“Most willingly,” replied Mirzoza, who began to be sensible of the advantages she gain’d: “you shall be satisfied, only follow the chain of my notions. I do not pretend to make arguments in form. I speak from my heart; this is the philosophy of our sex, and you understand it almost as well as we. It is probable enough,” added she, “that the soul occupies the feet and legs to the age of eight or ten: but about that time, or rather later, she quits that lodging, either of her own free motion, or by force. By force, when a tutor employs certain machines to drive her out of her native place, and lead her into the brain; where she is metamorphosed generally into memory, and seldom or never into judgment. This is the fate of schoolboys. In like manner, if a weak governant labours hard to form a young girl, stuffs her mind with knowledge, and neglects the heart and morals; the soul rapidly flies towards the head, stops on the tongue, or fixes in the eyes; and her scholar is but a tiresome pratler, or a coquet.
“Thus the voluptuous woman is she whose soul occupies her Toy, and never strays from it.
“The woman of gallantry, she whose soul is sometimes in her Toy, and sometimes in her eyes.
“The affectionate woman, she whose soul is habitually in the heart, but sometimes also in her Toy.
“The virtuous woman, she whose soul is sometimes in her head, sometimes in her heart, but never anywhere else.
“If the soul fixes in the heart, she forms the characters of sensibility, compassion, truth, generosity. If she quits the heart without returning thither, and retires to the head; then she forms those whom we call hardhearted, ungrateful, deceitful, cruel men.
“The class of those, in whom the soul visits the head merely as a country-house, where its stay is short, is very numerous. It is composed of Petits-Maîtres, coquets, musicians, poets, romancers, courtiers, and all those who are called pretty women. Listen to the reasoning of these entities, and you will instantly discern vagabond souls, which are influenced by the different climes they inhabit.”
“If that be the case,” said Selim, “nature has formed many useless things. And yet our sages hold as a constant maxim, that she has produced nothing in vain.”
“Drop your sages and their lofty expressions,” answered Mirzoza; “and as to nature, let us consider her with the eyes of experience only, and we shall learn from her, that she has placed the soul in the body of man, as in a spacious palace, of which she does not always occupy the most beautiful apartment. The head and heart are principally destined for her, as the center of virtue, and the residence of truth: but most commonly she stops on the road, and prefers a garret, a suspicious place, a miserable inn, where she drops asleep in perpetual drunkenness. Ah! If I were allowed for twenty-four hours only, to settle the world according to my fancy, I would divert you with a very strange sight: in a moment I would deprive each soul of the superfluous parts of its habitation; and you would see each individual characterised by the part left him. Thus dancers would be reduced to two feet, or two legs at most; singers to a throat; most women to a Toy; heroes and prizefighters to an armed hand; certain learned men to a skull without brains; a female gamester should be stinted to two hands incessantly shuffling the cards; a glutton to two jaws always in motion; a coquet to two eyes; a rake to the sole instrument of his passion; the ignorant and lazy to nothing.”
“If you leave the women any hands at all,” interrupted the Sultan, “those men whom you would reduce to the sole instrument of their passions, would be pursued. This chase would be a pleasant sight: and if the sex was as greedy of this game everywhere else as in Congo, the species would soon be extinct.”
“But,” said Selim to the favorite, “of what would you compose affectionate and sensible women, constant and faithful lovers?”
“Of a heart,” answered Mirzoza; “and I well know,” added she, darting a tender glance on Mangogul, “that, to which mine would wish to be united.”
The Sultan could not stand against this declaration: he sprung from his seat to the favorite: the courtiers disappear’d, and the new philosopher’s chair became the theatre of their pleasures: he gave her repeated proofs that he was not less charmed with her sentiments than with her discourse; and the philosophic equipage was thrown into disorder. Mirzoza return’d the black petticoats to her women, sent my lord Seneschal his enormous peruke, and to Monsieur l’Abbé his square cap, with assurances that he should be on the list at the next nomination. What would he not have attained, if he had been a genius? A seat in the academy was the least reward that he could expect: but unluckily he knew but two or three hundred words, and had never been able from that stock, to compass the composing of two Ritournelles.
XXVII
Sequel of the Preceding Conversation
Mangogul was the only person that had given attention to Mirzoza’s philosophic lecture without interrupting her; and as he was pretty much inclined to contradict, she was astonish’d at it. “Does the Sultan allow my system from beginning to end?” said she within herself. “No, that is not probable: has he found it too bad to deign to attack it? that may be. My notions are not the most just that have been broach’d to this day; I grant it: but neither are they the most false; and I am apt to think that worse have been invented.”
In order to clear up this doubt, the favorite resolved to ask some
