth of Algeria is said to be extraordinary.
Mercury, copper, and lead abound in the three provinces. Up
to this time fifteen "concessions" for working mines have been
granted by the government, but only four have as yet been
"exploited." I don't think there is much to grieve about if so
much metallic treasure really does lie dormant. What does it
D
34
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
matter? There is more precious stuff in the earth than ever
came out of it: that is certain. Somebody will get at it some
of these days, unless, in the course of revolving ages, it all turns
into oyster shells, or flint hatchets, or plaster of Paris, or the
hind legs of mastodons. I could never understand that con-
tinual carking anxiety which seems to beset some men, because
there are a lot of marine stores in the bowels of the earth which,
just now, cannot be got at. An American has told me, with
tears in his eyes, that there is enough gold and silver in Arizona,
Nevada, and Sonora, to pay the Federal debt three times over.
Is mineral wealth the only "resource" which is not yet "de-
veloped?" Why, forty-six per cent. of the entire area of Spain
is still destitute of cultivation-primeval sierra or tierra “in-
cult and horride." Why, we haven't grown the slopes of our
railway embankments and cuttings in England with coin yet.
Why, we haven't even allowed poor Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson
-the most maligned Baronet of this or any other period—to
get that little Finchley Road Bill of his through parliament,
and enclose a slice of Hampstead Heath. If all the mines in
all the world were worked, and all the commons enclosed, and
all the herrings on the north-west coast of Ireland caught and
cured, and trundled about in barrows for sale, and all the
window-sills covered with flower-pots growing mustard and
cress, and all our house-tops planted, like so many hanging
gardens of Babylon, but with potatoes and onions-in a word
4
STATE OF THE CASE.
35
were all our “ resources developed" to their utmost, do you
think the millenium would come? I am afraid it would not.
I am afraid we should still continue to commit adultery,
get drunk, hoard up wealth for others to squander, or
squander our own and go in rags. I am afraid we should
not leave off telling lies, and robbing and murdering one
another, in a public and heroic, or private and Old Bailey
fashion, as we have been doing-do you know how many
thousands of years, Doctor? Pison compasseth the land of
Havilah, where there is gold. "The gold of that land is good:
there is bdellium and the onyx-stone." But those are among
the mines which have not been "exploited" by financial enter-
prise, limited or otherwise.
The Arabs are not the less sons of Jabal, whom Adah bore,
and who was the " father of such as dwell in tents and have
cattle." Ten millions of sheep! Prince Esterhazy might be
jealous; unless the proud Hungarian chose to cap Mr. Caird's
statistics by asserting that he had ten millions of shepherds.
The Algerian pastoral allowance is more moderate, one shep-
herd to every thousand sheep. The sheep never require
extraneous fodder. The ten millions are feeding like one, and
find enough to nibble as they browse. The only care they
require is shelter from the sun during the hot months of June,
July, and August.
Stone abounds. Every seaport town in Algeria looks, so white
D 2
36
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
is its sheen and massive its sweep, as though it had been
hewn out of a quarry. The lithographic stones of Dellys and
the grey marble of Cape Matifou are famous. Bona is sur-
rounded by carrières, producing stone for building rivalling that
of Franconia. The Filfillas marble, quarried near Philippeville,
is little inferior to that of Carrara. Of course, as marble it will
not command the Carrara price in the market. Who believes
in Crimean and Californian and South Australian champagne,
exquisite specimens as they are? The public will only place
credence in the products of Epernay; so the wine-merchants, in
their own defence (for even wine-merchants must live), palm
the Crimean, Californian, and Australian upon us as veritable
Moet and Chandon, or Veuve Cliquot, and we, the public, pay
our money and brag about our cellars accordingly. Then, from
the province of Oran and the mines of Aïn-Ouïn-Kel, near
Arzero, comes a beautiful marble veined with pink and rich
brown, of which the makers of articles de Paris know how to
make such excellent use in vases and statuettes. Finally, in
1852, there was discovered at Tleman a fine quarry of onyx
marble, conjectured to be the translucid alabaster of the Romans.
There are likewise, scattered through the country, a number
of mineral sources and hotsprings, suited for thermal pur-
poses: notably the baths of Hammam-Melveran, on the river
Arrack; and a few miles from Algiers, much renowned among
the natives, the hot waters of Hammam-Rhira, near Milliana.
STATE OF THE CASE.
37
These are salt, and are said to be capital for the rheumatism
and all nervous affections. Near the same town, among some
old Roman ruins (the Aqua Calida) is a ferruginous source of
a very high temperature: sixty-five degrees. The government
have established, at Millianah, a sanitorium and thermal hospital
for the use of the army, just as, seventeen hundred years ago,
the Romans sent their invalid legionaries to the Aqua Calida.
Rheumatism, tic douloureux, and ague, are the scourges of the
French Zouave. His pluck is indomitable, his moral powers of
endurance inexhaustible; but it is not always with impunity
that he gaily bivouacs in the midst of a bog, or spends half a
day, waiting to pounce on an enemy, in a creek up to his arm-
pits in water. His light and airy costume is admirably suited
to preserve him against coups de soleil; but the moon has
likewise shafts in her quiver which strike quite as fatally as
General Phoebus' red-hot bolts.
The rising moon hath hid the stars
Her level rays, like golden bars,
Lie on the landscape green,
With shadows brown between.
And silver white the river gleams,
As if Diana, in her dreams,
Had laid her silver bow
Upon the meadows low.
;
Vastly pretty is such a picture poetised by Mr. Longfellow;
38
A TRIP TO BARBARY,
but an Algerian clair de lune is the bugbear of the Zouave
or the Chasseur d'Afrique. Diana kisses them as she kissed
Endymion, but kills them too, with her "silver bow," some-
times.
The Algerian baths are very " old Hummums" indeed. They
have no pump and assembly-rooms, conversation-houses, or
kursaals. Visitors don't go there to flirt, buy nicknacks, dance,
eat, drink, or play trente et quarante. They go to wash and
pray. The wells are all holy, and a Marabout's shrine is sure to
be close at hand, just as in Mexico the baths of the Peñon are
stuck all over with puppet-saints and doll-virgins. To hold a hot
sulphur or iron spring sacred is part of Pagan, Mahometan, and
Roman Catholic civilisation, or religion, or superstition, call it
which you will. Miracles have been (supposititiously) performed
at the Hammam-bou-Hadjar, near Aïn-Temouchent, just as
in old times they were performed at St. Winifred's well-
Tumblay-les-Sources. The modern watering-places—your Scar-
boroughs, Saratogas, Spas, Baden-Badens, Hombourgs-are not
troubled with any religion at all. Saints and Marabouts would
be out of place there. 'Tis quite another personage who has
taken les villes d'eaux under his patronage:-a personage
with horns, and hoofs, and a tail.
The cultivation of cotton is making rapid strides in Algeria.
In the space of ten years it has progressed in the proportion of
4 to 159. In 1851 the cotton crop was of only 8000 lbs,
STATE OF THE CASE.
39
(4000 kilogrammes) weight; but in 1861, nearly 318,000 lbs.
were picked. The American collapse-a collapse from which
the South cannot be expected to "recuperate" for many years
to come—has awakened even more extended hopes among the
Algerian cotton-growers. So recently as 1862 there were but
forty hectares of land under cotton cultivation in the province of
Algiers; in 1863 there were six hundred, and at present there
are over a thousand. Each hectare is calculated to give an
average net profit of 4000 francs.
Besides grain, vines, tobacco, cotton, flax and hemp, there is
a considerable cultivation of odoriferous, aromatic, and medi-
cinal plants-of indigo, prickly pear (the Mexican nopal),
garance, of which I don't know the English name, but it is
the tincture with which the trousers of the French army are
dyed red; sergho, a kind of sugar-cane, and poppies for opium-
making.
From the vegetable come we to the animal kingdom. Don't
expect a burst of eloquence from me about the Arab steed.
I know nothing about horses. I refer you to General Daumas.
But, in the way of facts, Mr. Gradgrind, I may tell you that,
in 1857, statistics showed that there were in Algeria 7119
horses belonging to the Europeans, and 195,985 the property
of the natives. The Europeans also possessed 3983 mules, and
the Arabs 150,612. The French owned 3649 donkeys; but
the statists are silent as to the number possessed by the
40
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
indigènes. As one out of every three Bedouins you meet in
the country is mounted on a meek little "moke," which, com-
bined with the long legs, towering body, and flowing robes of
the rider, produces a wonderfully ludicrous impression on the
mind of the spectator, I should put down the number of
Arab asses at about one million.
Put down 18,218 pigs belonging to French farmers. The
Kabyles, they say, keep pigs; but the Arab farmers rarely, if
ever, breed the prohibited grunter.
The number of camels held by the Arabs is estimated at
256,555, and this is probably below the mark. The camel, or
rather the dromedary, is the most characteristic animal in the
country, although the ugly, strong, serviceable, and not patient
beast is rarely seen in Algiers itself. The dromedary is
called, generically, in Arabic djemel; the male is a beir, the
female a naga. A stud of a hundred dromedaries is termed
an ibel.
Persistently averse as they are to statistics, the Arabs will
condescend to count their camels. It is not said of a man that
he has so much money, or so many asses, but that he has so
many dromedaries. The camel is the most domesticated of all
their live stock. The Arabs treat him very kindly, and he
lives to be from thirty to forty years old. The naga bears but
one foal, and the foal is fit to travel almost as soon as he is
born. He bears no heavy burdens, however, until he is five
STATE OF THE CASE.
41
years old; at least a native satirist, abusing a certain tribe of
avarice and meanness, accuses them of "weighing. down the
four-year-old with heavy packs." The stories of the last straw
breaking his back, or of his uttering a peculiar cry when he
thinks that enough has been placed on his back, are, it is
scarcely necessary to say, nonsense. He will bear as much as
you are brutal enough to put on his hump; and, when he can't
bear any more, he will tumble down, worn out with weariness,
as a horse or an ass, under similar circumstances, would do.
For a long journey, if he be a robust beast, they give him a
load of six hundredweight. This he will carry for many days,
with proper night rest and tolerable rations, without much
distress. General Yussaff (whose career has been more adven-
turous and romantic than could be set down in ten ordinary
sensational novels of the highest spiciness) has made great use
of the dromedary in carrying troops, and General Carbuceira
even found him useful for dragging artillery. Not for the
first time has the djemel been so utilised. In the Syrian
campaign, Napoleon I. traversed the desert from Cairo to
St. Jean d'Acre with fifteen hundred men all on camel-back.
In British India, I believe, the dromedary has not risen in
military economy above the status of a bât animal. Was
there not a General once, long before the days of the mutiny,
who excused himself for not earlier beginning a battle on
the ground that the "soda water camels hadn't come up?"
42
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
Without soda and B. the envenomed strife could not possibly
commence.
The Algerian dromedary will plod-which is strictly his
mode of locomotion-from twelve to fifteen leagues, say forty
miles a day. The famous Mehari or post-courier camel, and
whom you may see in M. Vernet's pictures with a bearer of
despatches on his back, and scudding across the desert at a
tremendous rate, is bigger than the pack dromedary, and has
longer legs, although his hump is smaller. The Arabs say that
the Mehari goes like the wind; but this is an exaggeration.
He is, it is said, to the pack dromedary as the racer is to the
cart horse. He will break into a prodigious trot, it is true,
and keep it up for nine hours on a stretch. Courier Meharis
have been known to do forty leagues, or a hundred and twenty
miles a day. He does not consume more provender than his
brother of burden, but it is the custom to give him when on
duty a ration of dates mingled with barley.
When the dromedary is twenty years old he is no longer
fit to bear burdens. Then the Arabs fatten him, and, I am
ashamed to say, eat him. A beef-dromedary, aged, is worth
forty francs. His flesh is said to be as wholesome and nourish-
ing as that of the ox, but it has a slight musky flavour.
Camel's hump has been declared as great a delicacy as buffalo's
hump; but the hairy beasts of the prairies don't bear fardels,
and the djemels of the Tell do. The hump, in an old camel,
STATE OF THE CASE.
43
from the continual pressure on the muscles by superposed
weights, is, in truth, tougher than any other part save the
thigh. It therefore requires nice cooking; but the flavour-
to those who like it-is delicious. I have eaten bear, and
buffalo, and parrot, and (I dare say) unconsciously, cat, but have
never partaken of camel. My esteemed friend Mr. Church,
the admired painter of Chimborazo and the Heart of the
Andes, told me that he once made a very succulent luncheon
off monkey, and that if the friendly Indians, who regaled him
with that simious stew, had only dispensed with serving up the
monkey's head-which had an unpleasant resemblance to that
of a baby-the dish would have been perfect.
Young dromedary is as tender as veal. The skin of the
slaughtered animal sells in Algeria for twenty francs. Out of
camels' hair the Arabs weave tent coverings, burnouses, kaicks,
and other tissues. The French have also taken to making
textile fabrics from it, and a M. Davin has a spinning-mill for
camels' hair, which he afterwards has woven into cloth, and of
a very fine glossy quality, too, at Sedan.
The "harmless necessary cat" is one of the domestic animals
in Africa, and enjoys as much quiet consideration among the
Muslim as she does among Christians. A Moorish house is
nothing without a fountain; but it is not very Alhambresque
to see, as you often do, a placid tabby couchant on its marble
brim.
44
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
Algiers is full of lap-dogs and poodles, learned and unlearned,
and, in accordance with the last hideous caprice of the French,
the poor little beasts are dyed all manner of colours. I suppose
the pigments used are, like quack pills, "purely vegetable," and
that it does not hurt to be painted rose-pink or sky-blue; but
you can't help pitying these chromatic poodles, shivering in
their coats of many colours, like modest little Josephs led in
silken strings by Mrs. Potiphars from the Chaussée d'Antin,
and hanging their ears and tails as though they were conscious
and ashamed of the grotesque appearance they presented. I
advised a shoddy millionaire in New York once to give his
carriage horses a coat of size, and then cover them all over
with gold-leaf, and he regarded the idea in anything but an
unfavourable light. I don't think a gilt horse in the flesh (we
have him in plaster in the chemists' shops) would be an
absurder sight than a sky-blue poodle. When I left Algiers
the dogs were still unmuzzled, although the days were to all
intents and purposes canicular; but it is on the 1st of July,
I think, that the inexorable gagging decrees of the adminis-
tration are put in force. After that date any dog, be he a
butcher's cur or le carlin de la Marquise, is doomed to death.
Morning and night the fatal tumbril, the dog-cart, goes its
rounds. It is a kind of wooden sarcophagus on wheels drawn
by a weedy mule, and conducted by a couple of blackguard
Arabs. They are armed with hooks at the end of long poles,
STATE OF THE CASE.
45
and literally fish for stray dogs, catching them up anyhow,
and often in a very barbarous manner. It would be much
more merciful to lasso them, South-American fashion. The
hookèd dog is swung high in air, a sliding trap in the
sarcophagus opens, he is pitched into the midst of a group
of other jowling victims, and, at the end of the horrid tum-
bril's rounds, is conveyed to the shambles and knocked on
the head. This is the end of poor Dog Tray. The Arabs
are paid so much a head for the dogs they kidnap, and
the capitation fee being liberal, few unmuzzled bow-wows
escape the fatal hook. A similar search for and massacre
of dogs used to take place, I remember, every morning during
the summer on a bridge over the Fontanta canal at St. Peters-
burg.
Of native dogs, the two chief varieties are the tawny, meagre,
smooth-skinned wretches-own brothers to those canine vaga-
bonds and loafers which have been so long the pests of Pera
and Stamboul-which bark at your heels, and will bite, unless
you have a stock of stones to fling at their heads, in the out-
skirts of the douars, or villages. A stick is of little use in
keeping them at a distance; but a few well-aimed pebbles
(under the ear is the best place to hit them) soon send the
varlets scampering. A friend who has just returned from a
pedestrian tour on the banks of the Rhine and the Moselle,
tells me that the German villages are infested by vagrant dogs
46
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
to the full as savage as those of Turkey and Algeria. The
aristocratic dog, however, of the latter country is the celebrated
slougui, or greyhound. The slougui of the Sahara are said to
be much superior to those of the Tell:-the only one I saw.
Those of the Ouhd-sidi-Cheikh are famous throughout Barbary.
They are tall as Scottish deerhounds; the nose is very
pointed;
; the barrel very slender; the ears short; the forehead
broad; the hair soft; the tongue and palate black; the teeth
exceedingly tender, as is fitting for sporting dogs who, like
"well-bred spaniels,” should
ર
civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite."
General Daumas, the great horse and dog Saharan authority,
tells us that the tip of a well-grown greyhound's tail, passed
under his thigh, ought to touch the exterior condyle of the
femur, neither more nor less.
Among birds Algeria can boast the eagle, the falcon-the
"swell" Arabs are great falconers-the crow, the red beak,
the pigeon, the turtle, the Carthaginian fowl, the quail, the
ortolan, the "demoiselle" of Numidia, and the rest of the
feathery fellows familiar to us in Europe. As for the Algerian
ostrich (strutho camelus of Linnæus, Mr. Gradgrind) you know
all about him. I never saw one alive, save at the Zoological
Gardens, in London; but he abounds in Algeria, as you have
STATE OF THE CASE.
47
been informed by more adventurous travellers than I am; and
I know that ostrich eggs are worth four francs a piece in
Algiers. What the Algerines do with the eggs besides eating
them, I shall tell you in a subsequent page. The male ostrich
is called delim, the female remda, the chicks—fancy an ostrich
chicken a young Garagantua !-are termed cherata. The
Arabs believe that the ostrich is a cross between the fabulous
roe and a dromedary. Thus, frequently they speak of the
ostrich as the "camel bird.”
Game of all kinds abounds, and the pheasants are magnifi-
cent.
They are "some, too," to use a Yankeeism, at reptiles and
insects. There is a pretty little land-tortoise, like the terrapin
of Maryland, and like him convertible into capital soup. You
mustn't look, however, at his fingers and toes as you eat him.
Those digits are not pretty. There is a fresh-water turtle; a
toad, which attains enormous dimensions, but is quite stupid,
harmless, and good-natured as other toads all over the world
(the poor, maligned, spade-snubbed fellows); a cameleon, a
tarantula spider, and a viper. Likewise is there to be found a
big lizard, called dib, eighteen inches long-quite a pony-croco-
dile, but as innocuous as a hedgehog. The Arabs say that the
lizard never sleeps and never drinks-he is, in fact, a dry-look-
ing, wide-awake customer enough—they roast his flesh and eat
him, and proclaim him toothsome. M. Geoffroy de St. Hilaire
+
48
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
has heard rumours of an Algerian land-alligator, savage and
voracious as his Nilotic kinsman, and called the ouaran. Doctor
Larger saw one in the Sahara two yards long. No ouarans
came my way; but in Algerian fancy-ware shops you may buy
plenty of purses and tobacco pouches made of terrestrial alli-
gator's skin, which is shiny and corrugated, like shagreen, and a
dusky brown in hue. The vipers are troublesome, but not
deadly. A sand-bath is the most esteemed cure for a male
bite. Among the insects there are the tarantulas mentioned
above; grasshoppers, which swoop down on the field sometimes.
by myriads, and destroy everything green,-fruit, grain, and
vegetables indiscriminately; and scorpions, which last I never
saw in Africa, but which from the brief acquaintance I made
with them in Cuba and Mexico, struck me as resembling flying
lobsters seen through minifying glasses. The silk-worm is an
importation from Italy, but has thriven wonderfully. The Arabs
are good bee-masters, and believe all kinds of superstitious and
legendary rubbish about those useful little creatures. Rubbish?
well, that is as you choose to take it. Bees may be, after all,
of a much higher order of intellect than we imagine; and
perhaps, had they the gift of speech, would not talk so much
nonsense, in the way of prophecy, as the great apiarian, Dr.
Cumming, does.
The Algerian leech is known to all European chemists and
druggists. He is a tremendous fellow, and laughs the leech of
STATE OF THE CASE.
49
Asia Minor to scorn, yet, for a long period, he was classed at
Apothecaries' Hall among the inferior blood-suckers, but of late
years he has been estimated as highly as the terrific sangsue of
the Bordelais. His principal fault is that he is too greedy,
gorges himself quickly, and does not hang on long enough.
Round about Algiers there are numerous leech preserves; and
a leech pond is generally one of the chief attractions in the
gardens of the café restaurants which abound in the environs of
El Djezzair. To try and push one another into the leech pond
is a favourite amusement with the sportive shop-boys of Algiers.
I heard a horrible story (which I did not believe) of a German
waiter at one of these cafés, who, overtaken in beer, fell in
among the leeches one night. Nothing but his pipe—a hand-
some meerschaum-was found in the pond the next morning, a
fact leading one to conjecture that perhaps it was the pipe and
not the waiter that fell into the pond. The sea-fish are almost
as plentiful and various as those in the Gulf of Mexico-that
piscatorial Tom Tiddler's ground-and comprise many fish of
which we seldom hear in Europe, such as the Saint-Pierre (not
a haddock, its name notwithstanding: there must be two fish
sacredly thumb-marked); the wolf-fish, the tunny (a meaty fish,
between salmon and sturgeon, but of a delicate flavour, and
delicious en marinade as a hors d'œuvre), the mituna of the
Romans; the dorado, the bonito, the sardine (which is no more
a sprat, as has been recently ignorantly asserted, than a flea is
E
50
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
a lobster: vide in Pindar, Sir Joseph Banks), and the Mediter-
ranean langouste.
I have told you of the domestic animals of Algeria; but the
wild creatures of Barbary claim a passing word. The colony is
rich in Wombwelliana. There are, if you choose to go in search
of them, lions, panthers, hyænas, ounces, tiger cats, lynxes,
caracals, servals, ichneumons, weasels, porcupines, foxes, jackals,
tiger- or brindled cats (forming, I suppose, a kind of coalition-
ministry of all the Talent in the jungle); monkeys of two
varieties-those of Kabylia, and those of Chiffa, which last are
the small and frolicsome pugs, usually termed Barbary Apes.
There is nothing to be said about the Algerian lion after that
which Jules Gerard and Bonbonnel have written concerning
him the last-named Nimrod has taken up the lion-hunter's
mantle dropped by poor J. G.; but while the indomitable Lieu-
tenant of Spahis was alive, the specialty of Bonbonnel tended
more towards panthers. Bonbonnel I have seen.
A little man,
alert and crisp, vulgar, but modest, and with a face all mor-
ticed in cicatrices of continual clawing by non-Ephesian wild
beasts.
:
The jackal, known to the Arabs under the name of Dib, is
much respected by the Arabs, who believe him to be a kind of
subdevil. The howls of the jackals and the sardonic merriment
of the hyenas may be heard any fine night in the outskirts of
any Algerian town, with the exception of Algiers. It is not bad
STATE OF THE CASE.
51
to go to bed with the hyana's cynical chuckle for a lullaby. If
he is supping off your neighbour's sheep, or his shepherd, or your
neighbour himself, what is that to you? "There is something
in the misfortunes of our friends' for the remainder see
M. de la Rochefoucauld.
""
Wild boars used to be exceedingly numerous in the under-
brush, right along the coast, and close down to Algiers; but
they are only to be found now up the country, and the sport of
pig-sticking, once the favourite recreation of the French officers,
has become more extensive, and less safe. The ludicrous human
individuality which the Arabs attribute to the wild boar, and
the wonderful reports they circulate of his soliloquies—reports
overheard by hunters who have lain in ambush for him—in
which he swears by the beard of the Prophet, and curses every-
body's grandmother, are most amazingly set forth in Drummond
Hay's work on Morocco—a book which, on the head of piggery,
has been unblushingly borrowed from by the compilers of twenty
handbooks and Farmers' cyclopædias. I decline to be the
twenty-first borrower, and refer the reader, for further informa-
tion, to Drummond Hay.
There is a wild bull in the mountainous regions of the south,
which would give fifty to a champion specimen of the Chil-
lingham breed, and beat him easily. The Arabs call him
begueur-el-ourharh: he is the bubalis of the Romans. He is a
little beast, not bigger than a calf twelve months old, and is
E 2
52
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
distinguished among all other bovines by an anatomical pecu-
liarity in the structure of his skull, from the parietal bone of
which protrudes a kind of osseous coronet, from the extremities
of which spring the horns. Then there is the liroui, or “orna-
mented sheep," which some take to be the bearded sheep of
Pennant. He is bigger and stronger than an ordinary ram,
and, in addition to his beard, has long wiry ruffles round his
ankle-bones. Finally, there is the gazelle, which darling
abounds all over the country, and of whose horns and hoofs
the prettiest conceivable ornaments are made for sale in the
fancy shops.
And now, Mr. Gradgrind, having told you about the animal
and the vegetable kingdom, suppose I give you a few facts con-
cerning the bipes implumis-the Algerian man. I won't be
very statistical, or at all ethnological. The entire population of
Algeria, according to the census of 1861, was 2,999,124 souls.
Of these, 592,745 were Frenchmen, Spaniards, and other
foreigners, and sedentary Moors and Arabs; while of Arabs,
Bedouins, and Kabyles belonging to wandering tribes, or living
beyond the military boundaries fixed for the colonists, there
were no less than two millions four hundred and six thousand
three hundred and seventy-nine.
soldiers must be added to the six hundred thousand of careful
and law-worthy subjects of France first enumerated; which
leaves just two millions and a half of wild Arabs, bigoted
Eighty thousand French
STATE OF THE CASE.
53
Mahometans, and moderate haters of the Frank for the
Emperor Napoleon to deal with.
Such is the state of the case, Mr. Gradgrind; and the last
fact I have troubled you with is, perhaps, the most important
of all.
IV.
AT LYONS.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead.”—Mariana.
"SHE will come, she will come !" was the pathetic aspiration.
of poor old Monsieur Jacques in his garret, hoping against hope.
"She will come !"-he nursed, he cherished the conviction, and
it consoled him under all the privations which poverty could
bring, and all the indignities which a sordid landlord and an
unsympathetic washerwoman could heap upon his aged head.
The long-looked-for "she" did not come, having died at
Palermo; but her daughter came instead, and made the mourn-
ful musician happy.
For the best part of a week I had been muttering to myself,
all day, and pretty nearly all night through-for the heat of the
weather renders sleep difficult the converse of Monsieur
Jacques's refrain. "He will go, he will go!" I repeated
audibly or mentally, with but very little cessation-the com-
AT LYONS.
55
plainte being only varied by self-assurances to the effect that
"he must go ;" "he is pledged to go;" "he ought to go;" and
"he is sure to go." But, as you have seen, he didn't go when the
whole Parisian public confidently expected his departure, and he
continued not to go, day after day, with an alacrity of dilatoriness
enough to drive one desperate. So I found myself stranded,
like a barracouta on a dining-room table, at Lyons, frizzling
in the sun, gasping in the shade, and waiting for the Emperor.
They say his Majesty will be here at six o'clock p.m.; but
this may prove, after all, only a fond hallucination à la
Lyonnaise. I have come round, now, to the exact complexion
of Monsieur Jacques. It is no longer a question of "Will he
go?"—for I have gone away from his Majesty--but “ Will he
come?" If he doesn't, it will be, so far as I am concerned, a
very serious matter. Setting aside the public duty which I
have engaged to perform, I have invested capital in the eventu-
ality of Cæsar's progress to his great proconsulate. I have
bought a sun umbrella, a bottle of chlorodyne (in view of
possible cholera), a pair of green spectacles, as a preservative
against ophthalmia, the Algerian Itinerary of M. Louis Piesse,
and a patent "air-chamber hat," surmounted by an Indian
puggree. I won't say anything of the six first letters of the
Arabic alphabet which, after five days' painful study, I have
acquired, for they may prove useful some of these days when
I am despatched as Special Correspondent to the Khan of
56
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
Khiva, or to King Theodorus of Abyssinia. But my actual
position is not the less serious. I can't go back without having
been to Barbary. My acquaintances would cut me. My pro-
prietors would scowl; my publisher would probably assassinate
me. Sir John Falstaff avowed that he had misused the King's
press damnably. I shrink from mis-using the press of the
people. I can't walk down Piccadilly in that puggree, unless it
be in a travel-stained state. The little boys would hoot me if I
unfurled in Regent-street a white umbrella lined with green.
As it is, I have lost caste with my friends in Paris by peram-
bulating the Boulevard des Capucines in a tropical suit of
blue flannel, of which, like a Catherine pear, "the side that's
next the sun" turns red. I can't go back to England after
having told everybody I was going to Algeria; and to describe
Algeria without the Emperor would be, under present circum-
stances, very much like giving the play of Hamlet with the part
of Hamlet omitted. It is impossible to reach Alexandria in
forty-eight hours, else I might hasten down to Marseilles, take
shipping, levant to the sandy land of Egypt, and describe the
opening of the Suez Canal on Monday next. They say it is
really going to open, but I still disbelieve the assertion. It is
with M. de Lesseps' big ditch as with the cry of "wolf" in the
fable. Some of these days the Mediterranean and the Red
Sea will really be united; but the fact will be swamped by
general incredulity. The Suezides have cried "wolf" too often.
1
AT LYONS.
57
It is difficult to exaggerate the moral peril in which I am
placed. If the Emperor throws me over, I don't see, as a con-
scientious Correspondent, any other way out of the dilemma
save to drown myself in the River Saône, or to hang myself to
one of the new and gorgeous lamp-irons in the Place Louis le
Grand. It would be making, after all, a good exit. One might
humbly hope for a niche in the Temple of Fame next to that
occupied by the immortal Vattel, who fell upon his own sword
an operation the feasibility of which I could never realise in
imagination--because the fish had not arrived in time to be
dressed for his royal master's table. And a Correspondent,
after all, is not unlike a cook. He is always at the fire, and not
unfrequently burns his fingers. The public requires his dishes
to be "spicy," and if the spice does not suit their palates they
curse him.
The streets of Lyons on this present Saturday are abundantly
hung with tricoloured flags, and everybody, from the head
waiter at the Grand Hotel-a very fair imitation of its proto-
type in Paris-to the old lady in the vast straw hat who sits in
a razeed cask and sells newspapers at the corner of the Rue de
la Charité, says that the Emperor is really coming. After re-
peated disappointments, I have grown sceptical. The Lyons
press, it is true, are unanimous in announcing the arrival of the
Imperial party this evening. Le Progrès, corroborated by all
its contemporaries, states that Napoleon III., accompanied by
58
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
three aides-de-camp, General Fleury, General Castelnau, and
General Count Reille; by two officiers d'ordonnance, the
Counts d'Espeuilles and De Ligneville; by M. Pietri, his
Majesty's private secretary; and by Dr. Corvisart, his physician,
will reach the railway terminus at Lyon-Vaise at six. A grand
official dinner is to take place at the Hôtel de Ville at seven.
To-morrow (Sunday), at eight a.m., there will be an official
reception of the municipal body; the chief of the State will
then proceed to the operatives' quarter and La Croix Rousse;
he will hear mass in the chapel attached to the hospital of the
arrondissement, and inspect the progress made towards the
demolition of the walls which have so long separated La Croix.
Rousse from the other quarters of this splendid and populous
city. At eleven the Emperor is expected to leave the Hôtel de
Ville for the Lyon-Perrache station en route for Marseilles.
He will pass the night on board the Imperial yacht l'Aigle,
which on Monday, the 1st of May, at nine o'clock in the morn-
ing, will get her steam up for Algiers. May I be there to
follow! The programme, you will perceive, is a sufficiently
rapid one.
Whenever a French monarch makes a progress-however
transitory it may be-through the departments, a deluge of
petitions is sure to descend upon him. Every one, from M. le
Maire down to Jacques Bonhomme in his blouse and sabots,
wants something: promotion, the cross of the Legion, a pension,
AT LYONS.
59
a pardon, justice against a knavish lawyer, protection from the
tyranny of a mother-in-law, funds to pay off a mortgage or to
pursue a course of study tending to the discovery of the per-
petual motion-anything you choose to mention. Centralisation
has made of the Prince in France a kind of sublunary Provi-
dence, and all mortals pray to him. In England no one knows
what becomes of the petitions showered upon Parliament every
afternoon in the session. What, for instance, will be the future
of that recent memorial of the gentlemen in the Isle of Dogs
who want the British Museum to be opened on Sundays? I
never saw a petition lining a trunk or encircling a pat of
butter. I fancy that the blue books and the petitions must
retire to some limbo of oblivion, as, according to Sam Weller,
the old postboys and the old donkeys go off, in pairs, “an 'I
niver hard narawun sey 'ded myoule," writes Mr. Josh Billings.
As for petitions addressed directly to the sovereign, I should
advise you in England not to attempt the presentation of one.
Z 92 would take you into custody in a trice, and it might fare
hard with you. In France, written supplications from the very
meanest of the community are carefully read, and their prayer,
if it be worth anything, is answered. The fact is, that the only
possible appeal in this country is to Cæsar, and Cæsar must per-
force incline his ear to the appellants. Some precautions are
still necessary to guard against the chief magistrate's being abso-
lutely suffocated as he passes, in his open carriage, by bolsters
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of paper.
Thus the multitudinous tribe of petitioners are
warned this morning, by authority, to lodge their supplications
at the Hôtel de Ville, a special bureau having been prepared for
the reception of such documents; and the public are strongly
"recommended to abstain" from casting bouquets or letters into
the Emperor's carriage. To what altitude above the heads of
the clerks in the special bureau the pile of petitions has by this
time risen, I have not been informed. I don't know what high-
water mark may be at the Pont de Serin; but I do most
sincerely pity M. Pietri, in view of the amount of work in
opening envelopes and reading spider-like scrawls which his
Majesty's private secretary will have to get through during the
next twenty-four hours. And the petitions of Marseilles are yet
to come. As for the classes who have no private or personal
requisitions to make, they are banded together in a many-headed
legion of expectants who are in hopes that Napoleon III. will at
once take the tolls off all the bridges across the Saône. A
Ministerial paper discreetly points out that if this act of grace
were accorded, so many passengers would at once flock over the
bridges, that these structures might give way beneath their
weight—a hypothesis which strikes me as being, at the least,
ingenious.
Special preparations have of course been made for the
Imperial visit; but the city does not wear that all-pervading
festive and holiday appearance which would be at once apparent
AT LYONS.
61
on the day of so momentous an event in an English town. An
extra allowance of tricoloured flags apart, there is, in truth, no
need to put any considerable place in la belle France in gala
apparel. There is always a fête. C'est le soleil et la gaieté
nationale qui font les frais" Phoebus and a light-hearted
people are always on hand to pay the pipers." The holidays
seem to last all the year round. At the same trim little tables
on the pavement, in front of the same handsome cafés, sit the
same ten thousand people who have nothing to do. They are
morning, noon, and night doing it :-playing cards and domi-
noes without gambling, smoking the strongest and worst cigars
without tumbling over with paralysis of the brain, and sipping
petits verres without getting tipsy. A strange people! I don't
think the most temperate of Frenchmen could exist without a
certain allowance of cognac in the course of every day; and
yet who ever saw a Frenchman "tight?" What in England
would a banker think of his clerk if he beheld him sitting in the
street, outside a tavern, at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, smoking
a cigar as big as a black pudding, drinking raw brandy, and
taking a hand at piquet? That banker would at once opine
that his clerk was going to the dogs. Change the scene to
France, and the banker will be regaling himself with absinthe
at one table, while the subordinate finishes up with vermouth at
another.
There is to be a grand Musical Festival this evening at the
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principal theatre-one of the largest and handsomest in pro-
vincial France. Félicien David's Desert-a very appropriate
pièce de circonstance, when it is remembered that the illustrious
visitors to Lyons will so soon make a personal acquaintance
with Sahara-is to be performed, and it is earnestly hoped
that the Emperor will be present. The festival is for the
benefit of the unemployed workmen of Lyons, of whom there
are unhappily at present many thousands. For day labourers—
masons and bricklayers, carpenters and painters-employment
has been found on those public works which vie, and on no con-
temptible scale, with the colossal undertakings by means of
which under the Imperial régime Paris has been all but
entirely transformed. Lyons has undergone a kindred metamor-
phosis. On every side sumptuous buildings are rising-their
dazzling façades of carved stone contrasting strangely with the
crumbling and blackened walls of the few old buildings which
have escaped the besom of municipal reform. Haussmanism
is visible from end to end of lower Lyons. New quays, new
bridges, new streets, among which the Rue de l'Impératrice is
pre-eminent; broad foot-pavements, where before were only
jagged stones and filthy gutters; the Hôtel de Ville-which,
in point of size and splendour, ranks next to the Stadt House
at Brussels-repaired and restored; the magnificent Bourse
rebuilt; new boulevards, hotels, cafés, shops, and private houses
innumerable all attest the renovating zeal which the example
AT LYONS.
C3
4
of Imperial Paris has instilled into the departments. There
is scarcely a trace of provincialism in the Lyons of 1865. It
has a thoroughly metropolitan appearance. It has drapers'
shops which rival the "Magasins du Louvre" or the "Villes
de France." It has a school of painting of its own, and the
Société des Amis des Arts is said to be as wealthy and
prosperous as our Art Union. Only now and then-in one of
those crumbling and blackened tenements of which I have
spoken, peeping through a bright perspective of bran-new six-
storied mansions; or in a time-worn and weather-stained statue
of the Virgin and Child in a niche at a street corner; or in a
lowly little wooden stall clinging to the wall of a church, and
displaying for sale clumsy wooden shoes, little saints and
saintesses in coarse earthenware, street ballads of the rudest
kind, flaring sheets of woodcuts setting forth the sufferings of
the Wandering Jew, the adventures of Géneviève de Brabant,
and the appalling tortures inflicted by Monsieur and Madame
Croquemitaine upon naughty boys and girls-can you find
aught to remind you that you are not in Paris. Everywhere else
are traces of Imperialism—of the new, the splendid, and the
sudden.
In the Croix Rousse, and elsewhere too in the working
quarters of the city, there is much poverty and its inevitable
attendant-sickness. Look through the broken casement into
that poor dark room. There are the beams and threads, and
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the sickly weaver, brooding. His face is very yellow-white.
He has always a blue, bristly beard of four days' growth. He
always wears a woollen nightcap in the daytime. God help you,
sickly weaver you have a bad time of it, though it is your
business to array Solomon in all his glory, and to dress his
multitudinous concubines in silken sheen.
For how many
hundred years have you been sickly and squalid, and half-
starved-you, and your twin-brethren in Spitalfields and
Coventry? Good harvests or bad harvests, Palmerston or Derby
uppermost, the weaver is always poor and pinched and sickly.
The loom in Lyons, just now, does not move quickly enough. The
shuttle is not thrown so often as it should be. The manufactures
of Lyons have not recovered from the stagnation brought about
by that horrible American war. The weavers are in a pitiable
state; and in a state as pitiable they will continue, I fear,
till weavers are no longer needed, or till kingdom come.
HE COMES.
We all started up from the table d'hôte at the news that
Napoleon III. had really and truly arrived, and we reached the
Place de l'Hôtel de Ville in time to hear the acclamations
which greeted the ruler of the French people as, accompanied
by a brilliant staff, and preceded by the prefect, M. Chevreau,
he entered the municipal palace, and proceeded to the suite of
apartments prepared for him. The Emperor looked in the best
AT LYONS.
65
of health and spirits, and was evidently well pleased with his
reception. It was most enthusiastic. The working classes
were very fully represented on the occasion, and especially con-
spicuous in awarding a cordial welcome to the man who has
done so much for them; and cries of "Vive l'Empereur!"
Vive Napoléon III.!" from the blouses rent the air in all
directions. The Grand Theatre of Lyons is within a few paces
of the rear of the Hôtel de Ville, and the intervening space was
closely packed with sight-seers, determined to catch a glimpse
of the Emperor as, having dined, he crossed the parvis on his
way to the theatre. Here, and in the adjoining Rues Impériale
and de l'Impératrice, all Lyons seemed to be concentrated.
Circulation was not impeded, thanks to the exertions of a
number of very courteous gendarmes, who persuaded much
more than they coerced; whose towering cocked hats appeared
to act as a more powerful solvent on the masses than do the
truncheons of our own somewhat too rough-and-ready police-
constables; and who, while insisting that stationary groups
should move on, did their spiriting most gently, as though
conscious that their reputation for gallantry among the fair sex
was at stake, and they were anxious not to imperil it by unneces-
sary harshness. The throng was, nevertheless, an enormous one.
The ten thousand people with nothing to do became suddenly
multiplied by twenty, and took up a stronger position than ever
at the tables on the pavement. Shrill cries for chartreuse verte
F
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and parfait amour resounded on every side, and the con-
sumption of good coffee and bad cigars was unprecedented. At
the door of every other shop were giggling and romping groups
of grisettes. The Lyonnese grisette is a delightful fact. She is
tall, shapely, and exceedingly handsome, and although not so
picturesque in attire as her Bordelaise sister, is still charming
and coquettish enough to drive the least excitable of males
crazy. Her eyes are like those of a young antelope; and her
hair is so dark and glossy that she can well afford to despise the
last Parisian vanity of essaying, by means of ochres and un-
guents, to turn it red. It is only, indeed, as you penetrate
south that you begin to see the French grisette in her true
colours. To-morrow I shall see her at Avignon, at Montélimar,
at Marseilles. The Parisian grisette-the racy little thing
who was first introduced to polite society by the delightful
Lafontaine, that large-hearted fabulist, "in wit a man, sim-
plicity a child,”—the grisette whom Béranger sang, whom
Charlet and Gavarni drew, whom Paul de Kock immortalised in
prose-exists no longer. Either she is ugly, and nobody takes
any notice of her save dissolute septuagenarians in the Marais,
or medical students in their first term; or, being pretty, she
ceases to be a grisette, and becomes a cocotte-the cold, calcu-
lating, rapacious creature with false hair, and a falser heart,
and painted eyes, who rides in the Bois de Boulogne in a basket
carriage, with postilions and outriders,-the barterer of smiles
AT LYONS.
67
for gold who is ever on the watch for Russian princes and South
American diplomatists whom she can fascinate, ensnare, and
devour. But the grisette of the South has not yet begun to
paint, or ceased to love.
Hark to that monotonous sing-song drawl in front of a café.
Here is a whole "school" of "patterers"-the principal, the
second, and the "stall"-close kinsmen to the Seven Dials'
“death and fire hunters" who pervade West-end streets after
nightfall, and cozen servant-maids sent out for the beer into
buying halfpennyworths of apocryphal news. "Demandez, de-
mandez, messieurs et mesdames, le programme de l'arrivée
dans sa bonne ville de Lyon de sa Majesté Napoléon Trois,
Empereur des Français, le prix duquel est dix centimes." Such
is the burden of the Lyons patterer's deep diapason.
It is well worth while expending two sous in the broadsheet
which he sells; for, although the "programme" is but a reprint
of the paragraph in Le Progrès of this morning, there is joined
to it a document which is worth ten times ten cents—I mean
the letter just addressed to the Minister of the Interior by the
Emperor, relative to the improvements still necessary to perfect
the complete "agglomeration" of the city of Lyons. This
Napoleon III. proposes to do by relieving the bridges over the
Saône, of which I spoke just now, of all tolls or dues; by demo-
lishing the old bastions and casemates of La Croix Rousse; by
clearing the approaches to the Archbishop's Palace; and finally
F 2
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tr
by the creation of two new squarrs"-one in the suburb of
La Guillotière, the other on the grounds just vacated by the
displacement of the great Seminary of Lyons. The terms in
which the Emperor announces his intention are significant.
His Majesty points out that, as the bridges over the Rhône
have already been enfranchised, a similar measure of liberality
is essential to those which cross the Saône. This measure will
cost nearly four millions and a half of francs, and the expense is
to be chargeable equally to the budget of the city of Lyons and
to that of the State. Fancy the frenzy of the county members
at home, if it were proposed to make Waterloo Bridge toll-free
at the cost and charges of the British Government! The Em-
peror proceeds to argue that the fortifications of the Croix
Rousse are morally as well as materially obsolete—“ elles n'ont
plus aucune raison d'être." They would be useless as a means
of defence against a foreign foe, and the time has gone by when
it was deemed necessary to raise barriers against internal revolt.
"The industrial population of Lyons," remarks the Emperor,
are too intelligent, they know too well how much I have their
interests at heart, to wish to compromise them by raising com-
motions. I desire, then, to replace the wall of octroi, the work
of the suspicions and the misgivings of a bygone epoch, by a
vast boulevard, planted with trees, which shall be an enduring
testimony of my confidence in the good sense and the patriotism
of the people of Lyons." In another portion of this remarkable
AT LYONS.
69
letter the Emperor specifies what has been done to prevent the
recurrence of inundations, and what there yet remains to do to
give "light and air" (de l'air et du soleil) to the populous
quarters of the city. Surely these are very pregnant words to
be heard in this great city, where, twenty years since, the
rumblings of discontent were almost incessantly heard. The
weavers were poor and sickly then as now; but it was at their
rulers' doors that they laid their sickness and their poverty;
and ever and anon they rose against them fiercely, and strove
to rend them in pieces. In that admirable series of Tracts
published by the Messrs. Chambers for the purpose of dis-
seminating information among the people, there is not one
more interesting in its theme, more graphic in its narrative,
more mournful in the moral it points, than that which contains
the account of the insurrections at Lyons in 1832 and 1835.
There is scarcely a stone in the declivitous streets of the Croix
Rousse but which might be cemented with the blood of French-
men slain there. Through the streets which Napoleon III. will
traverse to-morrow in peace, and honour, and the midst of a
shouting concourse, regiments of cavalry have charged till the
hoofs of their horses were bloody. Every narrow lane has been
choked by barricades; from every point of vantage the cannon
have belched forth their messages of slaughter, or volleys of
musketry have mown down men, women, and children. It is
good to hear of the grim, stupid, unreasoning bastions, built to
+
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""
keep down that ghastly chronic phantom of "l'Emeute,” being
laid low, and giving place to "a vast boulevard, planted with
trees.' It will be a long time, one may venture to predict,
before the workmen of Lyons rise in revolt again. Why do
men revolt? Because they are unhappy. I will go further
still-why do they steal? Because they are poor and miserable,
and were born hungry, and bred miserable and dirty. And the
cure? It is the old story. The architect, and he who directs
the architect, are the two great reformers. Pull down the filthy
hovel and the frowning wall, let sunshine and air into the poor
man's dwelling, give him water to wash with and books to
read, and you may give the perpetual policeman an all but
perpetual holiday.
There is
Lyons is ablaze to-night with illuminations.
scarcely a window without a loyal Chinese lantern, or at least a
patriotic dip; and on the staircase of the Grand Hotel I have
counted forty-seven elderly gentlemen, in white cravats and
Gibus hats, and with the ribbon of the Legion at their button-
holes, bound to the gala performance at the theatre.
•
V.
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
"Mes enfants, dans ce village,
Suivi de rois, il passa.
V'là bien longtemps de ça ;
Je venais d'entrer en ménage.
A pied grimpant le coteau,
Où, pour voir, je m'étais mise-
Il avait petit chapeau,
Avec redingote grise-
Auprès de lui je me troublai.,
Il me dit, 'Bonjour, ma chère !
Bonjour, ma chère.'-
'Il vous a parlé, grand' mère ?—
Il vous a parlé !
"""
BÉRANGER. —Les Souvenirs du Peuple.
THE rejoicings of Lyons, although on a very sumptuous and
complete scale, and altogether of the most gratifying descrip-
tion, were eminently genteel, and not devoid of the solidity and
gravity befitting a great manufacturing centre. Lyons, too,
assumes to be a metropolitan rather than a provincial city, and
may have been wishful to make strangers believe that she was
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accustomed to emperors, and respected her own dignity too
much to make any unnecessary fuss over them. Moreover, the
Agglomération Lyonnaise has its Rive Gauche as Paris has-
its certain proportion of politicians, not, I believe, among the
working classes, but in the more elevated ranks of the community,
who cannot be brought to think well of the existing Govern-
ment, or any existing Government, and whose nil admirari
disposition may have aided in repressing the effervescence of
popular enthusiasm, very much as a finger placed on the rim of
a champagne glass tends to keep the merry bubbles from racing
down the sides, and so on to the table-cloth. In a word, the
Emperor was received in Lyons much as he is generally received
in Paris-with great and apparently genuine joy by the opera-
tives for whose material well-being he has worked so steadily;
with cordial courtesy by the bourgeoisie, who are not in any
part of the South very demonstrative; and with calm good-
breeding by the Upper Ten Thousand.
At Marseilles the case was very different.
The reception
swelled into a triumph, and that of the most colossal kind. There
might have been reasons for such an outburst of popular jubila-
tion as I saw on the last of April-an outburst certainly never
surpassed in my experience of the entries of sovereigns into their
cities. Marseilles could be, in the first place, under no appre-
hensions of compromising her dignity by being noisier in her
demonstrations of gladness than Paris; for Paris is, in the
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
73
unanimously received Marseillais opinion, a very mean and con-
temptible little place when compared with la grrrrrande ville
de Marseille. "If Paris had a Cannebière," they say, “Paris
would be oun petit Marseille." The Tuileries are all very
well; so may be the Louvre; but what are both to the Château
Impérial and the new marine villa which the Marseillais are
building for their well-beloved sovereign, in order, to use their
own naïve expression, that he may "always have his feet in the
sca?" As for the Champs Elysées, bah! has not Marseilles her
Prado? Can the Bois de Boulogne vie with the Chemin de la
Corniche? Is not the Arche de l'Etoile a mere sentry-box by
the side of the Porte d'Aix? Are the column in the Place
Vendôme and the monument to Bishop Belzunce fit to be
named in the same breath? How can Paris affect supremacy
when she has no Quai de la Joliette, and no Bassin Napoléon,
to say nothing of the Old Port? and, in fine, can the Château
de Vincennes bear scrutiny by the side of the Château d'If?
The Marseillais are firmly convinced that it cannot. They
hold the comfortable and wholesome creed that their own city—
and a very jolly, bustling, handsome city it is-is the most
splendid on the face of the globe; and that Paris, London, St
Petersburg, and the rest, are but so many obscure and "one-
horse" capitals. I call this creed " wholesome." Is it not so ?
What could there be more salutary than for a man to believe
that his own place, his own people, his own manners and customs,
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are the very best in the whole world? Abstractedly, such a
persuasion may look like egotism and vanity, but in reality it
is patriotism. A Little Pedlingtonian has an immutable right
to stand up for the superiority of Little Pedlington against the
whole universe in arms. I remember once seeing in a Paris
café a gentleman from the hot southern city I am now inhabit-
ing, and who, having been overcharged some fifteen centimes
by the waiter, flew into a violent passion (as is customary with
his compatriots), foamed at the mouth, and proceeded to split a
marble table in half, to demolish a pile of coffee-cups, bottles,
and glasses, to half-strangle the offending garçon in his own
white cravat, and, on the whole, to do about a hundred and
fifty francs worth of damage. "Ze le ferai connaître, le
brigand!" he exclaimed, panting, when the sergents de ville
had gotten him under the armpits, "que ze souis Marseillais !"
And on this head I am reminded of a poor flower-girl on
St. Mark's Place, who once offered a halfpenny bouquet to
an English tourist. Like a goujat bourru as he was, he refused
it. The flower-girl told him, smiling, as only the Venetians can
smile, that she did not want any money: he still haughtily
declined; but, as ill luck would have it, when he reached the
Piazzetta, he, being again importuned, but by another flower-
girl, bought a rose from her. Forthwith florist number one
sprang towards him, and stabbed him under the fifth
rib. Beyond the Alps, they have usually a knife handy, en
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
75
cas de nuit―ou de jour. The Spanish women carry their
cuchillos in their garters; the Italians, I should fancy, in their
corsets. When interrogated as to the motives of her crime, she
answered proudly, "He despised me. What right had he to
despise me? Non son io Veneziana? Am I not a Venetian?"
And the raggedest gondolier on the Lido might brain you with
his oar, now, if you were to tell him that there were more ships
at Trieste than at Venice.
You will thus understand that “la grrrrrande ville de Mar-
seille" is, in the estimation of the natives of the Department of
the Bouches-du-Rhône, a city unsurpassed and incomparable.
Held by the strongest of Trotman's anchors to this rock of faith,
the old place, which claims, with what reason I know not, to
have a Phoenician origin, but which was undeniably a Roman
station of importance, determined to give the emperor a recep-
tion after her own fashion. Napoleon III. has done much for
Marseilles, as he has for every other town in France. He has
embellished it; he has enlarged it; he has replaced foul and
filthy alleys by noble streets full of palaces; he has developed
the industrial and commercial resources of the city—in a word,
he has imbued with life and action that which was heretofore
supine and inert. But beyond all these, he has another and a
stronger claim to Marseillais gratitude. He has abrogated the
unutterable abominations of the Old Port. He has constructed
new and commodious docks. He has drained a city once the
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of
unhealthiest in Europe. He has made Marseilles smell sweet.
Si monumentum quæris, circumspice: look around upon
broad foot-pavements instead of hideous kennels; upon wide
windows in place of blinking casements; upon streams of
fair water in lieu of heaps of ordure. The strong hand of
Sanitary Reform in Marseilles has bound with links of iron
the Old Devil of the Levant, who had his head in Cairo,
his arms at Smyrna and Stamboul, his feet at Marseilles.
Remember the Plague. The death-carts have lumbered up
the Cannebière; Solomon Eagle has been heard in the Cours
St. Louis; the plague-pits were on the road to Arles. That
Belzunce monument I spoke of was erected to the memory
a good Catholic bishop who did his best to stay the ravages
of disease in Marseilles in Louis the Fifteenth's time. Over
and over again has the city been more than decimated by
the most virulent form of Oriental pestilence. Marseilles was
ever at war with the plague, as the Knights of Malta were ever
at war with the Turks. Like a thief in the night the pestilence
would creep into the port-now in a bale of goods, now in the
rags of a ransomed captive from Algiers or Tunis, and swoop
down upon the defenceless population. The sun and the mud,
and the narrow streets and dirty houses, did the rest. Now,
although we are prone enough to forget the benefits that have
been conferred upon us, we generally preserve some decent
kind of gratitude towards the doctor who has saved our life.
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
77
Napoleon III. has done, and is doing, his best towards doctoring
his great Mediterranean seaport into health; and the gratitude
felt by the southerners is enhanced by the reflection that the
Imperial reforms have conduced not only towards purifying, but
also towards beautifying, that which they hold dear as the apple
of their eye—La grrrrrande ville de Marseille.*
And there remains another reason why a glorious welcome is
ever rendered by this hospitable and impulsive population to
any one who bears the name of Bonaparte. The Marseillais
claim the first Emperor as one of themselves. He was born, it
is true, in Corsica; but he belonged from early associations to the
shores of Provence. His father sought health at Montpellier ;
* Since this was written the cholera has visited Marseilles; but we are
entitled to assume that its progress would have been aggravated in severity but
for the architectural and sanitary precautions which have been taken of late
days in la ggggrande ville. Yet did I meet one inhabitant, who held the re-edi-
fication of the city in much disfavour, and prognosticated the direst results
therefrom. The Cassandra in question was an old woman who kept a book-
stall in a lane off the Rue St. Ferréol. "I should not wonder," she mumbled
out, "if all this va et vient, this pulling down of good old streets and houses,
were to bring the plague of 1721 back to Marseilles." On interrogating her I
found her imbued with a prejudice-for the rest, deeply rooted among
her country-people-that what is known as le remuement des terres, or digging
up of old foundations, is sure to provoke the outbreak of infectious disease.
Even in enlightened Paris a similar hypothesis prevails; and I have heard
that the stonemasons and bricklayers employed on the new boulevards have
christened by the name of "la Fièvre Haussmannique," a certain kind of
low fever, which, they declare, is bred by stirring up the ruins of old
buildings.
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his brother Joseph married into a family of the Marseilles bour-
geoisie. At Marseilles for years lived in poverty and obscurity
that grandest of matrons, Letitia Ramolini, afterwards to become
Madame Mère. Thither came her son, the young artillery
officer out of employ-the artillery officer who could not go to
Jerusalem for lack of a pair of boots, and remained at home to
conquer. Europe to Marseilles he came, poor and under a
cloud, to brood over the fallen fortunes of his house; to revolve
strange schemes of ambition in his mind; to carve, perchance,
"Imperio" on some garden-seat in the Allée des Capucines, as
he afterwards carved "Battaglia" on the tree the night before
Marengo. At Marseilles budded into matchless beauty the
Three Graces of this wonderful family-Caroline, Eliza, and
Pauline,* afterwards to bloom on the proudest thrones of the
Continent. Marseilles has not forgotten these things. La
grrrrrande ville hails the first Napoleon as an adopted son.
C'est un payse.
To her he is L'homme du Midi-the man
of the South, who could speak Italian before he could speak
French, and who, in familiar converse, even to the day of his
death, used the lingua franca in preference to the Parisian of
the boulevards; who, all sceptic as he was said to be, would in
moments of agitation cross himself as the Southrons are wont
* I picked up, lately, a medal bearing the head of this beautiful and
naughty woman. It is struck from a "dump" without a collar. Pauline's hair
is arranged, à la Grecque, and the legend is ПАTAINA ZEBAXTOY AAEA&H ;—
what a trumpet-title: "Pauline the sister of Augustus!”
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
79
to do, and who once nearly killed himself by his addicted-
ness to Provençal cookery. Yes; a mess of mutton and garlic
-'tis said it was poisoned-very nearly cooked the goose of
Achilles.
Can it then be matter for astonishment if Marseilles turned
out en masse, in her very best clothes, and waited with festive
impatience until sundown to greet the prevailing Bonaparte?
His Majesty's reception was, it may be at once stated, of the most
uproarious kind. There was nothing genteel about it. The
Marseillais are the noisiest people in all Europe. The Marseil-
lais himself very much resembles a roaring lion. He is like
the Dougal Creature made swarthy in a Southern sun-like a
Nottingham rough with a gousse d'ail in his button-hole. His
big head is covered with a shock of tufted black hair; his large
black eyes flash, his square white teeth gleam. He is always
clenching his fists. He rages furiously, and continually imagines
a vain thing. He swears awfully. Fortunately for the peace
of the world, he rarely drinks anything stronger than thin wine
or sugar and water. If he did, there would be murder every
hour in the day. Pass a cabaret or a café, and the howling of
Bedlam smites your tympanum. Innumerable bulls of Bashan
seem to be lowing in disconcert. Look in and you will see
scores of angry men, their eyes starting from their heads,
shaking their fists at each other, and launching forth volleys
of execrations. The rich sometimes smash the furniture, like
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my friend in the café at Paris; the poor have an occasional
tussle, in which they grasp
one another by the tufts of black
hair, but they do not stab. They are the best natured people
in Europe, and are always falling out and falling in again.
When I arrived at Marseilles from Lyons, at half-past six in
the morning, I thought by the prodigious row going on that an
émeute had broken out, or that at least, to use the locution of
the French penny-a-liners when one gamin kicks another
under the chin in the exercise of la savate, that "the rixe had
declared itself." The railway porters were running about,
uttering wild cries; they almost threw your luggage at your
head, instead of making you wait five-and-forty minutes for it;
and the custom-house officer at the octroi, instead of asking
whether I had any articles in my portmanteau liable to duty,
overwhelmed me with questions relative to Lyons and the
Emperor" How did he look ?-avait-il le petit air con-
tent?" I answered that he looked very well contented indeed.
The hand of the functionary trembled so with excitement that
he could scarcely hold his fiscal chalk, and made the customary
cabalistic sign on the skirt of my coat, in lieu of my valise.
The cab-driver swore at his horses in quite a jocund tone, and
was in too good a temper to have overcharged me at all; but
they have at Marseilles a very excellent system to prevent cab-
extortion under any circumstances. An inspector surveys you
ere you enter the vehicle; learns your destination; sees how
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
81
much baggage you have; takes stock of you generally; and then
hands you a pink card on which is pencilled the precise amount
you have to pay. If you like to give the driver a few sous by
way of a pourboire, that is your own affair. He dares not ask
you for any excess above his legal fare.
The Marseilles cabby, however, is not quite perfect. There
occurred during the stay I made in the city, on returning
from Algiers, one of the queerest cab accidents I ever remember.
A young man came home from sea-from the coast of Brazil, I
think—to visit his family, from whom he had been separated for
years. He brought with him a friend, a creole, from Rio, with
his pockets full of gold moidores, and anxious to find a French
wife. Both son and friend were cordially received at the old
home; there was a gala dinner; and in the evening the two
young men, his mother, and his sister, a very pretty girl, who
had already begun to look tenderly on the creole, must needs go
to the Grand Theatre. They lived in one of the small houses on
the old Port, and chartered a four-wheel cab from the rank
there. Now the regular driver of this cab was away at a wine-
shop drinking; but he had left his vehicle in charge of a kind of
stable-helper, a raw lad of about fifteen. The boy was nothing
loth to drive the pleasure-party to the theatre; but the night
was dark; the gas-lamps on the old Port are few; the coach-
man was unsteady. The end of it was that the horses ran
away, and that the entire machine was hurled into the sea.
G
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The young girl, with rare presence of mind, contrived to smash
one of the windows of the submerged cab, and to escape from
that horrible prison. She rose to the surface, and was rescued.
The boy-coachman, although he could not drive, was a good
swimmer, and escaped, like the man in Maccabees, "by the
skin of his teeth." But the sailor, his old mother, and the creole
were drowned. Can you imagine anything wretcheder than
the condition of that poor little half-drowned girl, saved only to
find that she had lost her mother, her brother, and a sweetheart?
The young stable-helper and the real driver were both put on
their trial; the former for gross and wanton carelessness, the
latter for confiding his carriage to a person under age, and for
contravening, besides, the law by neglecting to make him wear
his (the driver's) badge during his absence. Finally the boy's
father was also tried for not taking better care of his son.
The verdict was an odd mixture of red tape and pure equity.
The boy was acquitted, as having acted "without discrimina-
tion;" the father was fined; and the official driver was sent to
prison for a long period, and mulct in the costs of the trial.
When I reached the Grand Hôtel du Louvre de la Paix—not
to be confounded with the Grand Hôtel de Marseille, for every-
thing just now seems "grand" in France generally and in
Marseilles especially-I found the staff and guests in a state of
hysterical commotion. The bedroom they gave me was füll
of flags and streamers which workmen were hanging from the
MARSEILLES. IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
83
balcony, and I was glad to see that, the hotel being much
patronised by Overland Route passengers, a plentiful supply of
union-jacks had been laid in. The house was crammed to
suffocation, and the salle-à-manger overflowed with naval
officers in the picturesque but somewhat melodramatic uniform
patronised by the French Marine, and which reminds you equally
of that of the Admiral in Black-eyed Susan and the riding-
master at Astley's. Such a noise, too! Madame (stout, black-
eyed, and rosy lipped) shrilly scolding waiters from her rocking-
chair in the covered court; bells ringing; the electric telegraph
clicking all over the house, like a legion of crickets; Mar-
seillais gentlemen squabbling about nothing at all, in a torrent
of "enfins," and "quand je vous le dis;" and British tourists
shouting from the third loft, " Antoine, moi besoin eau chaude
pour rasy, savvy-vous? toute suite." The Grand Hôtel was
the Tower of Babel, and not in miniature.
A very pretty young English lady in the reading-room, who
was trying on a pair of primrose kids preparatory to going to
church, told me that she took sevens in gloves, and that the
hands of all her acquaintances being smaller, she was “glove-
stretcher-general to the English colony at Marseilles "—than
which I think I never heard a more artless and less vain
confession.
As, amidst the absorbing preoccupation of the day, "eau
chaude pour rasy" was an article more easily asked for than
G 2
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obtained, I went into the shop of a "coiffeur de Paris," to be
(C
barbed," as the Americans phrase the process of shaving. The
shop was in a by-street, and not fashionable, of which I was
glad, for it was full of genuine Marseilles life. Seven gentlemen,
very hirsute, very swarthy, with gold rings in their ears, and
looking very much like seven brigands or seven sworn foes to
Il Signor Babbage, who had left their organs in the adjoining
Cannebière, were sitting on seven chairs, awaiting their turn
for barbing. I was the eighth, and sat down, too, pending the
arrival of my turn. I never knew such a curious barber's.
The customers were all Frenchmen, and they were all talking
vehemently, but they did not speak a word I could understand.
The sound of the Provençal patois is half French and half
Italian, but verbally is like neither. The floor was covered
thick with tufts of black hair. The Marseillais always has his
hair cut on the morning of a fête: his head is so hot. It
grows, however, I should imagine, before evening, hydra fashion.
By-and-bye came in a ninth man, who spoke comprehensible
French, and who had his hair in paper. Then there was a
row. A dispute arose between him en papillotes and the
barber-first, relative to the merits of a little black dog with
a red collar, answering to the name of Biribi, and next on the
moot point whether a little man looked best in a big hat, or a
big man in a little one. "The rixe declared itself." They
did not come to blows, but the storm of "Troun di Dious "
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
85
was awful. I was watching nervously for the flash of cold
steel, when one of the brigand-looking gentlemen took down
a guitar hanging by the side of the case full of false collars
and pommade hongroise, and, striking up a plaintive air, began
to sing a song in patois of which I could catch the title,
"Lou Miracle.” The rest joined in chorus, and there was a
little dance :-the scene of hostile contention became an academy
of the Gay Science. Add to this the fumes of many dread-
ful cigars and a spicy gale of garlic, impregnating every-
body and everything, down to the very razor and shaving
soap, and you may gain some notion of a barber's shop
at Marseilles. The barber only charged me ten cents; but
to me the experience of his establishment was worth ten
francs.
The Grand Hôtel is situate in the Rue de Noailles, a grand
new street, built by the Emperor in continuation of the
Cannebière. The Marseillais, however, disdain to call it "De
Noailles," and speak of it as La Cannebière prolongée. I
cannot help fancying that they regard this protraction of their
beloved thoroughfare as an attempt to paint the lily and gild
refined gold. The Cannebière was perfection before; why
strive to improve it? This often-mentioned street is, in truth,
handsome enough, and as wide as the Rue de la Paix, in Paris,
but not much longer. The best shops and hotels of Marseilles.
line its trottoir, and it leads directly down to the port and to
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the sea.
There are streets quite as noble in Lyons and in Bor-
deaux; but the chief charm of the Cannebière consists in its
incessant and characteristic life and bustle, and the varied
costumes of the people, who seem to have been culled indis-
criminately from all the nations under the sun.
Venice used to be the most cosmopolitan-looking place in
Europe; but in these, the sad days of her hopeless bondage, she
has grown monotonous. Beyond the old Turk at the Caffè
Aurora, in a fez cap and baggy brown silk breeches, clean white
stockings, and carpet slippers, who sits puffing at his chibouck
from morn to night, as though he expected blind Dandolo to come
and conquer him again-beyond this antiquated fixture, with
the bare-legged gondoliers, the white-coated Austrians, and the
black-robed and veiled Venetian ladies, the picturesque has fled
from the Queen of the Adriatic. But here in the Cannebière
thousands are running to and fro, clothed in different habits,
gabbling different tongues, knowing not, perchance, their right
hand from their left. There are Greeks in roomy galligaskins
and long-tasseled skull-caps-Greeks with small dark eyes.
and silky black moustaches like leeches, and who, if they are
not rascals, might certainly bring actions for libel against their
countenances.* There are Wallachs and Bulgares in sheepskin
* Marseilles swarms with public cabinets de toilettes at fifteen centimes, and
wayfarers are directed to them by notices in every language. M. Victor Hugo
makes a great deal of the word Ã'NA'TKH, which he found on the portal of
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
87
jackets and caps, all broiling as is the sun. There are Maltese
sailors, suspicious-looking varlets with parti-coloured sashes of
many folds about their loins-sashes in which I am very much
mistaken if knives do not lurk. There are sunburnt sailors
and engineers—many of them English-from the Mediterranean
steamers in port, for Marseilles is the Southampton of France.
There are Parisians, "dressed up to the nines," and regarding
all things save the dark-eyed grisettes with supercilious glances.
At the dark-eyed grisettes the Parisians direct amorous grins
and lolling looks of admiration. There is the British pater-
familias and his wife, and his children, and his man-servant,
and his maid-servant, inspecting everything with a stern air, as
though it were, somehow or another, a humbug and "an in-
famous attempt at extortion, by Jove." And, finally, there are
the Marseillais themselves, who are picturesque enough in look
and gesture to satisfy the most sedulous disciples of Salvator
Rosa, or the Spaniard Goya. Nobody can tell exactly who the
Marseillais are. They have certainly very little either of the
Gaul or the Frank in their composition. They say themselves
that they are Romans, and the oldest families of the Provençal
aristocracy claim to be descended from Pontius Pilate, who, as
the legends tell, settled here and made a good end of it. Some
Notre Dame de Paris; what would he say to the Κοινοχσησία, or the Εὐχρησημα
and similar Attico-Romaic inscriptions staring one in the face at Marseilles.
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say they spring from a Phoenician colony; and others that in
origin they are Greek. From a touch of "Yorkshire" in the
midst or their ebullient temperament, I should opine that they
are not quite five hundredth cousins to the Hellenes.
I will spare you a lengthened description of the manner in
which the whole of the Emperor's route from the terminus to
the port was hung with banners; how the balconies were fes-
tooned with velvet and gold and tapestry; and how the very
lamp-posts were wreathed with flowers. This superb avenue
closed at the end of the Cannebière, from which the two quays
which line the Port branch off. At the head of this Port,
or natural basin-and a very nasty and insalubrious basin
it has always been-was a sumptuous pavilion, its canopy
draped with crimson velvet and bullion fringe, its curtains
looped up with cords of gold. At the corners the tricolor was
arranged en faisceaux, and at the base were large vases of
flowers and shrubs. The edge of the Port on either side was
roped in, and laid out as a perfect garden, with a gravelled
walk, flower-beds, and parterres. Here two marines—or rather
two sailors doing duty as marines, cross-belts above their blue
frocks, and on their arms shining muskets with sword bayonets
-walked to and fro. Every one was free to come up to the
crimson ropes and stare at the impromptu garden, and at the
war steamer l'Aigle, which was to convey the Emperor to
Algiers. No jetty was needed for his Majesty to embark. The
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
89
steamer a handsome paddle-wheel one-had been moored with
the stern close to the dock-head. There were just a few steps
covered with rich carpeting leading from the gravelled walk to
the gangway, and the Emperor could step on board. The
quarter-deck of l'Aigle was covered with a permanent awning,
which will prove, I hope, a comfort to his Majesty's staff.
Napoleon III. himself must be by this time a pretty good
sailor. He made the voyage to New York ere the Cunard line
had her being, and it is just a quarter of a century since he
made that memorable trip in the City of Edinburgh Boulogne
steamer.
From broiling morn to scorching eve the concourse thinned
not on the streets or in the Port. The cafés and wine-shops
drove, literally, a "roaring" trade.
roaring" trade. On the quays, it may be
hinted, any number of foreign sailors from the ships in harbour
were disporting themselves, and these mariners had evidently
been drinking something stronger than thin wine or sugar and
water. Then the Port abounds with shops for the sale of
singing-birds, even from the remote South American littoral
and the far-off Indian scenes; thus, to the confusion of tongues
was added the screeching of innumerable poll-parrots and
mocking-birds. Again, it was Sunday, and the Sabbath is
always a festival, and a very noisy one, in France. It is only
in Paris that they are beginning to learn to shut up the shops
one day out of the seven. The quacks and the mountebanks,
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the jugglers and the hucksters, were doing a very thriving
business in Marseilles yesterday. Mr. Dulcamara, red coat,
top-boots, gig, white horse, negro servant, and all, was in full
force on the Prado. Next door to the Grand Hotel a sort of
mock auction was flourishing, with which was combined a
lecture on popular science, illustrated by a drum which was
beaten by electricity, and a sapeur pompier, who, being gra-
tuitously galvanised, went into convulsions every five minutes.
The itinerant sellers of sweetmeats dispensed most Oriental-
looking confections, and, in proof that their goods were of the
pure grit," displayed entire sugar-loaves on their stalls.
There was a great run on pâte de guimauve, of which the
French seem to be as fond as the Americans are of planta-
tion bitters, and which, in their opinion, is a sovereign
remedy for all chest or bronchial diseases. I can remember pâte
de guimauve even from my school days, but I was puzzled
to recognise my old friend in the placard, of which I affix a
copy:
66
ALLA RENOMEZ
DELLA PATTE DI GUIMOVE
ALLINSTAR DI LION
OUNSOULE BATONE
This mystic announcement stood, I infer, for "A la renommée
de la pâte de Guimauve, à l'instar de Lyon: un sou le bâton."
The Marseilles version must by no means be taken as a sample
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
91
of bad spelling, but as a very high flight indeed of the Pro-
vençal muse, and the orthography of the Langue d'Oc. They
have a newspaper published in patois here, called "Lou Cas-
sure,” and which is under the immediate patronage of Prince
Lucien Bonaparte. It is a wonderful production, and should be
bound up with Ὁ Βριταννικος Αστηρ, the programmes of the
Eisteddfods, and the first number of the "Fonetic Nuz."
The hybrid status of Marseilles is shown, indeed, in a hundred
different instances; the nationalities are not kept distinct, they
blend in the oddest manner. The restaurants announce tag-
liarinis and raviolis in their cartes; the cabarets sell schubach
and vespetro, and occasionally a money-changer makes a plunge
into English on his door-jambs, by an inscription relative to
"Cambio of foreign coink and notte of the Banco de Angland.”
All at Marseilles is a little mixed. The people are amusingly
vain; but their vanity is of the most harmless and good-
natured order. Thus, photography is a branch of the arts
enjoying immense popularity in Marseilles. You may be photo-
graphed almost as large as life for a hundred francs, and you
may obtain a single carte de visite at as low a rate as seventy-five
centimes. There is a mine of drollery to be worked in the
advertisements over the show-boards of the cheap photo-
graphers. Faites-vous faire comme ça pour un franc cin-
quante:" "Exactement pareil pour deux francs;" and the
like. Then comes a wondrous penny-plain-and-twopence-
((
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coloured view of the interior of a studio, with a little man
with a big beard levelling his camera at a lady in a flame-
coloured moire and long ringlets. "Salon de pose du photo-
graphe!! Monsieur Duviquet opérant lui-même !!!" Thus
runs the legend. Let not the accumulated notes of admiration
be omitted. The Marseillais is always in the superlative. But
why should not Duviquet operate himself? it may be asked.
Is he such a very great Count, this Duviquet? Imagine a
show-board hung out in Regent-street, or Parliament-street,
with "Mr. Mayall, as he appeared adjusting the lens," or
"Mr. John Watkins focussing the Lord High Chancellor."
After all, the true secret of success in advertising is self-
glorification. One cannot, somehow or another, get rid of the
notion that Harper Twelvetrees is a friend of humanity, or
that Mr. Miles has done much towards regenerating humanity
by means of the sixteen-shilling trousers; and I have never
ceased to look with admiration and respect on the self-com-
missioned and self-exhibited portrait of a pale, pensive, fat man
in a West-end shop in London-now deceased, alas! but who
has gone down to posterity as the inventor of the Some-
thingorium for boots and shoes.
This being Sunday, the theatres will of course be crammed.
At the Gymnase they are playing La Belle Helène, a Paris
Variétés burlesque opera, and at the Grand Theatre, which I
know of old, and which is a very handsome house, the Italian
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
93
Opera Company from Nice are performing. I read in very big
letters that, "in consequence of the solemnity of the occasion
and the universally expressed desire, M. Merly, premier sujet
of the Académie Impériale of Paris and the great theatres of
Milan and St. Petersburg, has delayed his departure in order
to give one last representation of Ernani." This is very good
of M. Merly, especially as the Emperor intends to dine and
sleep on board l'Aigle, and does not go to the play to-night.
I should like to enshrine Merly in the same show-board with
Duviquet, who “operates himself.”
But it is three o'clock in the afternoon, and the crowd in the
Cannebière is larger than ever. The country folks have come
in from the environs, and to me they are charming to view.
In the French provinces patriarchal manners still reign, and
the fondness of every Frenchman for his mother is something
quite pathetic. Ma mère, oh, ma mère ! will always draw tears
from a French audience. It has been suggested by a cynic that
this excessive affection for the maternal parent is due to the
fact that the son of Gaul is generally certain that his mother is
his mother, whereas respecting his paternity there often arises a
doubt which the wisest child cannot solve. Here, however, in
front of the Grand Hotel gather group after group, containing
three, and sometimes seemingly four, generations. There is great-
grandmamma, who looks a hundred years old, and to judge by
her white moustache might have served in the horse-grenadiers
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under Marshal Saxe. There is grandmamma, in vast white
apron and flaming head-kerchief. There is the peasant-pro-
prietor, in waistcoat of astounding floral pattern, in bright blue
coat with dwarfed tails, in striped pantaloons, in fluffy hat of
amazing tallness, and with crimson umbrella tucked beneath his
arms. Forget not his ear-rings, and his shirt-collar sticking
up stiff on either cheek, in the form of an isosceles triangle.
Then there is his wife, swarthy, black-eyed, black-haired, with a
heavy gold chain round her neck, with sparkling rings in her
ears and on her fingers, and with much snowy lace about her
corsage and her sleeves. Multitudinous children in little striped
bedgowns, padded puddings, cling to the knees of their pro-
genitors. These are the real French peasantry in their holiday
dress. Do you know where I saw their brothers and sisters
last? Far, far away beyond the Atlantic Sea, on the banks of
the St. Lawrence, and in the little village of Charlebourg, over
against Quebec, I beheld, one sunny summer Sunday, the
self-same faces, the self-same caps, and waistcoats, and parti-
coloured umbrellas.
These good folk were squatting, very comfortably, on the
pavement; and having brought their provisions with them,
were, with laudable light-heartedness, making merry. There
was no one to say them nay. To "obstruct the thoroughfare
is not, save in times of émeutes, a crime on the continent. By
and by one of the mighty men of the Grand Hotel du Louvre
>>
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
9.5
et de la Paix good-naturedly caused half-a-dozen chairs to be
brought out, and lent them to the rustic groups that, hitherto,
had been camping on their Maker's footstools. The chairs were
lent under solemn pledge that they were to be returned so soon
as the Emperor had passed. Forthwith a nucleus was formed
for a regular bivouac. The crowing of the children under the
influence of the cane-bottoms, which could be climbed, and
sprawled upon, and played bo-peep round, was charming. Let
it be noted that in this part of France they grow the fattest
babies that ever were seen. They are very brown and rich,
and remind you of the glorious baked suet puddings, having
plums in them, of youth. They are the kind of babies one
would like to buy, if they did not charge so exorbitantly for
luggage on the French railways, and if you only knew what the
deuce to do with your purchases when you got them home.
A similar dilemma deterred Mr. Victor Hugo from buying that
pink sucking pig, of which he became enraptured at Mayence.
There was one little old man, in a long white coat, a broad-
brimmed straw hat with a black ribbon round it, a scarlet
waistcoat and knee breeches, who would suffer no one, juvenile
or adult, to interfere with his chair. This being a land from
which the sentiment of veneration for the aged has not yet
departed, uninterrupted possession of the cane-bottom was con-
ceded to him. Aloft he stood, for hours full twain, quite monu-
mentally, so patient was he. He shouldered his red umbrella,
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after the manner of a flag, and, from time to time, wiped the
perspiration from his brow with a blue cotton handkerchief.
He looked amazingly old; and his face, quaintly carved, and
lovingly tinted by long sojourn under the sun, and in a vine-
growing district, was suggestive, now of a brandy peach, and
now of a Nuremberg nutcracker. Great deference was shown
him by the bystanders, and he was evidently a patriarch de
bon aloi.
They had postponed the hotel table-d'hôte, from six to seven
o'clock, to give us time to see the show. I went out on to the
pavement as the clock struck six, and stood by the side of the
little old man with the nutcracker face. He was trembling with
pleasurable excitement, and mopped his brow more assiduously
than ever. The crowd filled the whole Cannebière. No attempt
was made to keep a line by which the procession might pass.
There were a few gendarmes, ostensibly to keep order, and a
great many soldiers off duty; but nobody was under arms, or
ordering anybody to stand back, and the Frenchmen in uniform
were enjoying the show as hugely as their compatriots in broad-
cloth and blouses. Show!-what show? Procession there turned
out to be none. Only the Emperor coming among his own
folk, and who was there to make him afraid? He has kept his
promise to that country on the other side of Mont Cenis, and
the ban of the Vehmgericht is taken off him.
Italy is free, and
the Carbonaro dagger sleeps in its bloody sheath.
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
97
The Cannebière was all alive; a double Gloucester overripe.
Every window, every balcony, every housetop was thick with
human life, and the hubbub was deafening. I am proud to say
that I had given up my bedroom, which was on the third story
of the Grand, to seven beautiful young ladies of Marseilles, who
from the window thereof were surveying the scene. I took up
a humble position among the mob. At a quarter past six the
cannon from the ships began to thunder. The arrival of the
Emperor at the railway terminus had been telegraphed to the
dockhead. Then I could hear the greater roar of a distant multi-
tude drowning the reverberations of the artillery. Looking up
the Rue de Noailles, I could see the handkerchiefs waving and
curling from the balconies like the surf on the breakers far out
at sea. He was coming. He came at last in a very plain open
carriage-the Senator-Prefect's, I think-with but two horses,
and driven by a coachman in modest livery. The carriage
moved at a walking pace; none other was possible, for it was
girt all around by the mobile, just as when the Prince of Wales
struggled through the city with his bride. There was no
imperial pomp or splendour in the Cannebière this day. With-
out a single guard-without so much as an equerry or an out-
rider-Napoleon III. came along, smiling, standing up bare-
headed in the coach. He was in a General's undress tunic, and
held his Algerian kepi in his hand. The people just “rose at
him,” as Edmund Kean described the rising of the pit at Drury
H
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Lane. To the tremendous vociferations of the surrounding
thousands he returned less formal bows than a series of friendly
nods. Have you never noticed that peculiarly confidential nod
to which the Imperial head adapts itself, and have you never
fancied that something of the nature of a wink flickered on the
Imperial eyelid, as though he were remarking-in strict con-
fidence-"This isn't a bad sort of thing, and I rather flatter
myself that we have done the trick at last ?”
The little old man with the nutcracker face was crying for
joy. “Il m'a dit bonzour," he sobbed out. I dare say that, in
his simple mind, he was firmly convinced that the Emperor had
recognised and personally saluted him. I looked at the little
old man's button-hole. I thought so.
Yes; there it was, the
bronze medal of St. Helena. And yet he had a reclamation to
make. As he descended from the chair wiping his eyes, I heard the
patriarch murmur: "Ze l'aurais mieux aimé s'il avait monté
oun zeval blanc." The scarlet kepi and pantalon garance of
Napoleon III. may have jarred somewhat on the ancient. He
wanted the white horse with golden housings, the grey great-
coat and little cocked hat. For yonder gentleman in the
carriage was to him no monarch of yesterday's creation, but the
Emperor, the Man of the South, the man who has never been
dead, the exile who has escaped from his rock-Napoleone il
Grande, as we see his engraved portrait wonderfully imitated
in oil in the background of John Millais' noble picture :
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
99
((
Soggetto d'immensa invidia
E d'inestinguibil amor :"
the man most bitterly hated and most passionately loved, of all
men that have ever lived.
I have seen the actual Cæsar a good many times. I re-
member at the Chiswick Fête, almost before Queen Victoria
came to the throne, a grave quiet gentleman in a brown surtout.
He had been rather unfortunate in the political line of business,
and people used to laugh at him. I remember the stern fixed
face I saw on the Paris boulevards on the first Thursday in
December, 1851, when, isolated, and fifty paces in advance of
his staff, the Prince President rode over the ruins of the barri-
cades and the smoking embers of civil war. I remember when
he passed down St. James's-street in one of the Queen of
England's carriages, and laughingly pointed out to his beautiful
wife the window of the second-floor in King-street where he
had vegetated so long, a bankrupt, banished man. I remember
when Orsini bombs were flung at him, and the panels of his
coach were shivered round him, and he yet sat afterwards
throughout the performance at the playhouse with face as calm
and unconcerned as though he had been pelted only with the
confetti of some Roman festival. I remember when he came
back from Italy as a conqueror and liberator, and the drums in
the Place Vendôme beat aux champs, and the Zouaves marched
past. But ten days ago I saw him in that paddock at the Bois
Up
H 2
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de Boulogne, holding his little son by the hand. But I had
never beheld him to so much advantage as to-day, unguarded,
and all but unattended, in the midst of a people whom he has
undeniably mastered, and whom he has seemingly conciliated.
It was no business of mine to be enthusiastic about French
Emperors and things. "I am not his perfumer," I said, "and I
should like my dinner." There was another gentleman by my
side, a Frenchman, staying in the hotel, with whom I had
struck up a table-d'hôte acquaintance. He was not enthu-
siastic. He was not his Majesty's perfumer. He shrugged his
shoulders as Cæsar went by, and the surging mob with him
literally jumping for joy. "C'est comme ça," said the French
gentleman, with another shrug, half discontented, half apolo-
getic. "Yes; c'est comme ça." The majority seem perfectly well
satisfied: what have the minority to do but to shrug their
shoulders, and acquiesce? It is a pity that the minority comprise
most of the ablest and uprightest thinking men in France.
((
Have you read M. Thiers' speech on the Italian question?”
asked the French gentleman. "I have it here in pamphlet
form. Seventy-five thousand copies have been sold in three
days. The opposition is gaining ground."
((
Seventy-five thousand opponents don't count for much
against thirty-nine millions nine hundred and twenty-five
thousand who are not in opposition, I have read Thiers.
MARSEILLES.-IN THE CANNEBIÈRE.
101
He bites the file beautifully-the wonderful little old
man. But what does it all amount to?
C'est comme ça.
Hark, the table-d'hôte bell is ringing. I will bet you half a
franc against your pamphlet that the soup is tapioca again
to-day."
VI.
ONE'S BOAT IS ON THE SHORE.
"My boat is on the shore,
And my bark is on the sea;
The bark belongs, Tom Moore,
To the Imperial Messageries."
BYRON, variorum edition.
YES; they gave us tapioca, for a potage, at the table-d'hôte
as the Frenchman who said "c'est comme ça," had predicted.
It was a gala dinner, however, and, in honour of the day, there
were no less than four ices. Grand hotel table-d'hôtes are,
as a rule, swindles; but that of the Louvre and de la Paix is
rather an exception to the rule.
Marseilles was, through the night, vivement émue. I use
the French term, because there is really no English one that
will serve to express the extraordinary hullabalo which, from
the top of the Rue de Noailles to the bottom of the Canne-
bière, and until sunrise, ceased not. "Much moved," would in
ONE'S BOAT IS ON THE SHORE.
103
no wise convey to you any idea of this tremendous rumpus.
Nobody—that I saw, at least―got tipsy; yet the entire popu-
lation seemed stricken with moral delirium tremens. They
were foaming at the mouth in the cafés over gooseberry syrup
and shrieking in the access of the wildest orgies over lemon-
water ice. The gaiety was not quite French. Your Parisian, on
a fête day, enjoys himself in a simpering, smirking, giggling,
and moderately-prancing manner; but he does not yell, and
shout, and tear his hair, and parade the streets nine a-breast.
The Marseillais does. They were at it all night: this very
impulsive and susceptible people. There was a row at every
corner; but the disputes were as frequently between the
gendarmes themselves as between the population and authority.
"Sacré vacarme!" exclaimed the dissatisfied reader of M.
Thiers's speech, with another shrug. Well; this was " comme ça
likewise. They sang, too, in the public thoroughfares throughout
the small hours. Street choruses are pleasant and pretty when
heard from a convenient distance. Far off vocal harmony, for
instance, from ships and boats in harbour is delightful. Have
you not heard the dreamy "complainte de Cadieux" softly
sung by the Canadian voyageurs floating down the St.
Lawrence on their timber-rafts? Have you never listened to
the wild, sad chants of the Indians paddling their frail canoes
of birch bark from Lachine lo Cuagnawagha? and the Spaniards
working a fishing craft out of port, and hymning the Virgin in
""
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((
""
gravely sonorous unison? Yes, and the homely songs, even
from the foremast men gathered in the round-house of the
Yankee barque in the old Port, chorusing, “Old Folks at Home,"
Annie Laurie," "When this cruel War is over," "Who will
think of Mother now?" Whimsical old ditties some of them are;
and yet far away from home, and in the soft and stilly summer
night, they are apt to bring on to the hardest cheek a drop of what
Policeman X would call the "unfirmilyar brind." There is a
Connecticut story of a young Yankee who made the "Tower of
Europe," and, returning to Sassopolis or East Hallelujah, told
his fellow-townsmen of all the famous "Eyetalian opera
singers to whom he had listened.
He had heard Sontag,
Cruvelli, Bosio, Patti, and the rest. Aye, aye," quoth an
elder and select man, when the youth had finished his glowing
eulogium on the great lyric artists of the continent; “but did
you ever hear Israel H. Parkes sing 'He shall break them in
pieces like a potter's vessel,' from 'cross the mill-pond in the
bright moonlight? Lawful Sakes! I've heard that young
man as distinct as the gong at a hotel for beyond three-
quarter of a mile. But I think he'll beat your Eyetalians."
Most of us, I think, have a secret Israel H. Parkes for a
I have listened to all the queens of song of my
age: even Pasta, and Malibran, and Viardot, and Grisi, in her
prime; and yet of all the scenas and cavatinas that have
entranced me, there is not one that I recall with so much sober
cynosure.
ONE'S BOAT IS ON THE SHORE.
105
delight as a hymn which, when I was a child, used to be sung
by the men of the Foot Guards from Portman Barracks attend-
ing a chapel in Great Quebec Street. I can see those doughty
choristers in scarlet now, ranged in military array in the gallery,
and hear them thundering out, till the panels shook, and the
old organ was put to its utmost pipes to make itself felt :—
"The Lord is great; His mercy dwells.
وو
I forget the rest; but do not the "songs without words" make
often the deepest impressions on our memories? The first
word suffices, and you may hum the rest. "And how is
monsieur, 'Midst pleasures and la li la la, li la, li la, la la ?'
Rossini used to ask whenever he met an Englishman. It was
the illustrious maestro's mode of recalling the song of "Home,
sweet Home," and the name of Sir Henry Bishop.
Yes, I am fond of distant choruses; but, ye gods! how they
screeched in the streets of Marseilles, and underneath one's win-
dows, too, throughout the night and "so early in the morning,"
at Marseilles. Who were the singers ?-Soldiers, sailors, boat-
men, students.
What did those incessant refrains of "Eh,
yioup, yioup, yioup!” and “gai, gai, gai, la gau-u-u-driole !
mean? They are the Gallic equivalents, perchance, for our
"Right tooral, lol tooral." And where on earth is the con-
nection between "Malbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre," and the
Imperial visit? I perceive that the theatrical rioters at Lyons
""
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
broke out into "Malbrouk" the other night, and that the song
was considered slightly seditious. Why? Mystery.*
I fell off into a broken slumber at last, and dreamt that I was
an Alexandre Harmonium, and that I had been promised the
Legion of Honour for walking without any clothes on through
the Cannebière. Then, in the sultry season, I packed my need-
ments, and remembered that I was bound for Africa. I had to
wait many hours, however, before I could start.
* "Malbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre," may fairly claim to be a national song in
France, yet it is, as the exponent of any national sentiment, as utterly devoid
of meaning as "Yankee Doodle." I never could see the slightest allusion
to the tyranny of George III. and the Declaration of Independence in the
quatrain :
"Yankee doodle came to town
On a little pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap,
And called him Macaroni.”
There is an explanation extant of how "Yankee Doodle" came to be the national
air of the Federals, but it is far-fetched and inadequate. "Malbrouk" is a
burlesque narrative of the funeral of the great John Churchill, Duke of Marl-
borough; but there is not a word of allusion in it to the desperate conflict
between the French and English in which the Victor of Hochstadt played so
great a part. The origin of the song itself is very cloudy. It was brought
to Versailles, according to one account, by a country woman who came to
nurse the little Dauphin, son of Louis XVI. I suspect that "Malbrouk" is
not a French song at all, but a Flemish or Walloon one; and that it was com-
posed by some "brave Belge" in pig-headed ridicule of the Great Duke, what
time he commanded that army which, according to my uncle Toby, swore so
terribly in Flanders.
ONE'S BOAT IS ON THE SHORE.
107
The bark which carried Cæsar and his fortunes put out to
sea at early dawn. The Emperor dined and slept on board
l'Aigle, and received in his cabin a few official notabilities of
the city; but he was up betimes. At eight o'clock the cannon
proclaiming his departure had begun to thunder again; and a
few minutes after nine the berth at the dock-head which
l'Aigle had occupied was empty. The effect was odd; to
come down to the place where the gallant war steamer seemed
fixed so immovably, and to find one yawning gap in the serried
tier of ships, as though some great tooth had been wrenched
from the jaw of the harbour. His Majesty reached Algiers
early on Wednesday. I was compelled to wait for the regular
steamer of the Messageries Impériales, which was to leave on
Tuesday at noon. The arrivals and departures of the boats
on this line are, very properly, as irrevocably fixed as the laws
of the Medes and Persians; but I do think that, under exist-
ing circumstances and the "solemnity of the occasion,"-to
quote M. Merly-the Messageries might have put on an extra
steamer to follow the Emperor. When English Royalty crosses
the ocean, five hundred passenger steamers and yachts are sure
to follow in her wake, in addition to her naval escort, and
British Royalty is, I dare say, often very much bored by this
throng of uninvited visitors, but the freedom of the seas is one
of the birthrights of the Briton. A sea-fight, even, cannot
take place without an English yacht looking on, en amateur.
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In France it is different. The French are born sight-seers,
and can no more get on without a spectacle than without a
loaf; but they like their pageant to take place close to their
own doors, and are by no means ambitious about going to sea
to witness a show. As with their fêtes, so is it with their
military triumphs. Distance, so far as glory is concerned, does
not lend enchantment to the Frenchman's view. He likes his
victories to be won within a couple of days' post. Solferino
and Magenta were just far enough off for him. The Rhine,
the Neva, the Danube, the Tagus, he might tolerate as localities
for glory-making; but don't send him to cultivate laurels beyond
sea. This is why the war in the Crimea, until the capture of
the Malakoff awakened a temporary spurt of enthusiasm, was
never really popular in France; and even the successful ter-
mination of the siege of Puebla failed to make the mercurial
Gaul in love with the Mexican war. Mexico is simply too far
off. The Frenchman is not strong in geography. Mexico is
là bas-in some vague and misty region. It is hard to work
a Frenchman into anything like excitement about Dupleix and
Lally Tollendal and the siege of Pondicherry; and till M.
Xavier Marmier wrote his book on Canada, I will wager that
not one Frenchman in five hundred knew or cared anything
of the good fight which the Marquis de Montcalm made against
our Wolfe, at Quebec.
Moreover, there is little or no competition on a large scale
ONE'S BOAT IS ON THE SHORE.
109
in France. Opposition lines of steamers would be looked upon
as something very nearly approaching organised sedition. A
certain line has a certain concession. What more can the
public desire? If the public does desire anything else, it won't
get it. Our gallant neighbours are still at the A B C of free
trade, and have not got to the axiom which teaches that com-
petition is the natural corollary of the libre échange. One
line of railway to each city, one pawnbroking establishment,
one public school-the French are fanatics in their devotion
to the unities. I don't quarrel with them for holding on tight
to monopolies. Man is born a monopolist. Just as Mysticism
has been described as "Virtue in her chemise," so is Free Trade
Socialism in an apron, with a pen behind its ear and sitting at
a counting-house desk. The machine of modern society cannot
move without Free Trade, nevertheless.
Marseilles has been illuminated in the most brilliant
fashion. Eagles, N's, and crowns, and laurel wreaths in pro-
fusion, both in oil and gas, decorated private as well as public
buildings. The progress which has been made in the art of
getting up "blazes of triumph" in France during the last few
years is astonishing. When Louis Philippe was king, the
official mind recognised no form of illuminations for public
buildings, save those barbarous devices known as lampions.
Pyramidal flights of steps were erected, and on their several
rungs were placed rows of earthen pots filled with tallow, into
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which were stuck lengths of rope well pitched. Similar rows
of pots were placed on the roofs, and in the windows were
placed candles in paltry paper lanterns. These lampions were
allowed to flare and fume and sputter till the tallow gave
out, and the smoke and stench from them were intolerable.
Now-a-days France illuminates herself with an elegance
and brilliancy which might strike envy into the heart of
Pall-mall.
The French press have been reiterating the question, in tones
more or less guarded, "What is the Emperor about to do" in
Algeria ?—and in England I have no doubt a similar interroga-
tion has been put. What, indeed, has moved Napoleon III. to
quit his capital at the height of the fashionable season, at pre-
cisely the time of the year when tourists do not go to Algeria ;
and at a season, moreover, when political complications seem to
be twisting themselves into the tightest of Gordian knots? The
Tsarewitch dead; the President of the United States assassi-
nated; the King of the Belgians decidedly ill: surely this is a
concurrence of events sufficient to keep an ordinarily prudent
sovereign at home; much more so eminently discreet a politician
as the Emperor Napoleon. But there is a hitch in Africa as
well as in Europe and America. I believe that the chief object
of the Emperor in visiting his magnificent dependency is to see
things for himself, and to study on the spot the condition and
the wants of his Arab as well as of his European subjects. He
ONE'S BOAT IS ON THE SHORE.
111
is tired of looking through other men's spectacles, tinted as
those spectacles are with malice prepense, either couleur de rose
or couleur d'orange. The broad facts of the case are patent.
For five-and-thirty years the blood and treasure of France have
been poured out like water in the African desert, and all that
has been achieved is a military occupation of the provinces
necessitating the continual presence of an army of eighty
thousand men. There is an indigenous population of over two
millions, and of these the vast majority are passively if not
overtly hostile-less to the French rule than to the manner in
which that rule is at present administered-while European
colonisation, which might have counteracted the unfriendly
disposition of the natives, has been at the best of times sluggish
and languid. Monsieur Emile de Girardin, who persists in
putting every human subject on the horns of a dilemma, reduces
the Algerian question to this: De deux choses, l'une; either
France must give back Algeria to the Algerines-who are the
Algerines ?or she must maintain herself there simply by the
strong hand and the right of conquest. The Emperor is under-
stood to hold different views. He has pointed out, in a memor-
able letter, that it is impossible for France to revert to the
ancient Roman policy of "refoulement," or deporting en masse
the inhabitants of conquered countries; or to the modern
American one of getting rid of the aborigines by exterminating
them. He is said to have formed a plan for "civilising” the
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
Arabs-of which, until I reach the country, I am, of course, no
more qualified to speak than of the feasibility of twisting a rope
out of the sands of the Sahara. We will discuss this matter
further; if you please, in Africa itself.
VII.
MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES.-THE ARETHUSA.
It is very certain that the piston beats the pen, and that, in
comparison with the oil used to lubricate locomotive and marine
engines, ink is nowhere. I can't keep pace with steam; and if
I could, there would be that pestilent Electric Telegraph to
forestal my news and anticipate my statements. I have to see
a certain thing, and to describe it as best I may on the spot;
but I have scarcely nibbed my crowquill ere the train or the
steamboat whisks me up and transports me hundreds of miles
from the scene I had begun to paint. Being human, one can-
not have the wings of a dove; but, oh! that the princes and
potentates of Europe would imitate a little more the pace of
the tortoise in their progress! Some of us are fat, and scant of
breath, like Sir John, and cannot be expected to attain the
pace of the nimble stag. Here am I, scudding over the Medi-
terranean, as fast as ever a screw steamer can carry me, in quest
of the Emperor of the French, who has gotten the start of us
humbler mortals who cannot afford paddle-wheel yachts.
It
I
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was absolutely unknown at Marseilles, when I left, whether the
Emperor was gone to Algiers or to Oran. The captain of the
Arethusa is not much better informed. As I am not Sir Boyle
Roche's bird, it is obvious that I cannot be at Algiers and at
Oran at the same time. I hope that between the two stools I
shall not fall to the ground, or turn up with the Arethusa, im-
paled on a coral reef at Bona. His Majesty intends, during his
stay of thirty-five days, to visit the chief places of the three
provinces of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine; to explore the
Tell, to traverse the Sahara, and to look up the mountain
ranges of Kabylia; besides making a short villeggiatura at
some wonderful hot sulphur baths, the name of which I have
been unable to catch. In other words, this means that the
Emperor of the French is bent on travelling through the
ancient Numidia, and the two Mauritanias-the Sitifian and
the Cæsarean. He is desirous of learning the condition and
wants of the "autochthonic" population. Strabo and Hero-
dotus help me; or, rather, Captain Burton and the Anthropo-
logical Society, come to my aid! In the naïve ignorance of
confirmed cockneyhood, I imagined that I should meet in
Algeria only those Bedouin Arabs whom one sees in the pictures
of Horace Vernet, or who in the flesh-and very brown flesh it
was used to stand on one another's heads and turn double
summersaults over phalanxes of soldiers with fixed bayonets at
the Colosseum in the Regent's-park. I never bargained for the
MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES. THE ARETHUSA.
115
((
autochthonics." A military medical gentleman on board tells
me that during my stay it will behove me to inquire into the
habits and peculiarities, first of the Berbers or Barbari—whence
the name of Barbary—or Kabyles, who are supposed to have
been quite an old people when Carthage was flourishing; next
of the Nomadic Arabs, or Bedouins dwelling in tents, careering
about on blood horses, driving camels before them, and wearing
over their picturesque burnouses monstrous sombreros of straw,
rivalling that famous "coach-wheel" hat which Mr. Robert
Keeley used to wear in the part of Orange Moll in Nell
Gwynne. The nomadic Arabs being disposed of--let me men-
tion that the most important tribes bear the fascinating titles
of the Oulad-Si-Yahïa-ben-Taleb, the Oulad-Ali-ben-Sabor, the
Beni-Djaad, and the Beni-Sliman—the sedentary Arabs, or
Hadar, inhabiting the cities, to whom the name of Moors has
been given, have to be considered. Nor must the she-Moors, or
Mauresques, who are married at twelve, and are grandmothers
before they come of age, be forgotten. After these come the
Koulourlis, or sons of Turks and Moorish women: the pure
Osmanlis were deported en masse by the French at the time of
the conquest. There are a good many negroes, too, Central
Africans, who were slaves—and very happy and contented slaves
-up to 1848, when they were emancipated by the Provisional
Government. Since the blessed Act of enfranchisement, my
military medical authority hints, our black brothers have
I 2
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turned thieves, loafers, and sorcerers-practising the abominable
rites of Obeah with the cheerful independence of freemen.
They represent the interesting sable communities of Zouzow
and Haoussa; Katchna, Sowi, and Tombuctoo; Tombou, Bam-
bara, Gomma, and Bornou. Of which, Exeter Hall, please,
when found, make a note. Then there are the Berranis or
outsiders," who have been in Algeria for ages, but who come
nobody knows whence, and belong to nobody knows what race.
They are subdivided into Biskris, Mzitis, Mzabis, and Larʼouatis ;
and there is another section of Berranis, or aliens, among whom
are included strangers from Tunis and genuine Moors from
Morocco. But enough—although the catalogue is by no means
exhausted; since the Jews, who are both numerous and wealthy
in Algeria, and the European colonists, administrators or mili-
tary-French, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians-remain yet to
be figured.
Meanwhile, I play the game of Patience on board the Arc-
thusa. She is a lively craft, and behaves in as sprightly a
manner as her saucy namesake, famous in the annals of the
British navy. As M. Nadar's balloon is not in working order,
and the ateliers de tapisserie at Aubusson do not weave carpets
of the kind erst provided by the Egyptian magician, I must be
content with the modicum of speed the screw can give me, and
grin and bear its grinding, churning motion till we cast anchor
in the harbour of Algiers. If the Emperor isn't there, I must
MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES. THE ARETHUSA.
117
go
to Oran; and if he isn't at Oran, I must go to the Mountains
of the Moon, which, I have been given to understand, are some-
where in the centre of the African continent.
We have on board the Arethusa, postal service packet of the
Messageries Impériales, whose captain is a lieutenant de vais-
seau in the Imperial Navy, about the strangest assortment of
humanity with whom it was ever my lot to come in contact.
It is altogether a phenomenal shipload, for, with the exception
of
your humble servant, there is not one representative of per-
fidious Albion on board. Nor do there seem to be any foreign
tourists. Everybody is on business of some sort; and this is
not, I suppose, the time of year when people go to Africa for
pleasure. I confess that I did expect to meet at least one
British T. G., his courier-bag at his side and his "Murray" in
his hand; or at least a Scotch laird going lion-hunting, or Guy
Livingstone blasé of fox-hunting and yearning for antelopes; or
a member of the Royal Society proceeding to the back of the
Sahara to study the habits of the Tupinambis arenarius, or
gigantic lizard-the terrestrial crocodile of Herodotus. The
hotel at Marseilles was full of our countrymen of the order
known at Lane's and Limmers's as "howling swells;" but there
are no swells to howl on board the Arethusa. No one has
thought it worth his while to cross this sea, which is as calm,
just now, as Etty's Idle Lake, to witness the great fantasia
which is taking place in Barbary. I am alone in my glory, and
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I am happy to say that I have a cabin to myself—albeit the
apartment in which I am billeted has three berths, an upper, a
lower, and a sofa one. The sofa berth is of the exact shape and
size of a coffin. I try to be cheerful, and to imagine it looks
like a warm bath, but the starched and snowy sheets and scanty
pillow have a horrible resemblance to grave clothes. For the
rest, the cabin is an excellent one, and about twice the size of a
state-room on board a British ocean steamer. It is beautifully
decorated; has a wide port, fitted with plate glass and a large
mirror; a rich green silk curtain veiling the portal opening on
the saloon, and its toilet appurtenances are perfect. It is
almost as coquettish and much more comfortable than the
bridal chamber" on board an American river steamboat. I
remember once tossing up with a digger just come from Cali-
fornia for this same 'bridal chamber it was only a dollar
and a half extra. I won, and went to bed in a berth with white
satin curtains and a crochet counterpane; but I did not take
much by my motion, for the steamer having a full cargo, a
number of casks of unrefined petroleum had been piled up
between the outside of the "bridal chamber" and the bulwarks,
and the stench that meandered through the highly varnished
venetian blinds was horrible.
tr
66
""
The state-room lights are in locked lanterns on board the
Arethusa, and they are kept burning all night; but there is no
prohibition against carrying lucifer matches, and wax tapers
MESSAGERIES IMPERIALES.-THE ARETHUSA.
119
or vesuvians are fizzing and sputtering about at all hours.
Smoking is tolerated all over the decks, and, so far as I can
make out, all over the ship, save in the ladies' cabin; and in
the passengers' berths there is not the ghost of a life-belt to be
seen. I mention these little points of detail for the reason that
they detract from the completeness of organisation of an other-
wise admirably-conducted line.
I have said that we have a very strange assortment of
humanity on board. Let me justify this assertion. At one
o'clock P.M. on the second day of May I found myself, in con-
formity with the regulations of the Messageries Impériales, in
the salle d'attente of their office in the Cannebière. I had com-
plied with all the police regulations-that is to say, instead of
being worried to produce my papers, and obtaining a visa for
Algeria and a permis d'embarcation, I simply said that I was
an Englishman, and was most courteously informed that the
whole of the French territory was open to me, to travel whither-
soever I listed. The cordial and ungrudging politeness shown
by all classes of Government officials in France to English
travellers-I do not speak of the people at large, who are
always polite-is one of the most remarkable features of the
epoch, and one of the most gratifying to a person who can
recollect the time when to be an Englishman was to be a
victim who was bullied, harassed, and driven from pillar to post
on the slightest pretext.
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I had the advantage of being brought up in a French college
where there were a thousand boys. That was about the year
1839. There were plenty of foreigners in the school-Italians,
Spaniards, Portuguese, Creoles, and even Turks; but I was the
only representative of perfidious Albion. A miserable time I
had of it. I was pinched, snipped, nipped, cuffed, and occa-
sionally spit upon, simply because I was English. I was called
“sacré Anglais," "rosbif," "pomme de terre," and especially
goddam ;" and when the chaplain came once a week to
catechise the younger boys prior to their first communion, I
was sure to be gravely informed by one of my tormentors that
as a protestant heretic I was sure to go to the devil. How
anxiously I used to look forward to my fortnightly exeat or
day's leave, when I would go and see a dear little sister who,
happier than I, had two bright English girls for her school-
mates! I always began to cry directly after I had kissed my
sister, say at 11 A.M. Then we did nothing but laugh until
7 P.M.; and then, as I was obliged to be within gates at eight,
I began to whimper again. Reviewing my experience of Eng-
lish and French education, I am inclined to think that about
the year 1839 there was not much to choose between the
position of an English boy in a French school and that of a
French boy in an English one. Even twenty years ago we had
no friends abroad save the hotel-keepers; and to these gentry
even we were sacrés Anglais, five minutes after we had paid
MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES. THE ARETHUSA.
121
an extortionate bill. Now all this is changed. The treaty
of commerce has avenged Waterloo; and I don't think
there would be any very great incongruity in graving the
head of Richard Cobden on the obverse of the St. Helena
medal.
Omnibuses had been provided, gratuitously, for the convey-
ance of the Arethusa passengers from the Messageries to the
place of embarkation at La Joliette. These were welcome, for
the heat was intense; but, in goodness' name, I asked myself,
what are all these good people going to do in Algeria? There
were whole families of Southern peasants-old women in tall
white caps; lithe and slender girls with the true Roman type
of Provence, high foreheads, aquiline noses, haughtily curved
upper lips, rounded chins, luxuriant hair, and flashing black
eyes; raw joskins in blouses, sabots, and straw hats, and some
in long tasselled nightcaps. There were some trim little bodies
of the demoiselle de magasin model, bound for Numidia, in
coquettish laced caps and plaited aprons. There was an im-
mensely fat old woman eating bread and sausage, wofully
impregnated with garlic; and an affable but faded female in
a full suit of the Royal Stuart tartan, in woollen-rather warm
wear this weather-who was munching hard-boiled eggs and
sucking oranges alternately; both, she informed me, admirable
preservatives against sea-sickness. There was a brawny fellow,
over six feet high, with a coal-black beard, and in a blouse, who
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*
held in leash three lamentably attenuated curs with lank bodies,
short legs, and drooping tails-turnspits, apparently, crossed
with Pariah dogs. They were all carefully muzzled with a kind
of strawberry pottle made of wire, although they did not seem
capable of biting anything save the dust. Were they on their
way to Africa, I wondered, with a view to a junction with the
famous slougui, or greyhound of the Ouled-sidi-cheikh? But
where were the tourists, the travellers who had paid ninety-five
francs a head for a first-class passage to Algiers? All these
good people seemed to belong to the lower middle class. At
the last moment about half-a-dozen middle-aged gentlemen,
mostly greyheaded and somewhat seedy in apparel, made their
appearance. On glancing at their button-holes I saw that five
out of the six wore the talismanic red ribbon of the Legion.
These, then, were the first-class passengers. I am aware that
when a Frenchman travels-save only when he is going to
Les Eaux, to Homburg, or to Dieppe-he puts on his very worst
clothes. You may cross from Calais to Dover every night with
a throng of foreigners who look as though they were not worth
thirteen pence between them; but they are very likely princes,
ambassadors, generals, or primi tenori. And yet, meet an
Englishman anywhere, in a steamer or on a railway, and two
minutes of the most superficial observation will tell you what
rank he holds in society.
The Peninsular and Oriental steamers, together with those
MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES.-THE ARETHUSA.
123
of the Italian and Oriental lines of the Messageries, lie at La
Joliette, and the way thereto is through an inconceivable
higgledy-piggledy of old houses half demolished, and new ones
half constructed. New streets and boulevards are being built
everywhere. The undertaking is magnificent; but on a broil-
ing hot day, what with the glare of the bran-new stone in the
sun, the smell of newly-slaked lime, the incessant clicking of
hammers, and the white gritty dust which forces itself into
your eyes and down your throat, reconstruction becomes at last
somewhat of a nuisance. You feel inclined to pick up a tile,
like the Hebrew man of old, and write upon it, and testify
against Marseilles and the prevailing mania for pulling down
cities and building them up again.
The Arethusa was moored in a rather narrow berth, along-
side a row of lighters, and the gangway was reached by means
of a series of inclined planes, so nicely carpeted that I looked
aloft to see if M. Léotard was about to perform on the trapèze
in the upper rigging. At the gangway stood a gentleman.
whom I mistook, first, for the captain in evening dress, next for
the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, and next for a master
of the ceremonies attached to the administration of the Pompes
Funèbres. He was clad in raven black; he was, small tri-
angular whiskers excepted, closely shaven; he wore a white
cravat with long fringed ends, white gloves, and a steel chain
round his neck. This imposing personage turned out to be
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We
the Économe, or Head Steward of the Arethusa. He was very
affable; made me a low bow; took my ticket with an air; and
handed me over to the second steward, an official in a hand-
some livery and gaiters-a kind of oceanic Jeames-who con-
ducted me to my cabin, and informed me that it was à ma
parfaite disposition. What next? You know what the next
thing is on board a British vessel. "Steward, a bottle of
Allsopp." "Steward, some brandy and soda." "Steward, what
time do we dine ?" "Steward, I'll be somethinged if that fat
Frenchman sleeps over me." Such demands, such conduct,
would be quite out of place on board the Arethusa.
smoke, we sing, we play cards for love, we make la promenade
sur le pont; but we only eat and drink at the duly appointed
meal times, we never blow up the Econome, and there are but
two meals a day-a light breakfast and a lighter dinner.
Good lack! What guzzling, and gorging, and gambling, and
grumbling I have seen and heard on board the sturdy swagger-
ing ocean steamers of Britain! I have known the morning
begin with rum-and-milk and hard biscuits, and the night close
with brandy-and-water and broiled bones. "You put water in
your wine," my military medical friend observed at dinner as I
tempered the somewhat potent Provençal; "when I was in
the Crimea your countrymen, the English officers, never did
such a thing. You have hard heads. Vous buvez sec. Les
Anglais en Crimée étaient toujours en train de prendre des
MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES.-THE ARETHUSA.
125
matières alcooliques et des choses capiteuses." I explained to
him that the taste for light French wines had sprung up
amongst us since the Crimean war.
We hove and catted anchor, and wore out of dock-a devious
half-hour-soon after two o'clock. French seamanship is to
me an exceeding marvel. Why do all the officers seem to be
giving contradictory commands? Why does a sailor, when he
receives an order, instead of obeying it there and then, shrug
his shoulders, extend the open palms of his hands, and appear
to utter a torrent of expostulations? The French are said to
be admirable navigators, and they are indeed born mathema-
ticians-logical, clear-headed, and simple in demonstration ;
but their seamanship puzzles me. To-day, for instance, as we
were wriggling out of dock, the first lieutenant shouted from
the wheel to the captain on the bridge, “En cinq minutes nous
sommes sur le quai!" and then arose a terrible hubbub of
orders and counter-orders, and Gallic marine oaths, which would
be awful were they not fortunately incomprehensible. All came
right, however, at last, and ere long we were passing the Château
d'If, where the Dantès of Dumas's fiction, and that Honoré
Gabriel Riquetti de Mirabeau of the world's real history, lan-
guished in a to them hopeless captivity; but the one to become
Count of Monte Cristo, the other to crush up the crown of
France like the pewter pot in the grip of the Strong Man at
the fair.
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Sweeping with my glass the forest of masts and the encircling
belt of tall white buildings, and the terraces of vine and orange
and olive, and the far-off blue mountains kissing the clouds, I
could make out, on the front of a small house, in red letters on
a black ground, the words "Sailors' Home." I am glad that
English Jack is cared for in a place where wine is so cheap
and fruit so plentiful. So, shutting up my glass, I saw the
last of the brave old city of Marseilles. Bonapartist to the
backbone is "la ggggrande ville," and yet-so queer are
the harlequin's tricks of history-I remember that in 1815
the city of Marseilles presented a bunch of olives, in gold, to
an Englishman named Sir Hudson Lowe. The presentation,
it is true, took place just before Waterloo, and was made to
the commandant of Corsican Rangers, and not to the gaoler of
Napoleon.
A few minutes before we started there had been mustered on
the lighter beneath us the raggedest regiment you ever saw out
of the suburbs of Coventry, or the play of King Henry IV.
The regiment was about twenty strong, and paraded in double
file. There was a tall Zouave and a short Zouave; there was a
heavy dragoon in scarlet trousers and spatterdashes, but with a
kind of canvas bedgown over his uniform; there was a lad in a
striped jacket and trousers, with sleeves and legs too long for
him, like a Pierrot; there was a fellow with a closely-cropped
head, a felt képi, and a tightly-fitting suit of black baize; there
MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES.-THE ARETHUSA.
127
was a man with a ragged undress jacket, without buttons, cuffs,
or facings; there was a Chasseur de Vincennes without any
coat at all; there were three or four men in peasants' blouses,
but with the regulation scarlet trousers; finally, there were two
mahogany-faced, black-bead-eyed, crisp-bearded, white-teethed
creatures, with bare legs and foul and tattered burnouses, whom
I knew at once to be Bedouins. "Ah," I thought, "military
invalids, no doubt, bound for some sanatorium on the African
littoral." I was mistaken. I learnt, on inquiry, that I was
surveying a gang of convict soldiers. A trim, fat little lieu-
tenant, with a slender switch in his hand, and a grim, bronzed
sergeant, with a book beneath his arm, behind him, inspected
these ragamuffins, who were all indescribably ragged and dirty.
Then they were marched on board, and I could see there was
good reason for their being paraded in double file, for they were
chained in couples. The irons, which were but manacles, were
joined together by links not much heavier than those in a dog-
chain, and fastened with a padlock. A squad of gendarmes,
their full-dressed cocked hats replaced for the nonce by forage
caps, accompanied these good-for-nothings. They were the
sweepings, I take it, of the military prisons of the Empire-
drunkards and thieves, and deserters, and incorrigible tapageurs,
and what not the black sheep of their regiments, the bêtes
noires of their captains, the despair of the military tribunals,
and who had been sentenced to divers terms of imprisonment
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and hard labour at the African penitenciers. I have heard that
the criminals are chained to wheelbarrows in those establish-
ments, and are made to drag cannon-balls attached to their legs.
How this may be, I know not; but on board the Arethusa the
scoundrels were not treated with any great rigour. We had no
sooner started than the gendarmes took their chains off, and
they were allowed to roam about the deck, and mingle with the
rest of the forward passengers. Most of them were smoking,
and towards evening more than one card party on deck was
organised, and these gay convicts made themselves quite happy
over piquet and écarté. I don't suppose that their reformation
was either delayed or accelerated by their being allowed to
smoke and play cards. I don't believe in the reformation of
adult criminals, myself. I believe that if a man is innately a
rogue, he will continue a rogue to the end of the chapter, even
though he be eventually a rogue in a white neckloth and with
a sanctimonious visage; and equally I believe that if a man
commits a crime through strong temptation or an uncontrol-
lable impulse, he will not have been an hour in prison before
he makes up his mind never to commit crime again. In your
criminal experience did you often hear of a prisoner found
guilty of manslaughter, and who had suffered for that offence,
afterwards committing murder? Repentance takes place in
the station-house cell before the first examination, or not
at all.
MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES. THE ARETHUSA.
129
:
""
I went forward and sat down among the rascals, and, with
the aid of some tobacco, passed a very comfortable hour with
them. They were conversational enough of course I did not
touch on the scrape they were in. It was none of my busi-
ness. I was not their perfumer. A "scrape," indeed, their
condition seemed to be considered by their fellow-passengers
who were not in bondage. The fat old woman of garlic and
sausage memory spoke of them as ces pauvres gens; and one
vagabond, who had a sore toe, was resting it on the lap of a
pretty little Gascon peasant girl, who, with the infinite pity of
her sex, was binding up the blain as tenderly as though she
were waiting on a princess. So have I seen the Russian pea-
sants pressing food and copper copecks upon the "unfortunates
who, laden with chains, were passing through the streets on
their way to Siberia. So have I seen an Indian in Mexico roll
up a cigarito, light it, and offer it to a criminal in the chain-
gang. This curious feeling of commiseration towards the guilty
springs, no doubt, from a weakened moral sense. In England
we are so exceedingly virtuous, that we cannot even travel in a
railway carriage with a couple of thieves handcuffed together
without writing flaming letters to the newspapers on the indig-
nity of being compelled to ride with convicts. And yet, after
all, on the score of kind-heartedness, I think the French, whom
we are so fond of describing as "half monkeys, half tigers,"
have slightly the advantage of us. I wonder what they would
K
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think in a French asylum for the aged and infirm-an asylum
directed by those admirable Sisters of Charity-of such a case
as that of Timothy Daly. I wonder what they would think at
Boston, in the State of Massachusetts-where the aged female
paupers are called the "old ladies," and have their private
parlour in the almshouse, and their cushioned seats in the
chapel-of such a case as that of Thomas Gibson. I know what
they would do if such a horrible thing occurred with them.
They would hang the master of St. Giles's Workhouse as high
as Haman,
There were a few-not more than two or three-unmis-
takably villanous countenances among these soldier convicts.
The man in black baize with the felt képi, and who had a
hatchet face desperately scarred with the small-pox, looked
from head to heel a "bad egg." There was a sanctified Maw-
worm expression, too, about this fellow, which filled you
with a strong desire to fling him overboard, or at least to have
him triced up at the gangway and comforted with three dozen.
I wonder what the man in black had done. He had been
pay-sergeant, perhaps, and had absconded with the regimental
chest. There was another, a big man, whose chin, closely
grained with indigo, seemed to show that ere the application of
the disciplinary razor he had had a big beard. Passion, un-
governable passion, was imprinted in every lineament of this
fellow's face, in every ve and tendon of the strong bare arms
MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES. THE ARETHUSA.
131
((
which he swung impatiently to and fro. His chains had been
removed with the rest, but a gendarme kept close to him, and
engaged him in soothing converse. He had a great deal to say
as he passed about "Le Colonel, voyez-vous." Had he killed
the colonel in a rixe? I fancied him a kind of Chourineur who
saw red" sometimes, and, when the blood was in his eyes,
slew. As to the two mahogany-skinned Arabs, I could make
nothing of them. What was their crime, if any—for they had
not in the first instance been chained-I could not settle in my
mind. They had been taken, perhaps, for a trip to France, and
had not liked it. Perhaps they had been assistant grooms to
the ostriches in the Jardin des Plantes, and were going back to
look up the rest of their stud in the Sahara. They were
miserable and woful creatures, and when they drew the foul
and tattered hoods of their burnouses over their heads they
resembled now Lascar beggars, now Trappists out at elbows,
now phantoms of Dogberry and Verges. But they were most
patient creatures, and, hour after hour, remained quiescent,
crouching on their haunches as Job might, waiting for some-
body to lend him a potsherd to scrape himself withal. But
they suffered nevertheless. The sea-breeze no sooner began to
blow than they began to shiver, and it was anything but
exhilarating to watch them cowering in corners, under the lee
of bales of goods, gibbering and chattering their teeth like
disconsolate pagods.
K 2
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Such a scene as the decks forward presented I can only
imagine a fellow to in the tableau described by W. M. Thackeray
in the “White Squall." Luckily, the mistral forbore to blow, or
the disorder among the heterogeneous assemblage would have
been fearful. As it was, everybody's elbow seemed to be in
everybody else's eye; and the deck passengers lay, stood,
lounged, lurched, and sprawled all manner of ways, like the
animals in a Noah's ark. The three dogs had been disposed,
their muzzles removed, in a coop, and were howling dismally.
A quantity of sheep and poultry were encaged at the forecastle,
and the squalling of babies was appalling. You met at every
turn the very oddest costumes. Now it was a young French-
man, to all appearance of the calicot or draper's shopman order;
but his loins were girt with a silken sash of many folds, and his
head was crowned with a fez cap with long blue tassel. There
were some very nice feminine toilettes about; but the ladies
were all second-class passengers-some of them even, I believe,
were third-class; and there was not a bonnet to be seen on
board. How all these strangely-mingled creatures-convicts,
peasants, soldiers, children, and grisettes-managed to eat and
drink and sleep, was to me a marvel of marvels; but they
seemed to get along very well, and showed in this the amazing
fertility of invention and adaptability to circumstances of their
countrymen. They made beds of trusses of forage and bags of
potatoes; they rigged up awnings and shelter-tents; they devised
MESSAGERIES IMPÉRIALES. THE ARETHUSA.
133
cunning wigwams; somehow or another, with some friendly aid
from the caboose I fancy, cauldrons began to simmer and a savoury
steam to rise. The famous pot au feu of France vindicated its
traditional renown. The soup was ladled out, the sausage was
sliced, the long brown loaf was cut into hunks; the little
children ran about full of beans and cabbage, and yelping for
joy; gulps were taken from bottles containing wine not much
worse, I fancy, than that we got aft; and then the fumes of
tobacco became odorous, and I marked the hatchet-faced man
in black baize stealthily slipping about and offering cigars for sale
-three for a sou. Where did this pock-marked individual obtain
his merchandise? Honestly? I doubt it. And when the night
came, and high above the mast you could see the fat white
moon, "like a dot over an i," as Alfred de Musset has it, all these
poor people had managed somehow to snuggle under rugs or
tarpaulins, and lay head to heel, or anyhow, for warmth-a
great hillocky mass of hushed humanity; the innocent babe,
the rude peasant, the valiant fighting man, the wild Arab, and
the convict black with crime, all dumb and quiet as though
they were dead. And then I turned from them and looked
over the dark bulwarks at the long, soft, silken swell of this
matchless Mediterranean sea-this sea that is like a beautiful
woman; for, all soft and silken as she is, there will come,
almost without a warning, the sharp and sudden tempest-the
mistral or the squall. Ware hawk! you will have your face
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scratched and your whiskers pulled; but, bless you, it is all
over in twenty minutes, and then the Mediterranean curls and
kisses and fondles round you to make it up again. She
drowned Shelley, though.
VIII.
MONSEIGNEUR.
Dixit Abbas ad Prioris,
Tu es homo bonis moris,
Quia semper sanioris,
Mihi das concilias.
Latynne for dogges; or Friar Brumstaples
Boke of jollie half-howers."
BUT though we had plenty of rogues aboard—and it was not
every rascal in the Arethusa, perchance, who wore a shackle at
his shin-we were not altogether graceless. We had Monseig-
neur, and, in addition, Monseigneur's Vicar-General, and a serv-
ing or lay brother, a most gluttonous person, in a rusty black
frock, like a Westminster Abbey verger fallen upon evil days.
He had a great, pudding, bullet head, with a sleek crop of black
hair of the true Portland cut, little pig's eyes, a gash for a
mouth, with livid, blubber lips, and flap ears which would have
done Praise-God-Barebones good to look upon. And yet, the
dominant expression in the fellow's face was less one of cunning
than of impenetrable stupidity. He was not, perhaps, naturally
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wicked or cruel, but he was so densely stupid that he was in a
fit state to become either. I shall not easily forget that tallow
face, those leaden eyes, that petrified grin, which distorted the
mouth in strongly contrasting conflict with the fossil scowl which
wrinkled his brow. There seems to have been in all ages an
average supply of these semi-clerical dullards kept in stock by
nature for the affliction of mankind. Sometimes they take the
tonsure and become priests: then they prowl about in shovel
hats and shoebuckles, gloze over women's toilet tables, and
cozen foolish girls into cloisters. Sometimes they take the
cowl and are monks: the real lazy, worthless, brutal friars,
whose shaven crowns and dirty sandalled feet are visible some-
times now-a-days at continental railway stations. Aye, and I
have seen the bullet-head surmounted by a Protestant chimney-
pot, and its throat encircled by a limp white kerchief of Dis-
senting pattern. Pudding-head may be either a Papist or a
Swaddler." In any clime, and professing any creed, he means
the same thing: bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and stupidity, and
he is as gluttonous over his rye bread and black radishes in the
convent refectory, as over the tea and muffins, and sally-lunns,
and other sanctified quasinesses of a Stoke Newington parlour.
As different as light from darkness is this flabby creature-
Stiggins, or Frère Canaille, call him which you will-from the
jovial village curé, with the little child-parishioners clinging to
the skirts of his cassock-from the stately Spanish padre dis-
<<
MONSEIGNEUR.
137
coursing over his chocolate on the miracles of the saints-from
the benevolent Anglican clergyman of the right sort, working
like a dray-horse among the sick and the poor, preaching capital
sermons, bringing up a tribe of his own boys and girls, fagging
in the school and the village club, and yet finding time every
week for a spell at photography, or a turn at that translation of
Edipus Rex, with notes (which will rather bother the German
commentators, he hopes), upon which he has been occupied for
so many years. And can this tallow-faced man with the flap
ears claim any kindred with yonder lofty browed, keen-eyed,
resolute man—the accomplished scholar, the polished gentle-
man. Hush! he is a Jesuit. According to Béranger they are
all of the same stock. Under the French flag I have a right to
quote him :-
"Et puis nous fessons,
Et nous refessons
Les jolis petits, les petits garçons."
Yes, bullet-head is own brother to the Frère Ignorantin, the
half sly, half sluggish boor in a gown-the cross between a
Sacristan and a Bridewell correctioner, who brandishes his cat-
o'-nine tails over the poor little rustic oaf standing tumbling
before him in the doctrinal school. Beadle, pedant, and whole
hog: a nice mixture.
I took an intense dislike to this serving brother; this hostler,
so to speak, of this sleek, plump mule of the orthodox Church.
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He never missed a meal, and over-ate himself at each, yet he
was, in the intervals, shamefully sea-sick. There are phases
in the mal de mer in which that disagreeable ailment may
assume the proportions of a vice. There are people who have
no right to be sick and who are sick, who give way to it, who
encourage it-great hulking, lazy lubbers, who lie and moan
like valetudinarian baboons, and let pretty, delicate, but plucky
and uncomplaining women wait upon them. There was no
lady to wait on the lay brother; but he led all the saloon-
stewards a hard life. He had gotten hold of a state-room quite
as good as his master's; and, in virtue of his semi-ecclesiastical
status, was tended with ten thousand times more solicitude than
he deserved. A quart of salt-water, and a round dozen at the
gangway to help him down with it, would have been the cure
for sea-sickness I should have prescribed for him.
Monseigneur and his Vicar-General were very different per-
sonages. But were they Bishop and Vicar, or Abbot and
Prior? In my ignorance of the economy of the Roman
Catholic hierarchy I was puzzled at first to tell. I think they
were both. The first was evidently of episcopal rank. He was
always addressed as "Monseigneur;" he wore a sumptuous
signet ring on his right forefinger; he had a golden chain about
his neck so rich and massy, that Benson might have made, and
the Sheriff of Middlesex worn it.
silk, too, on that portion of his
There was a square of purple
chest which in lay persons is
MONSEIGNEUR.
139
ordinarily covered with a waistcoat. When he went on deck he
wore a stately shovel-hat; but the rest of his attire was strictly
monastic. His ample crown was shaven, leaving only a narrow
ring of silver hair. The Cross, which depended from his massy
chain, was of plain wood; I think his feet were sandalled; and
from head to foot he was swathed in a long loose gaberdine of
fine white flannel. A cowl to this, behind, there might have
been; but if such were the case, it was hidden by a long cloak
of black camlet. About his waist was a plain leathern girdle,
to which hung his beads. This was Monseigneur; somewhat
of a dandy for all his conventional garb; for I fancied that his
fine cambric pocket-handkerchief was not devoid of a suspicion
of scent. 'Twas as a preventive perhaps against sea-sickness that
he had had recourse to Jean Marie Farina. He used a parasol,
too, blue silk, like unto the one erst carried by the famous Mr.
D'Orsay Clark, to shade his good old head from the sun in
places where there was no awning. He was tall and portly,
and sixty years old, perhaps—a calm, sunny, cheerful sixty-
sixty that has a good conscience, and takes its meals regularly,
and sleeps well o' nights. His plump hands were of exquisite
whiteness and softness. For the latter fact I can vouch, for I
had the honour of kissing Monseigneur's digits before I left him.
A face more thoroughly benevolent and innocent in its expres-
sion I never saw. It was positively refreshing to see the good
Bishop-Monk smile, to hear his artless pleasantries, and naïve
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inquiries of the captain at dinner-time as to how big the ship
and how deep the sea might be. A whole-souled, good man,
Milud-Abbot, I take it, of some Trappist or Lazarist monastery
in Algeria or in the Regency of Tunis. The Arabs do not do
these worthy fathers any harm, or wish them any ill. Why
should they? Their whole lives are passed in doing good.
This the Abbot; but, to him enter the Prior-Secretary, Vicar-
General, as I have scatteringly named him. He looked empha-
tically that which the Americans call a "hard case." Oh, such
a thin, wiry, dried up, salted and smoked and cured little man.
Not cunning, not hypocritical, perhaps; but sharp, decidedly
sharp. Make, by means of an imaginary metempsychosis, the
face and manner of John Arthur Roebuck pass into the body of
a ferret, and tone down the combination of Mr. Toole, of the
Theatre Royal Adelphi, in some part where he has to try to
look respectable, and you may get up a very tolerable mental
carte-de-visite of the Prior. Monseigneur was clearly in his
hands as clay in those of the potter. The ease with which he
passed a silken string through the episcopal nose, and twisted
the episcopal body round his little finger, was most edifying.
And yet the pair seemed to agree very well. Each probably
performed his respective part in the convent to admiration.
The sonorous voice of the Abbot, for instance, must have been
magnificent in the chapel, at vespers. His milder accents, hist
sweet and winning smile, must have been invaluable in admi-
MONSEIGNEUR.
141
nistering consolation to the afflicted, and in proving to erring
brothers the sinfulness of their ways. And those soft white
hands had bound up many a wound, I warrant. But the Prior's
functions I imagined to be very different. It was his business,
I took it, not to bark but to bite, to "tackle" the erring brother
when he couldn't be brought to see his error, and commend to
him the wholesome discipline of a banyan day and a dark cell,
nay, sometimes to administer to a refractory novice a little
whipcord for his soul's health. But he was no stupid savage
like that sea-sick bullet-head of a lay brother. He was very
shrewd and clever, and had read a good many books, although
he was, in many things which we call worldly knowledge, as
simple as a child. To the good monk, even the brightest in the
fraternity, the convent wall is as the foot of the bedstead to the
sick man. There is his horizon: there ends his world.
Nor could I avoid thinking that bullet-head, senseless clock as
he was, unable either to write or spell, bullied and tyrannised
over both Abbot and Prior, and made them dance as he pleased
to his piping.
We grew - leaving bullet-head out-stanch allies. Mon-
seigneur was good enough, when we sighted the Balearic Isles,
to address me as his son. I lent the Prior my glass, and told
him tales about strange countries, not entirely of the nature in
which the Royal Marines are sportively said to take delight, but
still, travellers' tales. I assure you that they were all true; and
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yet how people persist in disbelieving us.
They deny facts, and
yet will swallow the clumsiest fictions. The old woman who
placed implicit faith in her sailor son's story of having picked
up the hind wheel of Pharaoh's chariot in the Red Sea, turned
him out of doors for an impudent young liar when he explained
to her how some islands grew from coral reefs.
I thought it would turn out so. The convict in black frieze
got hold of Monseigneur. The Abbot went forward, and talked
long and earnestly with this scoundrel. They trotted up and
down the main-deck: the mitred monk looking ineffably be-
nignant; the ticketed felon looking a bigger rascal than ever.
The old Pentonville and Milbank story, only the scene and the
actors were changed. There was 297 "gammoning the chap-
lain" in the Mediterranean Sea. I have no doubt that Mon-
seigneur promised the man in frieze to use his influence with
the Governor-General, and get a year or two off his sentence.
IX.
EL DJEZZAÏR.
.... Nec ab Icosio taciti recedamus; Hercule enim illæ transeunte, viginti
qui a comitatu ejus dixiverant, locum deligunt, faciunt mœnia, ac ne quis
imposito a se nomine privatim gloriaretur, de condentium numero urbi nomen
datum. Porro urbs Icosium sic vocata fuit a viginti Herculis comitibus qui
illam condiderunt, nam elkooi, græce, latini viginti significat." (C. IVLII
SOLINI, &c. BASILEÆ, 1538, in-4.)
Old Hercules (the Lybian),
They say (or any other man),
While marching up the Afric coast
Was clean deserted by his host-
That is to say, by twenty villians
Who thought they'd like to turn civilians.
They chose a site, and built a city,
Which is the subject of my ditty;
But lest one of their scurvy band
Should give his name to all the land,
(And claimants to it there were plenty,)
They called the city Number Twenty,
Thus snubbing individual pride,
While one and all were glorified.
You'll find the Latin if you seek for 't,
Viginti; elkooi's the Greek for 't,
From which Icosium we indite
The modern Algiers :-Am I right?
Hudibrastic translation of Solin,
by a gentleman's butler.
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ALGIERS, or El Djezzaïr, as the Arabs still fondly term it, or
the Icosium of the Lybian Hercules' twenty deserters men-
tioned in the foregoing doggrel, and afterwards to become a
Roman city of importance; you may call it which you like.
Or, if you desire an additional qualification, the Signor Torquato
Tasso will help you to one. Algieri, infame nido di Corsari,
nutrice di leoni e d'elefanti-Algiers, infamous nest of pirates,
nursing mother of lions and elephants. The Signor T. T. is
ungallant, but he wrote in the fourteenth century, which must
be his excuse.
There is a Yankee locution descriptive of a process which
implies ruthless and wholesale demolition and devastation,
known as "knocking things into a cocked hat." The She-
nandoah valley, for instance, has undergone this process. So
has the once thriving city of Atlanta. So has the whilom
prosperous, beautiful, and hospitable Charleston. The Goths
and the Vandals and the Anythingarians, the Moors, the Arabs,
and the Turks did, during many succeeding ages, knock Icosium
into a cocked hat. Then, it retained stability for some cen-
turies as the Mahometan city of El Djezzaïr. Then the French
seized it, and, from an architectural point of view, they too
have knocked it into a cocked hat as battered and shapeless as
that of a parish beadle who has been maltreated by a mob of
mutinous paupers. But the French have made some amends.
Although they have demolished the most romantic portion of
EL DJEZZAIR.
145
Algiers, they have built it up again in the approved Paris
Boulevard fashion. For the ancient Moresco turban Louis
Philippe substituted the képi of a chasseur d'Afrique; and to
this has been superadded by Napoleon III. the petit chapeau
of Imperialism.
-a
Its partial devastation, and more deplorable restoration, not-
withstanding, Algiers is yet delightful. Enthusiasts declare it
to be adorable. It has been likened to a stately pyramid of
white marble, of which the base is flanked by venerable, dusky
hills, like old brown lions couchant. Another critic has dis-
covered that it resembles a huge Pentelican quarry scooped
out of the bosom of a mountain. The resources of comparison
have, indeed, been well nigh exhausted in the search for similes
to describe El Djezzaïr as it appears from the sea.
To one-
mathematical tourist, this—it is as a quadrant sharply cut out
of plaster of Paris. Another genius, of a nautical turn, likens
it to the mainsail of some huge argosy, or "tall ammiral"
stretched on the beach. To a gentleman whose mind was
more prosaic, but still akin to his immediate predecessor, it
occurred that the thickly-piled and snowy-hued buildings of
Algiers looked like nothing so much as a fortnight's washing laid
out on the shore to dry, with heavy stones at the corners to
keep the sheets and table-cloths from "flopping." The city is,
in truth, from a distance, of most sepulchral whiteness :—whiter
than Genoa, whiter than Naples, whiter even than Stamboul
L
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from the Golden Horn. And thus a bard in "milky white
numbers" sings:-
... Un soir
La blanche Alger dormait comme un grand encensoir
D'argent qui fume encore après le saint office."
The idea is certainly pretty, "the scented smoke curling from
a silver censer when mass is over." Only it is nullified by the
fact that no vapour curls from the silver censer of El Djezzaïr.
The Algerines smoke incessantly, but their houses never, save
when they catch fire, and are burnt down. The enfumed poet
was obliged to explain, indeed, in a foot-note that the smoke
he meant came from the adjacent lime-kilns of Bab-al-Oued.
I know their stench to be awful; and they are suggestive of
anything but silver censers.
But place for another poet, whose roucoulement is even
more romantic-
"Un cygne au pied de l'Atlas arrêté
Qui secoue au soleil son plumage argenté.”
Pretty, pretty, pretty" again, as Sir Joshua used, diploma-
tically, to murmur when amateur artists asked his opinion of
their works; but, to the English mind, I fear that the fore-
going couplet would be productive of a confusion of ideas made
up of the Atlas omnibuses, the Silver Cross, Charing Cross, and
the Swan with two necks.
EL DJEZZAÏR.
147
The last Algerine poet I shall quote is, in my humble judg-
ment, the best. He is a Cockney, and a Parisian Cockney.
He does as I do. He boldly and honestly compares Algiers
with his beloved Pantin. How many times have pound-a-
week critics belaboured me with double thongs because I have
likened Broadway to Bond Street, the Gostinnoï Dvor to Rag
Fair, the Kremlin to Dublin Castle, the Grand Canal to Pall
Mall (with the pavement up and the waterpipes cut)? Well,
I am not disposed to abandon the old paths. I maintain that
the Merceria at Venice is as like Cranbourne Alley as two
peas, and that the Five Points are the very image of Seven
Dials.
Be pleased, then, to listen to my brother, the lyrist of
Cockaigne-
Figurez-vous Paris englouti dans la Seine,
Et Montmartre debout, seul dominant la scène;
La pleine mer sera vers le quartier Latin,
D'où viendront des vaisseaux vers la chaussée d'Antin.
Mouillez au bord du quai qui sera Saint Lazare,
Passez au lait de chaux ce Montmartre bizarre,
En triangle étendant sa base vers la mer,
Et dont le soleil fuit sur le ciel outremer,-
Enveloppez le tout dans une vapeur ignée,
Et vous aurez Alger, la ville calcinée.
These lines are by Monsieur de Chance. I hope the bays of
Cockneydom will not be withheld from him; but I, too, a
L 2
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Cockney prosaist, must have my simile. Take Quebec. Give
its quaint houses a triple coat of whitewash. Substitute dark
red tiles for the glittering tin roofs of Stadacona. Widen the
waters of the St. Lawrence into a bay. Convert Point Levis
into the Maison Carrée, and assume that the Heights of Abra-
ham are Fort L'Empereur. You have no call to meddle with
either water or sky. Rare and intense blue are common to
both the African and the American. Arrange this in your
mind, and you will have an idea of Algiers. But Quebec, it
may be urged, isn't in Cockaigne, but in Canada. Dear Heart!
what does that matter? Any kind of stick is good enough to
beat a dog withal. To the Cockney mind everything is the
county of Middlesex, and the lower part of Quebec is very like
the lower part of Brentford, especially as regards beer-shops.
The houses of El Djezzaïr are as white as bran new dice,
and the little peepholes of windows in them stand for the pips.
I question if there ever lived such a nation of inveterate white-
washers as the modern Moors, who have been incited perhaps
to profusion in the use of the double-tie brush by their French
masters. Inside as well as outside the Moorish dwellings are
thickly covered with glaring white distemper paint. At least
six times a year every wall and every ceiling are whitewashed:
to the horror and despair, one would think, of the fleas. There
may at the same time be fleas that like walking upon walls,
and others that prefer to roost in warm garments. The Moors
EL DJEZZAÏR.
149
whitewash their inner courts and living rooms, persistently,
often to the concealment, beneath heavy layers of body colour,
of the most exquisitely beautiful sculpture and tracery, the
work of less enlightened but non-whitewashing ages. I wonder
how many acres of fresco and encaustic painting on the walls
of old English churches lie equally perdu, daubed over by the
Protestant brush? Surely there must be un infierno blanco,
a Tophet kept alway at a white heat, for those horrible Ostro-
goths and Visigoths, the whitewashing churchwardens of the
last century, and "lubber fiends" to "restore and beautify
them" with white lead, boiling hot.
I have often fancied that when a Moorish lady has nothing
to do—she never has much; still smoking, eating lollipops,
making coffee and love, and twanging the mandolin, do take up
a reasonable part of her time-she calls in the whitewashers
pour passer le temps. You shall hardly toil up one of the
steep lanes of the Moorish quarter without seeing the white-
washer swinging high in air, as one who gathers samphire,
sitting on a little bit of wood, pendant by ropes from the wall:
-a human hanging bookshelf. You shall hardly stand a mo-
ment to gaze sorrowfully on some delicate morsel of stone
undercutting he is filling up with chalky pigment without
being bespattered by the droppings of his brush; and then a
mysterious door opens, and there issues forth, not an Arab
cavalier, or Moorish damsel dreamily veiled, but a big negro,
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brush in hand, his teeth gleaming as snowily as the whitewash
in the bucket he carries.
All this interminable whitewashing is, avowedly, for the pur-
pose of keeping the houses sweet and clean, and keeping off, at
once, the fleas and the Cholera Morbus; but wherein lies the
use of this never-ending, still beginning badigeonnement, if you
don't change your serroual once in six weeks, or your burnous
once in six years? The Russian peasant is for ever boiling
himself in a bath; but he wears the same filthy sheepskin
touloupe from year's end to year's end. Precisely the same is
the case with the poor Arab. But the Moujik at least goes to
bed; whereas the Arab lies down to sleep with his clothes on.
Still El Djezzair, charming, lovely art thou among the cities!
I know some considerable places, too,-Civita Vecchia, for
instance, the Bermondsey part of London, some of the Lancas-
trian cotton-spinning towns, Troy, in the State of New York,
and many more which make you sick even to look upon : you
no sooner arrive than you long to be out of them. The first
sight of Algiers fills you, on the contrary, with a cheery hope
and light-heartedness. Grave men have been known to snap
their fingers and hum tunes, the sedatest have been seen to
chuckle and treat entire strangers to absinthe. Poor Albert
Smith, than whom, with all his occasional "bumptiousness,” an
honester and more clear-sighted hater of snobbery and shams
never lived, had a favourite adjective which he was continually
EL DJEZZAÏR.
151
using. It was "jolly"-you remember his sprightly young
lady in the Mont Blanc entertainment-the young lady who
had a little brother at Eton, and to whom most things were
"jolly." If Albert was welcomed at a Singapore club he
described the act of courtesy as "jolly;" when he was carried
in triumph by a lot of samschu-elated coolies at Hong-Kong,
he wrote home to his brother Arthur that the proceedings were
very "jolly.” Now he used "jolly," I take it, in its proper, pretty
sense, as meaning something pleasing both to the eye and the
mind—something gay, cheerful, and exhilarating. "Jolly,” in
short, should be the equivalent for the Spanish bonito and the
Italian gracioso. A Castilian will speak of a nice woman, a
play, a boot, a cigar, or a bullfight as bonito; just as an Italian
will press a peach or a glass of Lacryma upon you as molto
gracioso. Our word jolly has been wrested from its proper
employment, and impressed into the service of low and
crapulous debauchery. "Slap, bang! here we are again: for
'jolly' dogs are we!" Ugh! this kind of jollity is simply
horrible.
I am sure Albert Smith would have found Algiers jolly. It
is all bonito from the snowy mole glancing in the blue, blue
waters of the port, to the great battered old Turkish fortress of
the Kasba crowning the amphitheatre in the centre :— -Cæsar's
loge de face, so to speak, whence he can watch the games
and receive the salutes of the gladiators. Beautiful as is
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the chromatic effect of the city from a distance:—an effect
that Stanfield, or Pyne, or Beverley, might revel in. I have
heard a French landscape painter say that there are but four
hues to make up the picture. Cobalt for the sea, zinc white
for the houses, burnt umber glazed with raw sienna for the
hills, and turquoise (with the texture of satin) for the sky.
To this I may add a little Venetian red, for the tiled roofs.
These hues are all frank, outspoken, and trenchant; but they
never jar between themselves or offend you.
Save the domes of the mosques there is not a single spherical
surface to an Algerian building. The housetops are all as flat
as a tile, or a Royal speech. The whole city, in fact, is a
collection of cubes; and its general aspect goes far to dissipate
the theory that beauty is only attainable by a combination of
curves. I likened the houses of El Djezzaïr, just now, to dice;
but you may compare them also, if you please, to so many
Moorish ladies duly packed up in their snowy haicks, but ogling
you with their bright black eyes.
Have not the eyes been
Allons donc! a truce with
called the "windows of the soul?"
similes; and yet here is another French gentleman who poses
an image for Algiers, the gracefullest, perhaps, I have yet
marked. The city, he says, lies spread out like a great ivory
fan, and the hand which holds it is concealed in the bosom of
the Atlas.
The French part of the town, its cafes, barracks, hotels, and
EL DJEZZAÏR.
153
offices, I have dwelt upon at, perhaps, wearisome length. But,
let us leave the Place du Gouvernement, and the square of the
Governor's palace, and begin slowly to ascend those pre-
cipitous flights of steps bordered by whitewashed houses,
gaunt, silent, and suggestive, which in the upper town, or old
Moorish quarter, are called "Streets." Do you know La Rue
des Mâchicoulis at Boulogne ? Put the barelegged fishergirls
into trousers and haicks, and the fishermen into burnouses, and
the Mâchicoulis would very much resemble a street in the
Moorish quarter.
In the technics of the building trade, when the superstructure
of a wall leans away from you, it is said to be "on the batter."
The stories of the Moorish houses lean, on the contrary,
towards you. They are irreclaimably top-heavy, forming a
kind of serrated vault over you. There is no need to shore
them up, as we do tottering fabrics in the old streets out of
Cheapside. The opposite sides are so near touching each other,
that little danger would accrue from their tumbling further
forward. You would only lose that narrow riband of bright
blue over head, placed there as you think to let you know that
there is such a thing as a heaven above this città senza sole,
just as in the most intricate of the back alleys behind the
Merceria at Venice you will always find a thread of white
marble meandering along the centre of the pavement, and which,
if you follow it sedulously, will lead you to St. Mark's Place.
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Many of these streets-ladder-lanes rather-are not more
than six feet in breadth. They would, were they on a level
surface, be as fever-haunted as the abominable wynds and
closes in the Canongate at Edinburgh and the Trongate of
Glasgow; but being built on the steepest of inclines they are
compulsorily drained. For the rest, the sanitary precautions in-
sisted upon by the French authorities are excellent. The police
would have few scruples in walking into a Moorish house, were
it reported to be in a filthy state: only, they can't force the
male population to wear clean burnouses, or to undress when they
sleep. The Moors certainly do their best to keep their houses
free from Giaour intrusion. With very great difficulty they
have been brought even to submit their “état civil,” or births,
deaths, and marriages, to registration at the Mairie. Before 1830
there was simply a Beït-et-Mal, or "chamber of goods," which
took cognisance, with a view to the administration of property,
of the deaths of the population. If you ask an elderly Moor
when he was born, or married, or when his first child was born,
he will answer, either that Allah knows, not he, or that these
events took place about the time of such and such an earth-
quake, or an invasion of grasshoppers, or when this Dey came
into power, or that Pasha was strangled.
Narrow, and dark, and steep, and tortuous as are the streets
in the Jewish quarter, the houses are, in their way-in the
artistic way-gems. In the eyes of Gallic authority they are
EL DJEZZAÏR.
155
simply so many abominations, which need to be swept away to
make room for the alignement. The French would pull down
the Alhambra or the Taj-Mehal. It is well that the Russians
burnt Moscow about the ears of their invaders. Otherwise, and
had Napoleon kept his footing there, composite columns and
allegories of victory would soon have replaced the Byzantine
cupolas of the Kremlin. The Moors, in the opinion of non-
French critics, have always excelled in architecture; yet, curious
to say,
the maallum, or professional architect, is regarded in
Arab society less as the professor of a liberal art than as a
mechanic. My masonic brethren will remember that the
master mason who built the Second Temple was its designer as
well; but he was no magnifico; only a working man. Many
of the principal edifices in old Algiers were built under the
direction of Christian slaves, who, pour encourager les autres,
were occasionally bastinadoed, or strangled, if the edifices were
not finished in time, or if the outlay exceeded their estimates, or
if his Highness the Pasha-Dey did not like the house when it was
finished. There is one legend of an Italian architect-the con-
structor, indeed, of the Great Mosque, who was impudent
enough to cross its threshold after it had been consecrated to
the Mahometan worship! He was dipped into a vat of boiling
oil, and then hung up-to dry, I presume. High-banded
measures these, but not, perhaps, quite useless. Judicious
threats of a dose of stick to the architect might accelerate the
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completion of the new Foreign offices; and who knows but
that the lions for the Nelson column would have been finished
ere this had Mr. Cowper given Sir Edwin distinctly to under-
stand that, failing the delivery of the animals by a certain date,
he would be impaled.
The Moorish house,-the dwelling-house,-as it is still to be
seen in what remains of old Algiers, and to a greater extent in
Oran and Constantine, is simply the house common to Old and
New Spain-aye, and to the old East, and oldest Scripture
perchance. In actual Spain the writer has never been; but
the first time I set my foot inside a Mauresque habitation, I
started, and thought, "Why, this is a Mexican house.” There
is the patio, or open courtyard, the arched corridor around it,
the arched galleries above, and the azotea, or flat roof. You see
in the Moorish house a pretty close illustration of the divergence
between Oriental civilisation and ours. For a Moor, his house
can scarcely be too shabby and melancholy-looking without, or
too splendid or luxurious within. The house is, in short, a
symbol of Mussulman life, with its dreamy and impenetrable
mysteries. The front door looks like the most rearward of back
doors; it is like the stage door to a shut-up theatre, or the portal
to a gambling-house in the day time; half the paint scraped
or kicked off, splashed with mud or whitewash, which it is
nobody's business to clean off, bolted, barred, chained, and, it
would seem, nailed up. In one panel, head-high, is a little
EL DJEZZAÏR.
157
Judas trap, with an iron grating before it. There is never a
bell; and when there is a knocker, it is usually bolted down to
the woodwork. If you wish to make your presence known to
those within, you must thunder at the door with a cudgel, or
bang at it with your foot. After some ten minutes of this exer-
citation, the trap may be slowly opened, and the great grinning
face of a negress appear at the aperture. In some Moorish
houses, in addition to the Judas trap in the doors, there are
spy-holes in the wall-sometimes, and designedly, of consider-
able size; and you may become aware of a moon-face with
kohl-stained eyelids, surroundeed by tresses interwoven with
coins, and crowned by a dainty chachia, or skull-cap, beaming
down upon you. It is only a Rikat. It is but Jezebel, with
her painted face.
In the old days, when to be a Jew in Algiers was to be
a despised and persecuted wretch, the Moorish ladies used occa-
sionally to vary the monotony of their existence, by having a
little bit of fun with an Israelite, after this wise. There were
then, as now, numbers of Jew pedlars-vendors of jewellery,
gold lace, cosmetics, and other feminine fal-lals-wandering up
and down the precipitous thoroughfares of El Djezzaïr. Now
the cruel law decreed that no Jew, on pain of forfeiture and
the bastinado, was to be suffered to enter the house of a True
Believer. But as the Jews sold precisely the commodities most
dearly desiderated by the She-believers, they were fain to come
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to their front doors, and, holding them ajar, transact their
business there. The little bit of fun consisted in getting pos-
session of the Jew's merchandise, promising to pay him for it,
then slamming the door in his face, and, sliding open the Judas
trap, laugh at the poor pedlar's beard, tell him that he was a
son of Sheytan, and bid him go to Eblus. This was very funny,
was it not? The unhappy Sheeny, thus "left out in the cold,”
was powerless to regain possession of his property; for another
cruel law forbade to knock at a Mussulman's door. All he could
do was to stand in the street, whimper, yell, stamp, dance, tear
his hair and beard, and invoke Moses and the prophets. If it
were evening, the watch, perhaps, would come round. Then,
probably, the Jew would be beaten for making a noise; but he
was in luck's way indeed if the commandant of the patrol
took it into his head to do him justice, by thundering at the
True Believer's door, forcing the dishonest inmates to disgorge
their booty, and returning it to the pedlar with a deduction of
seventy-five per cent. for costs and trouble taken. The good old
times of El Djezzaïr. They remind me of an exordium to an
article I once read in a Review. "It was formerly the whole-
some custom in England, at the seasons of Christmas and
Easter, to stone and beat the Jews." And there are a good
many people, I daresay, who unfeignedly regret the abrogation
of that and many other equally wholesome customs.
The traveller Shaw was of opinion that the houses of Palestine,
EL DJEZZAÏR.
159
in scriptural times, were precisely similar to those in the modern
Algiers. It is, indeed, startling to find in a Moorish house the
vestibule or "gate" in which Mordecai sat; the "housetop" on
which the apostle dreamed his dream, and the "third loft"
from which Eutychus fell. But to discuss these matters is not
my province. I leave them to Mr. Hepworth Dixon and the
Palestine Exploration Society.
All Moorish houses are built on the same model. The
wealthiest make no pretence of exterior façades or porticoes.
Everybody-the richest and the poorest-lives in a cube of stone
or plastered brick; the only difference between the dwellings
of a sheikh and a cobbler is that of size. Here and there a little
wooden balcony, not unlike a chicken coop, may project from a
window; but, as a rule, the surface of the walls is entirely flat.
The door I spoke of just now is a most massive construction,
and garnished with huge convex-headed nails. Here and there
the panels may contain some carving in an antique geometrical
design, and over the lintel a full-blown rose is sometimes cut
in marble. One curious ornament, however, you are sure to
find, either painted or carved, in the neighbourhood of the front
door. That is, the representation of a human hand, cut off short
at the wrist. I was told that this manual symbol was always
affixed by the masons or painters to a Moorish house, at the
moment of its completion, to preserve its inmates thenceforth
and evermore from the influence of the evil eye :—the gettatura
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of the Neapolitans. The prows of the pirate ships which used
to sally forth from Algiers were, in a like intent, decorated with
the representation of a human eye. It is desirable, however, to
correct the mistake into which some tourists have fallen re-
specting the rude representations, in gold and silver gilt, of
human arms, legs, hands, ears, eyes, and noses, which are exposed
for sale in the shops of Algiers. These effigies, reminding the
Englishman of Miss Kilmansegge and her precious leg, have
nothing to do with the superstition of the evil eye. They are
votive offerings, to be purchased by people who have been cured
of hurts or affections of the members to which they have
reference, and to be hung up in the Catholic churches. There are
numbers of Maltese and Spaniards and Southern Frenchmen
in Algiers, all as superstitious as Pagans; and these simple-
minded fools—for is not superstition one of the principal
features of simplicity of mind?-are the great offerers of
offerings at the shrine of Notre Dame d'Afrique, and other
popular idols. I remember a droll story related, on this head,
by worthy M. Douz, the jeweller of the Rue Soggémah-and
whose "curio crowded first floor is at once the Hunt and
Roskell's and the Attenborough's of Algiers. I mean the
Attenborough who simply keeps the shop for the sale of articles
of vertu—not Attenborough, our common uncle. The captain
of an Italian brigantine, whose leg had been broken by his
falling into the hold, determined, so soon as he was well enough
""
EL DJEZZAÏR.
161
to get out about on crutches, to offer up a silver leg as large as
life at the shrine of his favourite saint. He called on M. Douz,
and ordered the leg to be made. It was to cost a thousand
francs. In a week afterwards he called again-Was the leg
finished? he asked. No, the model in wax was only just com-
pleted. Well, he had changed his mind, and he felt a great
deal better, and he thought a leg half the size of life would do.
In another week, he was again at Douz, much better, and with
a mind again changed. Suppose M. Douz made him a foot?
After all, it was only the ankle-joint which had been fractured.
Whereat M. Douz grew wrath, and told him that as in another
week he would probably be able to walk without crutches, and
would then further diminish his order, he had better let him
make him a silver toenail, and be off the leg bargain. In this
compromise the captain of the brigantine joyfully acquiesced;
but he must have got very well indeed afterwards, for he never
came to the Rue Soggémah again, and the saint who ought to
have had a whole leg did not get so much as a toenail.
M
X.
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
NAPOLEON THE THIRD arrived at Algiers on the second of
May. At half-past five A.M. repeated broadsides from the iron-
clad squadron-including Le Solferino, La Gloire, and La
Couronne, escorting La Reine Hortense, and the Emperor's
own yacht, L'Aigle-announced the momentous tidings to the
population of the metropolis of Algeria. Shortly before six,
L'Aigle, glowing in bunting from stem to stern, and followed
by the ironclads, steamed into port, amidst the thunder of a
fresh salvo of artillery from the land batteries. The military
and civil authorities were congregated on the quay, where an
elegant pavilion, formed of tricoloured flags, had been erected
for the reception of his Majesty. The local corps and the
troops of the garrison were under arms, and formed a double
line along the whole route to be pursued by the cortége, that is
to say, from the place of disembarkation to the palace of the
Governor-General, the former residence of the piratical Pasha
Deys. The military were all in full uniform, and were under
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
168
the command of General de Wimpffen. In front of the Impe-
rial pavilion, on the right, were the Prefect of the Department
of Algiers, the Secretary-General of the Government, the mem-
bers of the Council-General, the Mayors of Algiers and of all
the communes of the department, and a host of minor officials.
On the left stood the Lieutenant-Governor, the General com-
manding the division, the Intendant-General of the army, and
a brilliant throng of staff officers. The Emperor remained
undisturbed until half-past seven, when his Excellency Mar-
shal M'Mahon, Duke of Magenta, Governor of Algeria, went
on board to know the Imperial pleasure. The illustrious
visitor did not suffer the grass to grow beneath his feet. At
a quarter before eight, a barge, bearing the Imperial standard
at the stern, put off from the yacht, and the Emperor of the
French landed for the second time on the shore of Africa, His
first visit took place, you will remember, some five years since,
on which occasion he was accompanied by the Empress; but
the Imperial tour was cut short by the sad intelligence of the
death of the Duchess of Alba, the sister whom the Empress
loved so much and mourned so bitterly.
I need scarcely say that the Emperor had no sooner put his
foot on the quay, than the Maire advanced. M. le Maire is Mr.
Mayor, or the Herr Burgmeister, or the Signor Podestà, or el
Señor Alcalde, or the Starosta, or the Sheikh, or the Head-man
we know so well, the memory of man running not to the contrary
M 2
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thereof. He varies very little all the world over. Precisely as
the Muse said to the poet Béranger, " Chante, pauvre petit ! "
so do the immutable laws of tradition command Mr. Mayor to
open his mouth and speechify to Royalty on its travels. His
worship presented the keys of the city to the Emperor, and his
Majesty made haste to give the ponderous present back again.
There is no need to trouble you with a report of the municipal
discourse. It was à l'invariable: "Sire . . . respectful devo-
tion. . . joy painted on all countenances. . . Providence . . .
loyalty. . attachment day when Algeria will occupy
her true position . . . Vive l'Empereur ! Vive l'Impératrice !
Vive le Prince Impérial!.. " If you find a hiatus here
and there in this rapid summary, you can fill it up from the
Complete Municipal Address Writer." The first paragraph
of the Emperor's reply contained just eight gracious words ;
but, as usual in his Majesty's utterances, there was a significant
kernel in the Imperial nut. Je reviens,” he said, “avec bon-
heur sur cette terre à JAMAIS FRANÇAISE." Please mark the
words I have put in capitals. The assurance that Algeria is to
be "for ever French," is a sufficient retort and rebuke to the
politicians of the Girardin school, who wish Algeria to be
restored to the Algerines. I think we might as well restore
the Isle of Man to the Earl of Derby, or the Duke of Athol, or
the Manx cats, as expect the French to give back Algeria to
the mahogany gentlemen in the whity-brown burnouses who
(C
((
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
165
are squatting on their haunches beneath the window where I
am writing this letter, and doing nothing with a calm assiduity
which makes one long to be lazy.
The Emperor went on to express his regret that he was
unable in 1860 to devote a longer period to the study of the
colony, and of the interests of the active and laborious com-
munity who were here planting the first seeds of colonisation.
He concluded by saying that all his sympathies were with the
colonists, and that ere long a powerful company would con-
tribute to the development of the country. The "powerful
company," it may be inferred, is the Crédit Mobilier.
Loud acclamations followed the Imperial response, and the
Prefect then introduced the members of the Council-General to
his Majesty, who, after another interchange of official compli-
ments and Imperial condescension, ascended the magnificent
staircase leading from the quay to the promenade, or Marina, in
front of the Hôtel d'Orient. There an immense crowd awaited
him, cheering lustily, and adding to the vivats in honour of the
Prince Imperial the brevet rank of King of Algeria. The
Emperor proceeded to the cathedral, to hear from the Bishop
of Algiers, in the name of the hierarchy and clergy, a long and
loyal address, and in which the Prelate expressed a hope that
the see of St. Augustin at Constantine might be ere long
revived, and at Oran the pious labours of Ximenes completed.
A grand Te Deum was then performed. From the cathedral
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•
the Emperor was escorted to the Governor's palace, where, not-
withstanding the fatigue of his voyage, he at once received the
constituted authorities. The foreign consuls were also pre-
sented to his Majesty. With Mr. Churchill, C.B., her Britannic
Majesty's Consul-General, the Emperor entered at once into
most courteous converse, asking for information respecting the
sojourn at Algiers of the lamented Richard Cobden. The name
of the illustrious fiscal reformer could not have been more
appropriately introduced; for among the wants of the com-
munity in the Algerian littoral there are none so pressing as
those for free trade and the abolition of the tonnage dues. The
removal of these latter burdens, which are very onerous, and
which act financially just as a sand-bar would in keeping
English vessels out of the port of Algiers, has been pro-
mised for 1868. But if the abolition be a good thing, about
which there does not seem to be any diversity of opinion, it
cannot be too speedily consummated. The resources for trade
at Algiers are vast, but they are hampered and shackled by the
entraves of a bygone commercial policy, and trade at present is
said to be languishing.
So much for the dry details of the Emperor's disembarkation.
To-day he makes an excursion to some of the chief localities
of interest in the environs, amongst others to the conventual
establishment of La Trappe. You remember Horace Vernet's
picture of "Le Zouave Trappiste," the war-worn, sabre-scarred ·
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
167
veteran, kneeling before the half-dug grave, which he had
sought in vain among the Bedouins. On Saturday his Majesty
purposes visiting the Agricultural Show at Bou-Farik, on the
road to Blidah. There is to be a great funcion at Bou-Farik
a term of which I may sometimes have occasion to make
use when fêtes and fantasies grow hackneyed to my pen and
pall upon your ear. If Archbishop Trench or Dr. Latham
would only find out a few new Saxon words for the use of
Special Correspondents, and so save them from the peril of
falling into the unpardonable sin of iteration, or the necessity
of borrowing words from foreign languages or coining them
for themselves! Certainly, a recognised English word should
always be used in preference to the alien one; but. employ
the recognised English word fifty times in the course of five
pages, and see what a bore you will become to the public.
Algiers wears a very splendid and holiday aspect to-day. I
cannot echo the hyperbolical assertion in the Akhbar of this
morning to the effect that the population is "wild with joy,"
and that une ivresse générale reigns:-First, because it is so
hot that anything approaching "wildness" might suggest un-
pleasant thoughts of hydrophobia; and I shudder at the idea
of barking like a dog, biting the stout officer of the état major
in the next room, and bringing my career to a close by being
smothered between two feather beds by the garçons of the
Hôtel d'Orient. Next, because the imputation of "ivresse
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générale," taken in its literal sense, is decidedly a libel on
the population of Algiers, who are as sober folks as need be.
Some officers of the garrison are said to be inveterate devotees
of absinthe-the most nauseous and the most pernicious of
stimulants, attacking, as it does at once, the very substance
of the brain; and the soldiers, I suppose, get tipsy sometimes,
as soldiers will do in every country from Indus to the Pole;
but the temperate habit of the mass of the inhabitants, both
Arab and European, is, I am told, rigidly Oriental. It is here,
I conjecture, as at Vera Cruz, abating the vomito. Two stiff
glasses of grog, and you are safe for a fit of apoplexy. Crack
t'other bottle if you like, but make your will before you
crack it.
The whole town was illuminated last night, much to the
delight of the Arabs, who have flocked into Algiers in great.
numbers, and are scattered about the Marina in such numerous
white-burnoused groups that they look like so many flocks of
sheep grazing-sheep, be it understood, who would be all the
better for the performance of that ceremony which precedes
shearing, to wit, washing. They are highly picturesque, these
Bedouins, but the nastiest set of animals you ever saw. Rags
are worn en Arabesque, semée with patches; legs au naturel ;
papouches à la slipshod, or down at the heel; and oh, if you
could see their toenails! There is not a child of the desert
on the Place du Gouvernement but who might dig his great-
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
169
grandmother out of her grave with his pedal claws. I suppose
that when I go into the interior I shall see the Arab in all
the nobility and dignity of primitive nature. I hope he will
be a little cleaner and a little less ragged than the specimens
—to the number of some hundreds-I have yet seen. But it
is the old story. Take ever so copious a stock of illusions
with you to the bright Orient, and within half-an-hour after
landing you are as bankrupt as the Bank of Deposit. You
see a lank, weedy screw, with a switch tail, blear eyes, and
of the colour of a Danish carriage dog that animal, you are
told, is a full-blooded Arab horse. That lumbering, groan-
ing, wheezing brute is the camel-the famous djemel, the
ship of the desert," the offspring, as the Arabs poetically
declare, of the ostrich and the gazelle. And the end of the
story is, that the "Arabian Nights" turn out to be as dirty as
Seven Dials.*
I am not in the least disappointed with Algiers, however,
as I was prepared for the Arab, and the city is, besides, a
wonderful place. The amphitheatrical sweep of the houses,
and the double row of arches on which the quays are sup-
ported; the long white mole, stretching forth into the in-
tensely blue Mediterranean; and the little dancing barks, with
their lateen sails and yards at the most violent of angles,-
* See the "State of the Case," ante.
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put you somewhat in mind of Genoa: but land, and ere you
are five minutes older you will confess you are in a city you
have never seen before. I spoke just now of the Arabian
Nights. What was the name of the Frenchman who trans-
lated the Thousand and One in the middle of the last century?
It began with a G, I think. Well, Algiers is that gentleman's
translation, in stone, and plaster, and whitewash, and glaring
pigments. The Place du Gouvernement might be the prin-
cipal square of a French provincial town of the first class.
There are big hotels, cafés, counting-houses, and shops; the
names are French, the green blinds are French, the mer-
chandise is French. You may buy Paris chocolate, and pec-
toral paste, and pills, and sham jewelry, and crinolines. You
may dine à la carte or au prix fixe; you may buy the latest
In a
scrofulous French novel" at the bookstalls, and read the same
etiolated little newspapers, with their timid murmurings of
news a fortnight old, and their leading article devoted to a
puff on a corn-cutter or a juggler fresh come to town.
word, you are in a little Paris. The "pst!" of the consumer
sounds shrilly through the air, and the "v'là M'sr!" of the
garçon is audibly responsive. The itinerant musicians of Gaul,
the wheezy flute, the rachitic fiddle, and the harp dying of
atrophy strum and tootle feeble music at the street corner;
the commissionaire slumbers on his truck in the sun; the
shoeblack plies his trade; the bonne parades the same elabo-
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
171
rately-laced babies; the little girls in Hessian boots and frilled
trousers go through competitive exhibitions with skipping
ropes; a real French poodle, shaven and shorn, crosses your
path; groups of red-trousered soldiers lounge by, their mouths
agape, and their hands thrust in their pockets; the roguish
little milliner flits by with her bandbox; the tremendous
officier supérieur aiguilletted and epauletted, strolls out of the
café where he has been breakfasting, picking his teeth; the
orderly trots by with his leathern satchel on his hip; the
gamin makes faces at you, flees behind a corner if you threaten
him with your cane, and, when you are at a convenient dis-
tance, flings a stone at you; the snowy-vested, night-capped
cook emerges into the morning and leans against the door-
jamb to inhale the fresh air, all hot and hot though it be,
until it is time for him to dive into his burning tomb of pots
and pans again; Adolphe, in curly-brimmed hat and turn-
down collar preposterously vandyked, and cravat in a gigantic
true-lover's-knot, leers under the bonnet of Madame the spouse
of the employé of the administration, taking her walks abroad,
and attired in the height of Parisian fashion, to cheapen
leathery artichokes and skinny chickens in the market; whilst
Jules is humming "Rien n'est sacré pour un Sapeur," and
puffing his halfpenny cigar as superbly as though it were a
half-crown Embajador. Wan children press you to buy cigar
lights and three-sous bunches of flowers; bright in the sun
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glitter the gilded signs of the photographers and the dentists
-two branches of industry which appear at present to absorb
the most energetic of French faculties; there is a distant sound
of trumpeting and drumming; the calèche-drivers are asleep
on their boxes, as usual; and cropping up like poppies in a
cornfield are the red ribbons of the Legion. So plentiful,
indeed, are these glorified button-holes, that you begin to
wonder how many people there are in the French empire who
are not decorated. Surely this is Paris, or Lyons, or Bordeaux,
or at least Boulogne or Dieppe! No, you are in Africa; this,
indeed, is Algiers; and the Arabian Nights are all around you.
There goes the Sultana Scheherazade. The Sultana in walking
costume resembles a clothes-bag bifurcated, or say a pair of
well-inflated pillows, surmounted by a bolster, and covered
with a mosquito curtain. The Sultana may be one of the
wives of a wealthy Moresco, or she may be a washerwoman.
She is a Mauresque, and her out-door costume is invariable.
It consists of a pair of very baggy galligaskins, not at all of
Zouave cut, but precisely that kind of Turkish trousers which
Mandane wears in the opera of Artaxerxes. These-the shin-
tiyan of the Turkish women-are of plain white muslin ;
above is a quantity of semi-diaphanous drapery, which I cannot
attempt to describe; and over all is thrown a long robe, or
feminine toga, of very fine white linen or gauze, called a haik.
Sometimes another haik of a somewhat stouter material is
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
173
worn over the first. This drapery does not fall in graceful
folds. It is drawn close to the form, and the general com-
position of the pillow-case legs and bolster body is, in the
entire effect, droll. The feet and ankles are bare, and from
the hue of those extremities the Algerine expert is, I suppose,
enabled to judge whether the veiled lady is dark or fair. Of
course, I only presumed to look at the Sultana Scheherazade's
supporters for the purpose of verifying the fact that her feet
are thrust into wide shoes called sebabath, which, again, are
encased in looser slippers of yellow morocco, the papouches or
babouches. Looking at these slippers I could not, however,
avoid regarding that which the slippers covered; and I must
admit that the greatest part of the flesh I peeped at was very
dusky indeed. The upper class of Mauresques, however, are
said to be as fair as Europeans.
You can see nothing of the Sultana Scheherazade's face but
her eyes. The upper haik comes well down over her temples;
then you have a pair of big, black, sloe-like orbs, the lids so
prolonged that they almost meet, or are darkened at least with
kohl till they seem to join. The rest of the face is hidden by a
handkerchief tied tightly behind. Some Arab ladies are said
coquettishly to make use as a veil of a handkerchief so very
transparent that their features can be perfectly well discerned
beneath; but with the vast majority of the Sultanas I have
seen to-day the gauze mask has been a reality, and the conceal-
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ment effectual. I don't wonder at this veil, answering to the
Turkish "yashmak," having been, through so many centuries,
so obstinately retained. It may be regarded as a beautiful
dispensation of Providence for promoting outdoor equality
among the ladies. A pretty woman may let the passers-by
know, even through her veil, that she is comely; but an ugly
woman is, by the merciful interposition of the knotted handker-
chief, enabled altogether to hide her ill-favouredness.
This was perhaps, of all days, the most favourable for viewing
these ambulatory packages of femininity, for it was a festival,
and, moreover, an exceptional festival; and Sultanas are all but
mortal, so, actuated by a pardonable curiosity, they sallied forth
to peep at the Sultan-Cæsar, and the grand preparations made
to greet him. Once veiled and packed and pinned together,
the Mauresques enjoy entire liberty out of doors. No jealously-
curtained arabas convey them; no hideous eunuchs—ushers of
a perpetual seminary for grown-up young ladies-hurry them
along, forbidding them to look to the right or the left. Let me
hasten to admit that in point of tidiness and cleanliness the
Mauresques offer a very favourable contrast to the dignified and
dirty male child of the desert. Haik, veil, and unmentionables
are alike spotless and snowy. At ordinary seasons veiled women
are very rarely seen in the European quarter of Algiers. The
indigenous females are unveiled, and are either Jewesses or
negresses.
Yesterday the haiks and the yashmaks were ex-
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
175
•
ceedingly numerous in the great square. Sometimes the clothes-
bag was portly, and suggested a stout mamma beneath-a
suggestion strengthened by a pursuivant tribe of children, all,
down to little-girl toddlekins of four or five (so at least to judge
from their stature) as closely veiled as their elders. Altogether
the "
get up" of a Mauresque en promenade is livelier and
smarter than that of a Turkish woman, whose veil is horribly
ugly, who wears instead of the haik, a pillow-case of black silk,
and whose trousers hang in ugly folds over her loose and slovenly
boots of untanned leather. There is a spick and span, just-
home-from-the-wash look about these Moorish ladies very re-
freshing to view; but their ensemble is, nevertheless, as I have
hinted, funny. If you are in the Penseroso mood, you may
picture to yourself that all the feminine tombs in the great
cemetery of Mustafa have disgorged their tenants, and that they,
or their pallid ghosts rather, are wandering about in the sun-
shine, vainly seeking for the janissaries of the good old times,
and wondering how the Dey could think of allowing so many
Christians to be at large without shackles on their shins and
burdens on their backs. Or, still in ghostly frame of mind, you
may liken them to the phantom nuns who serenade Robert le
Diable. Very much like these sainted apparitions did the white
Mauresques look this evening, gliding through the dim arcades
of the Rue Bab-Azzoun. Or, if the Allegro suit you better, you
may fancy yourself gazing on the corps de ballet in Giselle, and
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that the airy creatures are but Wilis, with their ballet-skirts
tucked lightly round them. Or, to one of ruder vision, they
may appear like those five-and-thirty boarders at the ladies'
school where Mr. Pickwick went to prevent the elopement, in
their bed-gowns. Take them, however, as you will, and for
granted the grotesqueness of their trim, and you shall not divest
them of an indefinable but omnipresent perfume of the East-
of the dreamy, vaporous, sensuous land of mystery and sorcery
and jealousy and intrigue. I abandon for good the bifurcated
clothes-bag, the double pillow-case similes. At night, albeit the
glare of gas contends with the moon's rays, each pair of baggy
pantaloons becomes a novel in two volumes.
The shops are full of cartes de visite of Arab and Jewish
ladies, not only veiled, but with uncovered countenances—not
only smothered in the haik, but arrayed in all the picturesque
splendour of Oriental costume. Whence have these photo-
graphers obtained their models? Have they been permitted
to enter the penetralia of the Moresco houses? Has the camera
become one of the lights of the harem? I trow not. The
models, I apprehend, have been selected from the Rikat, or
naughty tribe-numerous enough here, as everywhere else.
In these photographs you may see, at least, the lay figure
dressed in the gorgeous attire of the Mauresque at home. The
baggy trousers, drawn tight about the ankles, are replaced by
the serroual, or wide drawers of silk, or china crape, and reach-
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
177
ing only mid-leg. The inmost garment is of finest gauze; the
feet are in slippers of velvet embroidered with gold; the hair,
plaited in long tresses, is knotted behind the head, and descends
almost to the ground; the head-dress is a dainty little skull-
cap or chachia of velvet, thick with gold and seed pearls,
and attached by golden cords beneath the chin. The upper
garment is the rlila, or jacket of brocaded silk, beneath which
are one or more vests of gay colours, ornamented with innumer-
able sugar-loaf buttons. Round the waist is swathed the fouta,
or many-folded sash of striped silk. Add rings and earrings,
often of diamonds and emeralds very clumsily cut; necklaces
with side rows of fine pearls strung on common string; bracelets
for the arms, called m'saïs, and bangles for the ankles termed
m'kaïs, and the Mauresque in her carte de visite or in-door
costume is complete. Stay; she sometimes wears a kind of
upper jerkin called a djabadoli, curiously filagreed with
gold. A knowing Frenchman of long Algerine experience tells
me that you may see the Mauresques in all this bravery of
dress, and in actual reality of visage, if you will only stay at
your window for an hour every evening before sunset, armed
with a powerful opera-glass. Then, sweeping the horizon of
houses, you may espy the beauteous she-Moors, gorgeous as the
Queen of Sheba, come forth on the flat roofs of those old tene-
ments in the upper town which have escaped the ruthless pro-
gress of French improvements. Simple she-Moors! Like the
N
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ostrich which is said to hide its head in the sand-but doesn't
do anything of the sort-and fancies itself invisible to the
hunter, the confiding Mauresques imagine that nobody can see
them when, glowing in silk, and velvet, and gold, and fine linen,
they take their evening walk upon the house-top. Another
informant tells me that scarcely an evening passes without his
seeing the unveiled Moorish women crawling over the tiles, very
much after the fashion of cats, from roof to roof, from house to
house, and often from street to street; for in the old quarters of
the town the thoroughfares are, as a rule, considerably narrower
than Middle Temple-lane or old Cranbourne-alley, or one of
those queer back streets at Venice, and each story projects so
much above the other that at the summit they touch. Shinning
over the tiles is the orthodox way of paying evening visits. The
tiles are the stairs, the flat roofs the drawing-rooms. It is pre-
cisely the same at Mexico, where the azoteas are the great sun-
set rendezvous. Sky Parlour is where the Mauresque woman
most enjoys herself. Thither she comes to gossip with her
neighbours, to sing, to eat sweetmeats, to hang out her linen, to
beat her carpets and her children. Life in a Moorish town
would be dreary indeed without the house-top. The house-top!
For how many thousands of years have these unchangeable
races been walking on the house-top! And the sheet that was
let down before the eyes of the visionary; what was that but
the old canvas curtain they rig here every night on their roof,
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
179
to temper the sea breeze, and afford shade from the latest
fierceness of the sun's rays. This Moorish woman's dress which
I have figured bit by bit from a bundle of photographs, might
have been copied almost verbatim from Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu's description of the dress of a Turkish lady in the
Seraglio a hundred and fifty years ago, and for centuries, per-
haps, ere that, no fashions in the harem had changed. Staunch
old Conservatism walks Algiers as proudly as of yore, and, for
all the improvements of the innovating Franks, they cannot
improve it out of the land which they occupy, but have not
conquered.
The position of the Mahometan woman in Algeria is theo-
retically much preferable to that of her sex in Tunis or Morocco.
The strictly equitable nature of the French rule forbids her
being treated with harshness or sold into slavery; but prac-
tically she is not much better off than in other Oriental
countries. She is the victim of a stupid and brutalising social
code, founded on and bound up in a religion whose theory
is pure, but whose practice is barbarous. She is either con-
temned or maltreated; a toy to the rich, a beast of burden
to the poor. When a child is born to a Moorish woman, she
cries, if it be a boy, "it is a blessing;" if it be a girl, "it is
a curse." Directly she comes into the world she is baptised in
the name of Fatma, which is that of the mother of the Prophet.
A week afterwards another name is given to her. The choice
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of appellatives lies between Aïcha, Bedra, Djohar, Halima,
Hasuria, Khredoudga, Khreira, Meriem, Mimi, Mouni, Rosa,
Safia, Yamina, Zina, and Zohra. Some of these names seem
to have a characteristic sound. Wouldn't you like to fall
in love with a young lady named Mouni; and can't you
fancy being blessed with a mother-in-law by the name of
Khredoudga?
If the Moorish girls' parents are poor they will regard her
only as an incubus. Her mother was probably married at ten
or twelve years of age; she ages early; and each accession of
maternal cares is to her only a renewed warning that she is no
longer fair to look upon. As for the father, it is as much as he
knows that he has a daughter till some one buys her of him in
marriage. The poor girl grows up to be beaten, overworked,
and despised; a Cinderella without a fairy godmother, but with
sisters as miserable as herself. The rich girl is neglected by
her mother, and is relegated to a corner of the harem and the
care of an old negress. When she is old enough to be sold, she
is married. She is profoundly ignorant, of course, very fond of
sweetstuff, very fond of the bath, very fond of flowers, very fond
of smoking cigarettes. In the street she ogles you with her big
eyes, and if there be anything peculiar in your appearance
points a henna-stained finger and giggles shrilly. Beyond these
characteristics, which may be gotten by heart in the course of
half-an-hour's stay in Algiers, I question whether a European,
ALGIERS IN ECSTASY.
181
not being a hakim or physician, would know much more of the
Mauresques if he dwelt in the country for forty years.
This state of life is no doubt very pitiable. The Government
can do little to ameliorate it. They have guaranteed to the
natives the possession of the civil law-which is the Koran-
and the social code and the civil law are one. They might as
well decree that the Mahometan women should go unveiled, or
that the Arabs should leave off their burnouses, as interfere
with the domestic arrangements of the Moorish gynecæum.
A benevolent French lady residing in Algiers has of late years
endeavoured to do that which the admirable Miss Whateley
attempted in Cairo, though on a purely secular basis. She has
established a school where nearly a hundred little Mussulman
girls, from four to ten years of age, receive a very good educa-
tion; and I am told that the progress made by some of these
young Paynims in geography, arithmetic, and history-besides
the more feminine accomplishments of needlework and flower-
painting-would have done no discredit to a ladies' college in
Europe. But the civilisation given to these poor little creatures
is, perforce, superficial. The lower classes are glad enough to
send their children to this school, for the teaching is gratuitous,
and the parents are even encouraged by bribes to send them;
but the half-educated girl goes back to all the dreariness and
all the drudgery of Oriental life. She is married, and becomes
a mother when she should still be learning her lessons; and
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she very soon forgets the few she has learnt. The wives of the
very rich Morescoes are said never to leave the house, save to
visit the holy koubbas to pray that they may have men-children,
and to propitiate the Marabouts with gifts. It is an animal
kind of existence altogether; but can be no more altered or
mended than the Koran. In the cities, it is true, there is a
class of Mauresques who go out to the "Perle" and other
brasseries and cafés chantants at night, in garments distended
by crinoline, and bonnets fresh from Paris. Elles valent ce que
valent leurs sœurs at Paris, and everywhere else.
XI.
THE FEAST OF BAIRAM.
ALGIERS continues to hold high festival. On the Place du
Gouvernement, indeed, there would seem to be a chronic
carnival all the year round, so far as diversity and gaiety of
costumes are concerned; but the Emperor's visit has doubled
the picturesque aspect of the place, and removed one great cause
of complaint from those who sigh over the gradual disappearance
of Oriental manners and the steady Gallification of Algeria.
The indigenous population have trooped into the town in great
numbers, and since I first set eyes on the town, I have had
occasion to modify the impression as to the universality of
rags
and dirt which the first view of the Arabs conveyed to my
mind. There has been a great encampment of friendly
Bedouins outside Algiers, and from their bivouac numbers of
children of the desert have strolled on to the Place, where they
contrast most favourably with the sedentary natives, who,
although they "compose" admirably in a picture or a photo-
graph, are to the naked eye a most grimy and deplorable
184
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crew. I have seen, since Saturday, Arabs six feet high and
over, well-built and straight-limbed, with coal black beards
and flashing eyes; and moreover, with burnouses that were
positively clean. They have left their long carbines, and
javelins, and jewelled yataghans in the camp; but they have
an unmistakeably warlike appearance. Nor can it be denied
that some of these Arabs have a majestic and imposing
carriage not to be approached by Europeans. They walk,
somehow, as if they knew that the land belonged of right to
them. It is exceedingly fortunate for Europe and for them-
selves that, although they may have an agricultural, they have
no longer a political interest in the soil of their country.
Whoever is to govern Algeria, it is certain that the Moors of
the cities, the Bedouins of the plain, or the Kabyles of the
mountains are not the persons to whom such government
should be entrusted. They would very soon play Old Harry
with it, as their predecessors did, and their contemporaries and
co-religionaries are doing in Tunis and in Morocco. Inde-
pendent Algeria would revert once more to a state of nature—
that is to say, the nature of a country in which the semi-civili-
sation is as impracticable as the semi-barbarism, and which is
inhabited by highway robbers in the interior and buccaneers on
the sea-shore. Algiers is just a thousand miles too near the
coasts of France and Spain for its toleration as an independent
Mahometan power to be possible. The French war steamers
THE FEAST OF BAIRAM.
185
from Oran keep a sharp look-out after their neighbour the Bey
of Tunis, and Gibraltar keeps Tangiers in order; but from
Algiers left to itself we might very soon expect to see the old
fleets of pirates issue, to pounce on Christian merchantmen, and
rob and ravish as in days of old. You may think that I am
begging the question, or assuming an eventuality of whose
occurrence there is not the remotest likelihood; but I venture
to point out to you that the abandonment of this magnificent
colony, and the rendition of "Algeria to the Algerians," is one
of the pet crotchets of an influential section of the Liberal
party in France. Algeria," said the Duke de Broglie, many
years ago in the Chamber of Peers, "is to France only a box at
the Opera." The remark is full of French pungency, and,
viewed under certain aspects, is true.
(C
To the low-class Frenchman Algeria is simply là bas-a
vague and indistinct land, where it is very hot, where the
conscript who has drawn an unlucky number is sent to
serve, where he dies in battle or of fever, or whence haply
he returns very much bronzed, with a confirmed taste for
absinthe, and full of wild legends about Moorish women
with faces like the full moon. To the majority of educated
Frenchmen the country is no
country is no more than "a box at the
Opera"-a box where you may see now a brilliant fantasia of
Bedouins, now a voluptuous saraband of dancing girls. Now
there is a picturesque "set" of a Mauresque hareem horse-
:
186
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shoe arches, tesselated pavement, bubbling fountains, gazelle-
like houris reclining on luxurious divans, pipes, coffee, prayer
carpets, black slaves with big ear-rings, venerable sheikhs with
long beards—all the "properties" of the Alhambra, in short.
Then the scene changes to the Desert, music by Félicien David
-Bedouin chiefs on sinewy barbs, camels, gazelles, a real lion-
hunt perchance; the whole winding up with the capture of the
Smala of Abd-el-Kader, including all his seraglio, by the
hundred and first regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique; the curtain
descending amidst repeated discharges of artillery, waving of
flags, and cries of “ Vive l'Empereur!" This is what has been
seen, for a quarter of a century, from the "Opera-box.”
If you
want glowing reproductions on canvas of the most exciting
tableaux, you may find them by scores at every Exhibition of
the Salon; if you need books in which life in Algiers shall
read as prettily as Mr. Beckford's "Vathek," M. Ernest
Feydeau, M. Théophile Gautier, M. Fromentin, will satisfy your
desire in any number of limp octavos. If you yearn for narra-
tives of sterner stuff, General Daumas will go behind the scenes,
and organise an imposing spectacle of the horses of the Sahara;
or Bombonnel-poor Jules Gérard's successor-will lead across
the stage a string of mules laden with the spolia opima of his
warfare against lions, and panthers, and jackals. All these
things the Parisian has seen from his snug proscenium-parlour,
until at last he has begun to yawn; the Bedouin in his
THE FEAST OF BAÏRAM.
187
eternal burnouse has become a bore; something else, by
way of a change, has been called for; and MM. Cambon and
Thierry have furnished the décors for a new ballet d'action
entitled “The Campaigns of Italy," or a grand hippodramatic
spectacle full of Mexican guerilleros and Indian chiefs, and
introducing the siege of Puebla and the occupation of Tenos-
titlan. M. David's "Desert," still politically speaking, has had
its "run," and ceases to draw. A very small proportion of the
French public are aware, even if they cared to know, what
enormous sums that African opera has cost, and what wofully
small receipts it has brought to the Imperial Treasury. The
outgoings have been tremendous, the incomings nil. Year
after year the best blood of France has irrigated the sands of
the desert; but the pulverous waste remains as arid as ever.
Here and there an oasis has been wrested from sterility,
ploughed with shares of gold, so to speak, and sown with silver;
but the fruits which the earth has yielded-I am always
speaking politically-have been mainly all rind and stone and
no pulp :-Dead Sea apples, fair to outward view, but full of
ashes within.
Here on the Place du Gouvernement at Algiers you may
see, stalking about, or lounging at the tables in front of the
cafés, any number of the "friendly natives" I have spoken
of. Some are officers of Arab Spahis, others chieftains of
mediatised or conciliated tribes. They are taking their sirop
188
A TRIP TO BARBARY,
de groseille or their coffee with French officers; they are
puffing cigarettes just as though they were with the cocottes of
the Bois; some of them have eye-glasses, with which they ogle
the French ladies daintily; the use of pocket-handkerchiefs is
not infrequent; on the breast of more than one burnouse I see
glittering the star of the Legion; they speak French with more
or less fluency, and dine at the restaurant, using knives and
forks and napkins, in lieu of squatting cross-legged on the
ground round a brass tray, seizing gobbets of food with their
fingers, and ramming them down their throats. Unfortunately,
these friendly natives do not, comparatively, represent their
nation, any more than our two or three smartly-clad West India
regiments represent the wretched black savages of the West
Coast of Africa. They are an infinitesimal part of the great
mass of natives, who are the reverse of friendly. There is no
need to insult them by likening them to Nana Sahibs-
greyhounds in outward polish, tigers in their hearts. If the
Arab hates the Frenchman, his hatred is honest, and in many
respects chivalrous. He is not, I am told, treacherous. But he
cannot be got to see that the Frank has any right in his terri-
tory. He cannot be persuaded to look upon his brother the
friendly native but as a renegade and traitor, to be renounced,
cursed, spit upon, and at the earliest opportunity shot. He
cannot be mediatised, he cannot be conciliated, any more than
the lion can be brought to dance a hornpipe and do tricks upon
THE FEAST OF BAÏRAM.
189
the cards. Van Amburgh, it is true, used to put his head in the
mouth of the King of Beasis; but the lion was a caged one-
he did not put on white kid gloves and come and sit in the
stalls, and the lion-tamer in the belt of his gay tunic had
always a short, stout crowbar, wherewith to brain his pupil if he
proved refractory.
Such is pretty nearly the situation of the French with
regard to the Arabs. They have penetrated into the bowels of
the desert, but it has ever been with a hand on the hilt and
a finger on the trigger. They have crossed their legs in
the tent of the Bedouin, and smoked a pipe with him; but
the next day they have been compelled to raise a strong fort, to
overawe and coerce their neighbour. At once the French must
be acquitted of any desire to tyrannise over or to maltreat their
Mahometan subjects. On the whole, indeed, they have behaved
towards them with singular equity, generosity, and forbearance.
The Moors of the towns have enjoyed under the French vice-
roys an amount of ease and protection for which they might
have sighed in vain "nder the Turkish Deys. Their religious
privileges, their civil rights, have been rigorously protected.
They have not been overtaxed; they have been secure from
arbitrary imprisonment or cruel punishment. In the interior
the natives have been confirmed in the tranquil possession of
the lands they possessed before the conquest, or which they
have acquired subsequently to it. The institution of the
190
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Bureaux Arabes, or administrative centres, where justice has
been administered and native interests watched over by French
officers speaking Arabic, and in constant communication with
the Arab chiefs, have, on the whole, worked well. Occasionally,
it is true, the directors of these bureaux have not been chosen
from the best class of officers, and the Bedouin or the Kabyle
has been treated very much after the fashion of a milch cow;
but instances of malversation or oppression have been rare.
With all this, the pacification of Algeria has remained a con-
summation devoutly to be wished for, yet giving little promise
of accomplishment. Bureaux Arabes, expeditions into the
Kabyle country, flying columns, promenades militaires, forts
and blockhouses, have not done much. There have always
been one or more tribes in revolt; there has always been
a cry of peace when there was no peace. You may exter-
minate that gaunt Bedouin, careering about on a weedy horse
with a blanket over his head. You have revolvers and rifles;
he has, often, only a dagger, or a musketoon with a flint lock.
You may vanquish him, but you cannot subdue him. So at
least the French have found, after thirty years' conflict with
an indomitable race. Thus the Grand Algerian Opera is a
very charming performance to witness from a loge de face, but
the great, weary score of the work is written in the reports of
innumerable governors, sub-governors, and prefects. Acres,
miles square of stationery have been filled with wordy exposi-
THE FEAST OF BAIRAM.
191
tions of the "situation," but little progress has been made
towards a final settlement; and thus, it is said, irritated and
tired out by a continual flux of reports leading to nothing, the
Emperor determined to come to the colony in person, and judge
things for himself. He stayed but for a few days in 1860, and
in 1865 his sojurn will be confined to a few weeks; and, of
course, it is questionable how far he may be able to carry away
with him more than an imperfect view of the true state of
affairs. The seven hundred beggars, more or less, who have all
been actually put under lock and key by the local authorities,
are a significant illustration of the desire felt by the Adminis-
tration to “make things comfortable." There is not a village
through which he has passed but has been swept, and gar-
nished, and whitewashed, and furbished up against his arrival.
Holes have been filled up, broken windows mended, ruinous
walls repaired, heaps of rubbish removed, from the Imperial
track. Those gentlemen who have no shirts," to use the
dictum of the politic showman, have been requested to stand in
the background, and give place to the more decently attired ;
and that which I saw at Bou Farik and at Blidah could not but
remind me very strongly of what I had read of Potemkin's
preparations for the reception of Catherine on her progress
through Southern Russia. The scene-painter and the property-
man, the florist and the costumier, were called in to embellish
the road followed by the Czarina. Prosperous villages sprang
CC
192
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up, as though by enchantment, where before had only been
miserable hovels; happy peasants were seen dancing on village
greens where yesterday had only been beggars and dunghills;
but no sooner had the Empress taken her departure than the
decorations were pulled down, and the dresses of the happy
peasantry sent back to the masquerade warehouse. It is possible
that the trophies and the triumphal arches, the garlands and
the N.'s, the tricolored flags and the illuminations, will some-
what impede the view which the most sagacious and clear-
sighted monarch in Europe is wishful to take of the state of
affairs in Africa; it may be that no sooner have the masts
of the ship which bears him to Europe disappeared below
the horizon, than the proceedings of the Algerian Adminis-
tration will resume its old blundering, tortuous, verbose
course-that the old squabbles and tracasseries will arise
between the Governor-General in Algiers and the Ministry of
War in Paris.
The general obscurity in which the state of things in the
colony is so studiously enveloped must be aggravated, so far as
the Emperor is concerned, by the extraordinary baseness of the
Algerine press. The servility of a semi-official journal in Paris
is oily enough; but the greasy adulation, the fulsome flattery to
be found in the Akhbar or the Journal des Colons is positively
marvellous. While the Emperor is here he will be beslavered
with praise; but when he is gone, and things have fallen into
THE FEAST OF BAÏRAM.
193
the old grooves, you may expect to find the journalists of
Algiers, who are the mere creatures of the Administration, slily
chuckling in print over the manner in which the local Govern-
ment has succeeded in counteracting the instructions sent from
the central authority in Paris. This has already actually been
done; and the Administration was not long since complimented
on having pursued a course of policy diametrically opposed to
that upheld in the metropolis.
A dynasty preceding that of the Third Napoleon, driven
almost to despair by the impracticability of the Mahometan
rebels whom it had striven so long to convert into subjects, once
hit on the notable device of employing as an extra-official
ambassador to the Arabs a professional conjuror. The cele-
brated M. Robert Houdin was sent to Africa, and, in the
presence of a number of Arab chiefs, went through his most
remarkable feats of hocus-pocus and legerdemain. The in-
tention was of course to impress the natives with an idea of the
superior skill and ingenuity of the Franks, and perhaps also to
hint that some of the most recondite of our jugglers' tricks were
due to superhuman agency. The experiment—at the best but
a very shallow and paltry one-was a failure. The Arabs re-
garded the sleight-of-hand tricks with little curiosity, next with
indifference, and at last with scorn. They have conjurors of
their own who could teach tricks to Robert Houdin. A flight
of pigeons from a portfolio, or an endless diversity of drinks
0
194
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from one bottle, failed to astonish them. It would have been
wiser to show them a steam printing machine, or an Armstrong
gun factory.
The Emperor Napoleon, wiser in his generation and more
dignified in his procedure, has just made an appeal to his
Mahometan subjects, which is certainly as bold as it is curious,
and as novel as it is bold. In the proclamation to the French
inhabitants of Algeria, the day after his arrival, the Emperor
very clearly indicated what should be the policy of his nation
towards the native races. "We must be the masters," he said,
"because we are the most civilised; we should be generous,
because we are the strongest." This seemingly logical proposi-
tion has been amplified and illustrated in the proclamation
addressed by Napoleon III. to the Arab people. I have spoken
of this production as curious and bold. There is certainly a
good deal that is strange and a good deal that implies hardi-
hood in the spectacle of the monarch of a great Christian nation,
of the Eldest Son of the Church, directly endorsing the doctrines
of fatalism and inculcating the precepts of the Koran. The
Emperor commences by telling the Arabs that it was never the
intention of France to destroy the nationality of Algeria, but to
rescue it from secular oppression, and to substitute for Turkish
domination a milder, juster, and more enlightened rule. Not-
withstanding which, as his Majesty naïvely points out, the
liberated race have, for five-and-thirty years, been fighting their
THE FEAST OF BAÏRAM.
195
liberators tooth and nail. The Emperor does not consider such
conduct on the part of the natives criminal. On the contrary,
he professes to honour that sentiment of martial dignity which
has led the Arabs, before submitting to the French, to invoke
"le jugement de Dieu," the arbitrament of the Almighty. But
He, the Emperor assumes, has "pronounced," and the Arabs are
thereupon exhorted to bow to the decrees of Providence. The
Emperor proceeds to point out that his own ancestors had,
twenty centuries since, to sustain a struggle as vain against
invasion; but from their discomfiture arose their regeneration.
The vanquished Gauls became assimilated with the conquering
Romans, and from the enforced union between contrary virtues
and opposite civilisations sprang, in time, that French nationality
which has pervaded the whole world with its ideas. The Em-
peror omits to say anything about the Franks, who, it strikes
me, were not a little concerned in the production of that French
nationality of which he speaks, seeing that they overcame both
the Gauls and the Romans. But strong meat is not fit for
babes; and his Majesty doubtless thought that lessons in history
to so primitive a people as the Arabs were best administered in
homœopathic doses.
The natives are thus bidden to accept "accomplished facts."
They are reminded of what their own Prophet has said, "God
gives power to whom He will;" and the second chapter and
two hundred and forty-eighth verse of the Koran—the famous
0 2
196
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and venerable chapter entitled "The Cow"-is quoted in sup-
port of the argument for French supremacy. The Emperor
declares that he holds his power directly from on high, and
that he intends to exercise it for the good of the Arabs. It is
further significantly hinted to them that they are but two
millions, whereas the French are forty millions strong-twenty
to one; a very apt commentary on the "cow" quotation, im-
plying the well-known maxim that Providence is generally on
the side of the big battalions. Besides, urges the Emperor, the
Arabs have sworn allegiance to him, and their conscience as
well as their Sacred Book alike command them to keep the
troth they have plighted (Chap. 8 "Of Repentance," verse
fourth). The Arabs are finally told to confide in their destiny,
since it is indissolubly united with that of France, and to
acknowledge, with the Koran (Chap. 7, "El Araf,” verse
one hundred and seventy-seven), that he whom God directs
is well directed-the personage so directed being clearly
Napoleon III., Emperor of the French.
I should very much like to know what the Holy Father of
the Eldest Son of the Church will think of this proclamation,
or how it will strike Monseigneur Dupanloup, or what Mr.
Spurgeon or Dr. Cumming will have to say about it. Can it
be denied that it is both curious and bold? A considerable
section of the Christian world are implicitly of opinion that the
so-called Prophet Mahomet was either a crazy visionary or a
THE FEAST OF BAÏRAM.
197
sensual and bloody-minded impostor, and that Al Coran is a
wild mixture of fables, hallucinations, plagiarism from Scripture,
and downright blasphemy. The Emperor of the French, how-
ever, would seem to be of the same opinion with that English
translator of Al Coran, who has printed on his title-page a
quotation from Cicero, to the effect that there is no doctrine,
howsoever false, without a grain or so of truth being mingled
with it. Napoleon has boldly pressed the Prophet Mahomet
into his service, and made him testify to the Divine Legation of
the French armies in Algeria. Whether history does or does
not repeat itself is a moot point among students; but the Third
Napoleon seems resolved that the middle of the nineteenth
century shall witness an exact reproduction of that historical
policy inaugurated at its commencement by Napoleon I.
Gazing upon the groups of bare-legged and turbaned and
burnoused Arabs who were conning the Imperial proclamation,
which, in French and Arabic characters, is affixed to every wall
and every Arcade in Algiers-musing over these appeals to
fatalism and destiny, and to these references to "The Cow"
and "El Araf," I could not but recall the image of Bonaparte,
general-in-chief of the armies of the Republic, sitting cross-
legged on a divan in a mosque at Cairo, surrounded by mollahs
and softas, expressing the profound veneration he felt for the
precepts of the Mahometan faith, and pointing out how plainly
it was commanded by the Koran that the Mamelukes should be
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overthrown, and the schismatical Sir Sidney Smith extirpated
from the land. The Sultan Gebir-"the Fiery Chief "-the
Egyptain Arabs were wont to call the young Republican
general. Napoleon III. may earn a title as lofty from the
Bedouins.
El Djezzaïr meanwhile rejoices. The bands from the iron-
clad squadron alternate with the music of the regiments in
garrison in giving open-air concerts every evening, from eight
to nine, in the Place du Gouvernement. The great Mosque
of La Pêcherie is illuminated every night; so are the ships in
harbour; so are the arches and trophies; so are the Cathedral
and the Palace of the Governor-General. The Mahometans,
too, are having a national fête of their own, and are enjoying it
after their own fashion. It is the Feast of Baïram. The first
day of the new year (1273, I think) in the Mahometan calendar
was on Friday. Since then, every morning and evening, troops
of negroes in the most fantastic and preposterous costumes you
can imagine-some of them in full Oriental costume, turbaned
or fez-capped, but with scarlet tassels to their burnouses;
others in rags and oripeaux, and scraps of finery innumerable—
old cocked hats on their woolly heads tied beneath their chins
with tape, frayed and tarnished epaulettes on their shoulders,
swordless scabbards at their sides, scarlet morocco boots, the
heels decorated with prodigious brass spurs-have been peram-
bulating the principal streets, making the air hideous with the
THE FEAST OF BAÏRAM.
199
noise of tom-toms and double castanets of brass. The tom-tom
is a kind of tin kettle covered with sheepskin, slung at the
side, and thwacked with a curved wooden bat, something like
a boomerang and a thin cane. The sound produced is abso-
lutely horrible. The clangour of the castanets alone would
impel Mr. Babbage to the commission of suicide. These
negroes likewise sing. What is the matter of their chant I
know not, but their manner is awful. Then they dance, a heel-
and-toe, double shuffle, cut six, and bob around, very much in
the fashion of the imitators, white or coloured, of "Boz's
Juba" who may be seen in the streets of London or the night
cellars of New York. The African Cæsar, to my mind, is re-
markably like the Transatlantic Pompey, only he seems a little
happier.
The French have a partiality for negroes, and treat them
with a sort of humorous kindness; looking upon them, I appre-
hend, in the light of amusing mimes and saltimbanques provided
especially for their diversion, but not much higher in the scale
of creation than dancing dogs or learned monkeys. The negroes
in Algeria are all very orthodox Mahometans-that faith lend-
ing itself, on festive occasions, to such religious exercises as
beating on the tom-tom and screeching. At the Feast of
Baïram the black musicians are in immense request, not only
in the streets, but in the old Moorish cafés and dancing-places.
They have plenty of money given to them, for the Arabs are
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very charitable, and it is quite sad to think that the beggars
should have been locked up this Baïram. At such a season no
one would refuse a copper to the mendicant who asks for it in
the name of the Prophet and Sidi Abd-el-Kader-who is not,
by the way, the celebrated Emir of that name, but a much
venerated Marabout of bygone times.
XII.
BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK.
My first experience of railway travelling on the African con-
tinent was made the day of the Emperor's visit to Bou Farik.
Let me tell you, first of all, where Bou Farik is, and why his
Majesty went there. This flourishing little town, or "centre
agricole," as our omnicentralising allies prefer to call it, is
situated in the plain of the Mitidja, at a distance of thirty-four
kilometres from Algiers. It is an assemblage of model farms,
with a model rural population, almost exclusively European, and
is considered to be the most successful of the numerous experi-
ments of the kind which, with an average on the side of failure,
the French have essayed in this most experimental colony.
Bou Farik-in railway parlance Bouffarick-was in 1830 an
uninhabitable compound of marsh and jungle, swarming with
wild boars, hyenas, and jackals. For some years following the
conquest, the French cavalry officers in garrison round Algiers
used, armed with long spears, to make excursions to this savage
place, there to indulge in the sprightly sport of pig-sticking.
202
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
A few bridle paths traversed the combination of thicket and
quagmire, converging at an expanse of somewhat more solid
earth in the form of a hillock, and crowned by a well, which was
overshadowed by three tall trees. From the branches of these
trees floated permanently sundry hempen ropes, and to these
ropes were not unfrequently suspended human bodies, the
corpses of true believers, who, to their own ill-luck, had come
into collision with the criminal code as administered by the
Moorish judicial functionaries. These gibbets were the only
signs of civilisation visible in the heart of the Mitidja, and, for
want of a better, the neighbouring Arabs made the Hanging
Well a place of periodical meeting, where they sold their flocks
and herds, or bartered them for such commodities as they
needed from Algiers, Fez, or Tunis. In all ages, I believe,
humanity has elected to rattle silver and gold at the gallows-
foot; and there is scarcely a market-place in the known world
but has also been, at some time or another, a place of execution.
The dealers who gathered under the shadow of the gibbets of
Bou Farik were, as a rule, anxious to get away as fast as pos-
sible from the scene of their transactions. The place was
horribly pestilential. No one dared to camp out there. The
Arab tents were always pitched outside the boundary of the
jungle; and none ventured, if they could help it, in its tortuous
paths after nightfall. When wild beasts ran short, wilder men
were not lacking to rob and murder travellers. To the Arab
BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK.
203
grazier, in short, Bou Farik was as a plague-smitten Barnet,
surrounded by a ferocious Finchley-common infested by high-
waymen and footpads.
In 1835 General Drouet d'Erlon established a camp at Bou
Farik. He entrenched it quite after the Cæsarean model;
parapets were constructed, and within these barriers fifteen
hundred men and six hundred horses could be encamped.
This was one of the earliest advances of the French into the
bowels of the land. A short time afterwards Marshal Clausel,
of Antwerp celebrity, decreed that a city should be built at Bou
Farik. The obsequious engineers on his staff christened the
city in embryo Medina-Clausel; but it came to nothing. Streets
were laid out on proportions as magnificent as those of Washing-
ton or the flourishing city of Eden; bastions were built and
counterscarps raised, and moats dug—with the pencil and T
square, on the drawing-board—banks, theatres, cafés, barracks,
were projected; but somehow these edifices never advanced
beyond the earliest rudiments of the foundations; and, mean-
while, the colonists who had been persuaded to come hither
from France died off like sheep with the rot, in the miserable
huts of mud and brambles which had been hastily thrown up.
Another immigration was fostered, and again it perished. Fresh
blood was poured into the veins of Bou Farik, and once more
it dried up. The place had to be thrice repeopled before the
nucleus even of a substantial community could be established.
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The Arabs used to declare that not so much as toads and vipers
could exist at Bou Farik, so unhealthy was it; but time and
energy and perseverance will accomplish almost everything;
and the whilom plague-pit is now a very smiling and prosperous
country town, with from four to five thousand inhabitants.
These are all either French or Jews. The Arabs will bring
their cattle to market, and stalk about the town in the day-
time; but they will not inhabit it, or even pass a night under
one of its roofs. Bou Farik is still to them a Golgotha, and an
accursed plaee. Immense drainage works have at length re-
claimed the fever-haunted bog; Bou Farik is no longer a lazar-
house; but the sacrifices necessary to bring about such a result
have been enormous. The mortality at one period approached
seventy per cent. Regiment after regiment of the conscripts
of labour died miserably. The exhalations from the stagnant
waters of the locality killed many, while others were literally
martyrs for the sake of those who were to come after them; for
it is one of the peculiarities of the virgin soil in Algeria, that
when first dug into with the spade the very disturbance of the
earth they say, as though a hornet's nest had been stirred up,
sends forth diseases in crowds.*
The ground poisoned those
* See remarks, ante, concerning "le remuement des terres." Does any ana-
logous impression as to the evil effects of stirring up the earth exist in the
mind of the Anglo-Saxon labourer? Tell me, some kindly correspondent of
"Notes and Queries."
BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK.
205
who sought to make it wholesome; the physician died as he
strove to heal his patient; but all the while the rankly rich
vegetation, thriving on that which slays human beings, grew all
around with a quick and lavish fecundity, that drove the wasted
and sickly skeletons who were contending against the climate
nearly desperate. Bou Farik wears a very different aspect now.
The palm, the date, the banana, the plantain, the cactus, the
prickly pear, flourish; but they are kept within proper limits.
The town is girt about with vast orchards, recalling the best-
cultivated parts of Normandy, and the inhabitants are real
country folk, hardy, laborious, simple, and frugal. The camp
of Drouet d'Erlon, converted into a kitchen garden, has, with
several acres adjoining it, been granted in fee to a good monk
called Father Brumauld, on condition that for a period of twenty
years he shall maintain an agricultural and industrial school for
two hundred apprentices-mostly orphan boys from the depart-
ment of the Seine. Our English Children's Friend Society
attempted many years since to do something of the same
kind for vagrant children from England at the Cape of Good
Hope; but a cry arose that the boys were sold as slaves to
the Dutch settlers, and the project, a very admirable one,
had to be abandoned. Charity, it is said, begins at home.
It would seem that our excellent English plant, philanthropy,
needs a great deal of criminal manure; so we have elected
to keep perpetual dungheaps of vice and crime at home, and
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at our very doors, in order to quicken the growth of home
philanthropy.
Bou Farik is still a market, but on a much grander scale
than in the Hanging Well days. Every Monday from three to
four thousand Arab farmers belonging to tribes scattered over
the Mitidja, and some even from remoter districts, flock into Bou
Farik with their cattle. A vast caravanserai has been built
for their accommodation. This Oriental Smithfield contains
lairs and stables, cafés, an inland revenue office, and a mosque.
No banks, however, are needed, as in our cattle market. All
transactions are for ready money, or, if anything be done on
credit, the primitive contrivances of the notch and tally serve
for all purposes of book-keeping, as the abacus, or balls strung
on a frame of wires, does for calculation. The Arab is his own
banker. He puts his money in a long bag, very much re-
sembling a cotton sock, thrusts it into his sack, and when he
gets home buries it in the ground. If he be a nomade Arab,
and does not live anywhere, he carries it in his saddle. The
interment of money is, however, more generally practised.
Many of the Arab graziers are reputed to be very rich. Among
the Kabyles, who are sedentary and industrious, there are
fortunes which even in Europe would be accounted handsome.
When the French invaded this country the market price of a
bullock was six francs; it is now worth at Bou Farik as many
napoleons. The European colonists who breed cattle drive a
BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK.
207
good trade; but in competition they must always be at a dis-
advantage with the Arabs, who have inherited, or squatted on
their farms; who have few local taxes to pay, and furnish their
contributions to their own native chiefs mainly in kind; who
have no position to keep up, and no appearance to make, save a
very wild and picturesque one, which is of the cheapest; who
are at no costs for educating their children, seeing that they
rarely educate them at all; whose wants are few, and whose
mode of life is almost incredibly abstemious; and who never,
comparatively speaking, spend any money. An Arab may live
somewhat luxuriously at the Feast of Baïram, and indulge in
a good supper after sunset at Ramadan; but at least three
hundred days in the year are with him Banyan ones. A hand-
ful of rice, or a ladleful of meal, which costs little, or a few
dates, and plenty of spring water, which costs nothing, and he
is satisfied. “Con tre soldi," say the Neapolitan lazzaroni,
"vive, mange, e ti lave la faccia"-for three-halfpence a day
you may have board, lodging, and washing. The blessed sun
provides the rest. The Arab seems to live quite as economi-
cally. Stay, he is very fond of smoking. Well, you may buy
capital tobacco in Algiers for a franc a pound, and cigars are to
be had three for two sous; but the Arab husbandman generally
grows his own tobacco. Coffee, again, he delights in; but in a
Moorish café the fragrant beverage is only a halfpenny a cup.
It is true that the cup is not much bigger than a good-sized
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thimble. When the Arab is sleepy-and when he has finished
buying and selling and smoking, he generally becomes drowsy-
he first draws the cowl of his burnouse over his face, kicks off
his shoes, uses his arm or a nice hard stone as a pillow, and
sleeps the sleep of the just. This is all the going to bed he
requires. In fact, there is not such a thing as a bed in the
Oriental scheme of society. The richest wrap themselves up
and fling themselves on hearthrugs or sofas; but "turning in"
is an unknown ceremony. The ordinary bolsters of the dormi-
tory, as I have elsewhere hinted, are articles of dress, and to go
about clad in a pillow-case and a pair of sheets is, with a lady,
to attain the height of the fashion. Every night, on the Place
du Gouvernement, you may see numbers of Arabs couched at
full length on the marble parapet of the quay, or on the steps
of the Mosque of La Pêcherie. I do not think the authorities
will suffer them to sleep under the arcades of the streets; but
the nooks and crannies which the closely-clustered houses in
the by-lanes of the old Moorish town afford generally shelter
their nightly slumberers, who in England would clearly bring
themselves within the provisions of that clause in the New
Police Act which prohibits sleeping in the open air. The Arabs
snoozing à la belle étoile in the Place are not beggars, else they
would be in gaol. They may be, for aught I can tell, sheikhs
of high degree; or perhaps they are philosophers of even a
more advanced degree of cynicism than Diogenes, looking upon
BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK,
209
a tub as an effeminate luxury, and holding a stone couch and
the stars for a blanket as the only sleeping accommodation fit
for a Mussulman sage.
We will now, if you please, proceed to Bou Farik. You go
thither per rail; the iron road being continued some twenty
miles further on to. Blidah, at the very foot of the Atlas range.
By an Imperial decree, dated April 8, 1857, the creation of a
network of railways was shadowed forth, comprising the three
provinces stretching parallel to the sea-coast from Algiers to
Constantine to the east, passing through or near Aumale and
Setif, and to the west from Algiers to Oran, passing Blidah,
Amoura, Orléansville, St. Denis du Sig, and Ste. Barbe. There
were also to be lines from Philippeville (Stora) to Constantine ;
from Bougia to Setif, and from Bona to Constantine, by
Toulma; from Tenes to Orléansville; from Arzen to Mosta-
ganem and Relizane; and from Oran to Tlemcen. These rail-
ways, with the exception of the short lengths from Algiers to
Blidah, Oran to St. Denis du Sig, and Philippeville to Constan-
tine, are as yet only radiant visions of the future; and the
Algiers and Blidah line, which is but forty-eight kilometres
long, and which was commenced in 1859 and took four years to
make, is as yet the most important sample of the adamantine
millenium to be expected. At all the stations along the line
the pernicious system of making the terminus at about two
miles distant from the town itself has been followed. You are
P
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consequently obliged to hang about a coach office for twenty
minutes, waiting for an omnibus to take you to the railway, and
the time lost in going to and from the stations is about double
that which you pass in the train. The Blidah railway runs for
miles out of Algiers, along the seashore, at almost a dead level;
and had the line been constructed by a Yankee company, the
cars would have been brought right up to the Place du
Gouvernement; but the French proceed more cautiously, and
the traveller is duly compelled to make his pilgrimage per
fiacre or omnibus into the outskirts of the town to the gare.
It is just the same at Bou Farik and at Blidah, the country
being at both stations as flat as a bowling-green. But is it not
precisely the same in Paris? With the exception of the Havre
terminus in the Rue d'Amsterdam, the railway termini are at
an almost inaccessible distance. The Chemin de Fer du Nord
seems to be at Timbuctoo, and the Lyons Railway somewhere
in the Gulf of Carpentaria. We English are, no doubt, getting
spoilt by London Bridge and Charing-cross and Victoria; and
even now we are crying out that Euston-square is too far off,
that Waterloo is among the Trasteverini, and the Great Eastern
is a howling wilderness; but a little experience of the infinite
pains taken by Continental engineers to place their stations as
far as ever they can from the centres of the life and business of
a town should surely make us grateful for the blessings we
enjoy.
BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK.
211
I reached the gare at Algiers at noon, the train being adver-
tised to start at half-past twelve, but the conductor of the
omnibus, an Arab, was determined that we should not miss the
train, and so afforded us an opportunity of cooling our heels for
thirty minutes in the waiting-room. "Cooling" is perhaps a
misnomer as applied to the heels in Algeria. Baking them
would be an expression more appropriate. A European suffers
from the heat of the climate much more in his lower extremities
than in any other part of his body. Against the rays of the
sun you may guard your head by the puggree turban, by an
umbrella, or by one of the white muslin nuquières or nape-of-
the-neck protectors worn by the Chasseurs d'Afrique. Your
blue or green spectacles will obviate the peril of ophthalmia
from the too constant contemplation of stone or lime-whited
buildings illumined by a blazing sun. A suit of white linen,
or of nankeen which is better, or of blue flannel which is best,
will keep you cool enough. You should not over-walk, or over-
work, or over-talk, or over-do anything. Take things coolly,
like Mr. Midshipman Easy. You should not allow your thirst
to get the better of you, even though you drink nothing but
syrups, sodas, and citronades. A large quantity of liquids of
any kind is dangerous. The very best beverage, after all, is a
demi-tasse of coffee poured into a tumbler and filled up with
cold water. Most Englishmen would think this potation in
the outset exceedingly nasty; but you soon grow accustomed
P 2
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to it, as the student did to the "Bottle Imp," and learn to
love it. There is much Bock beer drunk in Algiers by Euro-
peans, much execrable absinthe, and much of perhaps the worst
brandy to be found anywhere out of the province of Pomerania,
Prussia. Therefore wise medical men recommend café à l'eau
as a preferential drink. It is a mild stimulant, cheers when
you get used to it, and does not inebriate. Observe the pre-
cautions I have glanced at above: wear flannel next your skin,
a sash round your loins-as the prudent Mussulmans do-and
take a teaspoonful of citro-tartrate of soda in water if you feel
feverish, and a few drops of chlorodine in cases of cramps, and
you will get on very nicely in Africa, as you would, I think,
in the East or West Indies, or in Cayenne or in China. But
there is one thing you cannot do in Algiers. You can't keep
your feet cool-that is, if you go shod after the European
fashion. Try the lightest shoes, the thinnest elastics, the
breeziest Alberts, the softest white jean bottines of the tropics,
and on the cruel sands or the crueller dusty or sandy roads of
Numidia your unhappy hoofs will broil, and bake, and fry, and
at last calcine. Moreover, if you wish to enter a mosque, you
must take your boots off and leave them at the door; and the
mollahs who administer the funds of the fabric do not provide
bootjacks for the use of unbelievers. If they did, they would
like to brain them with those adjuncts of the toilette. The
only cure I can suggest for the fiery-furnace condition to which
BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK.
213
you are reduced is to go barefoot, or at least to thrust your
feet into loose and easy slippers, which you can kick off at
pleasure. Look at all those Arab boys on the dusty quay or
on the white-hot shingled shore. They are all barefooted, yet
they walk through the furnace as harmless as Shadrach,
Meshech, and Abednego of yore. Look at that old Moor who
has entered the watchbox-looking barber's shop to be shaved.
He sits down cross-legged on a bench; but, ere he surrenders
his chin to the barber's shear, he slips his feet out of his
babouches. When two Arabs sit down at a café for a smoke
and a sententious gossip, they open the conversation by taking
off their shoes. To take off your shoes in Africa is as ordinary
and habitual a thing as to take off your gloves in Europe.
The same sensible course had been adopted by the Arab
portion of the travellers waiting in the salles d'attente for the
half-past twelve train. I except of course the ladies, of whom
there were several, veiled up to the eyes, huddled together in
a corner, and looking very much like Banshees out for a frolic.
The women keep their shoes on-I don't know why, for what
European can know anything definite about a Mussulman
woman?-but they always have their slippers on, and very
ugly slippers they are. There were a good many Arabs waiting
for the train, and I observed that, although many of their
number seemed to be in easy circumstances, they all, without
exception, took third-class tickets. The railway company does
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not make much out of the true believers, I fancy. The friend
who was with me pointed out more than one hadji, or Mussul-
man who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca; but these holy
persons had, with an eye to the dust, taken the precaution of
tying red cotton pocket-handkerchiefs over their sacred turbans
and under their chins; whereof the effect was, to say the least,
funny. A descendant of the Prophet, also, with a peagreen
umbrella, does not appeal very strongly to the organ of venera-
tion. It was quite a train de plaisir; but I was very glad
to see that, the number of carriages being limited, the station-
master issued no more tickets than there were places in the
train. The third-class carriages were merely luggage vans, in
which a number of benches of rough-hewn wood had been
hastily fixed; but, the doors being left open, were infinitely
preferable to the stuffy first and second class ones. Not that
these carriages would have given anywhere else the slightest
cause for complaint. They were as elegant and commodious.
as the best vehicles on the French railways-they were simply
unsuited to the climate, and locomotive ovens, that is all. I
wonder that our ingenious allies, who in other matters have
shown so great a faculty for adapting themselves to circum-
stances who have dressed their Zouaves in Arab costumes,
and adopted in a hundred other ways the Arab mode of life—
have not yet arrived at the conviction that stuffed and padded
railway carriages are rather out of place in a country where,
BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK.
215
when the thermometer stands at eighty-four in the shade, it is
considered chilly. In the Cuban railways, and, I believe, in
Old Spain, they manage things much more sensibly. Stuffing
and padding are discarded, the sides of the carriages are
covered with thin silk or linen elegantly decorated, and the
heavy cushions are replaced by light and breezy cane-bottomed
seats.
In other respects that which I have seen of railway working
in Algeria merits the highest praise. Punctuality is rigorously
observed. There are plenty of employés, mostly soldiers whose
term of service has expired, and who are clean, civil, and
obliging. The engines are powerful, and the springs of the
carriages are in good order. Outside the pay-clerk's box there
stands a courteous person in uniform, who repeats your request
for a ticket to the clerk, if that functionary has not heard you,
who takes care that you get your proper change, and who will
answer fifty questions if you choose to ask them. Along the
line the stations, Hussein Dey, the Maison Carrée, Beni-Mered,
Birtouta, and so on, are kept in admirable order. Smiling little
stations they are, with arabesqued verandahs and coquettish
little gardens full of glowing flowers and plants, and close to
every station above the rank of a small hamlet you may see a
handsome hotel and one or more smart cafés. I mention these
little particulars, which at the first blush may appear so much
surplusage, for the reason that Algeria, so far as European
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colonisation is concerned, is a new country-a very new country.
It is not thirty-five years old. Within ten years the cultivators
who tilled the model farms, so soon as their hay was fit for
mowing, begged for a regiment of French dragoons to come
and carry it away at whatever price the Government chose to
give for it; else the Arabs would make their appearance and
burn the crop. So frequent and so fierce were the razzias of
the Bedouins, that one Governor-General of Algeria proposed
to protect the capital and its environs by digging a moat,
cutting off Algiers and the most fertile portions of the plain of
the Mitidja from the interior. Civilisation here, in fact, dates
only from the day before yesterday; and thence my astonish-
ment at finding handsome stations, civil guards and porters,
pretty gardens, and refreshment-rooms where you could actually
obtain lemonade and Eau de Seltz at a distance of twenty or
thirty miles from the metropolis. For when it was my lot to
travel about two thousand miles a month by railway, in the
United States of America, and when I used to grumble at the
uncleanliness of the cars, the brutality of the porters-when
there were any porters visible, which was but seldom-and the
surliness of the conductors; when I ventured to hint that the
engines were weak, and often breaking down or falling out of
gear; when I was so bold as to hint that the permanent way
was, as a rule, in a disgraceful condition, and that the stations
on the line were, with scarcely an exception, tumble-down
BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK,
217
hovels, rotten without and foul within, where, if you could get
any refreshments at all, they consisted of either rancid bacon,
or bad eggs, or pie-with a two-pronged fork to devour them
withal; when, to sum up, I presumed to assert that American
railway arrangements were, in the main, clumsy and barbarous,
I was always met with the rejoinder, "This is a new country,
and we are a new people, sir." There may be even, I will
admit for the sake of argument, another retort in addition to
the one we have mentioned, in the fact that an American
railway is often ten or twelve hundred miles long, whereas the
one from Algiers to Blidah is under fifty; but I beg to observe
that, while not expecting to find stations built like Moorish
kiosques or Etruscan villas in the state of Indiana, or pretty
stations, vending lemonade and Eau de Seltz, in the territory
of Nebraska, you do expect to find comfort, cleanliness, and
even a certain degree of elegance in the immediate vicinity of a
gigantic and luxurious metropolis. And you don't find these
desiderata even on the first twenty miles of any railway run-
ning out of New York. The termini of the Empire City, both
in New York proper and Jersey city, are not much better
appointed than the old cattle-lairs about Cow Cross; and a
journey by rail from New York to Philadelphia, and thence by
way of Baltimore to Washington, is one sickening pilgrimage
of dirt, discomfort, fleas—and worse than fleas oaths, violence,
insolence, saliva, and starvation. It is true that it was in war-
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time that I formed my impression of American railways. Now
that the thousand years of peace have begun, we may hope, I
suppose, for better things.
Very soon after we had passed La Maison Carrée, where
several of the leaders in the recent insurrection were confined,
we saw stretching before us the magnificent plain of the
Mitidja-that wonderful district which once rivalled Sicily as
the granary of the Roman empire. It may become a granary
well nigh as rich, for France; but not before fresh legions of
labourers have been poured into its sultry fields. The pano-
rama is amazing :—the sunken track of the Sahil to the right;
in the centre, and in the extreme distance, the blue mountains
of Millianah; and to the left the sudden and savage structures
of Atlas, hewn out, it seems to you, by short and desperate
blows from a great mass of living rock by Titanic masons, who
despised what could be effected by the gradual attrition of
Time. This is the Mitidja-not a desert, for it absolutely runs
riot with fertility, but still to a great extent incult-but still a
comparative solitude, sparsely tilled, and dotted only here and
there with farms or cultivated patches, and, in its greater
expanse, waiting for the reviving hand of the husbandman.
The Mitidja, like the greater proportion of the African littoral,
is three parts asleep, and Cæsar is expected to waken it up to
life, and health, and riches. The Arab historians say that in
the thirteenth century the plain of the Mitidja contained thirty
BY RAIL TO BOU FARIK.
219
cities. It has been ravaged and laid waste, time and again,
like the Shenandoah Valley, by captains not less merciless
than Sheridan. Bedouins and Kabyles, Marouns and Turks,
Spaniards and Kurdsmen have cut cach other's throats here
for centuries; but the "red rain" has made the harvest grow,
and the land is as fat as ever.
But, after an hour's travel, the train, commendably true to
its time, as most trains are with which Frenchmen have any-
thing to do, draws up at the coquettish little station of Bou
Farik. There is a dense crowd on the platform. There is a
clangour of martial music, a great waving of flags, and tremen-
dous cheering. The Emperor is here.
XIII.
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
"The cloth being drawn, and the usual loyal and patriotic toasts disposed of,
the chairman, the Right Hon. B-—— D——i, M.P., gave the toast of the
evening. In the course of his speech (from which politics were carefully
excluded), the right honourable gentleman alluded in withering terms to
the hideous turpitude and disgusting avidity for the unclean drippings
of office displayed by the existing and (so-called) Liberal administration.
This was not a political gathering, and therefore he would confine him-
self to . . . . Lord Palmerston, the survivor of a political tontine
dragging the country headlong to destruction (cheers) . . . . late illus-
trious Prince Consort.
their country's pride
veteran agriculturists
•
•
wisdom of our ancestors
•
•
bold peasantry,
·
superiority of indoor over outdoor relief
pair of plush breeches and thirty shillings
•
British constitution, the pride and wonder of the world! The right
honourable gentleman concluded his speech, amidst loud and enthusiastic
cheering, by proposing 'Prosperity to the
Agricultural Association.'"
Newspapers of the Period.
BOU FARIK had certainly done its best to "elevate itself,” in
French journalistic parlance, "to a level with the grandeur of
the occasion." About the last thing I ever expected to witness
was an agricultural show on the African continent; but one
BOU FARIK.—AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
221
""
never knows what may happen, and stranger spectacles even
than that which I saw at Bou Farik may be in preparation for
me. The station was very gaily and very tastefully decorated.
In matters of ornamentation our allies are, as you know of old,
never at a loss. In the most out-of-the-way places they are as
ready, aye ready," as the Napiers, either for a fête or a funeral.
A " property-room seems to be part of the machinery of
Government, even in the remotest districts. If you are an em-
peror on your travels, there is a never-failing stock of triumphal
arches, Aubusson carpets, pots full of evergreens, and tricolored
flags to welcome you. If you wish to be married, any number
of orange-flower wreaths and silver-edged corbeilles can be got
ready at half an hour's notice; while, if you are so unlucky as
to die, the Pompes Funèbres are waiting for you round the
corner, with a plate-glass hearse, a croquemort in a cocked hat,
your cipher neatly embroidered on black velvet, and whole gar-
den-crops of immortelles to shower on your tomb. The cherub
of centralisation is for ever sitting up aloft, to look out for the
life and the death of Jacques Bonhomme.
They had hung the very engines and carriages at Bou-Farik
with banners; and N.'s and E.'s, and crowns and eagles, and the
Imperial laurel wreath, and the Imperial bees, were everywhere.
There were garlands galore, and acres of crimson drapery dis-
posed in the most picturesque of festoons. A huge plaster bust
of the sovereign, crowned with laurel, surmounted a pedestal in
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
the vestibule of the station; but the most brilliant and the
most charming accessories of the occasion were, to my mind, the
myriads of real flowers with which the little station was literally
smothered. I never saw so many cut flowers of such varied
hues and of such delicious odour at one time in so confined a
space. In bouquets and in plateaux, in bunches and garlands,
in hastily improvised parterres, and in huge pyramids, the trea-
sures of Flora seemed really inexhaustible. The ladies were, of
course, brave in bouquets; the staff, the municipality, and
authority generally, were fearful perhaps of compromising the
dignified crimson of the Legionary ribbon which they all pos-
sessed, or hoped to possess, by placing roses or geraniums in
juxtaposition therewith; but the guard of honour, composed of
local militia, had small bouquets in the muzzles of their mus-
kets, and there was scarcely an Arab among the multitude
outside without a brilliant posey in the breast of his burnouse, in
the turban of twisted camel's hair round his cap, or-strange as
it may seem-in his ear, like an omnibus horse on May-day.
I have seen an English stableman with a polyanthus in his
mouth; but the sight of an Arab with a rosebud sticking from
his ear was to me, I confess, odd.
The platform and the rooms through which the Emperor was
to walk were laid with rich carpets, some from the looms of
Aubusson, others from the native manufacture of Mascara. It
is one of the first peculiarities which strikes the stranger in this
BOU FARIK.—AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
223
country that no room is carpeted all over, but that there is a
bit of carpet everywhere. Your bed-room is laid with quaintly-
arabesqued tiles, but at your bed-foot is the narowest strip of
gorgeous warp and woof. In the mosque the Arab unrolls a
scrap of carpet not much bigger than a bandana pocket-hand-
kerchief, and prostrates himself thereon to perform his orisons.
The little unwindowed shops, where artisans work or hucksters
vend their wares, are always provided with a bit of carpet to
crouch upon, or have a veil of worsted work looped up, to be let
down when the heat of the sun becomes too powerful or the
workman is taking his mid-day snooze. The caftans of many of
the town Arabs, or Moors, seem, as far as I can judge, to be
made of cloth, vandyked with strips of carpet. The effect is
handsome, although at first sight you may fancy the wearer has
cut up a patchwork counterpane intended for a fancy fair, to
make him a jacket withal. If you wish to play cards in a café,
the waiter brings you, in lieu of a "board of green cloth," a
square of carpet about the size of a kettle-holder, but vivid with
all the colours of the rainbow. And the end of all this is that,
by the time you have been a fortnight in Algeria, there will
come over you, whenever you see a bit of carpet, the impulse
to sit down upon it, not in the European fashion, but on your
hams, like a True Believer. A contempt for chairs is one of
the earliest symptoms of Orientalisation. Then you find that
you begin to prefer coffee by the egg-cupful, very black, and
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full of grouts, and without sugar. After that comes the whole-
some conviction that no transaction whatever can be commenced
or completed without the inhalation of a certain quantity of
mild tobacco-smoke. In process of time, I am given to under-
stand, there comes over the dweller in this fervid clime a
dreamy persuasion that it is very foolish to work more than two
days a week, and that it is not very wrong, if you have money
enough, to indulge in a few-say five wives; but my stay in
this country will be necessarily too limited to enable me to
speak from experience on the last two-named heads.
The carpets of Mascara (Oum' askeur, the mother of soldiers)
are famous throughout North Africa, and compete not unsuc-
cessfully with the world-celebrated carpets of Stamboul. Like
Turkey carpets, their pattern resembles nothing in the heavens
above, nor on the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the
earth; but, also like the products of the looms of Constantinople
and Asia Minor, the brilliance and the harmony of the colours.
is most exquisite. There are, in addition to the flat or close-
woven carpets, a very beautiful kind of loose-warped or "fluffy"
ones, like llama skins dyed in kaleidoscopic tints. They are not
very dear if you order them from the manufacturer direct,
although the Algerine shopkeepers strive to charge extortionate
prices. The wool costs so many francs per kilo. You order a
carpet of a certain length. When it is finished the weaver lifts
the roll of carpet he has completed with both hands, and tells
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
225
you
its weight by guess work. If you prefer it, he will weigh
it in a pair of wooden scales, with great brazen rings, like
quoits, for weights. For the pattern and the workmanship a
charge ridiculously low is made. As for the patterns, they are
invariable in their series, and have come down from time
immemorial. The coat of many colours that Joseph wore was,
very likely, woven after the same design. As for the workman-
ship, the weaver works in a grimy little niche whose dimensions
are between those of a rabbit-hutch and a box at a pawn-
broker's. His loom-timber, treadle, shuttle, and all-is not
worth half a crown; and a journeyman's wages are five sous a
day. The carpet-weavers of Mascara, whither the Emperor will
go during his trip to Oran, have gotten, I know not why, a
bad name among their compatriots. Ahmed-ben-Youssef, the
satirical Marabout of Milliana, who has written a history of
Algeria in the convenient form of sarcastic paragraphs—“ comic
copy," indeed, adapted to the Oriental mind-has left on record
some very severe things about Mascara. "I had taken a hun-
dred thieves,” he says, "and was leading them to prison. They
escaped and hid themselves in the houses of Mascara, where
they have begotten many generations of robbers." And again:
“If thou meetest one that is fat, ragged, proud, and dirty, thou
mayest be sure he is a Mascaran." And last, the merciless
Marabout has a fling at the Hachem who are settled near the
town of ill-fame: "The worst piece of bad money is a thousand
Q
226
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
times better than a man of the Hachem." The world, I have
begun to find out from wandering, does not differ much in the
form of its good or its evil speaking whithersoever we go; and
I commend to the attention of the accomplished writer on the
manners and customs of the globe the analogy between Ahmed-
ben-Youssef's gibes and a remark made to me about this time
last year by a canon of the Cathedral of Morelia, in Mexico. We
were riding into the city of Puebla together, and said the canon :
My son, this place is called Puebla de los Angelos—the City
of the Angels; but, believe me, were you to hang every man,
woman, and child in Puebla, yea even to the babe that is
unborn, you would only be ridding Puebla of so many thieves."
Thus El Señor Canonico. He was a Marabout too, after his
fashion, and as stern a censor as Ahmed-ben-Youssef.
But see how long a scrap of carpet has kept me at Bou
Farik. Some margin for dalliance may perhaps be allowed me,
for I am conscious that the mere details of Imperial and Royal
progresses are of the driest. There is the brilliant suite you
have enumerated a dozen times before; there is the stereotyped
address; there is the inevitable Prefect, or the more inevitable
Mayor. M. le Maire de Bou Farik bears the high-sounding
name of Ribouleau. He was as eloquent as his compeers, as
wordy, as loyal; and his oily platitudes were as graciously
received as those of his predecessors. It is all but impossible
to get anything new out of a mayor. Once in a century or
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
227
so, society may be adorned by a municipal prodigy like that
poetic mayor who, when the first Emperor was making a tour
through the departments with his Austrian bride, inscribed on
a triumphal arch the couplet-
En épousant Marie Louise
Napoléon n'a pas fait une sottise.
Although an undoubted genius, his worship was a bad prophet.
Not four years afterwards, his Imperial master had bitter cause
to confess that his union with a Princess of the House of
Hapsburg was the grossest act of folly he had ever committed.
But the poet-mayor was not to be discouraged. Louis XVIII.
came to the throne, and the bard was still in office. On a new
triumphal arch, or, perhaps, on the old one furbished up, he
stuck a distich even more inimitable than its precursor.
ran thus:
.
Vive le Roi,
Ma femme, et Moi !
It
But mayors such as these are not to be met with every day.
At Bou Farik there were no triumphal arches; but, what
was much better, there were drawn up three enormous waggons,
the tilts removed, and heaped high with men, women, and
children, the ruddiest and happiest-looking peasants I have
seen for a long time. Above each waggon floated a large
banner, bearing the following inscriptions: "The Farmers of
Q 2
228
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
""
Bab-Ali to the Emperor; "The Spanish Cultivators to the
Emperor and the Empress ;" "The Foreign Farmers to France."
The Spaniards in Algeria do not consider themselves aliens.
They are, to a great extent, African born, and in many cases
their forefathers have been here for centuries. The conquest
of North Africa was the dearly-cherished dream of Cardinal
Ximenes. Spain made at one time a successful lodgment at
Oran, only her ideas of colonisation went no further than
reducing what Moors she could get hold of to a state of abject
slavery; and her zeal for the propagation of Christianity among
the Arabs failed to conciliate the aborigines, through a way she
had of cutting their throats before she converted them.
After an attentive though necessarily rapid inspection of the
Agricultural Exhibition, the Emperor, accompanied by his staff,
but, as usual, without any military escort, plunged right into
the middle of the crowd, in which there were as many Arabs as
natives. One shudders to think at what a malcontent or a
fanatic might have done at this moment. Stand in an Arab
market-place, and you might fancy yourself surrounded by the
greatest ruffians and villains in the world. Such wild eyes,
such ferocious gestures, such scowling brows, you never saw out
of a picture by Salvator Rosa. But they are decent and honest
folk notwithstanding. Here is a brawny Bedouin, six feet high,
noble and dignified, and warlike in mien, but he bestrides the
humblest little donkey you can imagine. Neddy is burdened
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
229
too with a pannier full of spring onions; and the Bedouin is
inciting the meek little beast into a trot, not by blows or curses,
but by soft terms of Arabic endearment. You might fancy the
Bedouin to be Saul, the son of Kish, riding one of his father's
asses, and quite unwotting that he is to be made king over
Israel. But mount this Arab on a fleet barb, and give him a
long gun, and a sharp yataghan, and a holster full of pistols,
and see what a terrible man of war he will make. The Arab,
however, does not seem to make war on his own responsibility.
If the emir or the sheikh of his tribe raises the war-cry, he and
all his tribe get on horseback and fight like tigers. He will
rob and slay in a body, but individually he is neither an assassin
nor a thief. In truth, he is one of Nature's nobility, and a very
dirty, savage nobleman too, like most of the primitive peerage.
Dissimilar as he is in race, complexion, and garb, I am the more
and more reminded, as I mingle with these wild men, of the
Scottish Highlanders, as Sir Walter describes them in the
Legend of Montrose-true children if not of the Mist, at least
of the Sirocco-plunderers and cattle-lifters, and occasionally
blood-spillers; but the target and claymore once laid aside,
quiet and docile people; terrible in warfare as Fergus M'Ivor,
but gentle and affectionate in repose as Evan Dhu in the gaol
at Carlisle.
Moreover, the Emperor Napoleon III. knows perfectly well
what he is about. He knows that his life is as safe among
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these wild people as in the gardens of the Tuileries. He knows
that he is not afraid of the Arabs, and that the Arabs are afraid
of him. His presence in this country, while it has overjoyed
some European colonists, and excited the curiosity of some and
the indifference of others, and while it has thrown the servile
and liveried creatures of official life into ecstasies, the counter-
part of which we might expect if an ape, an onion, or a cheese,
in lieu of a wise and potent prince, occupied the French throne,
has, so far as the natives are concerned, acted, I believe, as
a very powerful spell. They press to see him; they fear him,
as the horse does his rider; but they admire him. He is the
lord of the vast empire to whom all Algeria is but a paltry
pachalik. He is the Caliph-the Sultan. He comes with the
great fire-ships whose thunders they heard but yesterday at
El Djezzaïr; he has innumerable hordes of warriors at his
command; yet, strangely enough to the Arab mind, he does
not come to ordain fresh razzias, to lay waste fresh districts, to
carry off more smalas, to ravage the country with fire and
sword, to tell the dwellers under tents that their flocks and
herds are no longer theirs, and that their pasturages have been
given to the Franks-in a word, to verify once more the old
Eastern proverb, that "where the Sultan's horse has trod there
grows no grass;" but, on the contrary, he comes with words of
peace and fair promise. He is the Mobacher who brings good
tidings. He assures them in the tranquil possession of their
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
231
lands and the undisturbed enjoyment of their religion. He
quotes the Koran to them to show that he is their natural
suzerain, and that they are bound to render him fealty. What
may follow the Emperor's visit to Algeria is uncertain; things
may perchance and unhappily fall into the old blundering
course of red tape and routine again, but it cannot be doubted
that while Napoleon is here a most salutary impression will be
made on the indigenous population. Whether that impression
will be lasting, depends to a great extent on the future adminis-
tration of the lieutenants of the Emperor.
During his brief stay at Bou Farik, his Majesty paid a visit
to the flax-dressing and spinning mills of M. Dumesgnil, where
more than two hundred male and female workers, belonging to
at least twenty nationalities, are employed. The communism
of labour is justly claimed as one of the most efficacious means
for bringing about the fusion of races. Abating the Negro,
who will not fuse satisfactorily with any one, this is, I take it,
undeniable. It is still pertinent in the mention of this flax
mill, with its Arab, Moorish, Kabyle, Berber, Italian, French,
and Spanish workpeople, to revert to a cotton mill which I saw
last February at Orizaba, in Mexico, where Spaniards, half-
castes, Pintos, pure red Indians, and Germans, with a few
Frenchmen, were working quietly side by side, under the
inspiration of English and Yankee overseers, and a Scotch
manager. So, too, in Havanna I have seen Chinese coolies and
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Spanish creoles labouring very amicably together at a litho-
graphic printing press; but I have not seen Sambo working
with anything approaching comfort and efficiency with any
persons not belonging to his own race.
The Great Farm of Bab-Ali had sent as a deputation on the
occasion no less than ninety yoke of oxen, forty ploughs, and
forty waggons and carts. Some of these are, in French rustic
phraseology, called "herses"-a term which I commend to the
notice of Archbishop Trench, seeing that the dismal vehicle we
call a "hearse" is in modern French styled "un corbillard."
Before leaving, his Majesty had to ascend a daïs erected on
the threshold of the show-yard, and to listen to more official
discourses. Two distinguished denizens of the locality had the
honour to receive the Cross of the Legion of Honour from the
Emperor's hand. The fortunate decorés were M. Arnould, Pre-
sident of the Imperial Society of Agriculture, and M. le Baron
de Franclière, proprietor of the estate called L'Oued-el-Aleug,
one of the oldest colonists of the plain of the Mitidja. The
Emperor then entered his carriage, and, amidst the almost
deafening shouts of the assembled rustics, left Bou Farik for
the village of L'Oued-et-Aleug just named, and which may be
regarded as another Oasis wrenched from a dreary waste of
pestilential marshes. The village is now approached by a
splendid alley of willows, more than two miles in length. The
Algerian willows are really magnificent. They are, it is true, of
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
233
the kind in Europe called weeping; but their appearance, so
green and luxuriant are they, is the very reverse of lachrymose.
I might compare these willows, perhaps, to very rich and hand-
some widows whose husbands have left them sole administra-
trixes, and who are of course inconsolable, but smile somehow
through their tears,
The
An Artesian well has lately been dug at L'Oued-el-Aleug,
and the Emperor insisted on tasting some of the water, that he
might personally assure himself of its pure and wholesome
qualities. He then drove away to the little town of Kolea,
distant some twenty-five miles from Algiers, and a large pro-
portion of whose population are the descendants of Andalusians
or of Moorish refugees from Spain. Before the awful earth-
quake which in 1825 destroyed both Kolea and Blidah, the
first-named place was a kind of miniature Mecca, to which the
Arabs, from hundreds of miles round, made pilgrimages.
Kolea of the present day is notable mainly for a very cosy little
inn, a couple of cafés, and a military club; but a quarter of a
century since it was the locale of the shrine or koubba of Sidi-
Embarek. This sainted Marabout belonged to that very tribe
of Hachems of whom Ahmed-ben-Youssef the sarcastic has said
such bitter things. Sidi-pronounce Seedy-having left the
Hachems, I hope not in disgust, came down to Milliana with
two servants. He could not pay these gentry their wages; he
consequently turned them out of doors. They went away to the
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borders of the Chelif, where they begat children, who became the
tribe of the Hachems of the East. Sidi-Embarek then repaired
to Kolea, where he engaged himself as a khramis, or plough-
man, to one Ismaïl, a farmer. The holy man-Sidi, I mean—
had, however, contracted the habit, not uncommon among his
countrymen, of going to sleep instead of working. Ismaïl, like
a jolly down-Eastern farmer taking his walks abroad over his
acres, espies his lazy ploughman asleep under a fig-tree. Forth-
with he makes up to him with a big stick, when, wonderful to
tell, he saw Sidi's oxen ploughing, with never a hand to guide
coulter or share, and the furrows were as clean as whistles.
The tradition likewise adds, that while Sidi thus slumbered he
was guarded by a covey of partridges, who, the holy man being
much tormented by fleas and other small deer even more
objectionable, performed all that was requisite in the way of
scratching and exterminating for the somnolent saint. After
this, nothing of course was left for Farmer Ismaïl save to fall
down at the feet of Sidi-Embarek and worship him. "Oh, my
lord!” cried this benighted agriculturist, "thou art clearly the
elect of Allah. Henceforward thou shalt be the master, and
I the servant." Whereupon the holy Sidi-Embarek set up a
koubba; devotees came to worship, bringing gifts; and he
gathered great riches. His descendants-for he was a married
Marabout-were respected even by the Turks, and the few
who still exist continue to exert a considerable though occult
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
235
influence. Ex quovis ligno-the rest of the proverb is some-
what musty. I have recorded the legend of a personage who
very probably, like many a pseudo-saint who has gone before
him, was nothing but a lazy and verminous old vagabond, for
a somewhat curious reason. I had not laid down General
Castellane's book, in which the story of Sidi-Embarek's life is
narrated, five minutes, when I took up the Siècle newspaper,
and there I found the strange and wondrous story of L'Homme
Sauvage de Collobrières—a kind of Peter the Wild Boy, with a
considerable spice of the rank impostor in him, who at this
present moment of time is the lion of the department of the
Arriège. The wild man of Collobrières is supposed to have
come from Savoy, and to have been brought up to the vocation
of a woodcutter; but, not feeling any vocation towards hard
work, he now condescends to pick up fir-cones in the woods,
which he sells to pious and charitable people. He has pre-
served, so he says, the cuttings of his hair and beard for fifteen
years; and, as the authorities have lately objected to his going
about clad in nothing but a thin pair of drawers, a devoted
female disciple had from these hair cuttings woven him a
comfortable polka jacket. He never does any work, sleeps a
great deal, and does not pay a cent for his board and lodging.
He is treated with the greatest deference; is believed throughout
the district to be a saint; and the country people never speak of
the wild man without uncovering their heads. All this, you
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will please to remember, is in the middle of the nineteenth
century, and in a department of the French Empire. Was I
not right? Is there not here another example of the very
slight difference there is in the way the world wags in all ages
and in all climes? The Wild Man of Collobrières might be
twin brother to Sidi-Embarek, the Marabout of Kolea; yet a
few hours' railway travelling will bring us within hail of the
one, while the other flourished and slept, and scratched himself,
and bamboozled the true believers, goodness only knows how
many centuries ago.
The Emperor returned to Algiers at half-past six; but as this
is the last you will hear of Bou Farik from me, I must take you
back to that prosperous village. The place, as I told you in my
last letter, is in architecture thoroughly French; in fact, but for
the intense heat and the exceptional vegetation, I might have
fancied myself in a provincial bourg in some French department.
There were long processions of school children in blouses, headed
by smiling and benevolent-looking priests in cassocks and shovel-
hats, going home delighted-both children and ecclesiastics-
with the smiles or the kindly words bestowed upon them by the
Emperor. Very chubby children they were "beef-faced boys,"
as Mr. Grimwig would have called them-in the newest, and
stiffest, and shiniest, and deepest of indigo-hued blouses. It
was very pleasant to hear their fresh young voices singing in
chorus, and to look upon their bluff healthy faces, their necks
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
237
and cheek-bones just bronzed by the African sun, and to
remember that in their origin they were the scum of the gutters
of Paris—heirs to nothing, children of nobody, and who, but for
this outlet, might have grown up to be vagrants and thieves,
like the Arab boys of London. "Reformatories and ragged
schools!" I hear some good people cry, pluming themselves.
Yes, good people, but I should like to know what becomes
of your interesting pupils when they have left the reforma-
tories and the ragged schools. Are the good people aware
that among all the garotters who have been convicted
after frightening London into fits, two-thirds were lads
· between eighteen and twenty-one, and more than one-third
had been discharged "cured" from reformatories or industrial
schools?
There is a very pretty little public garden at Bou Farik,
surrounded by a handsome gilt railing—a circular "squarr," if I
may be permitted to use such a solecism. The "squarr” move-
ment is very prevalent just now all throughout the sphere of
French civilisation; but our allies have not yet found out that
the real and proper use of a public square is to erect within it a
statue of some duke who never did any good to anybody, and
then to lock it up from nine hundred and ninety-nine thou-
sandths of the public at large. This is what we do in England.
I don't think that the argument that the privacy of the house-
holders of a square would be violated by the admission of the
238
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
""
public thereto will hold water; for I never heard of anybody
who objected to living in a house overlooking the Green Park,
or who wouldn't give his ears for a mansion in Park-lane. Per
contrà, I don't think I ever saw any meditative barristers
conning their briefs, or anxious attorneys piling up the costs of
the future in their mind, in Lincoln's Inn-fields. The "squarr
of Bou Farik contains one magnificent palm-tree, several dwarf
palms, a maritime stone pine-you know that beautiful tree
with the smooth, slender trunk, and dark-green, parasol-like
canopy which Turner was so fond of introducing in his pictures
—with bananas, and fig-trees, and a whole host of orange-trees,
their boughs laden with fruit. Oranges being about three-half-
pence a bushel in the Bou Farik market, the golden treasures of
this miniature Garden of the Hesperides are safe enough even
from the blackguard little Arab boys, who, of all the little black-
guards I have formed acquaintance with, are perhaps the most
inveterate gamins and vogous. Barelegged, and tattered as to
shirt, with baggy little breeches that have never a seat, and fez
caps bereft of tassels—with hands and feet thickly encrusted
with dried clay-with faces generally scarred in the most
horrible manner by the disease which has here replaced the
plague, but is almost as virulent—and, in the majority of cases,
with sore eyes-you will admit with me that there might be a
lovelier sight than a blackguard little Arab boy to look upon.
A walking dirt-pie, enhanced by chronic ophthalmia and the
BOU FARIK.—AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
239
scars of the small-pox, is not an agreeable subject for con-
templation. They are like so many hideous Yellow Dwarfs in
the pleasant gardens of Bou Farik.
The peasantry, clustered in boisterous laughing groups on
their waggons and herses, looked for all the world as though
they had landed in Africa from Provence or Auvergne the day
before yesterday. The Frenchman, I take it, changes very
little by transplantation. The Canadian habitant, as has been
already observed, is still identical with the French campagnard
of the eighteenth century. The children of French parents
born among the Moors have rarely, I am told, blacker eyes or
browner complexions than their parents; yet how often are we
forced to recognise the influence of climate in the children
of Anglo-Saxon parents born in India. In the West Indies
this influence is still more marked. A creole child, whose
progenitors shall be perfectly blonde, is often as dark in
hair and eyes, and as sallow in complexion, as a quadroon:
and yet the creole might be black as ebony without becoming
a negro.
There are a great many Jews at Bou Farik, as everywhere
else in Algeria where money is to be made. They are peace-
able, frugal, and persevering, and most of the retail trade of the
town is in their hands. In comparison with the persecution
and contumely they elsewhere undergo under Mahometan rule,
French Africa must be to the Israelites a kind of terrestrial ·
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
paradise. The Government has always treated them with con-
sideration, playing them off, so to speak, against the Arabs, not
unprofitably; and the Emperor has certainly no more loyal
subjects than the Jewish community of Algeria. Do
Do you not
remember the Laird of Somewhere's wife, whose husband held a
commission in the Black Watch, and who, being asked whether
she was a Jacobite or a Hanoverian in politics, replied that she
held that king the best who gave the laird a "guinea the night
and a guinea the morn." Certainly, to the industrious and
inoffensive people of Algeria, that Government must be the
lawful one which does not rob, which does not extort gifts or
tribute, which does not cut off heads, or strangle, or ply the
falack of the bastinado. On a future occasion I may have to
notice the chief peculiarities of the Algerine Jews. No de-
scription, in fact, however cursory, of Algiers would be complete
without a chapter on this head. Of their presence at Bou Farik
I need only observe so much: that they were all in their holi-
day-best in honour of the Emperor's visit; and the holiday-best
of an Algerine Jew is-well about ten times as gorgeous as the
every-day Orientalism of the Sultan Ismail-Bou-Maza I saw in
the Rue de Rivoli. It was, besides, the Sabbath. The costume
of the male Israelites very much resembles that of the wealthy
Moors :—a caftan of dark colour, and loose knickerbockers, gay
with buttons and embroidery, and a broad crimson sash round
the waist. The turban, however, is usually yellow or black;
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
241
and, unlike the Moors, the Hebrews always wear clean white
stockings, and shoes with heels, in lieu of bare legs and
babouches. The women are often handsome; but the practice
of shrouding the chin in a bandage of linen or muslin gives
them the semblance of having a perpetual toothache. They
are not so neatly or so cleanly stockinged as their lords. On
the contrary, their feet are merely sandalled and thrust into
heelless slippers. On their heads the Jewesses wear invariably,
first, a black silk kerchief, and next, a scarf, often of the richest
materials. Their dresses, on gala days, are of astonishing splen-
dour :—a heavy, bizarre, loaded kind of richness such as you see
in old hangings where the needle has depicted the Queen of
Sheba visiting Solomon, or Esther coming down with Ahasuerus
to release Mordecai from eating humble pie in the gate. Gowns
of velvet, of silk, of a stiff brocade resembling Irish poplin, and
sometimes of cloth of gold or silver; of such are the robes
of the Jiavudi of Algeria. You see them, in their robes of
state, squatting on the dirtiest doorsteps, their bandaged chins
resting on their fat, jewelled hands, and lolling from dingy
casements, like rainbows caught in cobwebs. But, take away
the dash of Arabian Nightism, and they are the same Jews
and Jewesses whom you may see on high days and holidays
taking their ease, with their ripe-lipped, moist-eyed children
round them, in the Judengasse of Frankfort, or in Petticoat-lane,
London.
R
242
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
They toss the ball so high, so low;
They toss it into the Jews' garden,
Where the Jews sate all of a row.
Then out stepped one of the Jews' daughters a-dress'd all in green,
"Come in, come in, my pretty lad, you shall have your ball again."
Thus one of the earliest and rudest versions of the legend of
Hugh of Lincoln." The picture is as true to the thirteenth
as to the nineteenth century. They continue to sit “all of a
row" with their daughters dressed "all in green," or all in pink
or salmon-colour, and as fine as fivepence on their ceremonial
days, waiting, waiting, always waiting, for the restoration of the
Temple and the end of the dolour. A queer people, but the
most interesting of all humanity.
The married Jewesses sometimes wear the Sanna of the
fourteenth century, or the unicorn's horn, with its long pendent
drapery of fine linen or lace familiar to us in the pictures of
Queen Philippa. This horn may, without exaggeration, be
termed exalted, for it is generally of gold or silver filagree,
most elaborately wrought. On their bosoms they wear a kind
of gorget or breast-plate of velvet, but rigid with embroidery
and precious stones. The cardinal distinctions between the
attire of the Mauresque and the Jewish women are that the
latter go unveiled and wear petticoats. The Mauresque out of
doors is, as I have observed, a walking clothes-bag; in-doors,
she is said to be a gushing creature in a round jacket and
Dutch-built nether garments. The dresses of the Jewesses are
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
243
as innocent of crinoline as of corsage, and cling to the form
from the armpits to the waist, and then fall over the feet in
heavy, angular, but not ungraceful folds. Their arms, seen
through sleeves of diaphanous muslin, spangled or flowered with
gold and silver, are remarkably plump and rosy. Chains, ear-
rings, and brooches are common to both sexes; but the ladies
wear at least two bracelets, and sometimes four or five, on each
arm. These splendidly-bedizened Rachels and Rebeccas, with
their fair complexions, blooming cheeks, glossy hair, and big
black eyes—whose lids they refrain from painting, as the Mau-
resques do, with kohl, but leave in their natural state-carry
you straight back to the middle ages. You may see the
daughter of Isaac of York-who keeps a ready-made clothes-
shop at Bou Farik-defying a possible Brian de Bois Guilbert,
in the shape of a saucy captain of Spahis, from every
window.
As for the Agricultural Show, which, from its Imperial
patronage, must remain for ever memorable in the annals of
Bou Farik, I am but ill qualified to describe it. I know a bull
when he runs after me, and a horse when he has thrown me,
and a dog when he bites me. I am very fond of cows, in Cuyp's
pictures, of pigs, in those of Morland, and of sheep, in those of
Sidney Cooper-likewise in the form of chops. Beyond this
fungi of familiarity lies the great desert of crass ignorance.
Long horns and short horns and crumpled horns, Devons or
R 2
244
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Alderneys, Babrahams or Southdowns, I know nothing at all
about them. The live stock exhibited at Bou Farik had attained,
I doubt it not, a high degree of excellence, and conferred the
highest credit on the neighbouring farmers; indeed, I have
sketched, in the imaginary quotation prefixed to this paper, the
heads of what is to be said by an agricultural critic laying claim
to anything like common decency in his vocation. To my un-
tutored eye the show seemed simply a lot of undersized and
bony bullocks and cows, weedy horses, scraggy sheep, and grey-
hound pigs, whose lairs, pens, and styes, to judge from the state
of their hides, fleeces, and bristles, must have been of the Augean
order. A Dutch housewife from Gouda would have fainted at
the bare sight of these unkempt cattle. The knowledge of
cattle-breeding possessed by the brave rustics of the Mitidja
must be also, I fancy, of the most rudimentary kind; for the
committee on awards complain in their report of "a painful
indifference to affiliation' on the part of the exhibitors-in
other words, if the farmer can bring up, "or drag up," a service-
able beast, he does not care ten cents who its sire or its dam
may have been. However, there were a certain number of
prizes to be given away, and given away they were. That is
one of the disadvantages of the emulative system. The school-
master may know that he has a troop of incorrigible dunces
before him; but he can't flog them on examination day. What-
ever may
be their real deserts, he must distribute the ordinary
BOU FARIK.-AGRICULTURAL SHOW.
245
quota of gilt-edged books, or parents will say that he can't teach,
and his school will come to grief.
There were, in all, fourteen hundred animals exhibited at
the agricultural congress of Bou Farik. To a farmer from the
village of Joinville a money prize was awarded for a cow which
yielded milk "without exacting the presence of the calf on the
occasion." If such a claim to recompense were recognised in
Europe, how deeply are all Atlantic travellers indebted to those
exemplary cows on board the steamers of the Cunard line, and
which are bound to furnish a certain amount of milk every
morning without ever setting eyes on a calf.
There were some notable specimens shown of a cow called
the "Mahonnais," a ram from the Balearic Isles-bright, sturdy-
limbed animals of diminutive stature, not unlike our Alderneys.
And a prize of two hundred francs was adjudged to the Sieur
Hubert "for the best dunghill." He had brought it with him
to Bou Farik built up most symmetrically, in fifteen waggons,
which, in the language of the report, he "contemplated with
legitimate pride." And he had more at home, the Sieur Hubert
said. Considering the heat of the sun, there was perhaps
enough fumier at Bou Farik, and a little to spare. Let me not
omit to state, in conclusion, that the programme of the day's
proceedings included a ploughing match. A prize in that
department was decreed to the Arab culivator Ben Aïssa-Ben
Djeloul des Beni-Khelil. From this gentleman's long-sounding
246
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
name you might think him a member of a very distinguished
family indeed; but for all his five prefixes, he comes very near
having no name at all. He is simply the son of Aïssa, who was
the son of Djeloul, who was of the tribe of the sons of Khelil.
He is one of that "lot" or clan-voilà tout. To wind up,
"honourable mention was made by the jurors, although, very
ungallantly, no prize was awarded to Mademoiselle Marie
Rousseau, aged seventeen, who led a yoke of oxen while her
father guided the plough, and exhibited “une rare justesse de
coup d'œil."
""
XIV.
ON THINGS IN GENERAL, AND THE BOMBARDMENT OF
ALGIERS IN PARTICULAR.
“Feu d'enfer ! ———— ”
Despatch of Prince Gortschakoff at
Sebastopol, 1855.
You are sitting, I will assume, tranquilly in your room,
which is at the Hôtel d'Orient, on the new Boulevard de
l'Impératrice, and faces the sea. You have enjoyed your
siesta-without which afternoon snooze life in Algeria is not to
be enjoyed, or, indeed, endured at all-and you are reading a
book preparatory to a stroll before dinner. Suddenly you are
knocked off your chair (morally), and thrown into the midst of
the apartment on your back. You lie sprawling there, when,
with equal suddenness, you are whirled on to your feet again,
and your head is driven with much violence first against one
wall of the room and thence against the other. At the same
time you perceive that the whole of the furniture is dancing
the hays in a frantic jig; that the chandelier has turned Niobe,
and is weeping floods of tears in cut-glass drops; that the wax
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
for
candles, which cost you seventy-five centimes apiece, and which
you never dream of burning, have been knocked out of their
sockets; that the clock has stopped; that your tumbler of
lemonade has spilt its contents over the mantelpiece; and that
eleven francs fifty cents have leapt out of your waistcoat-pocket,
and rolled away into remote crannies, where they shall remain
aye, undiscoverable. In order fully to realise the occurrence
of all these phenomena, it must be granted, as a foregone con-
clusion, that you are troubled with nerves. Else it might
simply strike you that a considerable disturbance was taking
place somewhere outside. But only admit that you are nervous,
and the thorough mental and physical disorganisation I have
spoken of will become at once comprehensible.
I never heard such an appalling shindy as began this May
afternoon about five o'clock, and went on until past six.
Algiers is a city full of noises, both of the day and the night,
and it is only during the hour of the siesta, when even the dogs
slumber and the birds cease to sing, that anything approaching
quietude can be obtained. At all other hours of the twenty-
four, the barking of the innumerable curs who infest the place,
and who seem to belong to nobody, but of whom everybody
appears to be passionately fond; the screeching and squalling
of the hordes of grey and piebald cats, who dispute with the
Mauresques possession of the house-tops; the strident Arabic of
the fishermen and fruitsellers, and pedlars of sweetstuffs, pan-
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 219
cakes, and pies, proclaiming the goodness of their wares-are
productive of what, in the aggregate, may be called "the city's
busy hum," but which to less cheerful minds make up a con-
tinuous row, such that were it prevalent at home would at once
move the Marquis of Westmeath and Mr. Michael Thomas Bass
to the presentation to Parliament of the most Draconic repres-
sive statutes. The night is not one whit more tranquil than
the day. So soon as it is dark, groups of itinerant musicians
gather before every café. The blind man deplores his cæcity
in dismal ditties; the man-in-the-bowl thanks Allah he has
arms, and utilises them by beating upon the cymbals; the
tight-rope dancer bangs the tambourine, the fiddles scream
hoarsely, the guitars twang, there is a tootling of flutes-in a
word, infinite psaltery. From eight to nine a powerful military
band plays in the Place du Gouvernement. Up to three or four
o'clock in the morning, you may hear joyous bands of sailors,
inebriated with long potations of gooseberry syrup or lemon-juice,
yowling forth choruses about love and wine and glory. Then
the patrols go round, or grand guards have to be relieved,
necessitating an immense amount of noise from drums and
clarions. If your residence adjoins the Moorish quarter, you
will hear at the most unseasonable hours the thrumming of
lutes, the tapping of tom-toms, the gurgling of pierced reeds,
and the jar of brazen castanets. I was told they only per-
formed on these instruments during the Feast of Baïram; but
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
that was eight days since, and the natives are still thrumming,
and tom-tomming, and chanting dreary ballads which have
neither beginning nor end. It cannot be always Baïram.
Again, the horses in the carts, and waggons, and diligences, and
omnibuses, wear collars thickly hung with little bells. The
omnibuses seem to ply all night, and the diligences start from
the Messageries at three a.m., so that the jingling is well nigh
perpetual. Finally, every window in Algiers is, save only when
the Sirocco blows, thrown wide open. From ten thousand case-
ments comes wafted on the breeze the sound of familiar converse
and of domestic jars in French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, the
lingua franca, and the sabir-which last is an indigenous
jargon distracting to hear, agreed upon by common consent as
a medium of intercommunication among the Arabs, the negroes,
and the French peasants from the South, and which sounds like
Welsh spoken by a stuttering man with no front teeth and a
cold in his head. If Mohamed Ali-ben-Chremsen-ben-Ismaïl-
ben-Kova, of the Oued-el-Goum, is correcting Mimi-Baya, his
wife, with a broomstick-the only emblem of marital authority
among the natives; if the Italian barber is squabbling with his
Spanish helpmate; if the little French milliner is bewailing
her exile from the Boulevards and the Batignolles in the plain-
tive refrain from the Pré aux Clercs,
Rendez-moi ma patrie,
Ou laissez-moi mourir ;
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 251
if the cobbler is squabbling with a customer; or the nurse is
spanking her young charges, and the charges are howling
mournfully under such castigation; or if M. le Chef du Bureau
of such and such a department is explaining, with interminable
verbosity and vehemence, to M. le Chef de Division of another
department, and for the five-hundredth time, over sugar-and-
water and cigarettes, the measures which are imperatively
necessary to insure the safety and prosperity of the “future of
Algeria "-you are sure to be, so far as hearing goes, an assis-
tant at all these transactions. Much is hidden from the eye in
Algiers, but nothing from the ears. It is a city of open windows.
You may hear almost the first cry of the new-born child and
the last groan of the dying man. This is why the jealous Moors
have built their walls so thick, and pierced them only with
bulls'-eyes and Judas-holes. But the climate is too much for
them. The courtyards of their houses are perforce open to the
sky, and from those courtyards come, at dead of night, the mur-
murs of Moorish revelry, and sometimes of Moorish quarrelling.
I had grown accustomed to the noises of Algiers, and liked
them. But the hideous vacarme of this afternoon was intoler-
able. What did it mean? Whence came it? Bang, bang,
bang! thud! and then bang, bang! again. I thought at first
it was the earthquake of 1825 come back again. The walls of
the Hôtel d'Orient did not, however, crumble into dust, and on
the earthquake score I was reassured. Had several volcanoes
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made their appearance in the Atlas range? I next began to
wonder; and was this uproar preliminary to an eruption? I
looked towards the window, but no shower of scoria was
visible, and no flood of boiling lava was sweeping the quay.
Then I fancied that the seven hundred beggars clapped up in
gaol had simultaneously been released by a penitent Adminis-
tration, and that they were celebrating their deliverance from
durance by yells of joy and discharges of arquebuses. But the
mendicants are still in "chokee." It wasn't the beggars, and it
wasn't an earthquake, nor an eruption, nor Bedlam broke loose.
What was it, then? Whence arose this tremendous clatter?
Bang, bang, bang! thud! it went on, as though legions of giant
genii, sealed up for centuries in caverns by Soliman-ben-Daoud,
had burst from their dungeons, and were slamming the doors
behind them in defiance. I felt that I was becoming stone
instead of parcel deaf. I rushed into the balcony, and looked
out upon the Mediterranean; then, with the aid of an opera-
glass, the mystery was explained in a moment. Over the blue
sea were curling long billows of whitish vapour, like clouds
which had dropped bodily from the firmament. And within
pistol-shot I could see half-a-dozen huge black hulls; and from
these came puffs of smoke and flashes of flame, instantly fol-
lowed by the awful reverberation of cannon. Then from the
forts on the mole, and from every headland, and from the steep
hills of Algiers, came responsive puffs of smoke and tongues of
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 253
fire and bellowing of guns. It was only the Emperor going
away to Oran, escorted by his ironsides, and the ships and forts
were exchanging broadsides in which a salute was made to take
the form of a sham fight. They were the same ironsides you.
all saw, the other day, at Brest and then at Portsmouth.
I missed while I was in America that bloody "salute" of a
hundred shotted guns which the Yankees fired on the fourth of
July into the dwelling-houses, full of women and children, of
Petersburg. The fiendish malice of this "salute" was worthy
of the great Boss Devil who inspired it. I have sailed past
Charleston, but saw no Greek fire flung into it. I never
assisted at a pitched battle; and, being a Cockney, my utmost
experience of salvoes of artillery has been confined to the
firing of the Park guns on those rare occasions when we fire
guns at all.
But I question whether those who are not
Cockneys, and who have had a much wider experience than
I can boast, would not have been semi-stunned by the cannon-
ading of this afternoon. It was so near, and it was so loud.
That feu d'enfer which Gortschakoff chronicled at Sebastopol
could not have been more terribly resonant; for where were
we, as to big guns, eleven years since? Swamp-angels and
Armstrongs, Dahlgrens and Parrotts, were yet in embryo.
These broadsides came from forts mounted with pieces of the
very heaviest calibre which modern destructive science has yet
sanctioned, and from ironclads whose names were La Gloire,
254
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Le Solferino, La Couronne, and La Provence.
Moreover, their
firing-ground was not to Algiers as Spithead is to Portsmouth.
It was close upon us. The fleet only stood out to sea about
half-a-mile. They (the ships) lay to, and waited for L'Aigle,
and, so soon as the Imperial yacht, with the Emperor on board,
was off the mole, they began their infernal serenade. It was
very magnificent, but I don't care about hearing it again. I
have had vertigo, nervous trembling, and incipient toothache
ever since. ""Tis distance lends enchantment to the view;"
and in the matter of big guns, the further off they are, the
greater will be the enchantment they will lend to at least
one ear in Barbary.
There were no means of following his Majesty by sea to
Oran, where he is expected to arrive at two o'clock on Sunday
afternoon; and I shall have to wait for to-morrow's diligence,
which, by way of Blidah, Milliana, Orléansville, and Mostagenem,
takes four days to accomplish the land journey. There are no
English men-of-war here, or one might have spunged upon
her Britannic Majesty's navy for a day and a half's cruise ;
and there is not one English yacht, at which I can scarcely
refrain from astonishment. Surely Algiers is not in the in-
terior of China. It is not so far from Marseilles as Malta. It
is as near as Naples, or Palermo. It is nearer than Corfu.
It is that mysterious word "Africa" which frightens naval
officers and Royal yacht clubmen away from this pleasant,
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 255
this very pleasant shore. I should like to write up Algiers as
a healthy resort for the consumptive (in the earlier stages of
that melancholy disease bien entendu), for the dyspeptic, and
for the nervous, hypochondriacal and ennuyé of every degree;
for I am certain there is not a healthier, cheerfuller place
between the Gut of Gibraltar and the Dardanelles: but the
number of English tourists here is wofully limited. The colony
residentiary of our countrymen does not-consul-general, mer-
chants, of whom there are two, and all included—exceed forty,
if it reaches that number; and the floating English population,
even at this exceptional time, does not number five-and-twenty
persons. There are handsome hotels, new, cheap, and scrupu-
lously clean, waiting for English patronage; there is, or there
was lately, and there will be again, an excellent English
medical man; there is a fund of amusement for idlers, of
sketching ground for artists, of materials for study and re-
search, for linguists and archæologists. The country is crammed
with Roman relics. There is the East again, the sunshiny,
mysterious, dreamy East, as glowing and picturesque as you
could wish to have it, but swept and garnished and kept in
order by an efficient police and a large European garrison, and
all within four and a half days' journey from Charing-cross.
Nothing can be more comfortable than the railway from Paris
to Marseilles-you can break the journey if you please at
Lyons, and take a run to Geneva; the steamers of the Mes-
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sageries Impériales are swift and serviceable, English-built and
English-engined; the arrangements on board are admirable;
the Custom House officers at Algiers, when you produce the
keys of your trunk, make you a low bow, and, hinting that
you must be fatigued with your journey, dispense with the
ceremony of examining your luggage; there is nobody to worry
you about passports or permis de séjour; the Arabs have been
too well disciplined by the French to bother you for backshish.
The plague has been rooted out, and the virulence of the
smallpox abated. The city is well drained, and lighted with
gas. The dogs, though innumerable and noisy, are placable
and funny, not savage and mangy as they are in Constan-
tinople. There are no mosquito nets to the bed; so that you
can imagine how innocuous are those elsewhere intolerable
little pests here. There are few fleas, save in the Moorish
quarter. The sirocco does not blow oftener than twice a week,
and the locusts and grasshoppers don't ravage the country
more than once in two years. It is never too hot, and never
cold. If it rains, the ground dries up within twenty minutes
after a shower. Cigars are a halfpenny each, and less. Oranges
are four sous for as many as you like to take. The British
Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews have
laid on a Protestant parson here—a convert from Judaism;
they say each convert costs the society five-and-twenty thou-
sand francs to make: but if a considerable influx of English
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 257
took place, this interesting renegade would doubtless be re-
placed by a chaplain of home growth. What more would you
have? Why don't you come, O you Great British tourists?
You have done the Rhine, the Elbe, the Seine, the Arno, the
Danube, to death. You have exhausted Europe; you have
drained the Bosphorus; you have explored every chamois hole
and every glacier of the Alps. Come to Africa. Let us have
an Atlas Club, or a Lady's Tour Round the Tell, or a Journey
from Sackville-street to the Sahara.
Meanwhile the bireme-accept paddles instead of oars
which bears Cæsar is fading away into that mellow distance,
which the sun just now is kissing with delicately rosy lips. In
an hour's time the sun and the sea will fall out, and gore will
be spilt in the sky. Sol will have the worst of it, and will bleed
to death; but he will rise to-morrow morning, as jolly a dog as
ever, to the chorus of "Here we are again!" As I shut up my
opera-glass, and fall to packing my trunk against Monday's
diligence, I ponder over the colossal tintamarre I have just
heard. Oddly enough, I cannot help fancying there was a taste
of Caesar's quality in yonder frightful racket. I know there are
some people who think that Cæsar can do nothing without having
some inscrutable purpose to serve. If he shakes his head, more
comes out of it than from Lord Burleigh's powdered poll in The
Critic. If he sneezes, tremble Austria! If he takes snuff, let
the Herzegovina look out! The Algerines, who are a mercurial
S
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race, much given to gossip and small talk, have been attributing
to the Emperor during the past week a host of deep designs
bearing on "the future of Algeria," and giving a mysterious
significance and pregnancy to his minutest movements. He
sent for M. Dorez, the jeweller, the other day, to bring his
sparkling wares to the palace. The aide-de-camp said that his
Majesty did not require any Maltese filagree work; did not
that mean that he was irrevocably opposed to the project of the
Pope taking up his residence under British protection in the
Mediterranean? He bought a number of Moorish lanterns,
mirrors, and ostrich eggs; thus the badauds argued he was
clearly determined to show great favour to the Arabs. That
night we heard that twelve Marabouts were to receive the cross
of the Legion, that the Bureaux Arabes were to be abolished,
and the Emir Abd-el-Kader made viceroy of Kabylia. By the
way,
the Emir has come from Beyrout to Constantinople. He
has called on the French Ambassador, and his Excellency the
Marquis du Moustier has called on him. Do not these visits
portend great things? The day before yesterday his Majesty,
walking on the shore with Marshal M'Mahon, and seeing the
two hideous sheds which the Messageries Impériales and the
Arnaud-Douache Company have run up to warehouse their
goods, turned to the Governor-General and said, "Is it thus
you intend to embellish the beautiful quays built for you by
Sir Morton Peto? Otez-moi tout ça. Take it away." The
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 259
sheds-I hope Sir Peto was not the contractor for them-are
to come down in a hurry; but the gobemouches persist in
asserting that the fact of their being an outrage to good taste
was not the sole cause of the decree which ordered their
demolition. The Emperor, they whisper, is about to grant a
concession to a new steam navigation company. I don't know
how many similarly far-sighted intentions have been ascribed to
Cæsar. He is about to build a new cathedral for Monsignor
Pavy, and give back the existing basilica to the Mussulmans, to
be reconverted into a mosque. He is about to order the con-
struction of a new boulevard right through the Moorish quarter.
He intends to remove the equestrian statue of the Duke of
Orleans from the Place du Gouvernement to the Jardin d'Essai,
and replace it by a statue of Napoleon I., who is said to have
"dreamed" (révé) of the conquest of Algeria, although the
English gave him, from 1802 to 1814, too much work to do to
enable him to carry out his idea. Finally, it is reported that
his Majesty intends, ere he returns to France, to create his son
King of Algeria. Flaming placards, with "Vive le Prince
Impérial, Roi d'Algérie," decorate the principal cafés; cards
bearing the same inscription are thrust into your hands by
discreet Arab runners. These, and scores more schemes as
elaborate, are thrust upon the sagacious but overworked gentle-
man who is endeavouring to combine a pleasure trip with a
visit of official inspection, and who is expected to solve in a
S 2
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month that problem which has been puzzling the wisest heads
in France for five-and-thirty years. And this eagerness to
make the wish the father to the thought, and to saddle Cæsar
with both, springs, I am afraid, from the utter abasement in
which the press of Algeria is sunk. Akhbar, Courrier de
l'Algérie, Journal des Colons-in not one of these sheets shall
you see one vestige of sensible comment or manly discussion.
If the Emperor desires to learn anything of the real condition
of the country from the columns of the local press, he will be
wofully disappointed. The newspapers dare not call their souls
their own. They are afraid not only of metropolitan, but of
provincial wrath. To be a slave in a proconsulate is worse than
being a slave in Rome. The papers content themselves with
licking the feet of the Emperor, just as they licked the feet of
Louis Philippe, and as they would lick the feet of any ruler
who was paramount. In short, the newspaper editor, cowed
by the Administration, has become a functionary; and in no
nation in the world are underling functionaries so unutterably
base as in France. While the journals here are fawning upon a
sovereign who, wise and clear-headed as he is, must despise
their adulation-while they are calling him "the arbiter of the
destinies of the world," and declaring that his presence in
Algeria was the one thing needed to ensure the eternal felicity
of the colony-the Press is miserably enslaved and gagged, not
by central, but by local influences. An English gentleman, the
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 261
secretary of a company who have purchased some extensive
cork forests at La Safia, near Philippeville, was lately admitted
to an audience with the Emperor. His Majesty received him,
as he invariably receives Englishmen, with the greatest affability
and condescension. The Englishman was naturally desirous
that the mere fact of the interview should be made public, and
forwarded a paragraph to that intent to the Akhbar; but he
was politely informed that, although the editor was "deso-
lated" at being obliged to refuse, the barest mention of the
incident could not appear without a direct authorisation from
the Prefect of Algiers.
And Cæsar's policy in causing that mimic bombardment to
take place so very close to the quays of Algiers? It did not
perhaps differ very widely from that avowed by the dragoman
in "Eothen," when Mr. Kinglake asked him why he abused the
camel-drivers and chaoushes without cause. "To inspire terror
and create alarm," quoth the dragoman: which is the only way
of getting on in the East. Call everybody sons of dogs; it will
produce a very good effect. Fire your pistols out of the windows
every morning; it will clear the moral atmosphere wonderfully.
If you have an old Freemason's certificate with a big seal upon
it, slap it fiercely, and declare it is a firman from the Padishah.
If ever you are in a difficulty, commence your expostulation
with "Do you know who I am?" People will begin to think
you are somebody, and in the end will fall down and worship
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you. Well, I may be growing as great a gobemouche as my
Algerine neighbours, but the bombardment to my mind had a
purpose, and a clever one. The Sultan wishes to show his Arab
subjects what those big black ships can do. In a perfectly
genial and amicable manner, he thinks he may as well excite a
little terror and create a little alarm. Now, an Arab believes
implicitly in a gun. It is a positive and tangible entity. It
is no mere sleight-of-hand or hocus-pocus trick like Robert
Houdin's, but a something which is something, and out of
which something comes-to wit, a ball. A little bullet will kill
a big man; but what multitudes would not the thundering ship
guns of the Sultan slay? There are middle-aged Moors in
Algiers who can remember very well when Bourmont's cannon
were first heard at Sidi-Ferruck; but there are aged Moors
whose recollection will carry them still further back, and who
have a distinct remembrance of the year 1817, when Lord
Exmouth rained shot and shell from the British fleet into
Algiers. The conquest by the French did not take place until
thirteen years later; but there is no doubt that the assault
made by Lord Exmouth broke the neck of the piratical power
of the Barbary States. The scare in Algiers was awful. The
terrified mob forced the Dey to come to terms, and the Janis-
saries strangled him shortly afterwards for having come to
them; but the object of the British was accomplished, and all
the Christian slaves were given up. To this day the exploit of
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 263
the English fleet is a subject of conversation in the Moorish
cafés. An Englishman who speaks Arabic with fluency told me
that the natives had frequently asked him why the terrible
Lord Bombarda does not come again, wrest El Djezzaïr from
the French, and give it back to the Algerines. There is still, I
am informed, among some old people a droll kind of uncertainty
as to why the English should have knocked the city to pieces
without sacking it and murdering the inhabitants. They can't
understand why the Ingliz should have gone away.
"How
much did it cost your nation to bombard my forts?" asked the
Dey of Lord Exmouth when the treaty of peace was signed.
The gallant sailor gave him a rough estimate of the number of
thousands of pounds sterling the expedition would probably
cost. "Allah is great!" exclaimed the Dey. "If you had
only told me beforehand and given me half the money, I would
have saved you all this trouble and bombarded the town
myself."
Very peaceful and innocuous, however, was this afternoon's
cannonading. Still, it may prove a lesson, and a salutary one,
to the natives. There are Arabs here from the far interior-
Kabyles from the mountains, Bedouins from the plains, Berbers
from the desert, dark strangers from Morocco and Fez and
Tunis and Tripoli-all phases of nationality fused beneath the
all-convenient burnouse, which is as a white domino in a great
African masquerade. Merchants and pedlars, jugglers and
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story-tellers, minstrels and morris-dancers, pilgrims and mara-
bouts, will go back to strange and remote lands-further off,
perhaps, than the Royal Geographical Society in its wisdom
dreams of—burning plains perchance no Bombonnel has trod-
den, no Berbrugger has explored-and will tell their country-
men of the fearsome things they have seen among the Franks
at El Djezzaïr-of the Caliph from beyond the sea, who goes
about without javelin men or musketeers; who landed in a
little shallop, but who has in his train huge black ships like
floating elephants-ships that vomit fire, and the sound of
whose voices shakes the city to its foundations. Policy or no
policy, I think the Arabs will attach much more credence to the
rough magic of a broadside from La Gloire or La Couronne
than to all the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle glamour of Robert
Houdin.
Eighteen hours will bring the Emperor to Oran, for the sea ist
smooth as glass. His Majesty has certainly not allowed the grass
to grow under his feet since his arrival here on Monday morn-
ing, the 1st of May. To work "as hard as a nigger" has become
a proverbial locution; but, so far as actual hard work goes, I
think Napoleon III. might, with great advantage to his muscles
and brain, have changed places with some of the ugly and lazy
black varmints who have been prowling about the town during
the Baïram, thumping the tom-tom, and cadging for coppers.
Baïram, forsooth! they are as much Mahometans here as they
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 265
66
are Christians in the United States. Religion of any kind to a
negro means a drum, and some money to buy rum with. That
faith is to him the most orthodox which affords him the greatest
opportunity for kicking up a shindy, and howling forth his
savage anthems.
Bismillah," or "Hallelujerum," it is all the
same to him as long as he can howl. You have been told,
doubtless, that the reason why the free negro gets on so badly
in America is because he is despised and looked down upon on
account of his colour-because no road of social advancement is
open to him-because, through the cruelty and injustice of his
white brethren, he is plunged in an abyss of degradation as bad
as, if not worse than, involuntary servitude with its accompani-
ments of cotton-picking and the cowhide. You have been told
that, with education and equal political and social rights, the
free negro will in process of time rise to the level of the white
man. Some amiable fanatics go so far as to maintain that
Sambo is, in all respects, about thirty-five per cent. better than
his fair-skinned brother. Well, the free-nigger experiment has
been tried by the French in Algiers, not dogmatically, but
almost unconsciously, for five-and-thirty years. Sambo in Al-
geria is held by authority to be as good as any other man.
The Europeans, the Arabs, the Jews, and the negroes all enjoy
equal rights. The Moors often marry their negresses. The
French have not the slightest prejudice against the negro on
account of his ebony skin. They never have had. Among the
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ladies Sambo is even popular. He is "un beau noir." The
Zouave walks arm-in-arm with the Turco; negroes and negresses
ride in the same omnibuses and carriages as white men; and
there seem to be as many negroes in Algiers-full-blooded, black
niggers-in comparison with the population, as in any consider-
able city of the North. I am quite certain that if a deserving
colonist were recommended to the Emperor for the cross of the
Legion of Honour, his Majesty would not withhold the decora-
tion from him on the ground that he had a black face. I don't
think the community would offer the slightest objection to a
negro sub-prefect or a negro commissary of police. Why should
they? The negro is a French subject, and all Frenchmen are
equal before the law. Thus, without civil disabilities, without
the stigma of belonging to an abhorred and contemned race, one
might imagine that enfranchised Sambo would have done some-
thing for himself by this time. The State provides gratuitous
education for all races, classes, and creeds; and there is plenty
of work, and money to be made, for those who are sober and
industrious. The end of all which is, that Sambo goes to sleep
in the sun, waking up to refect himself with "abundant pump-
kin," or plenteous plantains-you may buy a bunch of them for
twopence—and devouring, preferably, another man's pumpkin
to his own. He does a little fishing-that avocation affording
him plenty of time to swing his legs over a bank, crooning forth
songs of the tom-tom kind, and taking short dozes between the
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 207
bites; he does a little gardening; he peddles a few baskets, cala-
bashes, and bead rosaries, and higgles also fowls and eggs. This
is all. He works, perhaps, two days a week. He is very Catholic
in his creed, keeping with much scrupulosity, and as the closest
of holidays, the Mahometan Sabbath, which is Friday, the Jewish,
which is Saturday, and the Christian, which is Sunday, with
very likely a little Saint Monday of his own. And whenever
there is the slightest excuse for an extra festival he begs or
steals an old cocked hat and a pair of worsted epaulettes, to
surmount his turban or his shoulders withal; he sticks spangles
and tinsel over his caftan, and with Pompey, and Quashie, and
Quimbo, his brethren, he perambulates the streets, thumping
the tom-tom, clanging the castanets, howling the chants of his
country, and demanding sous. In the whole of Algiers there is
not a single reputable negro shopkeeper or artisan. You never
see the negroes, now that they are free, carrying heavy burdens,
or doing any kind of arduous manual labour; that they leave
to the Arabs. Sambo prefers to loaf and "slosh around."
The negro women officiate as shampooers in the Moorish.
baths, as peripatetic bakers of galettes or pancakes, as nurses,
prostitutes, and sorceresses. On the first Monday after the feast
of the Nissam they have a grand Obeah festival at the Ain-el-
Abiad (the White Fountain), distant about three miles from
Algiers on the sea-shore. Then they have their Derdebas, or
private festivals, in their own particular quarter near the Kas-
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bah or citadel of Algiers, in the streets of Darfour and Kattar-
oudjil. There, in their beastly dens, the women throw off the
striped blue mantles in which they muffle themselves abroad,
and appear in every variety of barbarous finery. The tam-tam
and karakob, or castanets, then come into play, and the women
go through those dances of which it is enough to say that they
resemble the orgies of the Gbawahzee and Almé of Egypt or
the Nautch girls of India dipped in a vat of lampblack. There
are always low-class Arab touters hanging about the hotels to
entice tourists into putting down so many francs ahead to get
up a Derdeba in the Kattaroudjil. If you decline to witness
the disgusting gambadoes of a "dignity ball," they will offer to
organise a Mauresque fandango for you, chez Fathma. Fathma
is the Ninon de l'Enclos of Algiers. She does not belie her
name, and is enormously fat. She is supposed to be very rich,
and to carry most of her wealth in gold and jewels about her
person. She goes about as closely veiled as though she were a
respectable woman; but you may know her, the adepts say, by
her wearing scarlet stockings. Of course she has rivals and
imitators who also wear red stockings, and would fain make
believe that they are each and all of them the real Fathma.
Anonyma, Synonyma, it does not matter much. A pair of red
stockings in one country, and a paletot made by Poole, with a
phaeton and a pair of picbald ponies in the other, and see to
what a common tune the world wags. Fathma at Algiers is a
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 269
personage. She has been sent for, it is rumoured, by great
people, to palaces, to be paraded as the most perfect—that is to
say, the fattest-specimen of a Mauresque extant, although her
non-admirers declare that she is not a Mauresque at all, but the
offspring of a negress and a Biskri. She boasts of gold chains
and diamond rings, given to her by the illustrious ones of the
earth. She is the only veiled woman who has been known to
enter a European café, and every morning, about eleven, you
may see her sipping her demi-tasse at a particular marble table,
her bracelets, chains, and ouches glinting through the thin folds
of her haick, and exhibiting her red stockings with conscious
superiority to a throng of whispering admirers. She is a shrewd
jade, and Jules and Adolphe think she is an Odalisque—a sul-
tana. She is only a Mauritanian Doll Common.
Fathma never condescends to give a ball unless a minimum
sum of one hundred and twenty-five francs is brought to her as
a peace-offering by one of the low-class Arab touters. These
balls, or ballets, or nautches, which are as stupid as they are
revolting, serve, however, one useful purpose. Without the faci-
lities offered by these balls you would not see on the walls
of the Royal Academy or the British Institution, or the Water-
colour Societies, those brilliant representations of " The Light of
the Hhareem," or "Moorish Maidens Dancing," or "An Eastern
Lady playing on the Mandolin," or "Life in the Seraglio," which
seem to argue so amazingly intimate an acquaintance with the
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inmost penetralia of Oriental life. Fathma and her colleagues
in Algiers, as in Tunis, as in Stamboul, as in Cairo, are lay-
figures in ordinary to the worshipful guild of painters in oil and
water colours. The meanest Moorish women, not being of the
Rikat sisterhood, would disdain to sit to an artist as a model.
A few photographs for backgrounds, a few visits to the Bazaars,
and a good stock of odds and ends of wearing apparel and
frippery from the curiosity-shops, and the painter may go to
work. Of putting a real Moorish lady from nature on canvas
he has about as much chance as of drawing the portrait of the
late Queen of Sheba from the life. In connection with these
"balls" gotten up by greedy adventurers for the hoodwinking
of ingenuous Europeans-young Harry Foker, travelling in the
East after having been jilted by Blanche Amory, is passionately
fond of seeing "a real Moorish fandango, sir, by Jove "-and
returning to my old friend Sambo, I must not omit to mention
the Issaoua, or fire-eaters, who are supposed to be a religious
sect, but are in reality only so many swindlers and impostors.
They are negroes, and profess to swallow live coals, to lick bars
of red-hot iron, to devour scorpions, the rind of the prickly pear
—which is certainly very tough eating, let alone the prickles-
ashes, chalk, and clay, always with a pious intent, and for the
greater glory of Allah. The red-hot poker and live-coal
swallowing are clever tricks, which the late lamented Ramo
Samee might have explained, and which I have seen before now
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 271
performed at country fairs in England; but as for the natural
capacity of the negro for gobbling up earth there is no reason to
doubt it. The parliamentary blue-books will tell you that the
frightful disease common in the West India Islands, and called
"Le mal d'estomac," was brought on by the invincible pro-
pensity of the blacks for gorging clay; and "dirt-eating" was
one of the recognised offences punishable by the slave laws of
Jamaica. An "Issaoua" is, as I have hinted, a swindle. The
sole object of the fervid religionists is to extract the greatest
possible number of twenty-franc pieces from the visitor. They
will begin their performances and then suddenly stop, declaring
that the police are at the door, but that if ten francs more be
advanced, they will eat a peck more dirt and a bushel more
prickly pear. Then the poker cannot be heated under an addi-
tional fifteen francs, or swallowed without an extra twenty. In
short, it is a continual round of "Twopence more, and up goes
the donkey."
There is another ceremony, or funcion, among the Algerine
negroes, more closely connected with the rites of Obeah, but
which is also made to serve the purposes of cheating and extor-
tion. On Wednesday morning in every week, on the road from
the faubourg of Bab-el-Oued to St. Eugène--which last is
distant about four miles from Algiers—you may meet groups of
Moorish women and children, on foot or on muleback, followed
by servants, carrying live fowls under their arms. They halt on
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the sea-shore, at a spot called Sebâ-Aïoun, the Seven Fountains.
Here the good and the evil genii of the Mussulmans are to be
invoked and exorcised. The good genii are white, green, blue,
and yellow; the bad ones are red, black, and brown. The
exorcisers are all negresses, who, when they conjure, tell
fortunes, or sell love-philtres, are called guizzenates. The
audience being grouped on their haunches round one of the
fountains, the performances commence. An old black woman
lights a fire under a brazen incense burner, on which are some
grains of benzoin. The person who wishes to propitiate the
genii inhales the vapour of the gum. Then the old black
woman takes the fowls prepared for sacrifice, cuts their throats
half through, and throws them on to the sand. If these un-
happy birds, partly slaughtered, half flying and half staggering,
can contrive to drag themselves as far as the sea, the sacrifice
has been propitious-the sick person will be cured, or the
dearly-cherished wish fulfilled. On the contrary, if the fowl
dies at once under the knife, the genius invoked is displeased,
and the whole thing has to be done over again. It need
scarcely be said, that the sable sorceress contrives to make a
good many failures ere a half-killed fowl reaches the briny
ocean, and that the abortive sacrifices are her perquisites.
Sometimes a sheep is sacrificed instead of a fowl, and on very
grand occasions-that is to say, when the touters can beat up a
sufficient number of sight-seers from the hotels in Algiers-a
THINGS IN GENERAL, AND BOMBARDMENT OF ALGIERS. 273
bullock is slaughtered. In this case, however, a buck negro
officiates as sacrificing priest, and the bullock is allowed to
expire on the sand without being expected to put out to sea,
like Jupiter running away with Europa. There is a great deal
more manœuvring of the "twopence more, and up goes the
donkey" order before the act is accomplished. The bull is
either too sacred, or not sacred enough; he has been smitten
by the evil eye—your eye, it may be;-the priest has been
warned in a dream not to slay him; will you give twenty,
fifteen, ten, five francs more to see him slain? and so on in a
diminuendo. Finally it is urged that "the police are coming,”
which is the most impudent lie of all; the sacrificial bullock
being actually provided at the cost and charges of a paternal
government, which, under the erroneous but good-natured im-
pression that the bestial and fraudulent mummeries of the
Sebâ-Aïoun are really religious observances, generously makes
the nigger sorcerers a periodical present of a bullock from the
commissariat stores. Now, won't this tempt you, lady and
gentleman tourists, to come to Algeria! Think of
'The priest who slew the slayer
And shall himself be slain."
Think of the Bull-Sacrifice at the Seven Fountains,-Flamens
and augurs, and all within eighty hours' journey from Charing-
cross, "The priest who slew the slayer" may be seen all alive
T
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and grinning, with an old gendarme's cocked hat on his woolly
cocoa-nut pate, and a pair of cast-off dress boots with red
morocco tops on his spindle-shanks. It would be unjust too
severely to blame the French authorities for thus subsidising
Obeah to the extent of a rather skinny bullock. For many
years the British Government in India greased the wheels of
the Car of Juggernaut at an enormous expense.
XV.
AT ORLÉANSVILLE.-POSTING UP THE LEDGER.
Le vaillant coq gaulois
Grattant sur le fumier,
A fait sortir le roi,
Louis-Philippe premier;
Qui par juste reconnaissance
L'a mis dans les armes de la France.
I RESTED at Orléansville, and the name of the place recalled
the savage epigram I have placed at the head of this chapter.
What has become of the Gallic cock?
ousted him from the French scutcheon.
Alas! the eagle has
How hard did poor
Louis Philippe strive to stamp his dynasty into the soil of the
country which his sons had helped to conquer for France! All
over the three provinces you may find traces of this painful,
strenuous striving. Orléansville, Philippeville, Aumale, Gaston-
ville, Jemmappes, Joinville, Nemours, Ponthièvre, St. Eugène,
St. Ferdinand, Ste. Amélie :-if names given to new cities alone
could fix a family on the throne, the monarchy of July would
be still flourishing in Africa, Orleans, Aumale, Nemours, Join-
T 2
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ville, Montpensier:-they were brave boys; but Cæsar has
swallowed them all up, and the reign of Louis Philippe pre-
mier would be as forgotten as the shadow of the shadow of
smoke, were not the pear-shaped head of Jacques Laffitte's
nominee still extant on so many five-franc pieces. Why didn't
he make a fight for his crown? Why did he run away so
meekly?—without his wig, and under the pseudonym of
Smith. The women of his house were pluckier than he. The
good Duchess of Orleans, when she confronted the Chambers
with her little son, or when, all being lost, she walked grandly
to her carriage, leaning on the arm of Ary Scheffer the painter,
this true wife and mother was not afraid. Old Louis de-
camped like a discomfited burglar. There was something of
Nemesis mingled with his flight; for he kept murmuring all
the way to England, "Comme Charles Dix! comme Charles
Dix!" The memory of the half-witted bigot who had been
kicked out to give him place clung to him like the shirt of
Nessus.
But I have something else to do at Orléansville besides
moralising upon the overthrow of Louis Philippe. I am sadly
in arrear with certain accounts. I have a ledger to post up.
To conduct an extended correspondence with an English news-
paper, while undergoing the agonies of a journey in a diligence
through this tierra caliente of Algeria, is, to say the least, as
onerous, if not so perilous, a task as to pen despatches on the
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277
hinder stomach of a sixty-four pounder; for no doubt you
remember how Junot began his fortunes, by volunteering to
write a despatch from Napoleon's dictation while under fire.
Perhaps the hardships here are even more terrible to confront.
You have not washed, so it seems to you, since last January
twelvemonth; the last time your hair was combed, or your
clothes were brushed, was in the reign of Queen Anne; every
time you grind your teeth with weariness and woe, you find
that you have something gritty between them to grind-to
wit, dust. You are all white and pulverous, like a miller, and
have returned to dust before your time. You have been
unable to procure a seat in the coupé, and are mewed up in
the intérieur, which resembles the prisoners' van painted
yellow and with the cellular bulkheads knocked away, which
contains ten persons-three Jews, one negress, two Arabs, a
captain of Spahis, a commissary of the intendance, a Lazarist
friar, and yourself; to which add an Arab conductor, who will
poke his head in at the window, and who is redolent of gales
anything but spicy, emanating from an Araby the direct re-
verse of blest. Allah be praised! we have no babies with us.
I am sure if we had, I should be tempted to do a turn of King
Herod's handiwork; but we have any number of bundles, and
a box of dried sardines which the negress holds on her lap,
and from which every now and then when she feels faint she
selects a handful to munch, as the sailor's wife in Macbeth
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munched the chestnuts. The Jews play backgammon. The
captain of Spahis is a cousin of Lord Hawkesbury, and his
expectoration is fearful and Transatlantic to hear; the Lazarist
friar, I am afraid, is troubled either with bronchitis or a bad
conscience, for his slumbers are uneasy, and he barks in his
dreams; and the two Arabs alternate guttural squabbles in
their incomprehensible lingo with lugubrious duets, of which
the invariable and interminable chorus is "Waa, laa; laa,
aoua, waa! 99
We only want a tam-tam and the brazen
karakob to complete the charms of the intérieur and go
raving mad. Everybody smokes, the negress included, which
is fortunate. Otherwise syncope must long since have super-
vened from the mingled stench of stale kouscousso, burnouses
that have not been washed since Baba-Mohamed- Isacalli
reigned at El Djezzaïr, and garlic, the fumes of which, like
the Egyptian darkness, can be felt, and could be cut, I think,
with a yataghan. When you halt to change horses, when you
snatch half-an-hour for breakfast, or three-quarters of an hour
for dinner, or two hours for stretching your legs generally, as
at Milliana, or nine whole hours for rest, refreshment, and
sleep—derisive word!—as at Orléansville, there is your little
correspondence to be thought of. You are travelling post to
Oran, but you have to think of that other post travelling back-
wards to England. There is no use in grumbling. You have
to do it. Remember Junot. You can write on a drum, on a
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279
saucepan lid, on the table of a cabaret, on a mattress thrown
on the floor, on a piece of carpet, on the Jews' backgammon
board, on the crown of your hat-unless it happens to be a
wideawake. You can begin a sentence at one stage and finish
it at the next; the which reminds me of a gentleman I once
met in a railway carriage on the North Kent Line, and who,
excited by bottled stout, sang a comic song which was five
miles long: that is to say, he began it at Woolwich Dockyard
and finished it at Erith. Your writing materials consist of two
sous' worth of tissue paper you bought at Milliana, a halfpenny
bottle of ink, and a pen you stole there is no other word for
it-from the café at Blidah; for of course you have lost the
key of your despatch-box, or it is packed up in your trunk, or
you never had one-what does it matter? Remember Junot.
Your despatch-box is a little bag at your side, containing your
stationery, a pipe, some tobacco, lucifer matches, a piece of
soap, half a sausage, a crust of bread, a handful of dates
wrapped up in a piece of old newspaper, a phial of laudanum,
and a volume of Arabic dialogues-which last are not of the
slightest use to you, seeing that all the Arabs with whom you
come in contact speak French after a fashion.
I am sure that I cannot have given anything like a coherent
narrative-nay, nor even a consecutive summary-of the pro-
ceedings of the Emperor since he has been in this country. I
do not think Samson, with Briareus for a secretary and Argus
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as an assistant, could have done it. I have thought it worth
while, however, to transcribe from my diary the briefest
abstract of Cæsar's movements. Such gaps as must necessarily
occur in it may be easily filled up. The Emperor, then, landed
at Algiers on the morning of Wednesday, the 3rd of May. He
received the constituted authorities and the foreign consuls, and
at night there was a grand dinner of sixty covers at the Palace
of the Government. The whole town was illuminated, as you
have heard. On the 4th his Majesty took a drive to the
villages of El Biar and Chiragas, and paid a visit to the
monastery of the Trappists at Staouëli. Here, on what is
termed in Arabic the "Plain of the Tents," took place, in 1830,
the first regular engagement between Bourmont's invading
army and the Turco-Arab forces of the Dey. The Turks were
of course routed, and the way to Algiers thenceforth became
easy. For many years following this sanguinary conflict, the
fields about Staouëli were strewn with cannon balls, dinted
sabres, and fragments of shells. But in 1843, a concession of
the field of battle was made by Louis Philippe to a community
of Trappists. In the month of August of that year the sombre
and laborious ascetics of La Trappe erected a little hut near the
clump of palm-trees where once had been pitched the golden
pavilions of Ibrahim, the son-in-law of Hussein Dey, and the
tributary beys of Oran and Constantine. The next day the
good monks solemnised a mass for the repose of the souls of
AT ORLÉANSVILLE.-POSTING UP THE LEDGER. 281
those who had fallen at Staouëli, and then tucked up their
sleeves and went to work like beavers. They have never
ceased to work, to pray, to clothe the naked and to feed the
hungry, ever since; and they are as much respected by the
Muslim as by the Christians. They had a hard time and a
rough work; but their handiwork has prospered, and they have
succeeded in transforming the sandy waste of Staouëli into a
smiling garden. They now possess a well-built abbey, several
farms, a large flour-mill worked by water-power, several work-
shops for turning, sawing, tailoring, weaving, and dyeing, an
orchard, a vineyard, and many hundred head of cattle. They
are bee-masters, floriculturists, and fishermen; they make
capital pickles and preserves; they shoe horses, and make
wheels, and dispense corn-plasters and eye-water to all who
need those medicaments. They are exceedingly hospitable to
strangers; and you may eat as succulent a dinner at La Trappe
de Staouëli as at the best restaurant in Algiers. Among them-
selves, labour and silence and prayer-prayer, and labour, and
silence-form the unvarying round of life. These are the "lazy
monks" one reads about sometimes. They seem to take to
their convict's life very kindly, and are sturdy and fresh-
coloured friars, although the soup they have for their own
dinner seems to have been made from a paving-stone boiled
with a few pot-herbs in plenty of water. They solicit no alms
from strangers; but, as you leave this house of work and prayer,
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1
you may buy if you choose a medal or chaplet from the brother
gatekeeper, which need not cost you more than half a franc.
The dole is not enormous, my Lord Archbishop. The last
medal of the kind I bought was from the Grey Nuns of
Montreal, in Canada-as charitable and hard-working religieuses
as these African monks. Am I inconsistent in speaking thus
of the African Trappists? Do I forget that which I set down
in an earlier chapter, respecting Bullet-head and his race? the
wretched, dense Frères Ignorantins, with their unwashed feet
and their cat-o'-nine-tails brandished over shivering urchins :-
Hommes noirs, d'où sortez vous?
Nous sortons de dessous terre,
Moitié renards, moitié loups;
Notre règle est un mystère.
Vous savez pourquoi l'on nous exila.
Nous rentrons: songez à vous taire,
Et que vos enfants suivent nos leçons.
C'est nous qui fessons,
Et qui refessons,
Les jolis petits, les petits garçons.
I go with Béranger to the utmost, but only against Bullet-head.
There are monks and monks; but the Trappists are monks who
work.
'If it be sad to live in the Trappe, how sweet it is to die
there!" Thus runs the inscription on the lime-whited wall of
the infirmary at Staouëli. I was reminded of the "Dieu vous
AT ORLÉANSVILLE.-POSTING UP THE LEDGER.
283
66
voit," "God sees you," on the walls, as white, of the American
nunnery. And this grim existence of the monkish labourers
goes on under the deep blue southern sky, with the laughing
Mediterranean laving the foot of their fields, with the vines
trailing round the very bars of their cells, and the big bunches
of grapes peeping and pouting in at the embrasures with a
come, kiss me" look, and with the air heavy and sensuous
with the perfume of orange trees and the choicest flowers.
They never heed the sights and sounds and odours of a world
which is rich and gay and luxurious. It is their business to
produce, and not to enjoy. What does the grocer's boy care for
figs? Do you think you could tempt that young lady at the
pastrycook's with Bath buns or strawberry creams? Steadfastly
and sadly the Trappist toils and moils and trudges on towards
his goal and his reward-that inestimable guerdon of the grave,
the infinite solace of death. When he dies they put him,
cassock, cowl, hempen girdle, and all, into a hole, and with
brief orisons cover him up, and leave him there in peace. Why
not? Bourbon or Nassau cannot sleep more soundly under
their hearse of porphyry and brass. When you are tired of
wearing a periwig and red-heeled shoes-of envying your
brother because he has got the Cross of the Legion, and when
you have got it yourself, pining after the Golden Fleece or the
Black Eagle-when you have eaten and drunken, and loved
and fawned enough-you might do worse than come to this
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African convent, tuck up your sleeves, go to work, and end
So.
The abbot will get something in the way of usefulness
out of your old bones, ere you die. As for society, there are
beggars who come to the gate for relief. As for recreation,
there are matins and vespers. All depends on habit. I
dare say St. Jerome in the desert found the lions very good
company.
On the 5th the Emperor, on foot, and accompanied only by
Marshal MacMahon and an aide-de-camp or two, visited the lower
part of Algiers, the artillery barracks, the Admiralty, and the
bassin de radoub-or graving dock, I think it is, in English-
at the mole. He also paid a visit to the permanent Exhibition
of Algerian Products and Manufactures, to which has just been
added a very gratifying exhibition of pictures in oil and water
colours. Madame la Maréchale MacMahon is herself a con-
tributor to the fine arts gallery, which boasts several works
by English lady-artists resident in Algiers. On the 6th the
Emperor went, viá Blidah, to the Agricultural Show at Bou
Farik, returning by Oued-el-Aleug, Kolea, and the Daouaouda.
The next day, after hearing at the Cathedral, formerly the Great
Mosque, a “military mass," solemnised by Monseigneur Pavy,
Bishop of Algiers, and which mass was of the conveniently brief
duration known as a Saint Hubert or "hunting" mass, his
Majesty started, passing through Blidah again, and halting for a
short time to be "mayorised," for Milliana. He visited La Chiffa,
AT ORLÉANSVILLE.-POSTING UP THE LEDGER.
235
Moujaia, Bou-Roumi, El Assoun, Bourkika, and l'Oued Vesoul-
Benia. Milliana is supposed to be the Malliana of the Romans,
and until lately there were ruins, unmistakably Roman, in the
very centre of the town; but these interesting remains have
been demolished piecemeal to make room for the alignement or
straightening of the streets. Bas-reliefs, columns, capitals, and
fragments of statues without number, buried in the courtyards
or built up in the walls of old Moorish houses, have also disap-
peared before this ruthless alignement, and very few relics, it is
to be feared, have found their way to the gallery of antiquities
under the hotel of the sub-division. There has been plenty of
fighting here, of course. Indeed, almost every square foot of
ground which the French possess in Algeria has been won by so
many thrusts of the bayonet. Milliana was besieged a quarter
of a century since by Abd-el-Kader, and relieved by General
Changarnier. How strangely significant is the sound of those
two names in 1865! The hostile Emir is a pensioner of France;
the reliever of Milliana died in Belgium a banished and pro-
scribed man. But there have been stranger turns of Fortune's
wheel in this strange clime. Those gallant sons of the House
of Orléans I spoke of just now were basking in viceregal splen-
dour in Algiers, when there came a swift steamer with the news
that their father had fallen from his throne. They had to sail
away from the shores of that France henceforth shut against
them, and past the Englishman's fortress-rock at Gibraltar, to
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the land of exile. And strangest of all is the story told of the
famous captain who conquered this country for the last Bourbon
king of France. His son had been slain in battle, and, return-
ing to Marseilles, he brought with him his heart. The corpse
of the young man had been already landed, and the custom-
house officers at Marseilles had the unspeakable ruffianism to
open the coffin, and search the body for the gold and jewels
which they believed to be concealed in it. The conqueror was
not permitted to pass through France; he was forbidden even
to take passage in a French ship. He got to Italy somehow,
and the story runs that, wandering one day into a café at
Leghorn, he sat down at the same table with a venerable old
Turk, with a long white beard and a turban of the shape and
dimensions of a pumpkin. Surely I have seen you before,'
remarked this ancient Osmanli, pausing between the puffs at
his chibouk. "It may be," the other replied, unconsciously
paraphrasing Mr. Macready in Werner: “I was a soldier, and
am a beggar. I am Marshal Bourmont." "Allah is great!
remarked the venerable old gentleman, taking another pull at
his pipe;
"I was the Dey of Algiers." He made rather a
jovial end of it, this savage old Dey; for he took away plenty
of diamonds sewn up in his baggy inexpressibles.
He was
rather too fond, however, of inflicting the bastinado on his
numerous wives, and one of them ran away and became a dame
de comptoir at a coffee-house in Naples. Of the Bourmont
((
AT ORLÉANSVILLE.-POSTING UP THE LEDGER.
287
story it may truly be said, se non è vero, è ben trovato. A
Bourbon to-day, an Orleans to-morrow, a Republic par-dessus
le marché, and a Bonaparte, like Jemmy in "Mrs. Lirriper's
Lodgings" "tops off;" but I never look upon the statue of the
ill-fated eldest son of Louis Philippe in the Place du Gouverne-
ment at Algiers without thinking upon Nemesis, and the old
King, heart-broken, murmuring-" Comme Charles Dix!
comme Charles Dix!”
On the 8th the Emperor returned to Algiers by way of
Marengo, an agricultural settlement founded in 1848-a large
and prosperous village at the foot of the Beni Menaur Moun-
tains. In the vicinity is the Lake of Halloula, where there is
much good duck and swan hunting to be had.
It is full,
besides—so the Arabs say-of leeches, which must be slightly
disagreeable to the ducks. As the swans, however, have black
legs, the leeches, perhaps, take them for brothers, and are
unaware of the plump and succulent white bosoms above water;
on the whole, I would rather not be a swan on the Lake of
Halloula. On the 9th the indefatigable and august sight-seer
visited the Library, the Museum, the Cour Impériale, the
Hametite and Maletite mosques, and the Franco-Arab College
at Algiers, where French professors who speak Arabic do their
very utmost to convince a perverse generation of little Mussul-
mans of the blessings of centralisation and civilisation. Where-
upon the little Mussulmans go home to their papas and
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•
mammas to play about the courtyard and eat rice, and are
informed-frequently with a slipper smartly applied by way of
enforcing the argument-that the Christians are sons of dogs
and protégés of Eblus. The efforts which the French have
made to get hold of the rising generation of Mahometans have
been prodigious, most laudable, but mainly unsuccessful. They
treat the pupils who come to them kindly, never striking them,
whereas their own parents thrash them like sacks; they give
them an excellent education; but the little Mussulmans, or
rather their parents, are as shy as the ducklings were in re-
sponding to the invitation of Mrs. Bond, when, with the endear-
ing appellatives of "Dilly, dilly," she conjured them to come
and be killed. In the interior the case is still worse. The
Arabs have a notion that their children should be taught in
their own schools, by their own masters, and in their own
fashion. To all the mosques there are attached Mussulman
colleges, called Zaouias, and in every village there is a Derrar,
which answers to our dame schools, only the teacher is of the
male sex.
Du reste, the pupils are boys. The girls, as a rule,
never get any education at all. The economy of an Arab
school is a very simple affair indeed. In a room with plastered
walls and an earthen floor, something between a back kitchen
and a cow-shed, several little boys in red caps and baggy
breeches squat in a semicircle on their haunches, occupied in a
languid pursuit of knowledge and an indefatigable search for
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289
fleas. Between the horns of the juvenile horseshoe is en-
throned, likewise squatting, on a ragged scrap of carpet, a dirty
old man with a long stick. He says something in Arabic, in a
sing-song tone, and his pupils repeat the words after him. If
one of the pupils manifests greater assiduity in flea-hunting or
in skylarking with his neighbours than in droning out sing-
song, the preceptor hits him over the head with the long stick.
Should that fail to make him a scholar and a gentleman, the
ligneous venue is changed to the soles of his feet, and not
unfrequently recourse is had to the ministrations of the never-
failing slipper applied in a succession of staccato movements to
that part of the person which "nature has intended for such
exercitation." The writing exercises consist in tracing Arabic
characters in a box full of sand, the attempts at caligraphy
being rendered interesting by a shower of raps on the knuckles
of the student-the whole reminding the spectator of a search
for eels in a basket where there are no eels. This is a Derrar.
The pleasantest part of the thing is when the youngsters come
tumbling out of school at the hour of prayer. They are ragged
and filthy, but oh! they look so happy! In the Zaouias or
colleges a higher class of tuition is dispensed. The master is
quite a Don. He may leave something to be desired on the
score of facial cleanliness, but he wears at least a clean turban.
The boys or youths are taught, purely by rote, to get certain
verses of the Koran by heart; and he who knows most Koran
U
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at the age of adolescence is Senior Wrangler in the schools of
Islamism. The course of instruction does not, however, stop
here. Scorn and hatred of Christians in general, and of the
French in particular, are a branch of ethics sedulously instilled
into the alumni of the Zaouias. They are taught that the
power of France is only transitory; that the successes of the
French arms are due simply to the will of Allah, who for some
wise purpose desires to chastise his elect. They are informed
that patience and resignation are the ordeals through which
the Arab race is bound to pass until the Mahometan Messiah—
the Moula-Saa, or "Lord of the Hour"-comes, as he may
come at any moment, to vindicate the true faith, and hurl the
Giaours over the quays of El Djezzaïr into the sea. I wonder
whether any doctrines similar to these are ever taught by
oily olive-coloured men in turbans and waist-cloths to little
Mahometans in British India. When masters or Talebs for
these schools are not to be found in Algeria, the Arabs send for
them to Morocco and Tunis, which countries may be considered
the Maynooth and Douai of French Africa. These Moors and
Tunisians, who have never lived in the neighbourhood of
Christians, are-a parrot knowledge of Al Coran apart-
crassly ignorant, bigoted, and superstitious; and they, and the
Marabouts, are shrewdly suspected of having stirred up the late
and still smouldering insurrection among the Babors of Kabylia.
These Babors must not be confounded with the inhabitants of
AT ORLÉANSVILLE.-POSTING UP THE LEDGER.
291
the Djudjura, or Great Kabylia, the key of all whose mountain-
passes is held by the French in their tremendously strong stra-
tegical position of Fort Napoleon. These Great Kabyles are
quite loyal and friendly to the French-as loyal as the inhabi-
tants of Baltimore are under the guns of Fortress M'Henry, or
as the people of Coblentz might be supposed to be when the
commandant of Ehrenbreitstein had given the word to prime
and load.
The French are at their wits' end to know how to combat the
passive resistance to their rule inculcated in the Mahometan
schools. One ingenious bureaucrat, fired by the theological
initiative set by the Emperor in his proclamation to the Arabs,
has proposed that a Franco-Arabic commentary on the Koran
shall be published, in which it is to be proved, I suppose, that
Paris is Mecca, and the Hotel of the Prefecture at Algiers
Medina, that the sainted Fatima belonged to the Gallican
Church, and that the Chasseurs d'Afrique and the Zouaves are
angels; in a word, that the Emperor is Allah, and Marshal
MacMahon his prophet. There are again some zealots of the
administration, and in high places too, who would boldly wrest
education altogether from the hands of the Talebs, abolish the
Zaouias, place the Derrars under strict surveillance, and ap-
point only schoolmasters certificated by the government, to
expound the Koran according to French administrative views.
"Half measures," writes M. Brosselard, Prefect of Oran, "are
U 2
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impotent as palliatives. Tolerance is culpable when we com-
pound with a foe. This is a question of life or death with the
young Mussulman generation." It is likewise a question of life
or death with the old French party, and a question which is
universal. It is a question which as much as any other troubles
us at home, and makes the unhappy island of Ireland a per-
petual battle-ground of discord and evil passions. No doubt
the French might sweep away the Zaouias and the Derrars
did they respect nothing but the law of force; but they are
irrevocably pledged to leave these institutions intact. They
have engaged to respect the religious observances of the Arabs,
and these schools are as much a part of their religion as the
mosques and the koubbas. I took the liberty lately of suggest-
ing to General Fleury that there existed a precedent for the
employment of means by which a wild, warlike, and insub-
ordinate people might be curbed and made quite loyal and
docile. Shortly after the Scotch rebellion of 1745-6, the British
Parliament, as is will known, passed a solemn act by which the
Highlanders were forced to wear breeches. Feudal tenures
were abolished at the same time with the kilt; but there is no
doubt that the enforcement of pantaloons on the Highlandman
broke the neck of Jacobitism. The man who wore small-clothes
soon wore a coat, a cocked hat, and a wig, for conformity's sake.
Ten years afterwards the Highland dress could, without peril,
be revived; but the Act of 1747 extinguished it as a national
AT ORLÉANSVILLE.-POSTING UP THE LEDGER.
293
costume. The picturesque garb of old Gaul is now worn only
by a few regiments of soldiers, by gamekeepers, and by a few
country gentlemen on rare occasions, or by those who are as
ambitious of singularity as a duke in England who wears top
boots and leathers. The Bedouins of 1865 are just the High-
landers of 1745, as wild, as noble, and as refractory. Their
feudal tenures are almost precisely similar to those which ob-
tained in the Highlands of Scotland before the great Rebellion.
The Emir is the Chevalier, the Aghas are the chiefs, the Oued is
the clan; the Scotch dhuine wassel was bound to do corvée and
yeoman-service for his chief, just as the Bedouin is bound to
grind the corn in his chieftain's mill, to bring him eggs, or
meat, or poultry when he entertains strangers, and to follow
his goum when he goes forth to war. To abolish the feudal
tenures of Algeria would be following one part of the pre-
cedent of '47; to suppress the burnouse and bare legs with the
men, and the haick and baggy trousers with the women, would
be another and the most vital. Force the Arabs by Imperial
decree to wear boots with heels to them, and in a very short
time the mosques would be deserted, and the practice of squat-
ting on the haunches abandoned. Put the Arab men into
round hats and sixteen-franc trousers, and make the Arab
women go unveiled and wear hoop skirts, Balmoral petticoats,
and high-heeled boots, and in half a dozen years Al Coran would
be a dead letter. Of course I put all this to the general as a
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reductio ad absurdum. Of course the thing could not be done.
<<
Mais la religion," he said, shrugging his shoulders. In the
cardinal difference of religion lies the root of the difficulty.
Burnouses, turbans, bare legs, squatting on the haunches, veils,
baggy trousers, bare feet, laziness, eating with the fingers, and
sleeping on the floor, are as integral parts of Mahometanism as
a faith in the Divine legation of Mahomet and his intimate
personal acquaintance with the angel Gabriel. I have known a
good many Turks in my time, but I never knew one who ate
with a knife and fork and wore gloves who believed in the
Koran or its concoctor.
I
I noted that the Emperor visited the Cour Impériale.
may set down briefly what the Cour Impériale is like. It is
held in a roomy old Moorish mansion in the Rue Bruce-as
queer a vagary of nomenclature, I think, in this Franco-Morisco
town, as is the Calle O'Reilly in Havana. There is a dark
entrance-lobby or vestibule to the court, as there is in all con-
siderable Moorish houses. Nothing of the interior is visible
from the lobby. Its only furniture is a stone bench, where
clients or suppliants sit or squat, and confer with the master of
the house when he deigns to give them audience. It is "the
gate," in fact; and in such a gate, perhaps, sat Mordecai. The
vestibule of the Cour Impériale is very cool and dark, and is
floored and partially walled with arabesque tiles. It is the
Salle des Pas Perdus, the Westminster Hall of this Algerine
AT ORLÉANSVILLE.-POSTING UP THE LEDGER.
295
There is a man
Palace of Justice, and the same curious people-though on an
infinitesimal scale as to number-who hang about courts of
justice all over the world, hang about this lobby. They have
the same half-eager, half-listless, weedy, mildewed look common
to their brethren in Lincoln's Inn and Westminster. Some
come because they have causes pending; others for the sake
of the coolness and darkness of the place.
asleep in a corner, and a veiled woman with a baby; a drunken
Biskri cobbler, the only intoxicated person whem I have yet
seen in Algeria, whom a discreet huissier is endeavouring to
elbow out of the precincts without raising unnecessary scandal;
and a little old Frenchman in a blouse, a pink and white striped
nightcap, and a violent passion, who has gotten his advocate
into a corner, and is, while vehemently detailing his grievances,
punching him all over the ribs and thorax with a roll of papers,
as though he, the advocate, were a pincushion, and he, the
client, were tattooing "Welcome little stranger" upon him.
Enter the court, and you will find the coolness and darkness
gone. It is the usual interior of a Moorish house—a square
courtyard, like a Spanish patio or the cortile of an Italian
palace, surrounded by a colonnade with horseshoe arches. The
French have "utilised" the open space and spoilt it. The area
has been covered in with an ugly glass roof, and now forms the
body of the court. The lateral arches have been filled up by
unsightly wooden screens; the beautiful arabesques have been
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badigeonnés with yellow; while a great floundering eagle and
a bust of the Emperor in plaster choke a graceful little niche,
where once perhaps was an inscription from Al Coran cut in
most delicate tracery. The plashing fountain which once occu-
pied the centre of the court has been replaced by the greffier's
desk, and the whole of one side of the area is occupied by a
long green-baize covered table, at which sit the judges in their
gowns, square toques, and long bands. If you have ever seen
the beautiful chapter-house at Westminster cumbered and dis-
figured by the hideous wooden presses of the Record Office-
presses where swelter and moulder thousands of dead-and-gone
writs and judgments out of date from the Queen's Bench and
the Common Pleas, you will at once understand the mournfully
incongruous appearance which the Cour Impériale makes in a
whilom Moorish palace.
I never could understand a French trial at law. Everybody
seems in a rage, including the President, and the only collected
person in court seems often to be the plaintiff. The suit I
heard pleaded was, I think, about a mur mitoyen, or party-
wall; but into the merits of the dispute between Ali Ben-
Jiorga-ben-Djemel of the Oued-el-Khramsa, and Zephyrini
Doudouchon, limonadière at Bordj Setti-Talekiet, I am not
qualified to enter. I think Ali Ben and the rest of it got the
worst of the case, for at the conclusion he gathered up the skirts
of his burnouse, and stalked out of the court in a huff, and with
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297
looks full of infinite disdain. The Arabs, although in criminal
cases they are bound to submit to the provisions of the Code
Napoléon, have the right to settle their civil causes in their
own courts, where the Cadi is, and Al Coran the only text book.
They are, I am told, as fond of litigations as those inveterate.
Peter Publeses, the Normans, and very frequently bring their
long-protracted civil suits before the French tribunals. The
result is, that legal oyster-culture receives a large impetus, that
the litigants are enabled to devote themselves to the study of
conchology, and that the gentlemen of the gown and toque find
out that "'twas a fat oyster."
On the evening of the 9th, the Emperor went to a splendid
ball at the palace of Mustapha, near Algiers, given in his honour
by Marshal MacMahon. At night the whole city and the
ironclads in harbour were illuminated, and there was a grand
display of fireworks in the garden of Mustapha itself. On the
10th, Cæsar gave audience to a number of native aghas and
chieftains, and decorated some of them with the Cross of the
Legion. He also received a deputation from the Agricultural
Association of Algiers. In the afternoon he went to the Garden
of Acclimatization, or Jardin d'Essai; and at night he attended
the theatre, where there was a gala performance.
On the 11th His Majesty made a trip to Medea, and break-
fasted in the renowned "Valley of Monkeys." They are said to
rusticate here in thousands, to have their laws, their police,
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their military force, and their aristocracy-to love, quarrel,
make it up again, steal, grin, and caper, very much after the
fashion of human beings: save that they do not lie, or tear
each other in pieces about religion. On the occasion, however,
of the Imperial visit, the Barbary apes, wise in their generation,
were shy, and did not put in an appearance. Tourists, it must
be explained, who breakfast in the Valley are in the habit of
bringing Devisme's fowling-pieces with them, and "potting"
the monkeys by way of a chasse-café.
On the 12th of May, Napoleon III. returned to Algiers, and
on the 13th he left again, for Oran, amidst the thunders of that
mimic bombardment of which I have spoken in the previous
section. He has been received everywhere with the greatest
enthusiasm ; and roving up and down the country seems to do
him good, for he is in the enjoyment of excellent health.
XVI.
OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA.
ACCORDING to the historian El Bekri, the actual city of Oran
dates from the year 297, when a certain Mohammed-ben-Abi-
Aoun came over from Spain with a band of Andalusian fisher-
men, and patched up a sufficiently amicable alliance with the
Beni-Mosguens, the original holders of the soil. The neigh-
bouring tribes burnt and sacked the place, or were repulsed
from it for four or five centuries or so,-the only light thrown
on the "dark ages" being that of internecine conflagrations,-
then, in 1086, the Almoravides conquered all this part of
Africa. The Almoravides were succeeded by the Almohades,
and these again by the Merinides; until, in the middle of the
fifteenth century, there came to Oran a refugee from his
revolted subjects, the famous Muley Mohammed, surnamed the
Lop-sided, King of Granada. At this period the historians
declare Oran to have been, as the Yankees say, "quite a place."
Elephants' teeth and ostrich feathers, tanned hides, gold-dust,
negro slaves, and corn were the staple of exports, and made the
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""
Oranese very rich. They excelled also in the manufacture of
rich stuffs and weapons of war. The Venetians, the Genoese,
the Marseillais, and the Catalans came in great numbers to
trade with them, bringing looking-glasses, silks and velvets, and
hardware in exchange. Alvarez Gomez says that in 1437 there
were six thousand houses in Oran, many splendid mosques,
colleges as learned as those at Cordova and Seville, quays cum-
bered with merchandise, and the most sumptuous "stews or
baths in the world. Unfortunately, wealth seems to have
brought luxury, luxury excess, and excess the most alarming
depravity; since we find a holy man named Sidi-Mahomed-el-
Haouari lifting up his voice, in this epoch, against the city, and
crying out, "Oran, city of innumerable adulteries, the stranger
shall enter into thy gates, and abide there until the day of
meeting and of dispersion;" by which is meant the day of
judgment.
El-Haouari died in 1439, and, seventy years afterwards, his
ominous prediction was fulfilled by the capture of Oran by the
Spaniards. The expedition which subdued it was a sort of
fragmentary tailpiece to the Crusades. In 1506, Ferdinand of
Spain, Emmanuel of Portugal, and Harry of England entered
into a compact to Christianise all heathendom by force of arms;
but they soon fell out among themselves, and then Emmanuel
and Ferdinand had to go to the assistance of his Holiness the
Pope, who, not for the first time in history, had fallen out with
OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA.
301
the Eldest Son of the Church in France. An edifying spec-
tacle the medieval Pontiff. He was either cursing Christendom
all round, or blessing some prince with a view to persuade him
to batter another prince's brains out.
But Cardinal Ximenes, the King-Cardinal of Spain, had set
his heart upon a crusade of some kind, and persuaded Ferdinand
to fit out an expedition to the African Main. The Spaniards
knew little of the geography of the country, and contemplated
a landing at the little town of Honein, on the frontiers of
Morocco. Then they were told that Mers-el-Kebir was the
richest point on the coast; for plunder, as well as proselytism,
was part of Ximenes' plan. Then the Spanish treasury—like-
wise not for the first time in history-was found to be empty.
But the Cardinal, in his religious and filibustering zeal, agreed
with his sovereign to pay for the crusade out of his own pocket.
Finally, Mers-el-Kebir was attacked and captured, and General
Don Gonzales de Ayora wrote home, quite in the Spanish
fashion, "We have conquered half Africa." And the Desert of
Sahara, and the country of the Touaregs, and that great white
patch upon the map, the Region of the Utterly Unknown!
Oh, thou most wall-eyed Don! Then occurred once more an
abhorrent vacuum in the exchequer of the most Catholic King,
but the indomitable Ximenes came to the rescue again. An
army of fifteen thousand men sailed from Carthagena for Mers-
el-Kebir. His Eminence himself accompanied the crusaders,
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performed high mass on the shore, and headed the troops,
crucifix in hand. So many millions of the children of humanity
have in all ages been smitten to death by those who arrogate
to themselves a peculiar property in the symbol of our salva-
tion, that I wonder it has never occurred to ingenious small-
arms manufacturers to contrive crucifixes with spring-bayonets
in the arms, or to cast cross-shaped rifle-bullets. They might
hurt as sorely as conical ones.
The Spaniards marched upon Oran, and took it with but
the loss of thirty men. The new era was at once inaugurated
by the pitiless massacre of eight thousand Muslim prisoners.
Public buildings and private houses were alike sacked, and the
treasures accumulated in Oran by three centuries of industrious
trade and half a century of piracy on the high seas were divided
among the Christian officers and soldiers. The great filibuster
X. was himself too highly placed and too proud to enrich him-
self by vulgar booty. He took nothing but a few Arabic
manuscripts and rare objects, which he presented, on his return
to Spain, to the Cathedral of Toledo and the Convent of San
Ildefonso at Madrid. Before Ximenes went away, however, he
ordered all the fortifications to be rebuilt, and the Tribunal of
the Holy Inquisition to be established.
The Spaniards kept possession of the place for two centuries;
but in 1708 the Regency of Algiers, profiting by the distracted
state of the Peninsula, in which the War of the Succession was
OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA.
303
then raging, sent Moustafa-bou-Chelar'em, Bey of Maskara, to
besiege Oran. He besieged it; accordingly the city fell, and the
Turkish janissaries ruled in the place of the captains-general of
Philip V. But Oran was still to be a challenge cup. The Peace
of Utrecht having been signed, the King of Spain began to make
preparations for the recovery of Oran, and a few years afterwards
wrested it from the Turks. The new lease of Spanish rule
lasted from 1732 to 1790, when, as I have said, came the great
earthquake and the final evacuation by the Spaniards. The
Turks, once more masters of the city, strove to rebuild it à la
Turque that is to say, in a pleasing intermixture of strong
castles and blind alleys full of mud hovels; but this style of
architecture was equally disgusting to the tasteful Moors and to
the Spaniards who remained behind. The Turks governed by
means of a Bey, a Khralifa or Finance Minister, and two Aghas.
The scheme of administration was of the simplest. The Bey
ordered a certain sum to be raised by way of revenue.
Khralifa, with the assistance of the Aghas, proceeded to squeeze
it out of the natives. He got it out of their backs, their
stomachs, or the soles of their feet, to all which parts of the
body the great persuader, the bastinado, was indifferently ap-
plied. He got it out of their fingers by means of thumbscrews
and lighted matches, and out of their heads by the skilful super-
position on their skulls of nightcaps of heated copper. When
the money was raised the Bey took as much of it as he chose,
The
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and the Khralifa and the Aghas stole as much of it as they
dared. The remainder was carried by the Khralifa to Algiers
as tribute to the Dey. If the sum was not sufficient, his High-
ness caused the financier to be soundly beaten. Sometimes he
had him bowstrung, as, according to Voltaire, Admiral Byng was
shot: pour encourager les autres. So that everything was
very nice and comfortable. The natives of the province of Oran
are not at all grateful to the French for having put an end to
this state of things. When have you found Orientals grateful
to Europeans for having given them an "administration" in
lieu of an out-and-out despotism? Perhaps the natives thought
that an occasional dose of the bastinado assisted the circulation
of the blood and helped to kill the fleas. It is certain that
when a Bey or a Khralifa vexed them too sorely, some one
managed to strangle him for the public good, and the new
broom, or Bey, swept clean for awhile. In 1830, the French,
not having any quarrel with the Government of Oran, were
constrained for a period to let them alone.
period to let them alone. Then Marshal
Clausel assigned the city to Sidi-Ahmed, Bey of Tunis, who was
to pay to France an annual tribute of a million of francs. Sidi-
Ahmed sent his Khralifa, Keir Edden, to Oran, but the natives
would not obey him; the French Government refused to ratify
the convention between the Marshal and the Bey of Tunis, and
in the end, almost in their own despite, the French had to
annex the province. Among the French governors who have
OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA.
305
ruled here you may find the famous names of Delmichels,
Létang, Lamoriciere, Cavaignac, Pélissier, Montauban, Martin-
prey, and Walsin-Esterhazy.
There are no Turks in Oran now, and but very few Kou-
louilis or sons of Turks. The noise and bustle of the French
system has been too much for these sleepy Orientals. They
have gone to Tunis or to Morocco, where they can still enjoy
the privilege of having their heads chopped off comfortably, or
of dozing cross-legged, with their chibouks between their lips,
on their carpets, and, as they count their beads, thanking Allah
that they have escaped decapitation yet another day. Hope
deferred maketh the heart sick; but, in certain phases of the
human mind, postponed disaster maketh the heart glad.
"Petit bonhomme vit encore!" Mayor Bailly used to say,
rubbing his hands, every morning that his name did not appear
in the executioner's list. It appeared there at length, and they
guillotined him; but to the last moment he who is holding on
to life even by the skin of his teeth may comfort himself with
the hope that the Deluge, or the Millenium, or an earthquake
may come to avert his doom.
The Moors of Oran are very much fairer than their brethren
at Algiers. You may even see red and auburn beards among
them. This is explained on the ground that they are not
Moors of Mauritania, or Morocco proper, but descendants of
the Moriscoes of Spain, who fled there before the conquering
X
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arms of Ferdinand and Isabella. They rarely wear the domino-
like burnouse of the Bedouin, the flowing white garment which
conceals the whole costume, however rich it be, but go clad in
a comfortable though somewhat sombre splendour—something
like Zouaves of the Imperial Guard without the accoutrements
and the yellow leggings. The well-to-do Moors at Oran all
wear shoes and stockings, and, save that they are more given
to corpulence and are less demonstrative in their manner, are
nowadays, and to an unpractised eye, scarcely to be distin-
guished from the Jews.
These Israelites are certainly, next to the Arabs, the most
interesting and the most picturesque of the inhabitants of
Algeria, and I must be pardoned for recurring to them so
often. To keep them in the background, however, would be
to suppress the most glowing tints of the picture which spreads
itself before the tourist. At Oran, so far as costume goes, there
are Jews and Jews. There are the old Jews, who cannot
forget days when the Turks forced them to wear a peculiar and
degrading dress, and who from habit still adhere to the dark
Levite robe, the black turban, and the loose trousers with
stocking-feet attached thrust into yellow slippers, which is still
the distinguishing garb of the Jews of Morocco. To these
must be added the Jews of the interior who come to Oran on
business, and who wear the haick or over-burnouse, but with a
bandage of camel's hair dyed black round the head. To these
OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA.
307
must be added the affluent Hebrew merchants, bankers, and
shopkeepers, who adopt the Moorish dress in all its details, save
that they are rather partial on the Sabbath to shoes with heels
and of patent leather. Their turbans are of the whitest and
amplest, and curiously crimped in diagonal lines to the folds.
Finally, there are the young Jews, who of late years have
shown a predilection for the European style of dress. I had
the advantage of the society of one of these young gentlemen
for three days and a half in a diligence, and it was very
amusing to mark the supreme contempt with which he was
regarded by two other Jews in the diligence, respectable old
parties with full beards, enormous turbans, voluminous sashes,
and baggy knickerbockers. This young dandy was evidently very
ill at ease in his new clothes. He had a tall shiny hat, which
was always tumbling off; he had shaved his chin, and preserved
only a tiny moustache, and he was continually putting his hand
to his lips to make sure that he had not swallowed it; and he
evidently did not know what to do with his legs, which were
imprisoned in the newest Parisian pantaloons of the most
violent stripe. Watching the two elders, with their handsome
caftans of purple cloth with sugar-loaf buttons of gold, their
rich sashes and roomy nether garments, I could not help
thinking of the story of the old Turk at Cairo, who, passing a
European exquisite lounging from Shepherd's Hotel, plucked
his little boy by the wrist, and said, "My son, if you do not
x 2
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obey the commands of Allah and the Prophet, you will come
some day to look like that." I am not treading, I hope, on
anybody's toes by hinting that in an Eastern country my young
Hebrew friend would have acted wisely in sticking to the
Eastern garb. The French have had the common sense to
acknowledge its utility in this climate by adapting the old
Janissary dress into the uniform of their Zouaves and Spahis.
Even the European civilian wears the caban, or short white
Algerian jerkin, the veil for the head and neck or nuquière,
and the roomiest of shoes in lieu of light boots. The Jews,
moreover, are foolish to pine over the tailor's goose fripperies
of Paris, for the Eastern costume becomes them admirably.
They, every tourist must have remarked, are the handsomest
people, both in face and figure, in all Algeria; tall and
muscular, and shapely in form, with regular Roman features;
with beards, black, glossy, and flowing, and with complexions
not sallow as the town Arabs, or dusky red like the Bedouins,
but clear and fair. As a rule they are pale-probably from
incessant smoking; for the women, who are comely, but not
nearly so handsome as the men, are ruddy to sanguineousness.
I can conscientiously say that, out of that regiment of our
Horse Guards who are said to be recruited exclusively from a
Dacio-Roman colony settled since the year one in the county
of Durham, I have never seen finer men than the Algerine
Jews. Their children are exquisitely beautiful, but, in the
OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA.
309
majority of cases, of Saxon fairness. Their hair darkens as
they age.
Indeed, the striking comeliness of the Hebrew community in
Algeria presents more than one curious ethnological problem.
One of the surest effects of slavery-so, at least, it has been
usually assumed-is the degradation of the physical as well as
the moral status of its victims. In Poland and Lithuania they
will tell you that the abject appearance of the dreadful Israelites
-who hang about the posting-houses and entreat you to buy tea,
tobacco, almanacs, and even brandy-is due to the miserable
social obloquy which for centuries has been their lot. Whence
arises another problem: Why do they swarm most densely in
the countries where they are most scandalously treated? In
Constantinople, where they have always been reviled and spit
upon, they have always abounded; whereas in the United
States, where they have never laboured under any civil dis-
abilities, they are rarely to be found. But the Jews of Algeria,
it is certain, show no signs of having been either morally or
physically degraded by the long ordeal of contumely and mal-
treatment they have undergone at the hands of the Turks-the
rudest, the most bigoted, and the most intolerant of all the
Mahometan races. Indeed, the Jews make no very grievous
complaints of hardships inflicted on them by the Moors. There
is much even now in the sedentary Moors of Africa to remind
the student of what he has read of the mild, polished, learned,
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and ingenious Moriscoes of Spain; and there are many old
Spaniards who maintain that the Moors and Jews are sub-
stantially of the same stock-that they are brothers in blood,
though not in creed, thus bearing out Mr. Disraeli's idea of the
Mosaic Arab. When Granada fell, and the Arab dominion in
Spain was destroyed by Ferdinand and Isabella, Moors and
Jews were involved in a common ruin, and shared in many
instances a common exile. They lived without any serious
molestation from their Mahometan neighbours on the African
littoral for many years; but it was when the Turks subjugated
the country that their sufferings began. It was the children of
Osman, and the ruffianly soldadoes of the Porte, the cruel and
fanatical Jenitcheri or Janissaries, who were their real persecu-
tors. They became the Djifa-ben-Djifa-carrion and the sons
of carrion. They were confined to a particular quarter, like the
Ghetto at Rome, which is now represented at Oran by the
suburb called La Blanca. At six o'clock at night they were
bound to be indoors. If they wished to remain abroad after
sunset, they were compelled to ask permission of the police, who
gave them a strip of bull's-hide, by which they might be known
if met by the patrol going the rounds. If the night was dark,
instead of carrying a lantern like the Moors, the unhappy
Israelites were expected to carry a lighted candle, which the
merest puff of wind might extinguish. Every time they passed
the Kasba, or citadel, they were required to fall on their knees,
OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA.
311
and then withdraw rapidly, the head bent and averted. They
were mercilessly beaten for the slightest offence, and—as there
was until the other day in Morocco-a female officer of justice
was appointed, whose special duty it was to flog Jewesses.
They were bound to wait with their pitchers at the fountain for
the last turn—that is, until every blackguard little Arab boy
or every smutty negress had filled his or her jar. If a Jew
insulted a Mussulman, he was put to death. If a Mussulman
killed a Jew, he only paid a certain fine; if a Janissary slew
one, he was only mulct in a pound and a half of tobacco. For
offences which in a Turk would have been visited only with the
bastinado the Jew was burnt alive. These oppressed people
could not leave the Regency without giving enormous bail for
their return. In addition to the innumerable extortions
practised on them on the slightest pretext, they were bound to
pay a heavy weekly tribute, which every Thursday evening,
before sunset, the chief or king of the Jews-for these bond-
men were allowed a king-bore himself to the Kasba. And,
finally, if driven to desperation by these tortures, the Jew wished
to apostatise, he was obliged as a preliminary measure, and with
a fiendish refinement of insult, to turn Christian before he could
become a Mussulman. I have dwelt on these facts with thus
much particularity for the reason that the Jews of Morocco-in
whose cause Sir Moses Montefiore so nobly exerted himself—
are, in the year 1865, very little better off than their brethren
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in Algeria in the days of the Janissaries.
Treaties with
European Powers and Imperial firmans notwithstanding, they
are barbarously abused; and the latest advices from Tetuan
speak of an energetic protest on the part of the foreign Consuls
against a most wanton outrage on twenty of the most respect-
able Israelites in that place.
And yet, amid all this intolerable misery, degradation, and
oppression, the Algerian Jews throve. That they gathered
wealth is no matter for wonder; they have enriched themselves
in all countries. It is, however, their having kept their good
looks and gallant bearing that excites astonishment. Their
vitality under so many cruel wrongs must have been prodigious.
We have been too much accustomed in Europe to study only
the Shylock type of the Jew,-the sallow, cowering, browbeaten
Hebrew, in his dingy gabardine and badge of sufferance. Go to
Algeria-and I think every traveller will bear me out-and you
will see the robust and bellicose-looking Jew, as you read of him
in the Book of Maccabees, the Jew of martial mien and haughty
port; aye, and the Jewess, tall and stern, and well-knit as she
who slew Holofernes in the night.
Alignation and Cæsareanism and earthquakes and conquests
and reconquests notwithstanding, Oran is still much more a
Spanish than a French town. Two hundred and fifty years of
Castilian rule are not so easily shaken off. The Château Neuf
and the new or French town rise in an amphitheatre to the east
OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA.
313
of the bay, and are encroaching more and more every day on
the Moorish and Jewish sections; but the lower town is half
Spanish and half Maltese. The most indelible traces of the
Spanish occupation are, however, in the long lines of bristling
forts with which the town is girt about, and which make of Oran
a kind of Mediterranean Cronstadt. One French writer, struck
with the solidity of all these bastions, ravelins, curtains, redoubts,
and demilunes-a solidity which has defied earthquakes and
cannonadings without number-qualifies them as "an orgie of
masonry, a debauch of stone and lime." They were all built,
the histories say, by convicts. The Spaniards were capital
taskmasters: witness the colossal paved roads they made in
Mexico, and which forty years of civil war have been powerless
to destroy. Nor do their public works, at Oran at least, seem to
have been very expensive, for at the eastern end of the Kasba
may still be read this remarkable inscription :
EN EL ANO 1589
SIN COSTAR A SO MAGESTAD
MAS QUE EL VALOR DE LAS MADERAS
ESTA OBRA
DON PEDRO DE PADILLA SO CAPITAN GENERAL
Y JUSTICIA MAYOR DE ESTAS PLAZAS
POR SO DILIGENCIA Y BUENOS MEDIOS.
"In the year of our Lord 1589, Don Pedro de Padilla,
Captain-General and Grand Justiciary of these parts, caused
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this edifice to be constructed, without any other expense to his
Majesty than the cost of the wood employed for scaffolding."
The convicts got the stone from the quarries, and then they built
the Kasba. This inscription is, to say the least, edifying. How
Joseph Hume would have hugged Don Pedro de Padilla to his
heart! Only fancy an analogous inscription on the breakwater
at Cherbourg, or on a drawbridge at Portsmouth!
Oran was for years the great bagnio or penitentiary of Spain.
Thither the corregidors sent Guzman de Alfarache and Lazarillo
de Tormes, rogues both, to mind their morals and build forts.
And yet, according to some accounts, the rascals had not such a
bad time of it in Africa. The Kasba must have taken a good
many years to build, or the convicts must have persuaded the
Arabs to do their work for them. There was a garrison of seven
thousand men, and about an equal number of puridarios, or
felons. Of Spanish inhabitants there were about three
thousand. Between the soldiers, the convicts, and the towns-
people there reigned the most charming entente cordiale. The
soldiers let the thieves do pretty well as they liked, and when
there was a captain-general who turned rusty and talked of the
cat-o'-nine-tails, the rogues took themselves off gaily to Morocco,
where to this day there are whole towns peopled by their
descendants. Moreover, the Spanish Government were in the
habit of banishing to Oran such hidalgos and caballeros as were
in disgrace for political and other reasons. Many of these exiles
OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA.
315
had plenty of money, and Oran became one of the most jovial,
most rollicking, and wickedest places it is possible to imagine.
It gained the sobriquet of La Corte Chica-"the Little Court."
Night and day there was nothing but balls, collations, and
festivities, wine-quaffing, cigarette-smoking, guitar-strumming,
bull-baiting, love-making, and cock-fighting. It was a presi-
dario of pleasure; but every now and then the Arabs or the
Turks would come thundering at the gates, and there would be
a bloody fight by way of diversion.
XVII.
ORAN.-HOW A BARBARY LION HAS BEEN TURNED INTO
A FRENCH POODLE.
THE town or city of Oran is not half so handsome, archi-
tecturally speaking, as Algiers, nor, from a purely Oriental
point of view, nearly so picturesque. There is a Moorish
quarter, but the roadways are more inclined to the European
horizontal than to the African perpendicular, so gloriously
vindicated at El Djezzaïr, where, when you have toiled up two
score steep flights of stairs bordered by stone packing-cases
facetiously called streets, and sit down on anybody's doorstep to
rest and gain a little breath, you find yourself listening to the
gentle twanging of mandolines from the interior of the stone
packing-cases aforesaid, and involuntarily humming that once
popular but now nearly forgotten melody which recalls the
allegro days of Ethiopia, when there was "sich a gittin' upstairs
and sich a playin' on the fiddle." The Moors of Oran are
content to dwell on a comparatively level surface, and when
they roost high take at least the precaution of having a plateau
ORAN.
317
of ground as foothold before their houses. In the upper town
of Algiers, for want of this table-land, you run the risk of
breaking your neck every time you quit your dwelling, and
going out of doors very much resembles pitching yourself out of
window. In fact, living in an Arab house at Algiers must be.
very like perching in the belfry of a church; only, the natives
not being provided with wings beneath their burnouses, a series
of inclined planes have in process of time been constructed to
enable them to reach their eyries.
The French-who since the memorable extension of the Rue
de Rivoli in Paris have gone stark staring mad on the subject
of the alignement, or lengthening and straightening streets,
and who, in the persistence of their prolongation mania, seem
anxious to try whether they cannot disprove the mathematical
axiom that parallel lines continued to infinity will never meet—
have sacrificed most that was Oriental and quaint and interesting
in Oran on the shrine of architectural novelty. Our gallant
allies trouble themselves very little about restoration. Once
in a while they may restore a Sainte Chapelle, or, in recon-
structing a Halle Centrale, leave standing a tower of St. Jacques
de la Boucherie, bereft of its nave and aisles; but in utter
demolition they take much greater delight. "Down with the
old," is their motto; down with it, root and branch; sow that
site with poudre de riz when you have shaved it quite close,
and then up with the bran-new building of the composite
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
poodle order. This rage for annihilation and re-creation is very
afflicting to those who love old houses, grotesque carvings, and
out-of-the-way combinations of light and shade; but the most
ardent admirer of the romantic is forced to confess that these
narrow streets and antique dwellings are apt to harbour fleas,
dirt, spiders, fever, bad smells, and worse characters. Social
economies, progress, sanitary reform, are not to be frustrated for
the sake of a few artists and antiquaries. In all the cities I
have seen, I cannot recollect one thoroughfare more admirably
picturesque in its lines and play of chiaro oscuro than Wych
Street, Drury Lane, on a bright summer's morning before the
vile shops were opened; yet every social economist must rejoice
at the fact of one-half Wych Street being already pulled down
for the erection of part of the ugliest hotel in the known world,
and of the other half being doomed to speedy demolition. For
the construction of the new law courts scores of charmingly old
houses, rare old carved porches and lintels and pilasters, must
be destroyed; but who save puling sentimentalists, dare regret
the dear and dirty nooks and corners which remind us of old
Lord Clare and Denzil Hollis, and Nan, the blacksmith's
wench, that became a duchess ?
Yes, certainly the French are quite right in having pulled
down more than half of Oran about the ears of the astonished
Moors, and in having substituted for the stone packing-cases,
with their blinking, wall-eyed little casements, any number of
,
ORAN.
319
pert, staring, six-storied houses, as full of windows as a cullender
is full of holes. They have undeniably produced lightness of
effect, brilliant contrasts of colour, a general glare and glitter
of new shops, new frames, new carpets, and new people, and a
strong current of air. One curious result of the alignement
has been experienced by the present writer in every one of the
eight or ten cities and towns, great and small, in which he has
sojourned during the past five weeks. Every new boulevard
has given him a fresh cold in the head. A whole city as well
as a single room will materially affect one's organisation. A
walk through Brussels, for example, on a Saturday afternoon,
when they are sousing the shop-fronts, is equivalent to a fit of
rheumatism. I will back half a hot day at Cologne to give
you as fine a bilious attack as you need desire; and who ever
passed a night at Burton-on-Trent without dreaming that he
had been out to dinner with a two-bottle man, or had had a
tasting order for the docks, and had not dissuaded the cooper
from thrusting the gimlet into that other cask of peculiar
sherry?
Let the old quarters go, then; let us photograph the cherished
remnants of the past, and then surrender them for ever. Only,
in the interests of aesthetics and good taste, one may be per-
mitted a mild protest against dingy but various antiquity being
replaced by clean and monotonous ugliness. The French have
certainly made no advance in constructional taste under the
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Second Empire. Of Gothic architecture, its principles and
practice, they have continued utterly ignorant since the revo-
lution of 1789, when they broke the noses off the monumental
effigies of their kings, and smashed all the stone altars in
France. Neither those kings nor those altars, nor the mo-
narchy, nor the faith of which they were the symbols, will
ever recover the smash of '89. In classical architecture of a
grandiose but somewhat ponderous kind they have, of course,
done wonders. The architects of Napoleon I. left plenty of
plans behind them, and Napoleon III, has had, in many in-
stances, only to complete the edifices which his uncle began.
The new Louvre, the completed Palais Royal, the interminable
arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, are very gigantic and splendid
performances; but when, fresh from the mean and dingy streets
which smother the public buildings of London, we fall into
ecstasies of delight over the architectural glories of Imperial
Paris, would it not be as well to ask ourselves the question
whether, after all, much of the astounding effect produced is
not due to quantity rather than quality? An abundance of
Ionic and Corinthian columns, mansarde roofs, enriched friezes,
ornate cornices, and niches filled with statues disposed round a
vast area, must in its entirety appear magnificent, the more so
when you make every gate and railing of bronze, and gild all
the lamp-posts, and pop a jardin anglais, as bright as a drop
scene at the opera, in the centre, and place any number of
ORAN.
321
k
sentinels in handsome uniforms round about. But is this new
Louvre, all colossal and sumptuous as it is, entitled to much
higher praise than that there is a great deal of it, that it is
built according to Palladio, with a dash of Jean Goujon, and
that the stone of which it is composed is quite new, and not
likely to be defaced by the filthy smoke of sea-coal? If we
could only clean the outside of St. Paul's from lantern to base,
and give it a blue sky for a background, where would be
St. Peter's? Nowhere I trow. If we could only knock over
the General Post Office in St. Martin's-le-Grand, and multiply
the façade of Goldsmiths' Hall by twenty, we should have less
need to feel a spasm of shame every time we look at the new
Louvre. As for the domestic architecture of the Second Em-
pire, I venture to think it detestable. It consists solely of
storeys piled one atop of another, pierced with ten times too
many windows, and overloaded with the most meretricious de-
corations-hunchbacked caryatides, with their tongues hanging
out, acanthus-leaves growing from the pits of their stomachs,
and groaning under the weight of nothing at all; festoons where
there should be flat surfaces, and string-courses where there
should be mouldings; heads in high reliefs of men with beards,
and women with jonquils sprouting from their ears-heads which
have not even the grotesque merit of a gothic gargoyle, but are
simply idiotic and without signification. But there is plenty of
this unutterable trumpery-miles of it, acres of it; wherever an
*
322
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
open space occurs the architect fills it with plate-glass; where-
ever there is an iron bar he sticks some gold leaf on it. The
result is of course gorgeous; the result is Imperial Paris; the
result is the Boulevard de Sebastopol, de Magenta, de Males-
herbes, du Prince Eugène, du Diable-anything you like to
mention. With an interminable arcade on the ground-floor, the
result is the Rue de Rivoli, the barrenest, unsightliest range of
arches, to my mind, in all Europe, but which the French
imagine to be twenty times finer than the Piazza del Popolo or
the Procuratie Vecchie. But the inside of these Imperial
palaces! Well, you have seen the Grand Hôtel and the Hôtel
du Louvre, the Grand Café and the saloons of the Jockey Club.
A thousand nimble decorators have cribbed the ornaments from
the Galerie d'Apollon and the state apartments of Versailles,
and stuck them thick as peas all over the walls, cornices, and
ceilings. The result is a combination of Madame Tussaud's
Napoleon Museum, the Kursaal at Hombourg, the Hampton-
Courtism of Verrio and Laguerre, and a nightmare vision of the
Court of Lions in the Alhambra. And then we are bidden to
fall down and worship the Golden Calf of Imperial Paris! In
the whole of renovated France, in all this dazzling mayonnaise,
this incredible salmagundi of scene-painting, stone-chipping,
mouldings and bosses, columns and curtains, carvings and gild-
ings, arcades without end and composite poodle columns, I state
a conscientious belief that there has not been erected during
ORAN.
323
the last fifteen years one new or original public building which
can vie with the Royal Exchange, London, with the Bank
of Ireland, or with St. George's Hall, Liverpool. I put our
Gothic and Tudor triumphs-our Westminster Palace, our
Margaret Street Church, our Lincoln's Inn Hall-quite on
one side.
It is a far cry, I admit, from the Boulevard de Sebastopol to
Africa; and you may ask what on earth this diatribe against the
barren copiousness of Parisian architecture has to do with the
travaux de l'alignement at Oran. I answer, everything. I
cannot at this distance recollect in what English historian occurs
an eloquent passage describing how the ancient Roman, where-
ever in the confines of the huge empire he might be, met at
every moment, and at every turn, with something to remind him
of Cæsar-of the universality of his power, the might of his
influence, the terror of his name. The whole world was one
vast picture to him with Cæsar fecit in the left-hand bottom
corner. Modern Imperialism seeks to be equally ubiquitous.
You may mark the meanest potsherds in a pyramid branded
with the ibis or the scarabæus; those who in centuries to come.
delve among the ruins of French Imperialism may find the very
bricks of a sewer stamped with the letter "N." The Cæsarean
boulevards, the Cæsarean six-storeyed houses, the Cæsarean
cafés, hotels, columns, curtains, festoons, faces with jonquils
sprouting from their ears and caryatides with nothing to carry,
Y 2
324
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
are being repeated on a gradually diminishing scale all over the
French provinces and all over Algeria. Go where you will, you
shall not escape from Cæsar. He is everywhere. Enter a little
café in a country town, say at Blidah, look up at the ceiling, and
there is Cæsar, in the guise of an Imperial eagle, clawing his
thunderbolts and winking his left eye with an expression of
command. Stroll into a marionette theatre and pay your five
sous to see the puppets, and Cæsar's arms are glowing over the
proscenium. The old world of France had grown obsolete; its
new birth has been accelerated by the Cæsarean operation.
The Mayor of Milliana conspires with the engineer of the
Ponts et Chaussées to drive a street through a Moorish bath-
house, a mosque, a fendouck, and a congeries of hovels, inha-
bited since the last earthquake by five hundred true believers
with never a shirt among them. The new street becomes the
Boulevard de l'Impératrice; the open space at the end is
christened the Place Napoléon, and forthwith surrounded by
cafés, cercles militaires, and hôtels de la préfecture.
Philippe, I have already remarked, did his best to Orleanise
Algeria. Numbers of places with Orleanist names remain to
attest the existence of his transitory dynasty; but his efforts
were faint and futile with what Imperialism has accomplished.
Poor L. P. had not enough money, or, at least, he was chary of
disbursing his five-franc pieces, and unsuccessful in persuading
other people to spend theirs. But despotism, backed by a
Louis
ORAN.
325
Crédit Mobilier, has a wonderful potency in procuring the
running up of new buildings. The Crédit Mobilier and its off-
shoots have been my landlords for five weeks. The Crédit
Mobilier or its succursals have charged me a franc a day for the
service I have not enjoyed, and seventy-five centimes for the
bougies I have not burned. Wherever I have gone in France
or Africa, I have found a joint-stock hotel, or one with a bogus
proprietor, who has borrowed his capital from somebody, who
has got it from somebody else, who has got it from the Crédit
Mobilier. The Algerians have got a little assistance from a
little Crédit Mobilier, but not enough. They ask for more, like
Oliver Twist. They would like to cut Emile Pereire into so
many hundred pieces, like the eyes of potatoes, and sow him
broadcast all over the Tell and the Sahel. With judicious ad-
ministrative manure he might come up nicely even in the
Sahara. If they had more Crédit Mobilier-or Crédit some-
thing or another-the Algerians urge, they would not be
obliged to borrow from the native usurers, who charge ten per
cent. a month, a hundred and twenty per annum. The real
question for solution is, whether the indiscriminate multiplica-
tion of new buildings is really conducive to prosperity. It is a
curious fact that a miscellaneous race of traders do seem to
follow the army of masons and carpenters and decorators, just
as camp-followers toil in the wake of an Indian army, and set
up a bazaar so soon as ever the tents are pitched. No sooner
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are the new boulevards finished, and the new shops ready for
letting, than they are tenanted by a tribe of vendors of spark-
ling rubbish-queer people of disciplined Zingari mien, the
Bohemians of retail commerce; prodigious old women with
yellow handkerchiefs round their heads, swarthy men in fur
caps, pale-faced lads in blouses, gawky girls dangling their legs
over stools, and reading the Petit Journal as they wait for
custom. Go through one series of articles, and it is repeated
over and over again, ad infinitum. There is no variety. It is
Boulevard de Sebastopol, Boulevard de Magenta, and Boulevard
de Malesherbes; and then Boulevard de Malesherbes, Boulevard
de Magenta, and Boulevard de Sebastopol-the same glass cases
full of two-franc jewellery, the same scarlet dog-collars, stereo-
scopic views of the Rue de Rivoli and the Nouveau Louvre,
photographic cartes de visite of Marshal Magnan, the Prince
Imperial, M. Emile Ollivier, Mademoiselle Theresa, Monseigneur
Dupanloup, the Emperor Maximilian, and "Skittles." I bought
a pretty large collection of photographs of Arab costumes at
Algiers; but the shopkeeper became quite downcast when I
refused to purchase the effigies of the Bishop of Orleans and
Skittelle," charmante Miss Anglaise. The same looking-
glasses, bad cutlery, papier-maché blotting-cases with pictures
from Sir Edwin Landseer's deerstalkings on the cover, electro-
plated inkstands, sham bronze candlesticks, ormolu clocks, toy
guns, sabretasches and shakoes, poodles that bark when their
t
ORAN.
327
pedestals are squeezed, flashy lithographs, coloured sheets re-
presenting the uniforms of the vivandières of the Imperial
Guard, histories of Madame Croquemitaine and La Belle au
Bois dormant. "La Religieuse," "Le Maudit," and "Le Moine,"
and "Le Consulat et l'Empire" in three sous numbers-these
are at the bookshops. The same twenty-five centime lottery
tickets of the Musée Napoléon-the same fans, gloves, rattles,
skipping-ropes, and martinets for the correction of naughty
children. Who makes all these things? Where do they come
from ?-Birmingham? No, they are the inferior class of the
articles de Paris. They are Imperialism, Boulevardism, Grand
Hotelism, Sebastopolism, Magentaism, Malesherbism, adapted
to the humblest perceptions and the slenderest purses. You
are at Oran, but you shall still be able to fancy yourself under
the beloved arcades of Rivoli. Walk in; there is entrée libre.
You may buy a pocket-full of glittering bric-à-brac for a
couple of francs. But ah! what a relief it is to quit this
jejune and tawdry raree-show and plunge into a little sinuous
shady alley, where Hassan the cobbler drones his drowsy
song over the yellow slipper he is mending, or where at the
corner Sidi Bou-Ali, in his great white burnouse, tattered and
foul, but standing erect and haughty as the King Sennacherib,
lays his brown and skinny hand on the shoulder of the
itinerant fruitseller and cheapens dates in the name of the
Prophet.
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The Administration would like very much to get rid of
Hassan the cobbler, and to convert the tattered man who sells
dates into a respectable épicier-I beg pardon, a marchand de
denrées coloniales. The alignement is pushed forward, the
new boulevards are built, the tall houses are run up in such
haste that their constructors, the entrepreneurs en bâtiments—
I am not speaking, of course, of "Sir Peto "-are often bank-
rupt before they are finished; the pettiest towns are running
into debt at lightning express speed; but the "future of the
colony" is still enveloped in darkness and doubt. The people
who sell the two-franc jewellery and the dog-collars are, after
all, but a nomadic race; they are here to-day and gone
to-morrow; their stock-in-trade requires no great outlay of
capital; one prosperous cheesemonger in an English country
town might buy the whole lot up. There is a want throughout
Algeria of shops that bear the impress of solidity-of shops
that look as though their owners were capable of doing some
wholesale business. There is not even about them the homely,
higgledy-piggledy, everything-shop look of the "stores" in
Canada and Nova Scotia, whose proprietors advertise in the
local journals that they have just received a consignment of
moire antiques, Inverness capes, parlour harmoniums, Dent's
watches, cod liver oil, Bagster's Bibles, Revalenta Arabica,
photographs of the Royal Family, and patent blacking. Every-
thing in the Algerian magasins looks bright and pretty, but
ORAN.
320
has a thin, brittle, and unsubstantial allure. In a word, you
might fancy that trade was done here exclusively by members
of the celebrated Veneering family. Nor do the customers
possess more than the dealers the genuine colonial look. I
speak of the French inhabiting the towns. They all look as
though they had landed from Marseilles by the last steamer,
and were going back by the next. The large garrisons in all
the towns save them outwardly from being dull, just as the
number of strange native costumes render them, in despite of
the frenzy for demolition, continually and kaleidoscopically pic-
turesque; but you perceive at once among the French the want
of a fixed, homely population, who will beget children that shall
afterwards point to Algeria as their native land. Those milli-
ners' girls are not enfants du peuple. They have been imported
in a batch from an atélier at Paris or Marseilles. Those school-
boys racing about and making faces at the little Arabs, who
return the grimaces with interest, are not the children of set-
tlers. They belong to employés of the Administration, or are
enfants de troupe from the regiments in garrison. If Asmo-
deus could be your companion during a stroll in the Rue
Kleber or the Place Napoléon, he would point out to you so
many wives of juges d'instruction and commissaires-priseurs,
so many daughters of chefs de bureau, so many nieces of sub-
stituts du Procureur Impérial, but very few who have made
Algeria their home for good. The smallest town is an official
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world in miniature. Everybody is something, as in some petty
German principality. But the people-the multitude—are
lacking, whereas they abound in Germany; or rather the real
people are here represented by Hassan the cobbler, or Sidi
Bou-Ali, with his skinny brown hand, who sits apart, and curses
the Giaour under his breath. I don't see how that "civilisa-
tion" of the Arabs, to which supreme authority vaguely points,
is to be helped out by the new boulevards, or the tall houses,
or the veneering shops. The Bedouins will certainly never be
regenerated by means of bad cutlery, photographs of "Skittelle,"
and scarlet leather dog-collars, for they hold artistic portraiture
in general to be an abomination, and in the way of bric-a-brac
they beat the French hollow in the confection of trifles in
Morocco leather; whereas the Kabyles manufacture swords and
razors of which Sheffield would not be ashamed. There is one
section of optimists among those who study the Algerian ques-
tion who would leave everything to railways. Give Algeria
plenty of iron roads, they say, and in twenty years' time the
Arabs will be civilised. Railways, in British India, they point
out, are rapidly undermining the prejudices of caste. Railways
in Algeria, they reason from analogy, will not fail in the long
run to abrogate Mahometanism in Africa. The theory is a
plausible one; only thus much is certain-if the Mussulman
abandon his own religion, he will never take up ours; and a
nation of atheists could scarcely be called civilised. Of the
ORAN.
331
ignorant and savage idolater the Christian missionary is, hap-
pily, able to make an interesting and exemplary convert; but
what are you to do with a man who is already in possession of a
detailed and formulated scheme of religion-who has his recog-
nised traditions and his authorised Scripture-who pits his
saints against your saints, his miracles against your miracles,
his prophets against your prophets, and who, when you begin
to tell him-say, about Abraham and Isaac-tells you with a
grave bow that he knows the story very well, and believes it
implicitly, only that you have fallen into error with respect to
one of the names, and that it should be Abraham and Ishmael?
No one can accuse the Roman Catholic clergy in any part of
the world of a want of zeal in proselytising; yet, with the
exception of a stray nigger now and then-and the negro will
join any church that will give him couscoussou for nothing
and facilities for hammering the tam-tam-the results of
missionary labour in Algeria since the conquest have been
virtually nil.
Alignation is doing its best to spoil Oran structurally; but it
is powerless to prevent its being, from its mixed population,
about the most curious gathering of humanity possible to con-
ceive out of Constantinople. The town is about two-thirds as
large as Algiers, and has about half its population; but of its
twenty-three thousand souls only seven thousand are Arabs.
The number of French may be about the same; the rest are
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Jews, Italians, Biskris or anybodies from anywhere, and espe-
cially Spaniards. Many of these last are the descendants of
Spaniards settled here for centuries, and others are emigrants
who are continually flocking over from Old Spain, the nearest
point of which to Oran, Carthagena, is but a day and a half's
steaming. It must not be forgotten that for centuries Oran has
been a kind of political challenge-cup. Half-a-dozen nations
have in turn fought for it, conquered it, lost it, conquered and
lost it again. The French are the present holders, and their
grip is a tight one; but there is no knowing to what vicissi-
tudes this town of strange fortunes is yet destined. Roman
medals, belonging to different epochs, have been found in
abundance in the neighbourhood; and the archæologists are at
issue as to whether Oran stands on the site of the Quiza Muni-
cipium of Antonius, or the Quiza Xenitana of Pliny. All, how-
ever, are agreed that the modern village of Mers-el-Kebir is the
ancient Portus Divinus, and that the little stream called by the
Arabs El Qued-Malah, and by the Spaniards El Rio Salado, or
Salt River, is the Flumen Salsum of the Romans. But the
archæologists here, as at many other points of interest on the
littoral, are necessarily thrown all abroad by the frequent
recurrence of earthquakes in and about Oran, which have mixed
up the soil like a salad, altered the levels, and torn down all the
landmarks. There was a stupendous earthquake in 1790, con-
sisting of twenty-two distinct upheavings, which continued with
OPAN.
333
but brief intervals for nearly a month. This capped the climax
of catastrophe so far as the Spanish supremacy at Oran was
concerned. A third of the garrison, and a vast number of the
inhabitants, perished amidst the ruins; provisions ran short; the
fortifications tumbled to pieces; hearing of which, the Bey of
Maskara cunningly marched an army of thirty thousand men
along the coast, and laid siege to the unhappy city. Spanish
reinforcements were hurried over from Carthagena and Majorca,
but in the meantime the Regency of Algiers made peace with
Spain; and one of the provisions of the treaty was that Oran
should be evacuated, the Spaniards being allowed to take away
their artillery, their goods, and as many Christians as chose to
follow them, but leaving intact such of the fortifications as the
earthquake had spared.
XVIII.
CÆSAR AT ORAN.
IN that same opera of L'Africaine, which has already given
me more than one treat for a sermonette, the French papers
tell us there are, between the acts, four intervals of three-
quarters of an hour each. The audience grumble, gossip in
their stalls, repair to the neighbouring cafés, or saunter in the
foyer; but these interregna are, it is said, indispensable to the
proper conduct of the piece. Everybody behind the scenes
requires breathing-time. A ship has to be built and sub-
sequently demolished; Vasco de Gama needs repose and voice-
lozenges after the exhausting task of setting the world (on
Mercator's projection) to music; all the fiddle-bows have to be
re-rosined, and all the leaves of the fatal mancenillier rubbed
with coculus indicus; finally, L'Africaine herself must have
her complexion rebronzed with the proper pigments. Ah! if
the grand melodrama of human life could only be divided into
so many acts, with say half-an-hour or twenty minutes' pause
between them! If the world would only stand still a little!
CÆSAR AT ORAN.
335
But the world won't. The huge ball persists in revolving on
its axis with unvarying and eternal punctuality. In the good
old times, it is true, there was something like a surcease
between one day and the next. The act-drop fell at sunset,
and rose again, with the lark and the sun, next morning.
People really went to sleep between the acts; they were
rocked with the ding-dong lullaby of the curfew, to be wakened
by the sprightly alarum of cockcrow. But who goes to sleep
nowadays? Who is not a king or a president, a member of
parliament or an editor, a compositor or a journeyman baker,
an electric telegraph clerk or a night porter, a policeman or an
officer of the watch, a railway guard or a market gardener?
The world has such an immense amount of business to get
through, that the whole of humanity is divided into gangs,
working by relays, and taking their spell of night duty in turn.
There is always somebody up; there is always something
going on. Does the railway whistle ever go to sleep? Do
the cab wheels ever know slumber? They say we live faster
in these times. Yes, it is of the fastest, this fierce and frenzied
hurry-skurry of events and interests and passions. The Human
Comedy has come to resemble, not a staid five-act performance
of the orthodox type, but one of those interminable spectacles
of the Théâtre du Châtelet, in which the act-drop plays no
part, but there is an unbroken succession of tableaux, each
one more astounding than the other: while some especially
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elaborate transformation is in preparation, the cunning car-
penters run on a cottage or a chamber scene close to the
footlights, in front of which the ferocious tyrant and the comic
servant of the piece play antics or propound conundrums till
the splendid "effect" behind is ready. Or the rather, while
simile runs on in a dramatic groove, may not the World's
Theatre, just now, be likened to one of those music halls which
the London managers, with the left-handed assistance of the
Lord Chamberlain, are striving in a purblind manner to put
down? Garish decorations, much blazing gas, sensational en-
tertainments, overflowing audiences of the most miscellaneous
kind. Dancing and tumbling and shrieking; women half-
dressed and men half-drunk; no rest, no halt; comic songs,
spangles, mutton chops, gauze petticoats, "Slap, bang! here
we are again, for jolly dogs are we;" cigars, selections from
Tannhäuser, the Lancashire clog hornpipe; "Come into the
garden, Maud;" devilled kidneys, pork-pie hats, the Stabat
Mater, boiled potatoes, and brandy-and-water hot; all the fun
of the fair, grandest entertainment in the metropolis, and any
number of servant-maids ruined. Such an olla podrida as I
have set down may appear grotesque and overcharged, but it is
not a whit stranger or more heterogeneous than the daily group
of telegrams which Mr. Reuter sends us; and what are those
telegrams but the programme of twenty-four hours' performance
of the Human Comedy?
CÆSAR AT ORAN.
337
The late Andrew Ducrow, observing in the orchestra at
Astley's a trumpeter whose clarion rested idly on his thigh,
asked him sharply what he was about. If you please, sir,"
replied the musician, pointing to his score, "I've got forty bars'
rest." "I don't pay you for resting; I pay you for blowing,"
quoth Andrew Ducrow, "and blow you shall." Forty bars' rest!
If the course of circumstances could only have been persuaded
to take forty bars' rest during the last six weeks. But fate,
sterner and more exigent than the Astley's manager, has sat
in the orchestra, and the trumpeters have been forced to
crack their cheeks in incessant blasts. There are none of
us so exalted, and few so humble, but might have been
grateful lately for the very briefest interval in the torrent of
incidents.
Taking the last first, I should have been infinitely obliged
to the Emperor Napoleon if he had travelled with a little less
celerity—if he had sojourned a few days longer at Algiers, at
Oran, at Fort Napoleon, at Constantine-if, in short, his move-
ments had been a little less like those of an Imperial whirlwind.
The art of instantaneous photography is making, I am told,
most gratifying progress; but, notwithstanding the antiquity of
the sister science of phonography, instantaneous caligraphy is
still one of the triumphs of the future. To keep pace with
modern rapidity, both in history, thought, and locomotion, a
journal composed in short-hand and printed by lightning, to
Z
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be read by people with no less than six eyes apiece, might,
perhaps, be a desideratum.
f
And Cæsar? and the master of so many legions, the disposer
of so many events, the hero of so many blazes of triumphs, the
Père Noble of the Imperial French drama? Might not he, too,
have gratefully appreciated forty bars' rest-not in his own
immediate part of the drama, for he has been indefatigable,
and has been borne, so to speak, on the wings of the sirocco
without turning a hair-but on that considerable section of
the political stage which he left behind him? In something
like the irony of the unseen, just before the Emperor went
away the submarine cable between France and Algeria broke.
It seemed determined beforehand, that he whose boast it is
that he holds his entire empire in the palm of his hand should
find a broken link in the chain of centralisation, and should
experience, like ordinary mortals, some delay in the knowledge
of what had occurred in his absence. It may not be generally
known that the managing director of the Atlantic Telegraph
Company, happening to be in Paris when the news of the
disaster to the Algerian telegraph arrived, and having a large
quantity of extra cable on hand, most courteously placed a
thousand miles of it at the disposal of the French Government.
For divers occult reasons, the generous offer could not be
accepted; but it was, as I have reason to know, acknowledged
in terms worthy of the spirit which prompted it. This was
CÆSAR AT ORAN.
339
contretemps. number one. Telegraphic communication could
be had through Spain to Carthagena, nearly opposite Oran,
whence the passage from Europe to Africa is but of eighteen
hours' duration. A special service of swift avvisos was there-
fore organised for the conveyance of despatches between Oran
and Carthagena, and a considerable amount of time conse-
quently gained; but the loss through the unlucky snapping
of the cable between Algiers and the French coast was still
most serious. The foreseeing sovereign had made every
arrangement for things to go on comfortably during his
absence. The Empress was Regent; Prince Napoleon was
Vice-President of the Privy Council; Mr. Bigelow had delivered
his credentials as Minister from the United States, and the most
amicable assurances had been interchanged between France and
America; the chiefs of the Parliamentary opposition were to
be asked to dinner at the Tuileries, and made much of by the
Empress Regent: everything, in short, was to go merry as a
marriage bell, only much more quietly. And away sped the
Emperor in triumph, and when that awful collision between
the vessels of the Imperial squadron took place in the
port of Marseilles-the collision in which Le Solferino all
but sank Le Daim, but of which the papers have been
permitted to say scarcely anything-his Majesty never lost
his presence of mind, but is reported to have said to the rear-
admiral in command, "Partez à toute vitesse," put on steam and
Z 2
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go ahead-the modern translation of " Quid times? Cæsarem
vehis."
But that pestilent world would not stand still, and there was
to be no breathing time between the acts. There came to Paris
the secretary of the Emperor Maximilian, evidently-all official
pooh-poohings to the contrary-with news that affairs in Mexico
are in a bad way, and would be worse so soon as ever France
should get tired of maintaining 35,000 men in the country.
Concurrently with M. Eloin's arrival came the news of the
Mexican recruiting movement in the Northern States; a move-
ment which, as yet, possesses scarcely any significance-the
time for mass meetings to vindicate the Monroe doctrine and
filibustering expeditions to Sonora being not ripe yet by many
months. This was contretemps number two. Then M. Thiers,
deputy for the department of the Seine, that wonderful little
old man who at 70 years of age is still as eloquent and vivacious
as when he stung the Bourbons to death in the columns of Le
National, must needs start up in the tribune of the Legislative
Assembly and deliver one of the most crushing exposures of the
prodigality and mismanagement of the French finances ever
heard within those walls. Adolphe Thiers has been a Minister
of Finance himself, and there is a story that, entering a café
once to take some refreshment, he left, on departing, his purse
on the table.
"And this, forsooth," cried the garçon, con-
temptuously picking up the ministerial portemonnaie, "is the
CÆSAR AT ORAN.
311
man who takes care of the national strong box." It is needless
to say that the garçon belonged to the Opposition. And then
the fourth, the worst of all. His Majesty's attached and devoted
cousin, his Majesty's loyal and trusty Vice-President of the
Privy Council, the President of the Commission of the Exhibi-
tion of 1867, the prince of the blood, the lord of the Palais
Royal and the Pompeian house-his Imperial Highness Prince
Napoleon, in fact-went to Ajaccio and made that dreadful
speech. How it must have astonished the Corsicans, if those
worthy islanders of Italian descent understood it! But how
the prefect must have been stricken dumb, how the mayor of
Ajaccio must have looked blank, and the adjoint paralysed!
When you come to read the speech there does not appear, at
the first glance, to be anything particularly dreadful about it.
Aspirations for the liberation of nationalities have been attri-
buted to Napoleon I. before this. The memoirs of Benjamin
Constant are full of the promises the great man made, just
before and just after Waterloo, to govern constitutionally and
grant entire freedom to the press. Waterloo, and the courage
of the late King Jerome thereat, are painted in roseat tints;
there is an allusion to St. Helena, and a slap at the memory
of the late Sir Hudson Lowe, which might be warranted to
"bring down the house," in an Imperial sense, without obviously
offending the powers that be. But when you read the speech
attentively, paragraph by paragraph, line by line, and word by
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word—as the present writer did on shipboard, the agitated state
of the Mediterranean Sea preventing him from writing—you
may without much difficulty discern what it contains, or does
not contain, of a nature calculated infinitely to vex supreme
authority, and, in particular, those who are more Imperialist
than the Emperor. With the exception of an allusion in the
opening paragraph to the fact of his Majesty having given the
bronze for the monument at Ajaccio, there is not, from begin-
ning to the end of that long and elaborate harangue, one single
allusion by name, and scarcely one by implication, to Napoleon
III., or the great things which he has accomplished. To
endeavour to whitewash the fame of Jerome Bonaparte was a
filial and a pardonable act; but to leave without allusion the
deeds of him who has restored the fallen fortunes of the
Bonaparte family was more than an offence of lese majesté;
it was an act difficult to understand, or to associate with the
official position of the actor. Thus the Imperial cushion during
this progress, now approaching termination, has been tolerably
well stuffed with thorns, and in the laurel wreath of triumph a
few spiky leaves have asserted themselves to warn the wearer
that he was mortal. All of which, I take it, must be entirely
attributed to the fact of the world refusing to stand still, and of
there being no three-quarter-of-an-hour intervals between the
acts.
In my last summary of the Emperor's movements I left his
CÆSAR AT ORAN.
313
Majesty at Oran. He has since returned to Algiers, and made
an excursion to Fort Napoleon, in Kabylia. Then he returned
to Algiers, and then took his departure for Philippeville, whence
he proceeded to Constantine, and to Batna and Bistra, on the
extreme verge of the Desert of Sahara. After this I have lost
count of the Emperor Napoleon. The last I heard of him
he was on his way, by sea, to Stora, otherwise Bona, and ere
you receive this letter his Majesty may have returned to
France.
Respecting the Emperor's sojourn in Oran itself, it was the
sojourn at Algiers on a somewhat diminished scale, and there is
little more to be said on the subject without repeating the ten
times told tale of official receptions, official speeches, and official
dinners. On the excursions, however, in the vicinity of the
city made by the Emperor during his stay, I may dwell a little
more in detail. Let us say a few words about Mers-el-Kebir.
It may also be hinted that, of all the atrocious nests of piracy
which, from the days of Tasso to those of Marshal Bourmont,
made the Barbary coast a nuisance to the civilised world, this
Mers-el-Kebir was the worst. It was a little place, but awfully
wicked. They say that the stings of the tiniest mosquitoes are
the most to be feared. Even the Portuguese, who have in most
ages been a peaceable kind of folk, lost their patience at the
incorrigible piraticisms of Mers-el-Kebir, and bombarded it
once pretty smartly. Bombarded it! the Mers-el-Kebirines
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were accustomed to bombshells, even as the hardened little
Pickle of a public school grows accustomed to the birch, and
counts that day a dull one on which he has not been flogged.
The French blew it up in 1830, even before they had made up
their minds to occupy Oran. Nature has given it surprising
strategical advantages; that is to say, it looks precisely the
sort of place that ought to be bombarded, being a mere rugged
tongue of rock, jutting out into the sea and covered with forts,
more or less ruinous, while the trumpery little town behind
scrambles down a mountain, and hooks on by the tail end to
the fortress. Seen from the summit of the mountain, Mers-el-
Kebir, thrusting its tongues like a thirsty soul into the blue
Mediterranean, is very like Monaco, that naughty little
gambling den on the other side of the Mediterranean, which
would be likewise, I take it, none the worse for some moral
bombardment. The resemblance is increased by the old
Spanish road, with nothing but a six-inch parapet between it
and the precipice, running along the scarp of the mountain at a
height of 400 feet above the level of the town. A false step
of your mule, and you might be hurled headlong on to the
minarets of the mosque of Mers-el-Kebir, or into the sea. The
French, however, who are certainly the best topographers in
the world, have cut a new road out of the living rock, close to
the shore; and the old Spanish track-a miniature chemin de
la corniche, like that between Monaco, or rather Mentone,
CÆSAR AT ORAN.
345
and Nice, joining the grander one to Genoa-has fallen into
disuse.
The Emperor was seemingly wishful to remind the inhabi-
tants of Mers-el-Kebir that their immunity from shot and shell
depended solely upon their good behaviour, and that if they
deserved the punishment they might be bombarded again. A
sham fight on a grand scale was gone through in the little bay.
The ironclads belched many broadsides, luckily harmless, at
the forts, and the forts, manned by French artillerymen bien
entendu, were allowed to emit responsive thunders. It was
settled by authority that the forts were to be supposed to have
the worst of it, and the fleet withdrew in triumph; thus
settling, it is to be inferred, at once and for ever, the great
question of the superiority of iron ships over stone walls.
Mers-el-Kebir en était quitte pour la peur; but she may know
what she has to expect should M. de Girardin's wishes ever be
gratified, and, " Algeria being restored to the Algerines," Mers-
el-Kebir return, as she surely would in such a conjuncture, to
her old piratical ways. Imperial excursions of a far different
nature were those to the towns of Sidi-bel-Abbis and St Denis-
du-Sig. Sidi-bel-Abbis is a considerable town, 82 kilometres
from Oran, and in the midst of a district which is one mass of
olive and mulberry trees. The combination has a romantic
sound, but, alas! is there a much uglier sight anywhere than a
plantation of olive trees? In the interest of the picturesque,
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give me, decidedly, hops. Sidi-bel-Abbis is of about the same
calibre as Blidah or Milliana, and scores of similar towns, more
than half French, formerly picturesque, but now undergoing the
ruthless metamorphosis of the alignement. There is a theatre
where the good old stock vaudevilles of Passé Minuit, Le Sourd,
and La Chambre à Deux Lits-our "Two in the Morning,"
"Deaf as a Post," and "Box and Cox," are not yet thought
obsolete, a café chantant, several tolerable hotels, and a military
club. The cercle militaire in Algeria, and indeed in France, is
quite a modern institution, and has not yet become very popular
among military men. Rag-and-Famishism is decidedly not one
of the characteristic elements of the French army, nay, nor
Senior nor Junior United Serviceism. The natural club of the
French officer, his second home, is the café. There he smokes
his halfpenny cigar, plays his twopenny game at piquet, and
reads the Moniteur de l'Armée. He is not horsy, even when
in the cavalry—he has had too much of horseflesh at Saumur
and never bets. He is not literary, and does not thirst after La
Revue des Deux Mondes, or Le Mémorial Diplomatique. He
twists his moustache so fiercely, rattles his long sword on the
floor and clinks his spurs so aggressively, that he frightens the
pékins or civilians away from the café which he frequents, and
has it, de facto, to himself. What does he want with a club?
Moreover, there is no social equality among the officers of the
French army. There is more between officers and sergeants, or
CÆSAR AT ORAN.
347
even privates, than between the captain and a lieutenant,
between the gros major and a subaltern. "Je vous flanque
aux arrêts” is a monition very frequently heard by a junior, to
remind him that as yet the bullion of his epaulettes is incom-
plete. The officers do not mess together. Even if they are en
pension at the same hotel, the officers, superior or field and
staff officers, take their meals in one apartment, the captains in
another, and the subalterns in a third. Discipline, military
authorities declare, would suffer were the system otherwise.
I have had considerable difficulty in persuading intelligent
French officers that the president of an English regimental mess
may be a junior ensign, and that at table, and, in fact, anywhere
out of the orderly-room and the parade-ground, there is no
social difference between the colonel and the subaltern. Those
French officers, however, who have been in the Crimea under-
stand our regimental system and its working perfectly well.
It is admirable, they admit, but it would never do in France.
Your officers," they say, "whatever their difference of military
rank, all belong to the same class of society. Ils sont tous
'gentlemans.' Promotion from the ranks with you is rare.
With us, although by no means the rule-for at least fifty per
cent. of our officers come from St. Cyr-it is frequent. If you
had, say 12 out of 40 officers at table who had been privatẹ
soldiers, you would very soon find social equality in military
life a chimera and an impossibility." From which it is to bę
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concluded that there is much that is good in both systems, and
that each is equally adapted to the requirements of the country
in which it is followed. For instance, such a case as that which
we have just read in Galignani, that of the impracticable and
cantankerous Colonel of the Guards, would be impossible of occur-
rence in the French army. An officer of high rank may make
himself as disagreeable to those beneath him as ever he pleases.
His subalterns have but to obey. Moreover, he can only annoy
their social enjoyments and
them in matters of duty. With
domestic concerns he has nothing whatever to do. On the
other hand, if he be a subaltern and given to quarrelling with
his fellows, his irritability will very speedily come to an end by
means of the inch and a half of daylight which will be let
through him by a broadsword in one of the 20 duels to which he
is sure to be challenged. But I cannot for all this see what the
French officer can want with a club.
Sidi-bel-Abbis enjoys the inestimable advantage of having no
history worth speaking about. It is a creation, in fact, of the
day before yesterday; but it has a mayor, an adjunct, a conseil
municipal, communal schools-an administration, in fact-and
it greeted the Emperor with the triumphal arches, the speeches,
and the vivats de rigueur. Stay, there is one little romantic
incident on record touching Sidi-bel-Abbis. There, just twenty
years since, took place the desperate encounter known as the
Attempt of the Fifty-eight. It must be premised that the town
CÆSAR AT ORAN.
343
takes its name from the Marabout or koubba of Sidi-bel-Abbis,
one of the innumerable holy men of Algeria, whose shrine adjoins
the redoubt or block-house erected for the defence of the place.
In the month of January, 1845, this redoubt was manned only
by a company of military invalids, the main body of the
garrison having marched on an expedition against the Oulad-
Sliman. Early one morning the sentry on duty saw a band of
Arabs, clad in rags, and carrying only the matragurs, or long
sticks, which all classes bear when travelling, approaching the
redoubt. They began to recite prayers in a very fervent
manner, and the sentinel, thinking them merely pilgrims
desirous of visiting the shrine of the holy Marabout hard by,
allowed them to pass. Suddenly the foremost ragged man of
the band up with his
stick and knocked the sentry into the
ditch of the redoubt. The rest made a rush at the gate; guns,
pistols, poignards, and yataghans were produced from beneath
the ragged burnouses. For a short time the fifty-eight were
masters of the redoubt; but the military hospital club rallied
the most valid of the convalescents; the tables were turned,
and the fifty-eight were, to the last Bedouin, exterminated. The
history of the conquest of Algeria is full of charming little
episodes such as this. Nor must the sequel be omitted, to the
effect that it having been discovered that these half-hundred
and odd fanatics belonged to the tribe of Oulad-Brahim, and
had been incited to their attempt by the preaching of a certain
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Marabout, also a member of that tribe, an expedition, otherwise
called a razzia, was organised against the Oulad-Brahim for the
purpose of "chastising" them. For such a chastisement as a
razzia nothing but scorpions will serve. The chastising column
burn up the country of the offending tribe right and left, drive
off their flocks and herds, seize their chattels wherever they can
lay hands on them. There are two sides to every question.
Hear both of this. Had the fifty-eight succeeded in capturing
the redoubt of Sidi-bel-Abbis they would have massacred the
entire garrison, sick or whole. They would-as is the invariable
and fiendish custom-have mutilated the corpses in a manner
too cruel and revolting to be more than hinted at here. Give
and take is the law in Algerian warfare; that is, give no quarter
and take none. Still bearing in mind the mutuality of merci-
Tess slaughter in this conflict, which has now been going on with
but brief respite of tranquillity for upwards of thirty years, one
may be entitled to doubt the probability of anything of a really
friendly understanding springing up between the vanquished
and the victors. The Emperor put the question very logically
the other day in his proclamation to the Arabs. "We, the
French," he pointed out, "are forty millions against two millions
of Arabs. The odds are twenty to one. Une lutte insensée.
Can't you see that you had much better submit?" But were
the odds five hundred instead of twenty to one, may not, from
time to time, fresh fanatics arise to despise disparity of numbers,

CÆSAR AT ORAN.
351
and to surmount obstacles even more formidable than these?
Algeria is at present quiet. The Babors of Kabylia, of whom I
have spoken more than once, and who were lately in revolt, have
tendered their submission. I really believe that the Emperor's
visit, fruitful as it has been in evidence of his material strength,
his strong will, and his desire to act fairly by the natives, has
done an appreciable amount of good. It remains to be seen
whether that good will be of a permanent character, or whether,
when the Sultan has taken his departure, the old hallucinations
about independence will not arise. I really believe that the
French are actuated by no wish more earnest than to deal
justly and generously with the Arabs and to live in harmony
with them. Their razzias, massacres, and cave-smotherings have
been, after all, so many acts of retaliation against a savage and
implacable foe; but there is no knowing whether more razzias,
more "exterminations," more "executive measures," resembling
those of the cave of Dahra, may not be called for by the stern
exigencies of a war necessarily predatory, sanguinary, and
vindictive. There has been lately a revolt in Tunis. There is
a rebellion in full swing in Morocco, which the Sultan has called
out his famous "Black Guards" to quell. The Algerian pulse
vibrates in sympathy to every throb felt in a neighbouring
Mahometan country. Without telegraphs, without posts, with-
out carriages, without roads, political news travels with amazing
rapidity among Mussulmans. A beggar is the mobacher, the
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tr
bringer of tidings;" a pilgrim is the carrier-pigeon; a leaf, or
a few grains of seed, are a despatch. The interior of Algeria
may be as quiet as Kennington Oval to-day, and all in a flame
a month hence.
The Arabs, say the French with a sigh, are not to be trusted.
Whenever, in this world's history, were one's deadly enemies-
men who have not the same blood, who do not speak the same
tongue, who do not hold the same creed-to be trusted? They
must be civilised, say the optimists. They must be exter-
minated, say the pessimists. But they won't be civilised,
thinking their own civilisation quite sufficient and quite good
enough for their needs; and they cannot be exterminated.
Two millions of hardy, industrious, sober, warlike people are not
to be swept off the face of the earth like the miserable abori-
gines of Van Diemen's Land. We have not been able to
exterminate the Kaffirs. We have failed either to convert or to
kill off the New Zealanders. In North America the Indians
have gone to the wall, simply for the reason that their number
was scanty compared with the vastness of the territory over
which they were scattered, and they had to contend against a
numerous and continually renewed European emigration. But
three centuries and a half of Spanish administration, cruelty, and
oppression in Mexico have failed to extirpate the Indians there.
They are, with all the gaps made in their ranks by slavery and
disease, five millions to one; nay, they have in part absorbed
CÆSAR AT ORAN.
353
the conquering race, and peopled the cities with half-castes. And
yet the Mexican Indians are infinitely inferior, both morally and
physically, to the Arabs of Algeria. There is but one mode by
which the Arab nationality could be fused into the French-
there is but one way by which to civilise them-the destruction
of the Mahometan religion. And to destroy that religion,
whether by force or by persuasion, were about as arduous a
task as to reduce Mount Atlas to the level of the plain of the
Mitidja.
5
A A
XIX,
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
I HAVE not quite finished with the environs of Oran. A few
lines must be devoted to the Emperor's trip to St. Denis-du-
Sig, a town of purely French creation, and, next to the oft-
cited Bou Farik, the most prosperous agricultural settlement
in Algeria. The French have a traditional and commendable
veneration for the memory of St. Denis-the holy man, you
will remember, who was wont to go about with his head under
his arm, and who shares with St. Geneviève the honour of
patronising the good city of Paris. To old Anglo-French
travellers, likewise, there is still something comforting and
refreshing in the bare name of St. Denis, putting his headless-
ness and his beatitude altogether on one side. That squat and
dirty little town, the home of the grand old abbey church where
the bones of the kings of France tranquilly mouldered fron
century to century till the economical patriots of '93 dug up
the leaden coffins to cast into bullets, and scattered cranium
and clavicle, humerus and femur, far and wide, was the last
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
355
post on that long and dreary diligence journey from Calais to
Paris in the days when the Chemin de Fer du Nord was not.
With our clothes an inch thick in dust, with parched tongues
and bloodshot eyes and dislocated limbs-ah! how happy we
were then when the sorry jades were for the last time accoutred
with their rope harness at St. Denis, and the conducteur began
to hint that if we meant to present him with a gratification,
now was the time to be generous. How little we cared for the
abbey church, and the tombs of the kings of France; but how
sweet was that draught of beer at the post-house of St. Denis-
the beer which tasted like soft soap whipped into a froth and
flavoured with ipecacuanha lozenges. That dear but dreadful
old diligence journey, sixty hours long, with its dust, its beggars,
its steep hills, when the conducteur used politely to request
you to alight from the coupé and walk for half a mile or so; its
table d'hôte dinner at Abbeville, at which you never had time
to eat anything, but from which, determined to have something
for my four francs, I once carried off an entire water-melon, not
much smaller than the Saracen's Head on Snow Hill. Don't
think that I am needlessly digressing when I descant on
diligences in connection with St. Denis-du-Sig. The little
Algerian town is precisely the place for the memories of the
old Calais and Paris journey to press thick upon you. St.
Denis-du-Sig has its Messageries Générales, and in front
thereof are still visible, arriving and departing, those fine old
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yellow structures with the gouty wheels, the dropsical bodies,
and the hydrocephalous luggage-piled roofs, which of old made
the name of Laffitte and Caillard famous. The diligence, half-
beloved and half-abhorred machine, is fading away in Europe
from the face of civilisation; but in Algeria it still flourishes in
all its quaint discomfort. They never scrub it, they never
brush its cushions; oh, no! Last year's mud is on its wheels,
last year's dust on its leathern tilt. There seems to be a
special breed of horses, the flower of the knackers' yards,
affected to the service of diligences. The drivers have a special
language, an exclusive vocabulary of execrations to be applied
to recalcitrant steeds. For instance, I have often heard a
French hackney-coachman call his horse a pig, a cow,
and a
crétin; but I never heard any but a diligence-driver address a
jibbing wheeler as an Ostrogoth, or a kicking leader as a
Chinese. What will become of the diligence-drivers when the
railways are made from Algiers to Oran, and from Constantine
to Algiers? They will never come to driving engines, for they
are too old to study steam; and, besides, it is a waste of words
to call a locomotive an Ostrogoth. The conducteurs—the
genuine conducteurs as we knew them in France-the con-
sequential but good-natured functionaries with the silver badges,
the caps with military peaks, and the gaily-braided jackets—
have already quitted the scene in disgust. They have become
railway guards, or found places in the administration. The
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
357
conducteur of the Algerian diligence is a lean and haggard
Arab boy, pockmarked and ophthalmic, clad in a fez cap, a
shirt, a pair of baggy knickerbockers, and nothing else, who
hangs on to the hinder part of the rotonde, or perches on the
iron step of the intérieur, or crawls along the pile of luggage to
the banquette, or by way of diversion runs barefooted in the
dust by the side of the vehicle. The old conducteur was in
authority over the driver, and reined him up, on occasion,
pretty tightly; but the Arab guard is in no way esteemed by
the coachman, and is cuffed and kicked by him on the slightest
provocation. It is some relief to the monotony of an Algerian
diligence journey, when, as happens about four times a day,
there is a row overhead. Such bumping and pounding and
scrambling! You expect every moment to see the Arab
guard's bare legs protruded between the hat straps; but anon
his brown and skinny face is grinning at the open door, and
he tells you in his Sabir jargon that the Francez overhead is
"no bono." To an Englishman the Arab usually says, "bono
Ingliz;" but this I take to be mere humbug, meant to curry
favour and get a few coppers. If we were their masters we
should be "no bono" to-morrow. In speaking of the Arab
"cad"-an epithet which in the diligence case can be applied
to him without any afterthought of slang-I must not forget to
mention a striking peculiarity in the style of French affected by
the Arabs when they can speak French at all. They always
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tutoyer you, or rather they "thee" you, after the manner of
old-fashioned Quakers. "Toi boire café?" Wilt thee drink
coffec? "Toi colère avec moi?" Art thee angry with me?
"Toi descend ici?" Dost thee alight here? may be taken as
samples of this odd style of locution: which I was hasty,
perhaps, in ascribing solely to Quakers, since it is very exten-
sively used by the humbler classes throughout the North of
England-for example, "Be'est thee foughten; then get thee
foughten." An Arab gentleman, when he wishes to be very
polite, addresses you in the feminine of the third person
singular: "Elle a crainte ?" Are you afraid? "Elle me fait
honneur," You do me honour. This is the fashion, I believe,
when you address Majesty on the Continent, and in which
the savage Highlanders of Scotland used to speak of them-
selves two hundred years ago. Frequently, however, the most
dignified native will find his tongue sliding into the more
familiar toi. The commander of a Bureau Arabe told me that
an agha who was his neighbour, and who piqued himself on the
nicety with which he followed all European observances, once
gave a dinner to a large party of French people, among whom
was a lady. There was a table-cloth, there were knives and
forks, there was champagne, there was claret; in short, the best
restaurant at Oran could not have done the thing better. At
the conclusion the lady complimented her host on the admi-
rable style in which she had been entertained. Ah, madame,"
(C
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
359
replied the worthy agha, with a low bow, and laying his hand
on his heart, "tais-toi, donc." He ought to have said, “Il n'y
a pas de quoi,” or something genteel of that sort.
There are no hotels, properly so called, at St. Denis-du-Sig,
although there is a mayor and a conseil municipal; but grand-
hotelism has not yet found its way thither. As a compensation
there are two or three tolerable inns; and in the keeping-room
of one of these, the Auberge Wicq, you may see a poor little
photograph representing an entrenched camp with a blockhouse
at each angle, situated in the midst of a treeless expanse of
stones and sand. This is St. Denis-du-Sig in the year 1845.
On the 20th of this month (June, 1865) the town will be just
twenty years old.
To the camp succeeded a commissariat
dépôt; then a justice de paix was set up, and then a commune
was organised. The French municipal system, frivolous and
vexatious as it often is in practice, is in theory admirable, and
a marvellous model of logical subdivision. No two institutions
would seem to differ so widely in their actual results as those
of France and the United States, yet when you study the
patiently grooved and morticed and bevelled organisation of
a French commune you really seem to be investigating the
scheme of a New England township, with its assessors and its
select-men, so inimitably described by Mons. de Tocqueville.
And perhaps the more obvious difference is only one of de-
gree. In New England the government is theocracy fused with
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democracy; in France and Algeria it is democracy welded into
bureaucracy.
The nomenclature of St. Denis-du-Sig seems an odd com-
pound, but it may be explained that the Sig is a river running
through the plain in which St. Denis is situate. The valley of
the Sig has now become as fertile as the valley of the Mitidja.
As in the Jardin d'Essai at Algiers, almost everything which
can be quickened into fructification by the sun seems to grow
there: olives, oranges, mulberries, dates, plantains, sugar, grapes,
tobacco, cotton, and cereals. There is a market held here every
Sunday morning, frequented by from seven to eight thousand
Arabs, and a wild-looking lot, but remarkably shrewd in the
art of taking care of Number One, they are. The streets of
St. Denis-du-Sig are straight, broad, and built in rectangular
blocks, and the side walls are planted with lime and plane trees,
A
and that beautiful shrub called the bellombra. So white are
the houses, so green the trees, so clean the thoroughfares, that,
but for the crowd of burnouses on market-day, you might fancy
yourself strolling through Hartford, Connecticut. There is
plenty of water, too, in the town-a commodity which is sadly
wanted in most parts of Algeria; and the numerous running
streams give the place that indescribable freshness and cheer-
fulness which the neighbourhood only of that element beyond
price can bestow on the face of a land. God bless the brooks,
even to the tiniest rills that run on for ever! If you want to
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
361
see a town pinched, confined, gloomy, discontented, unhappy,
you are sure to find it where the water supply runs short.
The most noticeable feature, however, about St. Denis-du-
Sig, and the one which evidently excited the greatest curiosity
on the part of the Emperor, is the thriving agricultural enter-
prise known as "L'Union du Sig." The Agricultural Union
of Africa, a joint-stock company, began operations here the
year after the foundation of the town, with a Government grant
of three thousand hectares of land. The Union of the Sig was
started on the principle of the combination of capital and
labour; in other words, it is a co-operative farm on a very large
scale. By its statutes any working man, by taking a fifty-franc
coupon, payable in instalments of one-fifth, becomes a share-
holder in the undertaking. The shares, just before the Revolu-
tion of February, when co-operation, not yet developed into
communism and phalansterianism, was exciting much attention,
were eagerly taken up. Emigrants came out in considerable
numbers. They had reckoned, however, without a certain
unwelcome host in the person of the Emir Abd-el-Kader, who
for two years after the settlement of St. Denis was careering
about the province of Oran. This meant that when you had
stocked your farm, the Arabs either houghed the cattle or drove
them off, and when you had got in your corn the Arabs came
and burnt your ricks. Finally, when you proposed to sit down
under your own vine and fig-tree, the Arabs came and blew
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your brains out. This is the invariable history of French set-
tlements in Algeria; and it is very much to the credit of the
settlers that they have been able, in so many instances, to
surmount difficulties so terrible. I omitted to mention a
supplementary feature-another farmer's friend. The French
agriculturists in Algeria declare that there is a peculiar form
of febrile disease arising from les terres qu'on remue-from the
disturbance of marshy land which it is necessary to drain and
plant. This, they say, was the Hanging Well Fever, which
decimated Bou Farik no less than four times. Curiously
enough, I read lately in a Paris newspaper that a peculiar and
virulent form of low fever had begun to prevail among the
workmen employed in demolishing the old streets of Paris for
the construction of the new Boulevards, and that some satur-
nine wag had proposed to give to this new disease, in honour of
the Prefect of the Seine, the name of La Fièvre Haussman-
nique. Here is a peg on which Lord Derby and the other
anti-railway lords might hang most eloquent arguments in
favour of leaving the poor in possession of their pigstyes. I
am not doctor enough to determine what fevers may be bred
by pulling down old houses, but I am certain there are a
good many which flourish apace through leaving old houses
standing.
Against the Bedouins and the fever, then, the good folks of
St. Denis-du-Sig had to battle for many a weary month. To
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
363
build their houses they were compelled to bring masons,
Spaniards for the most part, from Oran; and these masons
would not touch chisel or trowel under two piastres, or ten
francs, a day. Then the Administration insisted that, for the
protection of the colonists against the Bedouins, each farm
should be surrounded by a rampart, and guarded by bastions.
A lively kind of life; but the undertaking has turned out in
the end exceedingly successful. Cotton, tobacco, and corn are
the three great staples of produce; and for drying and cutting
tobacco St. Denis-du-Sig possesses one of the largest establish-
ments in Algeria. There are flour-mills, and cotton-spinning
factories, some quite on a Lancastrian scale, in the neighbour-
hood; and in the factories it is pleasant to see Arabs and
Europeans working together at the mules, and in the lobby the
burnouse and the blouse of the workpeople hanging side by side.
Your great harmoniser and humaniser, after all, is the machine
moved by steam power-your "melancholy mad elephant," as
Mr. Dickens called it. You can't get hold of the man of flocks
and herds he is here to-day and gone to-morrow; he strikes
his tent, and is off. Try to civilise him, and he is scudding
over the desert on a dromedary. He will sell you an ox, or
buy a bale of cloth from you, but half-an-hour after market he
will cut your throat. The Factory, however, brings men toge-
ther, keeps them together, teaches them what they are worth,
and what they are fit for among themselves. I have seen in
:
·
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Havana a comic periodical printed at a lithographic press in
the corner of the great cigarette manufactory of the Honradez.
It was a Spaniard who set the type and transferred it to the
stone. The comic drawings were made by a Frenchman. Then
an Asiatico, as the Spaniards call the Chinese coolies, carefully
gummed and sponged the stone, and adjusted the paper to it.
Then the great rollers revolved; and it was a nigger boy aloft
who took the wet sheet from the cylinder, and grinned from ear
to ear as he looked at, perchance, a caricature of himself on the
front page. Let me not omit to state that the press-to judge
from its embossed inscription, "Jabez B. Slygo, Pittsburg, Pa.,"
or words to that effect-came from Yankee-land. When I saw
the paper next day in the hands of an English lady, I could not
help thinking on the five nationalities which, not remotely, but
directly, had been brought into requisition for the produc-
tion of a Tom-fool's joke; and yet how deftly and harmo-
niously their several handicrafts had dovetailed; and how, in
one way or other, every one of them was the better for
working in unison, and putting his shoulder to the same
wheel. And so it is, and will be, I fancy, all over the world.
If ever the lion and the lamb are to lie down together in
Algeria-if ever the Moslem and the Giaour are to become
friends-the alliance will be cemented in some tall-chim-
neyed factory.
Look here. Here is one of those carpets of Mascara of which
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
365
I told you. Survey it well. It is very pretty, very quaint and
tasteful, but it shows not in one stitch a sign of the civilisation
which brings people together. You have seen the Arab who
wove it, toiling at his rude loom on the earthen floor of a hovel
in which one gap serves both for door and window. You have
seen his pattern, pricked on a coarse piece of canvas-the pattern
which has been handed down from father to son, and from tribe
to tribe, for innumerable generations. You know how he buys
his wool in the rough, by the pound; how his wife cleanses
and spins it; how it is dyed in a pipkin after some recipe as
old as Solomon's Temple, and with hues extracted from the
nearest vegetables. The carpet is a beautiful work of art when
finished; but it is no more indicative of any kind of organised
and disciplined labour than the wampum belts which the
Indians embroider, or the clubs and canoe-prows which the
New Zealanders carve. As the carpet is now, so was its fore-
runner five hundred years ago, and the maker has varied no
more than the manufacturer from the primeval type. But look
again at this twopenny-halfpenny portrait of the winner of
the Derby on a Manchester pocket-handkerchief. Coarse and
tawdry and trashy if you will, it is a deliberate combination of
co-operative skill-of labour, and capital, and ingenuity. It is
a product of civilisation. You know that sleazy calico was
made in a mill, and by steam-power. You know it has gone
through bleaching and dyeing and glazing works, and that it
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has been entered in big vellum-bound books by clerks with
regular salaries, and warehoused, and ticketed, and docketed,
and sold wholesale before it reached the retail shop in Totten-
ham-court-road. You know that a draughtsman has been
employed to copy the picture of the horse and the jockey; that
the design has been engraved on, a metal plate, and transferred,
by a process which is in itself a miracle of ingenuity, to a steel
cylinder; and that the cylinder itself has been forged and
turned, and tempered, and softened and hardened, and polished
by skilled workmen, regularly apprenticed to such crafts. Then
you know that it has been endued with ink made in chemical
works by astute professors, who can squeeze and cajole and
coerce all the colours of the rainbow out of the refuse of a
sewer. You know finally that the colours have been fixed,
and that the tawdry handkerchiefs have been packed by
hydraulic pressure into bales, and dispersed to the ends of the
earth by means of railways and steamships; in short, you know
that hundreds of hands and brains have been at work, each in
his separate department, to produce that square of printed
calico, worth only twopence-halfpenny, but which could not
have been produced without the association of many approved
workers and many wealthy capitalists.
In bidding adieu to St. Denis-du-Sig, I may mention that
the co-operative system has run the same career there which
in most civilised communities it ordinarily runs. It has been
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
367
a substantial success, and the shareholders have drawn good
dividends; but for a co-operative undertaking it is an old one,
having had nineteen years of existence. Thus, as inevitably
happens, many of the small proprietors have gone away, and
disposed of their interest in the concern. In a few hands
many shares have become accumulated. Round about St.
Denis there are a score and more of wealthy proprietors—lords
of the soil-capitalists, in fact, not through any feudal tenure
or exceptional privilege, but because they have acquired so
many shares; and this is the natural end of most proprietorial
things. They say the New River Company belongs to a fish-
monger in Billingsgate, a deaf old lady at Clapham, and a
Doctor of Divinity. In process of time, I suppose, the Marquis
of Westminster will own all London; and when a man has got
all, and can say with the Tura hidalgo, "Soy señor de todo el
mundo," the Goths and the Vandals come and take everything
away from him.
A paragraph devoted to Mostaganem, and I have done with
the people of Oran. Mostaganem is a day's diligence journey
from Algiers, about ninety kilometres, and on the direct sea-
coast road from Algiers. It was an Arab town, and one of the
most curious, they say, twenty, ten, five years since; but it has
experienced the ordinary fate of Arab towns under French rule,
and its few Moorish streets can now be counted on the fingers.
The European quarter is broad, clean, smart, pert, distressingly
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well ventilated, monotonous, and-well, the word must out-
ugly. Mind, I am not grumbling; I am not for one moment
about to deny that clean, and well-paved, and well-lighted
streets are, on the score of social economy, infinitely preferable
to narrow lanes, tumble-down tenements, and no lamps at all.
Yet for once in a way it may be pardonable to bid economy,
both social and political, go to Jehanum-to let one's pic-
turesque sympathies get the upper hand-to bewail the genteel
barbarisms with which the French are sweeping away every
vestige of Moorish architecture in this country. We have
grown so accustomed to look upon the French as an artistic
and tasteful nation, that we are apt to forget sometimes that
the artists and the men of cultivated taste form, after all, but a
single class, and not the most numerous, in France. Now, next
to that monument of contented stupidity the French bourgeois,
the French functionary, municipal or prefectorial—the employé,
in fact is about the most tasteless and narrow-minded per-
sonage to be found anywhere.
provincial cities, the press, the caricaturists, and the higher
members of the Government keep him within due bounds;
but beware of him in the small towns. He will restore the
most exquisite relics of antiquity by tearing them down bodily,
and erecting Père-la-Chaise-like cenotaphs on their site. He
will convert a cathedral into a barrack, or a Lady-chapel into
a tallow-melting factory; he is, to sum up, the surviving
In Paris and in the large
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
369
brother of that English churchwarden of the last century who,
after hacking priceless mediæval frescoes from walls, or rolling
half-a-dozen clustered columns into one with repeated coats of
whitewash, used to stick up a panel with his name in gilt
letters, and an assertion that under his churchwardenship the
church had been repaired and beautified. In England the
great conservators of ancient art are the Established clergy.
As a rule they are cultivated gentlemen. They have leisure
to bring to light, and taste to admire, that which is old and
beautiful around them; and their influence with the neigh-
bouring gentry brings what funds are required for the restora-
tion of the relics of the past. In the last century it was
otherwise. Gothic architecture was at a discount, and Parson
Trulliber was a type of clergyman by no means uncommon.
The churchwardens had things their own way, and “beautified”
the churches to the utter obliteration of all that was beautiful
in them. In France the clergy have very little power, and
very little inclination, to act as conservators of ancient art.
Archæology, encaustic painting, or glass staining, are not
branches of art cultivated in the seminaries; as a rule the
clergy do not belong to the class of gentry; they are good and
pious men, but unlearned; male devotees are rare, and the
donations of pious ladies tend rather to the purchase of a new
set of vestments, or the commissioning of a painter from Paris
to paint a staring altar-piece full of sprawling angels, than
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towards the restoration of a chancel or the staining of an oriel
window. This is the state of things in France; in Algeria it
is ten times worse. There is no resident gentry at all. The
clergy are laborious parish priests or toiling monks, who regard
what is left of ancient times either with indifference or with
horror. As for the military, they would eat couscousou out of
a sarcophagus, and tear up a tesselated pavement to dig a
hearth for their pot-au-feu. Everything is left to the Adminis-
tration. The Administration means l'alignement-that is to
say, demolition and reconstruction after the boulevard type.
I believe that M. Berbrugger, the estimable curator of the
Museum at Algiers, suffers acutely from that disastrous admi-
nistrative passion for pulling down-the more so as the icono-
clasts frequently contrive to kill two birds with one stone,
destroying not only an old Moorish house, but rooting up
the foundations of a Roman villa. M. Berbrugger is always
flying about the three provinces to rescue encaustic tiles,
encrusted bas-reliefs, and curiously carved pillars from destruc-
tion; he is, however, only a single antiquary against a legion
of destroyers.
But there is another feature in this lamentable history that
adds bitterness to the overbrimming cup. It would be some-
thing if some beneficent genius would only persuade the French
to build the new edifices which they persist in erecting in the
Moorish style. They have no need to send to London for a
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
371
copy of Owen Jones's Alhambra. They have, or rather had, an
inexhaustible store of the most exquisite models of Moorish
architecture at hand. That architecture, all but idiots will
admit, is most eminently suitable to the nature of the climate
and the wants of the natives. The dark and shady vestibule,
the open courtyard, with its trees, its flowers, and its cool
plashing fountain in the midst; the colonnades of horse-shoe
arches, where you can saunter and chat, with your back against
a pillar, or squat on a bench and take your coffee, or spread
your carpet and say your prayers till you go to sleep; the
rooms opening on the trellised gallery; the woodwork to which
you can hang cages full of singing birds; the flat terraced roof
with its little kiosque in one corner, where you can smoke, or
play chess or the guitar, or gaze lazily upon the blue sea:
these are the elements of a real Moorish house-all else is
impertinent sacrilege. By putting doors to the rooms, carpeting
the staircases, and glazing the little peepholes in the outward
walls, you may Europeanise a Moorish house enough to suit
most reasonable people.
I will even make a further concession. If it be abso-
lutely necessary to economise space, as in a public office, I
have no objection to the courtyard being covered in by
a glazed roof; although the result is to make the area as
stiflingly hot as an oven. But, for mercy's sake, don't sub-
stitute for the courtyard and the colonnade, the horse-shoe
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arches and the trellised balconies, the encaustic tiled pavement
and arabesqued walls and sculptured niches, that gaunt and
garish structure, with its entresol and its sous-sol, its premier
and its second up to its sixième, its attenuated oaken staircase
with skinny balustrades, its slippery floors and gingerbread
consoles and yawning fireplaces-where you don't want a fire
five times in a year, and if you do, what is there more con-
venient than an iron brazier full of live coals stuck in the
middle of the room?—its staring wall-paper and imbecile
Louis Quinze scrolls and mouldings, and its mirrors and great
gaping windows, like shop-fronts with the stock sold out. To
come upon a house like this in an African town; to see the
shepherds and shepherdesses of Watteau staring and simpering
from the walls; to hear the infernal ticking of gilt clocks and
the abhorrent pattering of the paws of a French poodle over
the pavement which should re-echo only to the musical jingle
of the golden anklets of a fair she-Moor-these are enough to
make you sick at heart.
sick at heart. But the matter is not to be mended.
It is too late. The French are incorrigible. They are not
exactly a vainglorious or an offensively conceited people; they
do not brag, or boast, or cram their institutions down your
throat, like the Yankees; but they accept their infinite supe-
riority in matters of taste to the rest of the world as a foregone
conclusion. They are calmly, imperturbably, and smilingly
convinced that they know more about architecture and decora-
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
373
tion than any other people existing. You talk about Moorish
architecture. "C'est joli, mais c'est du rococo," they say, and
shrug their shoulders. When a Frenchman shrugs his shoulders
there is nothing more to be said or done. It is his dernier
mot; you must either agree with him and let him have his
own way, or fall upon him and beat him. You don't want to
do the latter, for a kinder, braver, more cheerful, and more
generous creature than he is not to be found in a long day's
march. Only, he has got Boulevard on the brain; only the
New Louvre has blinded and deafened him.
In the reign of the Emperor Gallienus, it is recorded, the whole
of this part of Africa was visited by a tremendous earthquake.
One of these convulsions may account for the astonishingly
bizarre form borne by the rocks behind Mostaganem. They are
of all shapes and sizes, and might have been studied with ad-
vantage by Gustave Doré for one of his sombre tableaux in the
"Inferno." Anything more terribly abrupt it is difficult to
picture, and, happily, the Administration have been impotent to
improve these savage masses of nature's masonry into the ver-
tical and the horizontal. The hot and salt streams which are to
be found in the vicinity, among which the chief is Ain-Sinfra
or Yellow Rivulet, are also ascribed to the earthquakes. The
original Roman town port, lighthouse and all, and called Mitra-
naga, was what the Americans elegantly term "knocked into a
cocked hat," or swallowed up bodily by the Mediterranean. The
374
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Arab historians describe Mostaganem as a charming city, full of
mosques, bazaars, and baths; but I am rather inclined to think
that the Arab historians were not unfrequently given to the
composition of fibs, and our old satirical friend, Ahmed-ben-
Toussouf, of Milliana, has said of the Mostaganese that they
have added heels to their slippers in order to be able to run
faster after their prey, and away from their pursuers. In
slippers without heels, of course, you can only shuffle. I should
like to resuscitate Ahmed-ben-Toussouf, and make a collection
of his smart sayings applicable to the Algeria of the present
day. He would be rather hard on the French, I fancy.
The town was seized by the French in 1835, to prevent its
falling into the hands of Abd-el-Kader; but it was allowed to
be governed by a native bey until so recently as 1840. Gra-
dually, however, French institutions were introduced; and the
town, which has now nearly nine thousand inhabitants, is
thought considerable enough to be the seat of a sub-prefecture.
There are many Jews, and a very large and handsome syna-
gogue. The great mosque-whose beautiful octagonal minaret
is as much out of the perpendicular as the leaning tower of
Pisa, but, in worse case than that architectural whimsey, is
swaying more and more every day until it threatens to topple
over-has been converted into an infantry barrack. There is
also a Franco-Arab school here, and a Masonic Lodge, with the
odd title of the "African Trinosophists." The Arabs, as you
ENVIRONS OF ORAN.
275
may have heard, are great at freemasonry; but they will never
enter the French lodges, and very rarely even will consent to
communicate masonically with a Christian. I have been told of
instances of their so doing, but they are few, and not well
authenticated.
XX.
FRENCH OCCUPATION.-A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT.
NAPOLEON III., it has been loudly proclaimed, went to Algeria
for the purpose of seeing and studying things for himself, and
on the spot. The intention was a most laudable one, and his
Majesty deserves every species of credit for the assiduity with
which he has endeavoured to carry it out; but it is not given to
mortals—even to those of the Cæsarean type of mortality-to
command success in everything they strive to accomplish; and,
all sagacious and clear-headed as he is, it is not probable that
the French Emperor could have carried away with him anything
beyond a very broad and general notion of this magnificent
appanage of France-the genuine feelings and sentiments of its
indigenous population, and the real wants and wishes of its
colonists. Long and anxious hours the great schemer may have
passed during his holiday at Biarritz, weaving and unweaving,
Penelope-fashion, elaborate plans for converting Algeria into a
trans-Mediterranean Department of the Seine, and moulding
that impracticable Muslim into a bon bourgeois de Paris with
FRENCH OCCUPATION.-A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 377
a burnouse above his redingote. The pigeon-hole or the waste-
paper basket must be, I fear, the final home of most of those
elaborate plans. What has become of Abbé Sièyes' constitu-
tions ?—like the amours of Don Juan, mille et un. Pigeon-hole
entombed. Where is Jerry Bentham's Panopticon? Waste-
paper basket sepulchred, Echo answers. Where even nine-
tenths of all but perfect John Howard's suggestions for the
amendment of Prison discipline? In Limbo, Echo says, again.
Cæsar may
"civilise" Algeria on paper, and add Commentaries
to Al Coran till it grows to the bigness of that perpetually
swelling Post Office London Directory; but Algeria may be,
twenty years hence, as uncivilised as ever.
There are two kinds of people, it has been remarked some-
what paradoxically, who know nothing about a country—those
who have been there too little, and those who have been there
long. Belonging, by necessity-as every hurried tourist must
do-to the former category, Napoleon the Third was sur-
rounded by those who appertain to the latter. The "old
Algerian" has become as familiar a type in French society
as the "old Indian" was, before the Mutiny, in ours. Our
withered, jaundiced, splenetic, intolerant, curry-loving Anglo-
Indians, in whose heads there were but three dominant ideas-
that a soldier was infinitely inferior to a civilian, that he (the
civilian) ought to get so many more hundred rupees per men-
sem, and that the civilian immediately above him in seniority
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was an unconscionable time in falling sick of liver complaint
and dying-these tough old scribes of the H.E.I.C.S. are extinct,
or ought to be found only in a fossil state in Bath, Cheltenham,
and Upper Baker-street. They have been superseded by smart
young men from the Universities, who go out smiling, and come
home on leave with livers intact, and looking as fresh as paint
-smart young men whom grumblers declare to be greater pro-
ficients in Latin, Greek, and mathematics than in Hindostanee,
Sanskrit, Persian, and the Civil Law. But the old Indians have
a large family of congeners in North Africa. The "old Algerian”
is no colonist. He looks with as much contempt on a Provençal
or Auvergnat farmer in the Mitidja as a Member of Council in
Hindustan would have looked on an indigo planter. The
colonists are, to him, only so many importunate and objection-
able people who have to be "administered" somehow, and over
whom a tight hand must be kept. If he had his way, there
should be no colonists, and no civilians, save, indeed, the “ ad-
ministration,” with a few shopkeepers to sell coffee and ices, and
to curl the wigs of the authorities. Algeria, in the opinion of
the "old Algerian," ought to produce everything and manu-
facture nothing-for European use at least. Burnouses, ba-
bouches, embroidered saddles, and Moorish lanterns the natives
may
be permitted to fabricate, in order that the authorities may
purchase them as presents for their relatives and friends in
France when they go home on leave; but anything approaching
FRENCH OCCUPATION.—A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 879
the development of colonial industry must be regarded with
suspicion. The cocked hats and the gold-laced coats, the tri-
coloured scarfs and the lemon kid gloves, the stamped paper and
the ruled paper, the absinthe and the chartreuse, the chocolat
de santé and the limonade purgative of which authority or its
dependents may stand in need, should all come from France.
A few milliners may be tolerated in the colony for the con-
fection of such ephemeral articles as bonnets and ball dresses;
but the solidities of the toilette should always bear the mark of
the métropole. In short, Algeria should be a land flowing with
milk and honey; but the milk should always be forwarded to
Paris, in neatly padlocked cans, there to be made into cheese or
butter, and the honey should in due course of time figure in the
most elegant sweetmeats in M. Siraudin's bonbon shop. It is
but justice, however, to the "old Algerian" to admit that,
although he is fretful, fussy, and pompous-although he worries
and pesters those over whom he is set in authority in a hundred
meticulous and vexatious details, although he has a horror of
free speech, and looks upon printing, save when it is the preamble
to an official form, as an invention of the enemy; and although he
is to those above him in office inconceivably cringing and servile,
and to those beneath him brusque and imperious, he is, as a rule,
incorruptible. People in Paris have got hold of a notion that the
departments of the administration in Algeria are filled with
functionaries as unscrupulous in their treatment of the natives
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
as those old Nabobs of ours were said, and perhaps with equal
injustice, to be in the days when "writers" went to India to
shake the pagoda tree, and there were rich droppings of gold
mohurs from its branches. There is no pagoda tree in Algeria
to shake; you can no more get five-franc pieces off a desert
palm than milk out of a paving-stone, or breeks off a Highland-
man. The Turks, who were immensely wealthy, were foolishly
sent away by the French at the conquest. The few Moors in
the cities who are rich are as secure, through the strict equity
of the French rule, in the enjoyment of their property, as a
bourgeois of the Rue de la Paix is in his; and in the country
those who have any money bury it, as Mr. Pepys did his savings,
in a hole in the back garden. The taxes are few and light, and
the collectors are too well watched to embezzle them. In the
French administration eight quires of foolscap will not suffice to
settle the pros and cons of a pane of glass, in a guardhouse
window, broken by a drunken deserter; and the spilling of a
bottle of ink may lead to rivers of gall and lamp-black being
spread over notes, reports, and abstracts of the case. An
Edmunds scandal would be impossible in any department of the
French administration; or, did it occur once in a generation,
would create as great a commotion and bring ruin as signally
upon the guilty parties as did the Teste, Parmentier, and
Cubières frauds twenty years ago. Moreover, the French official
is not loftily ambitious; and ambition is, in a vast number of
FRENCH OCCUPATION.-A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 381
cases, the mainspring of dishonesty. The "game" of the
French bureaucrat, to use a familiar expression, is a very little
one. He covets moderate promotion, the "approbation of his
chiefs," the Cross of the Leigon of Honour-which is to him as
the air he breathes; so that if he have it not, he pines away;—
and in due time he expects his retraite and a pension, which
shall enable him to play dominoes and drink little drinks in a
café at all hours after nine A.M.-amusements from which he is
diurnally debarred during his tenure of office. The French
grenadier, it is said, carries a marshal's bâton in his cartouch
box; but the French sous-prefet very rarely finds the portfolio
of a minister beneath his blotting-pad. To rise to the head of
his division, to the secretariat of a cabinet, or, haply, to a pre-
fecture or a councillorship of state-this is the lot only of a
favoured few. The official, again, retires―rentre dans la vie
privée, at a comparatively early period; and at an age when the
English merchant or functionary would still be desperately
striving, although grey-headed and stiff-limbed, to attain the
topmost rungs of the ladder, the Frenchman is calmly preparing
to quit the stage and retire with his red ribbon and a couple
of hundred pounds a year-a handsome fortune to him-to
a country town or a Parisian suburb, there to cultivate his
cabbages, or vegetate, a contented rentier, upon dominoes, sugar
and water, and the Constitutionnel.
The hundred mayors, the five hundred members of the
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
municipal councils, the prefects and sub-prefects, the intendants
and directors, the chiefs of this and chiefs of that who have
been in due course presented to the Sovereign since his arrival,
who have presented him with the keys of towns that have gates
in number sufficient to set his Majesty up in business as a lock-
smith; who have harangued him and sung interminable varia-
tions in their official pæans on the solitary air " Vive l'Em-
pereur! Vive l'Impératrice! Vive le Prince Impérial! who
have assured Agamemnon, King of Men, that he is Jupiter-who
have declared that, now he has condescended to visit Algeria,
the colony may go to sleep for ever in the slumber of beatitude ;
all these worthy folks belong more or less to the type of the
“old Algerians” I have depicted. They are quite as much at
home at Algiers or at Oran as at Tarascon or Arcis-sur-Aube.
The Emperor hears the same elegiac odes, couched in the same
verbiage, here, as he has heard, time and again, there. Apart
from a mosque or a Moorish fountain, a palm, a date, or an
occasional tree; abundance of cactus and prickly pear in the
hedges; a few grasshoppers by day, and mosquitoes by night;
a few veiled women; a number of ragged Arabs with bare legs
and blankets over their heads, and from time to time a Bedouin
chief stalking about in lordly dignity, and the Emperor might
fancy himself in France. Oran is more than half Spanish, but
it is not more Iberian than Bayonne. The sky is as blue, the
houses are as white, and the weather is as hot at Toulon or
FRENCH OCCUPATION.-A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 383
Marseilles as at Algiers. His Majesty passes under the same
triumphal arches, gazes at the same balconies hung with tri-
coloured flags, inspects the same communal schools drawn up
in double file, and reviews the same soldiers in blue coats and
red trousers, he has seen and inspected and reviewed a hundred
times before at home. Three things certainly he may have
learnt since he has been here-that the littoral of Algeria to
a depth of perhaps eighty miles inland from the frontiers of
Morocco to the frontiers of Tunis is amazingly rich and fertile ;
next, that not one-fourth part of the land is under cultivation ;
and lastly, that nine-tenths of the indigenous population go
without shoes or stockings-not because they are paupers, but
because bare feet belong to their notion of civilisation, and they
like it.
His Majesty has, it is true, an alternative in the society of
those with whom he may take counsel. The civil administra-
tion, as a rule, can tell him nothing, and suggest nothing, save
that he is the greatest Monarch with whom, under Heaven's
favour, any country was ever blessed, and that if he could order
or persuade MM. Rothschild, Talabot, or Emile Pereire, or any
other European capitalists, to spend a few millions of francs
every year in the construction of railways, boulevards, palais de
justice, refectorial hotels, barracks, and docks, he would have
additional claims to the national gratitude. If they know or
can suggest anything more, they dare not so much as hint at it.
384
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But the Emperor can appeal to those who have a profounder
knowledge of Algeria, and who may claim by tradition some
additional licence of speech. There is a host of military men,
from the Marshal, Duke, and Governor-General, to the captain
of infantry detailed from his regiment to superintend a Bureau
Arabe-there are intendants of the manutention, commandants
of garrisons and flying columns, colonels of Zouaves and Spahis,
and officiers d'état-major without number, who could all give
copious if not valuable testimony. I apprehend that the views
of the gentlemen in epaulettes, although differing diametrically
from those of the civilians, would not help the Emperor much
towards the solution of the African problem. The civil official
in Algeria dislikes the colonist, but bears with him for the
reason that somebody has to be "administered,” and that, as
the native Arab in his reluctance to be "administered," very
much resembles that tribe of gipsies who scampered from one
parish to another in '51 to avoid the enumerators of the census,
the European settler is the only person left on whom the bless-
ings of "administration" can be inflicted. But the military
man is more catholic in his dislikes. He objects to the colonist
as an intruder, who is always getting into trouble, and to the
civilian official as a pékin and a bore. His wish is to be left
alone with the natives, and to "administer" them himself, and
after his own peculiar military system; in the which, I need
scarcely hint, powder, ball, and cold steel welded into a tri-
FRENCH OCCUPATION.-A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 385
angular form are important elements. He claims that he
knows the Arabs much better than the pékins can do; that he
speaks and writes their language with vernacular fluency;
whereas the French professors in the Algerian colleges have
acquired a scholastic Arabic which mollahs and talebs may
comprehend, but which to the wild Bedouin or the ragged
fellow with the blanket over his head is so much Welsh. With
plenty of Bureaux Arabes, plenty of forts built in strong strate-
gical positions, plenty of troops and artillery, and from time to
time an expeditionary column, a razzia, and the smoking out of
a refractory tribe from the cave where they have taken refuge,
the old Algerian officer thinks the colony can be administered
well enough. Thus it has been administered under Clausel,
under Bugeaud, under Pélissier, under Randon, with such men
as Changarnier, as Lamoricière, and as Bedeau to help them,
any time during the last quarter of a century. The Emperor
has on his staff more than one veteran of the African campaigns
-among them Mr. Kinglake's "resolute Major named Fleury,”
now a general and high in the Imperial friendship and confi-
dence. I have very good authority for stating that in very
influential military circles there is a decided wish to discourage
European colonisation in the interior. In the towns of the sea-
board the influx of settlers from France or other countries may
be tolerated, and even fostered. Many more tradespeople are
wanted as tenants for the shops on the grand new boulevard
C C
386
•
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
which Sir Samuel Morton Peto is building, or to occupy the
houses which, in their ruthless pursuit of l'alignement, the
municipalities are running up on the site of the picturesque old
Moorish mansions. In the model agricultural settlements also
-such as those at Bou Farik, Marengo, and Blidah, in the
Mitidja; or at Medea and Milliana; in the neighbourhood of
Philippeville to the east, and at Sidi-ben-Abbis, Saint Denis-
du-Sig, and Mostaganem, to the west-a numerous immigration
of any nationality, French, Spanish, German, Irish, would be
welcome. But all these settlements, the military critics main-
tain, should be under the shelter and the shadow of the French
cannon. There should always be a camp round the corner.
There should always be an appeal to Cæsar in a képi and epau-
lettes, twisting his moustache, and smoking his cigar over his
tumbler of absinthe. Otherwise things will go wrong. What
has happened, the martial critics ask, in remote regions, among
the Berbers of Kabylia, for instance, where the colonists, like
the pioneers of Western America, have pushed on ahead into
the wilderness? The Berbers or the Kabyles have come down
upon them, spoiled their goods, and chopped off their heads.
To prevent these regrettables sinistres, the French colonist is
bidden to keep well under the wing of the depôt battalion, and
to ply his spade and hoe under the safeguard of the sentinel's
musket and bayonet. It does not appear to strike any of these
dogmatical gentlemen, military or civil, that no country was
'
FRENCH OCCUPATION.--A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 387
ever yet colonised without the earlier colonists incurring, and
that pretty frequently, the disagreeable risk of decapitation, or
some other form of violent death. Let us take a town in New
England, for instance-say Springfield, Massachusetts. How
clean and pretty the town is; how trim the houses; how well
planted the environs; what charming villas there are round
about; how industrious and prosperous are the inhabitants!
Well, all this had to be conquered once upon a time, first from
the wilderness, next from the wild beasts, lastly from the
Indians. How many of the earlier colonists had their heads
chopped off, or, worse, were gashed in pieces or tortured at slow
fire by the bloody savages? The other day the mayor of an
Algerian town presented to his Majesty as a kind of phenomenal
heroine a poor little girl of fifteen, whose parents had been
murdered, and who herself had been shamefully maltreated by
the natives. The Emperor received her paternally, and ap-
peared horrified at the recital of the outrages committed upon
her. "I knew nothing of these atrocities!" he exclaimed.
"Nothing has been told me about them." Of course, “atroci-
ties" do not enter into the official programme of ecstatic
loyalty; but they are, nevertheless, among the commonest
features of colonisation. In the smoke of how many thousand
Indian wigwams have hung the golden-haired scalps of Anglo-
Saxon women and children? No country was ever yet wrested
by a civilised from a barbarous people without the burning
CC 2
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
down of houses, the chopping off of heads, and the maltreat-
ment of the feeble and unprotected; and in many instances the
civilised have been guilty of atrocities as execrable as those
committed by savages. "But," contend the dogmatists, "the
Arabs, although barbarous in many of their usages, have a
certain kind of civilisation. Moreover they are three millions
strong, among whom can be reckoned, at the lowest com-
putation, three hundred thousand muskets and yataghans
with soldiers as brave as any Frenchman to wield them. We
do not wish to extirpate them as the Anglo-Saxons have
extirpated the North American Indians. We wish to live in
peace with them, to civilise them, and to convert them into
loyal subjects of the Emperor Napoleon." The theory is
admirable, but how is it to be put into practice? / What is
meant by "civilising" the Arabs-that word which is perpetually
in the mouth of every Frenchman you meet? Civilisation,
from a French point of view, means hats, coats, boots, table
d'hôte' dinners, cafés chantants, masked balls in Carnival time,
wigs, hair dye, kid gloves, bonnets, paintings in oil and water
colours, quadrilles and polkas, overtures to Sémiramide and
pots pourris from the Africaine, the Pompes Funèbres,
dominoes and piquet, the novels of MM. Feydeau and Flau-
gergues, and the Code Napoléon. I am not aware of any other
considerable elements in French civilisation, save, perhaps,
grand hotels, the songs of Mademoiselle Theresa, rolls on the
FRENCH OCCUPATION.-A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 389
drum, the demi-monde, and the Academy of Inscriptions and
Belles Lettres. What on earth is the Arab to do with French
civilisation? He won't wear hats, or coats, or boots. He eats
with his fingers. He has his cafés chantants; but then only
one song, and that one 5000 years old, is sung night after night
to the music of one lute, one tambourine, and one timbrel, all
dating from the time when Miriam exulted in the sinking of
the horse and his rider in Egypt's dark sea. The Pompes
Funèbres concern him not. He observes no dark ceremonial of
sorrow. You may see an Arab funeral every day in the
cemeteries of Algiers. When a true believer dies, they dress
him in his best burnouse, pop him into an open chest gaily
painted, and cover all save his face with carpets, or silken
stuffs, or dirty rags, according to the rank of the deceased; and
then six sturdy fellows hoist this bier on their shoulders, and
scamper away with it as fast as ever their legs will carry them
to the burying-ground. Arrived there, the corpse is turned out
of the chest on the ground and denuded. Then a professional
person comes with soap and water, and a handful of flax, and
scrubs the dead man all over, and then, uncoffined and un-
shrouded, he is hidden away in the bosom of his pitying
mother earth, and the painted chest serves for somebody else
who dies next day. To civilise the Arab in an undertaking
sense, you must give him men in rusty black, with cocked hats
and red noses, coffins, palls, and black velvet draperies, with his

390
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cipher, nine or none, emblazoned thereon; to say nothing of
wax candles, holy water, incense, cross-bearers, a priest, and two
or three choristers. These undertaking paraphernalia are all
more or less connected with the religion of civilisation, and that
religion is Christianity. The Arab believes in his heart of hearts
that the Christian is an infidel and a dog. Do you wish to
civilise him with regard to marriage? His customs, which are
his religion, enforce the inclaustration of women at home, or
their concealment under a veil when abroad. There can be no
courtship. The Mahometan girl is sold to a man she has never
seen, and after the honeymoon the most strenuous efforts of the
husband are directed towards the counteraction of that which
he deems to be the predominant idea in his wife's mind-the
desire to commit adultery. As for quadrilles and polkas, the
only Moorish women who dance in public are public women.
As for novels, the Arabs, not being priests, schoolmasters, or
scribes, are not given either to reading or to writing, and their
only acquaintance with fiction is derived from a few scandalous
excerpts from the "Arabian Nights"-not more scandalous
perhaps than the civilised "Fanny" or "Madame Bovary"-
related by professional storytellers in the coffee-houses, or from
the blackguard performances of the puppet-show called Karag-
heus, corrupted by the French into Garagousse-the Arab
Punch. If you offer the Arab the Code Napoléon, he tells you
that Al Coran is enough for him. He has a demi-monde of his
FRENCH OCCUPATION.-A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 391
own ; and in lieu of frequenting a grand hotel he retires to a
caravanserai, where he sups off half a pancake, a draught of
sour milk, and a handful of dates, and wrapping himself up in a
camel's-hair cloak, goes to sleep on a floor of baked mud. This
is what the Arab really is, and these are the alternatives which
the French offer him. I leave you to draw the obvious
deduction.
But there is another, a better, a purer civilisation, some
kind-hearted people at home may think, which the Arabs
would gladly accept, and from which they might derive in-
estimable blessings. The French, it may be, benighted
foreigners and Papists as they are, can exhibit to the Maho-
metan mind only a garbled and imperfect Evangel. How
would it be if we tried these Paynims with the genuine British
article? We have tried the experiment in India, both among
Hindoos and Mahometans, at the cost of millions, and with
what success all the world and the missionary societies know.
Could anything be done to civilise the Arabs from an English
point of view-I mean by way of tracts, Sunday schools,
tight-lacing, police reports, mother's meetings, penny readings,
district visiting, the cane, savings banks, working-men's clubs,
lending libraries, and Holloway's pills? The effort is worth
making, at all events. The stern simplicity of the Protestant
ritual might find more favour in the eyes of the Moslems than
the gaudy and meretricious ceremonial of Romanism. Nothing
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
can be plainer than a mosque; a Dissenting chapel is gorgeous
in comparison with its naked unadornment. Whitewashed
walls, a few mats on the floor, a hole in the wall to hold the
Koran, a pulpit like a washhouse copper with the lid off, and
a couple of ostrich eggs dangling to strings from the dome,
and this is all. Again, there is no indisposition among the
Mahometans to examine the grounds on which their faith is
built. Their sacred volume is no sealed book to them. All who
can read do literally search their scriptures from morning till
night, and those who cannot read have the Koran daily and
hourly read and expounded to them. There is scarcely a
camel-driver or a porter who has not more chapters of the
Koran by heart than an English National school-child has
verses. Wild, savage, vindictive, and debauched, no reasonable
persons can deny that the Arabs are eminently religious. They
believe unfeignedly in what their prophet has taught them;
and, alone among the religionists of the world, they practise the
precepts of their scriptures. Here, then, is a people predis-
posed, it would seem, for religious instruction. They are grave
and courteous in controversy, patient listeners, and fond of long
discourses.
When an affluent English colony is permanently settled
in Algiers-when there shall be English chemists' shops on
the Boulevard de l'Impératrice, an English City Mission on
the Place du Gouvernement, and an English ragged school in
FRENCH OCCUPATION.-A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 393
the Faubourg of Bab-el-Oued—great things may be wrought
among a deluded generation.
As in a violent dispute between two doctors over a sick-bed
the eminent Sangrado is all for phlebotomy, while the equally
eminent Diafoirus is invincible in his devotedness to drastics,
but neither think it worth their while to ask the principal
person concerned, to wit, the patient, how he would like to be
treated, so the Algerian controversy has hitherto been con-
ducted without any reference to two parties most immediately
interested in its settlement-the native Arabs and the French
colonists. One need be no conjurer to predict that, were the
natives polled, the all but unanimous expression of opinion,
from his Moorish Highness Prince Mustapha down to the
lowest donkey-driver, would be, "Get out of the country and
leave us alone." Such a step, it has already been demon-
strated, is impossible. The French can no more evacuate
Algeria than we can evacuate Ireland; only Algeria in the
reign of Napoleon III. very much resembles Ireland in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth. There are Lords of the Pale, and
Lords outside the Pale, friendly natives and hostile natives,
and any number of "wild Irishes. or Arabs fighting occa-
sionally among themselves, but all agreed as to the desirability
of getting rid of the French. Even among the sedentary
Moors, a most quiet, gentle, and inoffensive race, there prevails
an impression that they have been somehow swindled or

">
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A TRIP TO BARBARY.
cozened out of their country by the Gaul.
they urge, "as an act of revenge because
You took Algiers,"
Husseen Dey hit
your Consul in the eye with a fly-flapper. Bourmont Pasha
landed at Sidi Ferruch, the Casbah capitulated, and the Consul
was avenged. You drove away the Turks-that was well;
it was a Turk who hit M. Dejean in the eye-a Moor would
have been too well-bred to think of such a thing. Well, you
concluded, having taken Algiers, to keep it. That was very
well too; for the Janissaries were rude, swaggering creatures,
and led us poor Moors a terrible life. But what right had you
to go up in the mountains and worry the Kabyles? They
never manned pirate ships; they never hit your Consul. They
are sober and industrious folks, who have enjoyed their in-
dependence since the days of Iskander the Great, Sultan of
the World. What business had you to seize Oran and Con-
stantine, which were separate beyliks, tributary to, but other-
wise independent of, Algiers?" The French can reply, as we
do in India, that their gradual course of conquest has been
forced upon them by the inevitable logic of circumstances.
Qui a bu, boira. We English can only wonder the French
have not annexed Tunis and Morocco by this time. But the
Moors cannot be brought to see the force of the fatal exigencies
of civilisation. They have gotten hold of a French word very
forcibly expressing their sense of the manner in which the
French have become possessors of so much of North Africa.

FRENCII OCCUPATION.-A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 395
FRENCII
Mais ces Français," they complain, "ils nous ont ca-a-a-
rottis." To "carrottir" any one, say an uncle or a creditor,
it to chizzle or chouse" or
or "do" him out of his property
(C
""
(C
amidst assurances of highflown benevolence and exalted in-
tegrity. The Arabs persist in asserting that they have been
carrottis by their present masters. In the towns they are not
actively inimical to their rule, for they acknowledge perforce
that clean and well swept streets, an efficient police, and strict
security for life and property are preferable, even at the hands
giaours, to the filth, the disease, the bowstring, and the
bastinado which flourished in the old days of their Turkish
masters. If you take up any abstract of Algerine history, you
will come, at about every other page or so, to a summary
similar to the following: Ali-ben-Moustafa Dey, deposed;
Moustafa-ben-Ali-Pasha Dey reigned three weeks, strangled;
plague; grasshoppers; several fires; war declared against Ham-
burg. In fact, an epitome of the entire history of Barbary
might be written with very slight variations of the foregoing
scheme. But the natives, while they cannot but recognise the
change for the better which has taken place since the conquest,
are but faintly grateful for it. The benefits they have expe-
rienced have been the work of a people alien to them in blood,
in speech, in manners, and in creed. It is not, perhaps, quite
correct to compare the feelings which they hold towards the
French with those which the Hindoos hold towards us. They

396
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
hate us, heartily enough, it is true, but they still admit our
superiority; to Mahometans, Brahmins, and Buddhists we are
alike the Sahibs, the strong, proud, dominant race in white
linen jackets, who drink brandy and eat beef, and always booted
and spurred, with tough whips and cruel curbs, to ride on the
native back. They hate us, but, mainly, with a cowardly,
cringing loathing—the aversion mingled with terror with which
the dark-skinned man ever beholds the white. And the higher
up they live, and the fairer they grow, the stronger they are, and
the less do they hate and fear the Sahib. Moreover, this same
Sahib has reigned in India for many generations; and, for a
hundred years at least, has had the upper hand. But the Arabs
are no soft and effeminate creatures, such as the Hindoos, whom
a well-directed punch in the midriff may kill. The Kabyles
have often been likened to the Sikhs-hardy and unbending
mountaineers—but it is to the Moors and Arabs of the plains to
whom I am alluding. There is, in the first place, no inferiority
on their side as regards colour. They are dark or fair, swarthy
or pale, sometimes a dusky red, sometimes a singular mat
blonde; but they are dark or fair as Franks are, and are never
to be confounded with niggers. No woolly heads, no "pigment
beneath the epidermis," no blunt noses, blubber lips, splay feet,
curved shin-bones, as negroes—no straight lank locks, high
cheek-bones, pig's-eyes, teaboard simpering faces as Chinamen
and Japanese have, no liver-hued, flaccid-muscled, Hindoo forms
FRENCH OCCUPATION.-A DEBIT AND CREDIT ACCOUNT. 397
do you find here. They are Men-Adam-like men, stalwart,
and tall, and beautiful-fit to marry Eves, and beget Abels, and
Cains, too, sometimes. Then, as to lineage. An Arab gentle-
man can trace his descent much further back than the majority
of French marquises. The very horse he rides upon has a
pedigree which dwarfs the genealogy of an Eclipse or a Coffin
Mare to the proportions of that of a costermonger's donkey.
He will not condescend to enter a horse for a race at which
animals belonging to Europeans under a certain rank are per-
mitted to compete. His greyhounds are of noble extraction
and long descent. Then he is the strictest of Conservatives,
both in politics and religion, and holds Democracy and Free-
thinking alike in horror. Finally his subjugation to the Frank
is but of yesterday's date; and it has been accomplished by a
people whom for centuries his ancestors were accustomed to
browbeat and despise. When it is remembered that there are,
at this day, numerous elderly Moors in Algiers, of the highest
respectability, who in their time have owned French slaves who
worked in their gardens, built their houses, cooked their dinners,
and filled their pipes-slaves whom they could scourge when-
ever they had a mind, within an inch of their lives-when it is
borne in mind that, within the memory of men still living,
noble European ladies have been the involuntary inmates of
Algerine harems-very simple reasons may be found for the
inexpressible bitterness with which an ancient and gallant race
398
A TRIP TO BARBARY.
behold the spectacle of the countrymen of their whilom bond-
servants riding about on Arab horses, stretching their legs on
the luxurious divans of the palaces of Moustafa and Hussein Dey,
and professing to teach the true believers out of their own
Coran that obedience and submission to the Caliph or the
Infidels was one of the prime duties imposed on the Muslim
by the prophet Mahomet.
THE END.
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

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