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.