Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century

To her visitor Lady Hester seemed about fifty years of age; she was really fifty-six; she was still beautiful – beautiful with that beauty which lies in the form itself, in the purity of the lines, in the majesty, the thought which irradiate the countenance. On her head she wore a white turban; from her forehead a veil, or yashmak, of purple wool fell down to her shoulders. A long shawl of yellow cashmere, an ample Turkish robe of white silk, with hanging sleeves, enveloped her whole person in their simple and majestic folds; so that you could but catch a glimpse, where this outer tunic opened on the bosom, of a second robe of Persian stuff, which was fastened at the throat by a clasp of pearls. Turkish boots of yellow morocco, embroidered in silk, completed her costume.

"You have come a great distance," said Lady Hester to her visitor,21 "to see a hermit; you are welcome, I receive few strangers, but your letter pleased me, and I felt anxious to know a person who, like myself, loved God, and nature, and solitude. Something told me, moreover, that our stars were friendly, and that our sympathies would prove a bond of union. Be seated, and let us converse.

"You are one of those men," she said, "whom I await; whom Providence sends to me; who have a great part to accomplish in the work that Fate is getting ready. You will shortly return to Europe. Well, Europe is worn out; France alone has a great mission before her; in this you will participate, though I know not how, but I can tell you this evening if you wish it, after I have consulted the stars."

"As yet," she continued – evidently her keen perception had detected her visitor's vanity, and she skilfully played upon it – "as yet, I do not know the names of all. I see more than three, however; I can distinguish four, perhaps five, and – who knows? – still more. One of them is certainly Mercury, which bestows clearness and colour upon intelligence and speech. You will become a poet – I see it in your eyes, and in the upper part of your face; in the lower you are under the sway of widely different stars, almost all of them of opposite characters. I discern, too, the influence of the sun in the pose of your head, and in the manner in which you throw it back on the left shoulder. What is your name?"

Lamartine, who had already won distinction as a poet, told her.

"I had never heard it," she exclaimed, with a convincing accent of sincerity; "but, poet or not, I like you, and have hope for you."

"Go," she added; "dinner is served. Dine quickly, and return soon. I go to meditate upon you, and to see more clearly into the confusion of my ideas respecting your person and your future."

Lamartine had scarcely concluded his dinner when Lady Hester sent for him. He found her smoking a long Oriental pipe, the fellow of which she ordered to be brought for his own use. Accustomed to see the most graceful women of the East with their tchibouques, he was neither surprised nor shocked by the gracious, nonchalant attitude, or the light wreaths of perfumed smoke issuing from Lady Hester's finely curved lips, interrupting the conversation without chilling it. They conversed together for a long time upon the favourite subject – the unique, mysterious theme of that extraordinary woman, or the modern Circe of the Desert, who so completely recalled to mind the famous female magicians of antiquity. The religious opinions of Lady Hester seemed to her guest a skilful though confused mixture of the various creeds among which she was condemned – or had condemned herself – to live.

"Mystical as the Druses, with whose mysterious secrets she alone, perhaps, in the world, was acquainted, resigned like the Mussulman, and as fatalistic; with the Jew, expectant of the Messiah's coming; with the Christian, a worshipper of Christ, whose beneficent morality she practised – she invested the whole in the fantastic colours and supernatural dreams of an imagination steeped in the light of the East, and, it would seem, the revelations of the Arabian astrologists. A strange and yet sublime medley, which it is much easier to stigmatize as lunatic than to analyze and comprehend. But Lady Hester Stanhope was no lunatic. Madness, which reveals itself only too clearly in the victim's eyes, was not to be detected in her frank, direct look – madness, which invariably betrays itself in conversation, which it involuntarily interrupts by sudden, irregular, and eccentric outbreaks, was nowhere discernible in Lady Hester's exalted, mystical, and cloudy, but sustained, connected and vigorous monologues.

"If," adds M. de Lamartine, "I were to offer an opinion, I should rather say it was a voluntary and studied madness, which knew what it was about, and had its own reasons for posing as madness. The patent admiration which her genius has excited, and still excites, among the Arab tribes, is a sufficient proof that this pretended insanity is only a means to an end."

In the course of conversation, Lady Hester suddenly said to her guest:

"I hope that you are an aristocrat; but I cannot doubt it when I look at you."

"You are mistaken, madam," replied the man of sentiment, "I am neither aristocrat nor democrat; I have lived long enough to see both sides of the medal of humanity, and to find them equally hollow. No, I am neither aristocrat nor democrat; I am a man, and an ardent partisan of all which can ameliorate and perfect the whole man, whether he be born at the summit or at the foot of the social ladder. I am neither for the people nor the great, but for all humanity; and I am unable to believe that either aristocratic or democratic institutions possess the exclusive virtue of raising humanity to the highest standard. This virtue lies only in a divine morality, the fruit of a perfect religion! The civilization of the peoples – it is their faith!"

We shall shortly see that Lady Hester, with her quick insight into character, an insight sharpened by long and varied experience, took "the measure" of her visitor very accurately, and lightly estimated the vanity, self-consciousness, and inflated sentimentality which weakened the genius of Lamartine and marred his career, both for his country and himself.

She invited him to visit her garden – a sanctuary into which the profanum vulgus were never allowed to penetrate. Here is his description of it, somewhat exaggerated in colouring: —

"Gloomy trellises, the verdurous roofs of which bore, like thousands of lustres, the gleaming grapes of the Promised Land; kiosks, where carved arabesques were entertwined with jasmines and climbing plants, the lianas of Asia; basins, into which the waters – artificial they are here – flowed from afar to leap and murmur in the marble jets of alleys lined with all the fruit trees of England, of Europe, and of the sunny Eastern climates; green leaves besprinkled with blossoming shrubs, and marble beds enclosing sheaves of flowers."

She also exhibited to her famous guest, if, indeed, he may be implicitly credited, the noted mare which realized ancient prophecy, in which nature had accomplished all that is written on the animal destined to the honour of carrying the Messiah – "She will be born ready saddled." He says: "And in truth, I saw, on this beautiful animal, a freak of nature, rare enough to encourage the illusion of a vulgar credulity among half-barbarous peoples: instead of shoulders, she had a cavity so broad and deep, and so exactly imitating the shape of a Turkish saddle, that one might truthfully say she was born ready saddled, and, with stirrups at hand, one might readily have mounted her without a saddle." This magnificent bay mare was the object of profound respect and admiration on the part of Lady Stanhope and her slaves; she had never been ridden, and a couple of Arab grooms cared for her and watched her carefully, never losing sight of her.

A few years later, and the brilliant author "Eöthen," Mr. A. W. Kinglake, while travelling in the East, made his way to Lady Hester's Lebanon retreat. She had been the friend of his mother, and consequently he had no difficulty in obtaining admission.

In the first court which he entered a number of fierce-looking and ill-clad Albanian soldiers were hanging about the place, a couple of them smoking their tchibouques, the remainder lying torpidly upon the flat stones. He rode on to an inner part of the building, dismounted, and passed through a doorway that led him at once from an open court into an apartment on the ground floor. There he was received by Lady Hester's doctor, with a command from the doctor's mistress that her visitor would rest and refresh himself after the fatigues of the journey. After dinner, which was of the usual Oriental kind, but included the wine of the Lebanon, he was conducted into a small chamber where sat the lady prophetess. She rose from her seat very formally, uttered a few words of welcome, pointed to a chair placed exactly opposite to her sofa, at two yards' distance, and remained standing up to the full of her majestic height, perfectly still and motionless, until he had taken his appointed position. She then resumed her seat – not after the fashion of the Orientals – but allowing her feet to rest on the floor or footstool, and covering her lap with a mass of loose white drapery.22

The woman before him had exactly the person of a prophetess; not, indeed, of the divine Sibyl, imagined by Dammichino, but of a good, business-like, practical prophetess, long used to the exercise of her sacred calling. Her large commanding features reminded him of the great statesman, her grandfather, as he is seen in Copley's famous picture; her face was of surprising whiteness; she wore a very large turban, composed of pale cashmere shawls, and so arranged as to conceal the hair; her dress, from the chin down to the point at which it was concealed by the drapery on her lap, was a mass of white linen loosely folding – an ecclesiastical sort of affair – more like a surplice than any of those blessed creations which our souls love under the names of "dress," and "frock," and "bodice," and "collar," and "habit-shirt," and sweet "chemisette."

Such was the outward seeming of Lady Hester Stanhope, the grand-daughter of Chatham, the adviser of Pitt, the Queen of Palmyra, the prophetess of the Lebanon – she who, in her life, had played so many parts, but in all had given full rein to her master-passion, pride. And assuredly the moralist who, commenting on the disastrous effect of this passion, should need an illustration to point his moral and adorn his tale, could find none more striking than Lady Hester Stanhope's career affords.

A couple of black slaves appeared at a signal, and supplied their mistress and her visitor with lighted tchibouques and coffee.

"The custom of the East sanctions, and almost commands, some moments of silence whilst you are inhaling the first few breaths of the fragrant pipe. The pause was broken, I think, by my lady, who addressed to me some inquiries respecting my mother, and particularly as to her marriage; but before I had communicated any great amount of family facts, the spirit of the prophetess kindled within her, and presently (though with all the skill of a woman of the world) she shuffled away the subject of poor, dear Somersetshire, and bounded onward into other spheres of thought…

"For hours and hours this wondrous white woman poured forth her speech, for the most part concerning sacred and profane mysteries; but every now and then she would stay her lofty flight, and swoop down upon the world again. Whenever this happened I was interested in her conversation."

In reference to her mode of life, she informed her guest that for her sin, or sins, she had subjected herself during many years to severe penance, and that her self-denial had not been without reward. "Vain and false," she declared, "was all the pretended knowledge of the Europeans. Their doctors asserted that the drinking of milk gave yellowness to the complexion; yet milk was her only food, and was not her face white?" Her intellectual abstemiousness was not less severe than her physical self-denial. Upon book or newspaper she never cast a glance, but trusted wholly to the stars for her sublime knowledge. Her nights she usually spent in absorbed communion with these silent but eloquent teachers, and took her rest during the daytime. She spoke contemptuously of the frivolity and benighted ignorance of the modern Europeans, and gave as a proof their ignorance not only of astrology, but of the common and every-day phenomena produced by the magic art. She evidently desired her hearer to believe that she had at her command all the spells which exercise control over the creatures of the unseen world, but refrained from employing them because it would be derogatory to her exalted rank in the heavenly kingdom. She said that the charm by which the face of an absent person is thrown upon a mirror lay within the reach of the humblest magicians, but that the practice of such arts was unholy as well as vulgar.

Reference was made to the divining rod or twig (Virgil's "Aurea virga"23), by means of which precious metals may be discovered.

"In relation to this," says Kinglake, "the prophetess told me a story rather against herself, and inconsistent with the notion of her being perfect in her science; but I think that she mentioned the facts as having happened before she attained to the great spiritual authority which she now arrogated. She told me that vast treasures were known to exist in a situation which she mentioned, if I remember rightly, as being near Suez; that Napoleon, profanely brave, thrust his arm into the cave containing the coveted gold, and that instantly his flesh became palsied. But the youthful hero (for she said he was great in his generation) was not to be thus daunted; he fell back, characteristically, upon his brazen resources, and ordered up his artillery; yet man could not strive with demons, and Napoleon was foiled. In latter years came Ibrahim Pasha, with heavy guns and wicked spells to boot, but the infernal guardians of the treasure were too strong for him. It was after this that Lady Hester passed by the spot; and she described, with animated gesture, the force and energy with which the divining twig had suddenly leaped in her hands. She ordered excavations, and no demon opposed her enterprise. The vast chest in which the treasure had been deposited was at length discovered; but, lo and behold! it was full of pebbles! She said, however, that the times were approaching in which the hidden treasure of the earth would become available to those who had 'true knowledge.'"

Among the subjects on which Lady Hester discoursed, with equal fluency and earnestness, were religion and race. On the first head she announced that the Messiah was yet to come; on the second, she expressed her low opinion of Norman, and her high opinion of ancient French, blood. Occasionally she descended to inferior topics, and displayed her conspicuous abilities as a mimic and satirist. She spoke of Lord Byron, and ridiculed his petty affectations and sham Orientalism. For Lamartine she had still less mercy. His morbid self consciousness and exaggerated refinement of manner, had excited her contempt. Indeed, she seems to have cherished an abundant scorn of everything approaching to exquisiteness or "æstheticism."

Next day, at her request, he paid her a second visit. "Really," said she, when he had taken his seat and his pipe, "we were together for hours last night, and still I have heard nothing at all of my old friends; now do tell me something of your dear mother and her sister; I never knew your father – it was after I left Burton-Pynsent that your mother married." Kinglake began to furnish the desired particulars; but his questioner could not long attend to them. She soared away to loftier topics; so that the second interview, though it lasted two or three hours, was all occupied by her mystical, theological, transcendental, necromantical discourse, in which she displayed the expressiveness, if not the glowing eloquence, of a Coleridge.

In the course of the afternoon, the captain of an English man-of-war arrived at Djoun, and Lady Hester resolved on receiving him for the same reason as that which had governed her reception of Mr. Kinglake, namely, an early intimacy with his family. He proved to be a pleasant and amusing guest, and all three sat smoking until midnight, conversing chiefly upon magical science.

"Lady Hester's unholy claim to supremacy in the spiritual kingdom was, no doubt, the suggestion of fierce and inordinate pride, most perilously akin to madness; but I am quite sure," says Mr. Kinglake, "that the mind of the woman was too strong to be thoroughly overcome by even this potent feeling. I plainly saw that she was not an unhesitating follower of her own system; and I even fancied that I could distinguish the brief moments during which she contrived to believe in herself, from those long and less happy intervals in which her own reason was too strong for her.

"As for the lady's faith in astrology and magic science, you are not for a moment to suppose that this implied any aberration of intellect. She believed these things in common with those around her; and it could scarcely be otherwise, for she seldom spoke to anybody, except crazy old dervishes, who at once received her alms and fostered her extravagances; and even when (as on the occasion of my visit) she was brought into contact with a person entertaining different notions, she still remained uncontradicted. This entourage, and the habit of fasting from books and newspapers, was quite enough to make her a facile recipient of any marvellous story."24

After Lady Hester's death, a visit was paid to the place which had been her residence for so many years, by Major Eliot Warburton, the accomplished author of "The Crescent and the Cross." He speaks of the buildings, that constituted the palace, as of a very scattered and complicated description, covering a wide space, but only one story in height; courts and gardens, stables and sleeping rooms, halls of audience and ladies' bowers, all strangely intermingled. Heavy weeds clambered about the open portals and a tangle of roses and jasmine blocked the way to the inner court, where the flowers no longer bloomed and the fountains had ceased to play in the marble basins. At nightfall when Major Warburton's escort had lighted their watch-fires, the lurid gleam fell strangely upon masses of honeysuckle and woodbine; on the white, mouldering walls beneath, and the dark, waving trees above; while the quaint picture seemed appropriately filled up by the group of wild mountaineers, with their long beards and vivid dresses, who gathered around the cheerful blaze.

Next morning, Major Warburton explored the spacious gardens. "Here many a broken arbour and trellis bending under masses of jasmine and honeysuckle, showed the care and taste that were once lavished on this wild but beautiful hermitage: a garden-house, surrounded by an enclosure of roses run wild, stood in the midst of a grove of myrtle and bay trees. This was Lady Hester's favourite resort during her life-time, and now, within its silent enclosure,

"'After life's fitful fever she sleeps well.'"

It is painful to know that in her last illness she was shamefully deserted. Mr. Moore, the English consul at Beyrout, on hearing that she was stricken, rode across the mountains to visit her, accompanied by Mr. Thompson, the American missionary. It was evening when they arrived, and silence reigned in the palace. No attendants met them. They lighted their own lamps in the outer court, and passed unquestioned through court and gallery until they reached the room where she lay – dead. "A corpse was the only inhabitant of the palace, and the isolation from her kind which she had sought so long was indeed complete. That morning, thirty-seven servants had watched every motion of her eye; its spell once darkened by death, every one fled with such plunder as they could secure. A little girl, adopted by her, and maintained for years, took her watch and some papers on which she had set peculiar value. Neither the child nor the property was ever seen again. Not a single thing was left in the room where she lay dead, except the ornaments upon her person: no one had ventured to take these; even in death she seemed able to protect herself. At midnight, her countryman and the missionary carried her out by torchlight to a spot in the garden that had been formerly her favourite resort, and there they buried the self-exiled lady."

Some curious particulars of Lady Hester Stanhope's mode of life in its closing years are recorded by her physician. She seldom rose from her bed until between two and five in the afternoon, and seldom retired before the same hours in the morning. It was sunset before the day's business really began. Not that the servants were permitted to remain idle during daylight. On the contrary, their work was assigned to them over-night, and their mistress employed the evening hours in arranging their occupations for the following day. When this was done, she wrote her letters and plunged into those endless conversations which seem to have been her sole, or, at all events, her chief pleasure. She always showed a reluctance, an air of unwillingness, to retire; not an unusual characteristic in persons of her peculiar temperament. When the room was ready, one of her two girls, Zezefôrn or Falôom, would precede her to it, bearing wax tapers in their hands.

Her bedstead might have suited a veteran campaigner; it consisted simply of a few planks nailed together on low tressels. On these planks, which sloped slightly towards the foot, was spread a mattress, seven feet long and about four and a half feet broad. Instead of sheets, she had Barbary blankets, which are like the finest English, two over and one under her. There was no counterpane, but, as occasion required, a woollen abak or cloak would be used or a fur pelisse. Her pillow-case was of Turkish silk, and under it was another covered with coloured cotton. Behind this were two more of silk, ready at hand, if needed.

Her dress for the night was a chemise of silk and cotton, a white quilted jacket, a short pelisse, a turban on her head, and a kefféyah tied under her chin in the same manner as when she was up, with a shawl over the back of her head and shoulders. It is rather a puzzle how she could enjoy in this full panoply any sound or refreshing repose.

No man is said to be a hero to his valet; I suppose the proverb may be applied in the case of his physician. Certainly, Lady Hester Stanhope's medical attendant does not forget to expose her weaknesses. "As it had become," he says, "a habit with her to find nothing well done, when she entered her bedroom, it was rare that the bed was made to her liking; and, generally, she ordered it to be made over again in her presence. Whilst this was doing, she would smoke her pipe, then call for the sugar basin to eat two or three lumps of sugar, then for a clove to take away the mawkish taste of the sugar. The girls, in the meantime, would go on making the bed, and be saluted every now and then, for some mark of stupidity, with all sorts of appellations. The night-lamp was then lighted, a couple of yellow wax lights were placed ready for use in the recess of the window, and all things being apparently done for the night, she would get into bed, and the maid whose turn it was to sleep in the room (for latterly she always had one) having placed herself, dressed as she was, on her mattress behind the curtain which ran across the room, the other servant was dismissed. But hardly had she shut the door and reached her own sleeping-room, flattering herself that her day's work was over, when the bell would ring, and she was told to get broth or lemonade or orgeat directly. This, when brought, was a new trial for the maids. Lady Hester Stanhope took it on a tray placed on her lap as she sat up in bed, and it was necessary for one of the two servants to hold the candle in one hand and shade the light from her mistress's eyes with the other. The contents of the basin were sipped once or twice and sent away; or, if she ate a small bit of dried toast, it was considered badly made, and a fresh piece was ordered, perhaps not to be touched."

In what follows we are almost inclined to suspect a degree of exaggeration. Dr. Meryon says that the dish being removed, the maid would again depart, and throw herself on her bed; and, as she wanted no rocking, in ten minutes would be asleep. But, meanwhile, her mistress would feel a twitch in some part of her body, and the bell would again be rung. As servants, when fatigued, sleep sometimes so soundly as not to hear, and sometimes are purposely deaf, Lady Hester Stanhope had got in the quadrangle of her own apartments a couple of active fellows, a part of whose business it was to watch by turns during the night, and see that the maids answered the bell; they were, therefore, sure to be roughly shaken out of their sleep, and, in going, half stupid, into her ladyship's room, would be told to prepare a fomentation of chamomile, or elder flowers, or mallows, or the like. The gardener was to be called, water was to be boiled, and the house again was all in motion. During these preparations the mistress would recollect some order she had previously given about some honey, flower, or letter – no matter however trivial – and the person charged with its execution would be summoned from his bed, whatever might be the time, and questioned respecting it. Nobody in Lady Hester's establishment was suffered to enjoy an interval of rest.