Hester Stanhope

“ The marked characteristic of Lady Hester Stanhope’s mind was the necessity she was under of eternally talking. This is a feature in her life to which justice can hardly be done by description. Talking with her appeared to be as involuntary and unavoidable as respiration. So long as she was awake, her brain worked incessantly, and her tongue never knew a moment’s repose. It might be supposed that such a perpetual flow and outpouring of words must lead to the unconscious disclosure of every thought and feeling; but it was not so with Lady Hester Stanhope. ”

“ I was pleased to find, my dear little Eugenia, that you inherit your father’s good-will towards me. I must thank you and Mademoiselle Longchamp for your kind offers of assistance, but I must decline them, having taken a determination not to have anything more to do with the doctor’s family than if it did not exist in the country. I should forget my situation and rank in life were I to condescend to dispute and make daily explanations to my inferiors. ”

“ I shall give up everything for life, that I may now or hereafter possess in Europe, to my creditors, and throw myself as a beggar upon Asiatic humanity, and wander far without one para in my pocket, with the mare from the stable of Solomon in one hand, and a sheaf of the corn of Beni-Israel in the other. I shall meet death, or that which I believe to be written, which no mortal hand can efface. There is nothing else to be done. ”

“ Fair or foul means, it is all alike to her. She has been so flattered in her lifetime, that no praise can turn her head. Money she thinks no more of than dirt; and as for fear, she does not know what it is. As for me, your Highness, I wash my hands of her.’
“Oh, doctor, if you were to feel the bump behind my ear, it is bigger than any thing you ever saw! And they say of the lions, that the more their ears are buried in bone the bolder they are. ”

“ Everybody who has visited Lady Hester Stanhope in her retirement will bear witness to her unexampled colloquial powers; to her profound knowledge of character; to her inexhaustible fund of anecdotes; to her talents for mimicry; to her modes of narration, as various as the subjects she talked about; to the lofty inspirations and sublimity of her language, when the subject required it; and to her pathos and feeling, whenever she wished to excite the emotions of her hearers. There was no secret of the human heart, however studiously concealed, that she could not discover ”

“ On another occasion, one of the Emir Beshýr’s people came on some message to her, but, before he entered her room, laid by his pistols and his sabre, which in Turkey these myrmidons always wear on their persons. Lady Hester’s maid whispered to her what the man was doing, when her ladyship, calling him in, bade him gird on his arms again. “Don’t think I am afraid of you or your master,” she said; “you may tell him I don’t care a fig for his poisons—I know not what fear is. It is for him, and those who serve him, to tremble. ”

“ I have been bred in the work of revolutions since I was first with Mr. Pitt. How many plots did he crush, within two or three days of their consummation, of which not a syllable was ever known! The great freemasons, doctor, exist all over the world: they know I am the person they want. ”

“ I can see an idle fellow or a rascal get a beating with the same tranquillity that I smoke my pipe: but nobody is more tender than I am, even when an animal suffers unjustly. I never shall forget how two or three of the servants turned as pale as death on hearing me on a sudden utter a cry, because a lazy villain was driving an ass with foal, heavily laden, down a steep bank. ”

“ Now, doctor, let the friend of the fair Ellen come to me, and I will receive her to my bosom, and she shall be my friend; for such sentiments as hers will I honour and respect wherever I find them.” She went on: “How strange it is that immorality, in England, is met in some persons by such severity—much too great; and, in others, escapes animadversion! * * * * * The poor are spurned for errors not half so gross as what the wealthy my lords do in the open face of day, and set people at defiance to boot.” ”

“ He received his orders from Lady Hester herself to this effect. “Osman, you will say to each horse, before you shoot him, putting your mouth close to his ear, ‘You have now worked enough on the earth; your mistress fears you might fall, in your old age, into the hands of cruel men, and she, therefore, dismisses you from her service.’” This order, strange as it may appear, was actually executed to the letter, with imperturbable gravity. ”

“ Gerardin to acquaint you with the great loss I had sustained in the faithful Miss Williams.
After two years of plague, there broke out, over almost all Mount Lebanon, a kind of fever, which I do not know precisely how to name. Whether it was a sort of yellow or malignant fever, poor Miss Williams fell a victim to it, as well as a servant, named Môosa, the only one in whom I had any confidence; and I but just escaped death from it myself. I am, as it were, come to life again by a miracle, owing to the attentions of a rich peasant, who came from a considerable distance to assist me. ”

“ A woman sixty years old, with impaired health, inhabiting a spot removed many miles from any town, amidst a population whom their own chiefs can hardly keep under control, was no fit object, one would think, for molestation under any circumstances; but, when the services of Lady Hester’s family are put into the scale, it seems wonderful how the representations of interested money-lenders could have had sufficient weight with those who guided the State to induce them to disturb her solitude and retirement. ”

“ The weather was beautiful; and, although the sides of Mount Lebanon, only a few miles off, were covered with snow, we sat until sunset with the windows open. The climate of Syria is, probably, one of the most pure and balmy in the world.
Lady Hester, from one thing to another, returned to the subject of Mr. Pitt’s amiable disposition. “It is wonderful,” said she, “what a man Mr. Pitt was. Nobody would have suspected how much feeling he had for people’s comforts, who came to see him. Sometimes he would say to me, ‘Hester, you know we have got such a one coming down. ”

“ Everybody who heard for an hour or two retired humbled from her presence; for her language was always directed to bring mankind to their level, to pull down pride and conceit, to strip off the garb of affectation, and to shame vice, immorality, irreligion, and hypocrisy. ”

“ But these were trifles, in comparison with the destruction and pilfering common to the negresses and peasant girls; and so little possibility was there of keeping any article of furniture or apparel for its destined purpose, that, after many years of ineffectual trouble, she, who was once, in her attire, the ornament of a court, might now be said to be worse clad than a still-room maid in her father’s house. Her ladyship slept on a mattress, on planks upheld by trestles, and the carpeting of her bed-room was of felt. She proclaimed herself, with much cheerfulness, a philosopher ”

“ August 4.—“The people of Europe,” said Lady Hester, “are all, or at least the greater part of them, fools, with their ridiculous grins, their affected ways, and their senseless habits. In all the parties I was in during the time I lived with Mr. Pitt—and they were a great many—out of thousands of people, I hardly saw ten whose conversation interested me. ”

“ She talked of her debts, her illnesses, her trials and sufferings, and never finished a day without picturing to herself a brighter futurity, when her worth would be more appreciated, when the clouds that overspread her existence would be dissipated, and when the neglect in which she was left by her friends would meet with its just punishment, and her magnificent star rise again, with renewed splendour, to gladden the world, and those, more particularly, who had been faithful to her cause. ”

“ No one in the village194 would dare to let his camels or mules to us, and I knew that, at Sayda, every consular agent would decline mixing himself up in any business against Lady Hester, apprehensive of the harassing consequences to which it would inevitably expose him: for it was well known that, in speaking of people who attempted to thwart her, her constant expression was, “If they want a devil, let them try me, and they shall have enough of it!” ”

“ Therefore, it is better to be like a true Turk, and do our duty to the last, and then beg of the believers in one God a bit of daily bread, and, if it comes not, die of want, which perhaps is as good a death as any other, and less painful. But never act contrary to the dictates of conscience, of honour, of nature, or of humanity. ”

“ Would you believe, doctor, that, in the last weeks of his last illness, he found time to think about his groom, in a way that nobody would have suspected in him? He had four grooms, who died of consumption, from being obliged to ride so hard after him; for they drank and caught cold, and so ruined their constitutions. This one I am speaking of, when first attacked in the lungs, was placed at Knightsbridge, and then sent to the seaside. One day, Mr. Pitt, speaking of him, said to me—‘The poor fellow, I am afraid, is very bad: I have been thinking of a way to give him a little consolation. ”

“ At all events, do not let your head be crammed with ideas that you cannot land; for, notwithstanding the departure of consuls and Franks from this part of the world, I firmly believe that, any one coming to me either in a man-of-war or in an open boat, his landing would not be opposed, even if things were more decidedly bad than they are at present. Sulyman Effendi, whom you recollect at Sayda, is governor of Beyrout, and Ali Aga has succeeded him at Sayda; Laurella, as Austrian consul, still remains at Beyrout, though but little friendly to me, as does old Gerardin at Sayda ”

“ At one time, Lady Hester had an Armenian steward, who kept his accounts in his own language: at another time, she had a Piedmontese, who went to Beyrout to negociate the bills, and must have known the nature of such transactions. Who can wonder, therefore, if all her concerns proved ruinous to her, surrounded as she was by adventurers and intriguers? Add to this, that various sorts of money are current in Turkey, as many, perhaps, as thirty, all fluctuating in value, and contributing still more to the complication of her distresses. ”

“ I recollect once he was driving me out in his curricle, when, at a turnpike-gate, I saw him pay the man himself, and take some halfpence in exchange. He turned them over two or three times in his hand without his glove. Well, thought I, if you like to handle dirty copper, it is a strange taste. ‘Take the reins a moment,’ said he, giving them to me, and out he jumped; and, before I could form the least suspicion of what he was going to do, he rushed upon the turnpike-man, and seized him by the throat. ”

“ But what are half the people in the world? I hold them in the most sovereign contempt. Sir J. Mackintosh, who makes a speech, and makes a talk at a dinner-table, and then says he doesn’t know what about witchcraft—he may say what he likes, but there are evil spirits in mankind. Go into a madhouse!—all madnesses are not alike—and where you suspect the presence of an evil spirit.... ”

“ I never can imagine that all the celebrated Greeks and Romans were a pack of old women; and therefore what they believed in must be as good as what other people believe in. But many, who see these things with the same eyes as I do, are still in the dark. ”

“ On returning to my own cottage in the village, (which was generally after midnight) , I was accompanied by a servant, who carried a lantern. On these occasions, I rode an ass, as being the most sure-footed creature for mountainous paths in the dark. In England we have no idea of a road to a person’s house such as this was; in itself, however, in no wise different from that which led to the Emir Beshýr’s palace, or to any other principal or princely dwelling on Mount Lebanon. These paths are no wider than is requisite for a mule or a horse ”

“ Every room is a saloon; and, when night comes, from a recess or niche in the thick walls of their houses, covered by a curtain, is drawn forth a wool mattress with a sheet, which are spread on the floor-matting. Upon this ready couch the lovely daughters of those favoured regions throw themselves dressed (let not this be lost sight of—dressed) very much in the same clothes as in the day-time, even to the turban, and draw over their persons a wadded quilt, to which is sewed the upper sheet, as a certain way of preventing it from shifting its position with reference to the quilt. ”

“ Who ever thought that there was not a better judge of women in London than he? and not only of women as they present themselves to the eye, but that his knowledge was so critical that he could analyze their features and persons in a most masterly way. ”

“ I found Lady Hester in good health and excellent spirits, and looking much the same as when I left her some years before. She received me with great apparent pleasure, kissing me on each cheek, ordering sherbet, the pipe, coffee, and a finjàn [27] of orange-flower water; all which civilities, at meeting, are regarded in the East as marks of the most cordial and distinguished regard. I myself was truly astonished at all this, but more especially at her salutation on the cheeks after the Oriental fashion ”

“ My kind friend and former physician, Dr. ——, having heard that for some years my situation has not been a pleasant one, and that my health is very indifferent, has given a proof of attachment and disinterestedness very rare in these times. He has blasted his own prospects in life by giving up every thing in Europe to join me in this country, without consulting any one. He wrote to me from France that, if he did not hear from me by the 25th of April, he should proceed to Leghorn, and there embark for this country. ”

“ She, moreover, was accustomed to mark, not merely the day, but the precise hour, that persons coming to visit her were to present themselves. She would do so with Duke Maximilian, or with Matteo Lunardi. On the morning to which I have referred, Lady Hester was in bed. “What do you want?” said she, in rather an angry tone. I replied that I had brought her a cut-glass cup and stand for her sherbet and lemonade, as hers was so common that it gave me pain to see her use it. “No, doctor,” she said, “I am much obliged to you, but you must send it away again. ”

“ Lady Hester seized the opportunity thus offered, of letting us feel how much our comfort would be rendered dependent on her pleasure: for we were informed, when looking out in the village for a maid to take the black’s place, that one of Lady Hester’s people had circulated a report that it would be dangerous for any one to serve us, because whoever did so ran a chance of being turned out of the village; adding, that great folks like her, when a thing displeased them, sometimes made an elephant of a flea. So we sent to a village about four miles off, and got a peasant girl ”

“ We took long walks every day, talking over our troubles, and contriving how we should free ourselves from the thraldom under which we were suffering; for we were as effectually in prison as if we had been under bars and bolts. This may seem incomprehensible to Europeans; but, in the East, where the will of a powerful chieftain hangs like a spell over every individual within his reach, it is in vain to argue about people’s rights. Besides, out of consideration for Lady Hester Stanhope’s name, I did not wish to come to an open difference with her ”

“ Now, as servants, when fatigued, do sometimes sleep 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, on 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. ”

“ It is never right to give a reason for an order to a servant. Take it for a rule through life that you are never to allow servants to expect such a thing from you: they are paid for serving, and not for whys and wherefores.’”
116 When Lady Hester Stanhope got up, increasing attention to her own personal wants through long years of bad health had rendered her a being of such sensitiveness, that a thousand preparations were necessary for her comfort; and herein consisted the irksomeness of the service for those about her. ”