plates with a whip thrust into it. His tall felt hat was swathed in a kind of bubble of silver gauze, forming an extraordinary kind of turban. The Black Eunuch's dress consisted of a long white robe lined with fox fur, and on his head was a snowy turban set with a golden clasp.
They both bowed ceremoniously and presented a letter bearing the
In fact, while Marianne hastened to her room, Latour-Maubourg knew a moment's hesitation, fearing the consequences of allowing the emperor's personal friend to go, unattended and at night, into the seraglio. He feared that the flowery terms of the invitation might conceal a trap. On the other hand, since Marianne's object was to enter the harem, it was scarcely possible for the French ambassador to request the favor of accompanying her, nor did the presence of the Aga of the Janissaries leave much room for argument. In any case the command, on a second reading, was unequivocal: the Princess Sant'Anna was to go to the seraglio alone. A closed litter was already waiting at the door. With a caique and another litter, it would carry the princess to the place of the Sultan Valideh's choice and bring her back again by the same route when the audience was concluded.
And so, when Marianne came down again some minutes later dressed for her audience, the ambassador said merely that he trusted they would not keep her all night, since he and Jolival proposed to wait up for her, whiling the time away with a game of chess.
'And may God go with you!' he added in a lower tone, like a good Breton.
As the caique rounded the seraglio point, Marianne was thinking to herself that divine inspiration was precisely what she needed most. During the days of waiting she had gone over in her mind a hundred times the things she meant to say and had tried to picture the questions she would be asked and the answers she must make. But now that the time had come her brain felt curiously empty and she could not remember any of the speeches she had prepared so carefully.
In the end, she gave up and concentrated instead on trying to calm her nerves by filling her lungs with the sea air, cooled by the evening freshness, and her eyes with the magical vision of the fabulous city before her. With the coming of night, the voices of the muezzins had fallen silent in the minarets of the great mosques, but the evening shadows, through which there still gleamed here and there the gold of a cupola or the rich molding of a palace, were pierced little by little by a multitude of tiny lights from the oiled paper lanterns which every citizen was bound to carry with him when he went out. The effect of all these little gilded lamps was charming and gave to the Ottoman capital the fairylike appearance of a vast colony of glowworms.
They were on the Bosporus now, and the vast bulk of the seraglio's formidable walls loomed over the glittering waters. The black points of cypress trees showed where they enclosed a world of gardens, kiosks, palaces, stables, prisons, barracks, workshops and kitchens, providing occupation for some twenty thousand people: In a moment they would be landing at the old Byzantine jetty of worn marble that led by a flight of shallow steps up to the two medieval gates in the walls between the palace gardens and the shore. This was not the main entrance, for the Princess Sant'Anna, despite the ties of kinship which lay between her and the Queen Mother, was deemed to be on a private visit and so would not enter by the Sublime Porte in the usual way of ambassadors and other important persons. This was a private visit and the lateness of the hour, like the mode of entry, stressed its unofficial nature.
But while the Black Eunuch involved himself in a host of explanations designed to convey this to the Frankish princess without undue offense to her pride, Marianne was thinking that really it did not matter to her in the least and that in fact she infinitely preferred it so. She had never wanted to be burdened with an official diplomatic mission, the emperor himself had stressed the private character of the undertaking and she had no conceivable wish to tread on Latour-Maubourg's toes, being only too well aware of the difficulties he was up against.
The oars were shipped and the caique drifted up to the jetty. Marianne was ushered from her awning into a kind of flat-bottomed egg-shaped container, hung with brocaded curtains and smelling strongly of sandalwood.
Borne on the shoulders of half a dozen black slaves, the litter passed through the guard of janissaries, armed to the teeth, outside the gates and entered the scented, humid atmosphere of the gardens. Here were roses and jasmine in abundance. The salty sea smell was lost in that of thousands of flowers, and the slap of the waters was drowned in the music of the fountains and streams that cascaded over steps of porphyry and pink marble.
Marianne stared about her, abandoning herself to the rhythm of the bearers. Very soon a fragile building appeared at the far end of an alley. It was surmounted by a translucent dome that shone like a huge, multicolored lantern in the darkness. This was a kiosk, one of the delicate, precious little pavilions with which the sultans loved to dot their gardens, each bringing to them something of his own life and tastes. This one, standing at the highest point of the gardens, was silhouetted against the dark background of the Asian shore and seemed to tremble on the brink of the Bosporus as if it feared to lean too far and fall to meet its reflection in the water. Around it was a little secret garden planted with tall cypresses and a carpet of pale blue hyacinths which the Bostanji Bashi, the head gardener whose dominion extended over all the gardens of the empire, kept in flower all the year round because they were the Sultan-Mother's favorite flowers.
The delightful retreat, set apart from the somewhat forbidding mass of the seraglio as a whole, had a private, festive air with the rose-colored lanterns hung about it. Fragrant shrubs that looked as if they were covered with snow crowded up against its slender columns, and the exotic, turbanned shadows of the eunuchs of the guard passed to and fro against the blue-green and violet-tinted glass of the windows.
As the slaves set down the litter a gigantic figure surged forward from between the pillars and bowed low to the visitor. Marianne beheld a round, smiling face, as black and shiny as if it had been well polished, under a tall, snow-white headdress in which gleamed a brooch of blood-red rubies. A magnificent robe, sable lined and covered with silver embroideries, fell majestically to his feet, covering a royal stomach which did honor to the palace kitchens.
Speaking in a soft voice, in impeccable French, this imposing person introduced himself as the Khislar Aga, chief of the Black Eunuchs, at the visitor's service. Then he informed her with another bow that he had the honor to present the 'noble lady come from Frankish lands to Her Highness and Sultan Valideh, most revered mother of the Omnipotent Padishah.'
Marianne thanked him briefly and with a little kick sent the long train of the green satin dress shimmering behind her like a changeable river of crystal and pearls. Instinctively she lifted her head, suddenly conscious that she was at that moment the representative of the greatest empire in the world. Then, gripping the slender sticks of her matching fan between nervous fingers to give herself confidence, she stepped forward onto the great blue silken carpet which flowed down into the gardens.
In another moment she had paused, holding her breath to listen to the strains of a guitar, light and melancholy as they came to her, the strains of a guitar playing:
Marianne felt the tears prick her eyelids, and there was something sticking in her throat, something that might have been pity. Here, in this eastern palace, the simple song sung by children at play in France had the plaintive sound of a lament. And she wondered suddenly what kind of woman this was who lived here guarded by an ageless ritual. What was she going to find within those translucent walls? A fat woman, stuffed with sweets and self-pity? A little dried-up old woman cut off from the world? The sultana was roughly of an age with her cousin Josephine and so must be nearing fifty, which seemed a great age to the nineteen-year-old Marianne. Or a creature of exaggeratedly girlish ways, a superannuated school girl? No one had been able to give her even the faintest picture of the Creole girl who had risen to such a fabulous position, because not one of the people who had described her had ever set eyes on her. A woman might have told her more, but no European woman, to her knowledge, had passed the threshold of the seraglio since the death of Fanny Sebastiani. And all at once Marianne was afraid of what she was going to find, dearly though she had longed for this moment.
The delicate notes of the song floated on the air. The Khislar Aga had paused, realizing that he was not being followed, and was waiting.
