French and Oriental Love in a Harem

Next, out of consideration for your poor intellect, let me inform you

also that under the blessed skies of Turkey the wife has no such

presumptuous ambition as that of possessing a husband all to herself.

Reared with a view to the harem, the young girl aims no higher in her

ambitious fancy than to become the favourite and outshine her rivals;

but never, never in the world, does she conceive the outlandish notion

of becoming the sole object of the affections of lover, master, or

husband. The ideal of girls like Zouhra, Nazli, Hadidjé, and Kondjé-Gul,

is the life which I am now giving them; they abandon themselves to it,

as to the realisation of their hopes. Their notions respecting the

destiny of woman do not go beyond this happiness, which they now

possess, of pleasing their master and being loved in this way by him. It

is no use, therefore, for you to string together a lot of conventional

abstractions with a view to drawing from them any deductions applicable

to the laws of the Kingdom of Love.

The truth is that Hadidjé, Nazli, and Zouhra burst into transports of

joy when Kondjé-Gul repeated to them my promise to be "faithful to all

four of them."

My dear fellow, there is a great deal of the child remaining in these

creatures, who seem to have been only created to expand their beauty, as

flowers are to exhale their perfume. Cloistered in the life of the

harem, their ideas do not reach beyond the horizon of the harem. Their

hearts and their minds have only been cultivated by recitals of

wonderful legends and of superstitious romances of love; they know

nothing else.

You may say, if you like, that they are just pretty little animals

without souls--but you would be wrong. Again I repeat, most of our

so-called refined and civilised ideas about sentiment, virtue,

propriety, and modesty, are conventional ideas, differing according to

place, climate, and habits; and this you will see clearly by following

my story, which I may with good reason call natural history, for when I

take the instincts of my little animals by surprise, they display for a

moment bold impulses which bear much more resemblance to genuine

innocence of mind than do certain affectations of modesty practised by

the young ladies of our educated society.

The slipper being nearly dry, Kondjé-Gul put it on her little arched

foot, with its famous light green silk stocking, and we recommenced our

course through the park. I will say nothing about a row we took in a

boat on the lake, with great willows on its banks. The swans and the

Mandarin ducks followed us in procession.