Harem

“ I am not the hero of a romance of the Harem. I am a good young man, an advocate of morality and propriety, notwithstanding the fact that you have often honoured me with the title of "a regular original." Be so good as to believe, then, that the most I have been guilty of is a too artless simplicity of character. I did not suppose that Louis would show you this eccentric letter, for I had expressly enjoined him to keep it from you. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Note on the Harem, or Harum.—It is curious to compare with the princess's disillusionizing account of a harem, such a poetical and romantic description as the following, in which it becomes a bower of beauty, tenanted by an Oriental Venus:—
"The lady of the harum—couched gracefully on a rich Persian carpet strewn with soft billowy cushions—is as rich a picture as admiration ever gazed on. ”

“ To dream that you maintain a harem, denotes that you are wasting your best energies on low pleasures. Life holds fair promises, if your desires are rightly directed.
If a woman dreams that she is an inmate of a harem, she will seek pleasure where pleasure is unlawful, as her desires will be toward married men as a rule. If she dreams that she is a favorite of a harem, she will be preferred before others in material pleasures, but the distinction will be fleeting. ”

“ But you must know that the character of the harem has entirely changed under the new régime, and the women of the harem are now at liberty to learn and to read, and to work, and even to come into contact with the outside world; to participate in the movements of the day, and even to influence them. ”

“ The harem, thus understood, is an institution that has very much to recommend it. It secures its occupants a privacy which, in the estimation of Oriental women, more than counterbalances their apparent loss of liberty. ”

“ The harem is the cradle and school of infancy. The new born feeble being is not there swaddled and filletted up in a swathe, the source of a thousand diseases. Laid naked on a mat, exposed in a vast chamber to the pure air, he [p16] breathes freely, and with his delicate limbs sprawls at pleasure. ”

“ The whole harem, combining against a favorite, might, through the use of poison or by some other clandestine means, end the life of her who was so unfortunate as to be loved by the king beyond the measure thought by her rivals to be her due. ”

“ Dhamaphat left his work and went away, cursing the old priest, his tutor, and himself, in the impotency of his rage and sorrow.
[Pg 107]
CHAPTER XII.
THE INTERIOR OF THE DUKE CHOW P'HAYA MÂNDTREE'S HAREM.
Every harem is a little world in itself, composed entirely of women,—some who rule, others who obey, and those who serve. Here disinterestedness vanishes out of sight. Each one is for herself. They are nearly all young women, but they have the appearance of being slightly blighted. Nobody is too much in earnest, or too much alive, or too happy. The general atmosphere is that of depression. ”

“ It is your will that I bare my neck here to Death upon this spot. Allah decrees it, and the Prophet assents. Think not that it is with any regret that I leave this world. My heart has been too full. I have been your plaything, the vehicle of your passion.
"We women," she cried with rising spirit, "are the prisoners of the harem. It is our fortune. We are sold from out our birthright; we pass under foreign hands; we are the non-entities of pleasure. And lo, there is among us not even the little liberty of desire. ”

“ Most of this make-believe remains unconscious. We are all so used to it that we do not see in it the expression of the dying harem instinct in women. Yet it persists, even where the harem instinct would be passionately repudiated. ”

“ If he is able to manage it, he should hang about the harem every day, and, under some pretext or other, make friends with the sentinels, and show himself attached to the female attendants of the harem, who may have become acquainted with his design, and to whom he should express his regret at not being able to obtain the object of his desire. ”

“ The duties of guarding the harem or seraglio, as it is sometimes called, are intrusted to a small army of eunuchs, the chief officer of whom generally enjoys considerable political influence. The inmates of the harem lead a very secluded life. ”

“ European or American ladies may grace their boudoirs, models of beauty and excellence, and Turkish Hanums may, by the exercise of domestic virtues, equally adorn and ennoble the precincts of their Harems.
The word Harem is familiar to most persons, but how grossly misunderstood. Some have considered it as unmentionable to ears polite; while the votaries of pleasure, ever ready to indulge their longing [216] fancies, have pictured it to themselves as the earthly realization of the Paradise of Mohammed. ”

“ From other sources we know that all women of the higher class were cloistered in the harem and never appeared by the side of husbands or brothers in public. The harem system, at least for Western Asia and Europe, most probably originated in Babylonia. ”

“ As for the man himself he had better not enter a royal harem, even though it may be easily accessible, on account of the numerous disasters to which he may be exposed there. If however he wants to enter it, he should first ascertain whether there is an easy way to get out, whether it is closely surrounded by the pleasure garden, whether it has separate enclosures belonging to it, whether the sentinels are careless, whether the King has gone abroad, and then, when he is called by the women of the harem, he should carefully observe the localities, and enter by the way pointed out by them. ”

“ They are the chiefs of the army, the supreme judges, and the kings. Behind the towering white walls of the Imperial Harem at Constantinople live thousands of persons of both sexes, all of them ministers and servitors to the pleasures of the Sultan. There is an army of eunuchs, and several hundred cooks, besides a multitude of slaves. The eunuchs who guard the approaches to the palace are all white men, who are not permitted to enter within. Negroes are the personal attendants upon the ladies of the court and the harem.
140
The Chief Master of the Maidens is a dignitary of unique eminence. ”

“ The wives and subordinate spouses are veiled, and secluded in their own apartments, and waited upon by slaves and eunuchs. There are beauties in the harem, and some of them are fair, with light tresses, which they plait and braid. ”

“ The disgraced image of love, defiled by blood and flames, once more rose in its pure beauty! Living, breathing! The wounds inflicted more than a thousand years before again opened, fresh drops of blood trickled from the brow torn by its diadem of thorns, again the "Continue ye in My love" fell from the pallid lips of the Lamb of God, and what Puritanism had destroyed in its dead form was born anew in a living one. ”

“ Passion flickered, waned, and, on a pause of doubt and misgiving, tenderness dawned—tenderness, pity, remorse, regret, a growing horror and anguish, a growing knowledge of Heaven forfeited, of Hell made sure, a crescent terror, and dismay unspeakable, and under it all tenderness deepening, deepening, deepening, like a flood pressing against a barrier that it must at last break down. ”

“ Conceive, if you please, of a man floating in the most ecstatic delight of heaven pulled suddenly thence down into the most filthy extremity of hell, and then you shall understand the motions of disgust and repugnance and loathing that overpowered our hero, who, awakening thus suddenly out of his dream of love, found himself in the presence of that grim and obscene spectacle of death—who, arousing from such absorbing and exquisite meditations, heard his ears greeted with so rude and vulgar an address. ”

“ Had I failed in my attempt to reveal the crime, had the Domina but suspected that the mystery was none to me, my ruin was inevitable. Angels who watch unceasingly over those who deserve their favour, have enabled me to escape detection: I am now at liberty to relate a Tale, whose circumstances will freeze every honest soul with horror. Mine is the task to rend the veil from Hypocrisy, and show misguided Parents to what dangers the Woman is exposed, who falls under the sway of a monastic Tyrant. ”

“ These have conquered me—the divinity of the instruction, and the power of the Word: for as a skilled serpent-charmer lures the terrible reptile from his den and causes it to flee, so the Word drives the fearful passions of our sensual nature from the very recesses of the soul; first driving forth lust, through which every ill is begotten—hatreds, strife, envy, emulations, anger, and such like. Lust being once banished, the soul becomes calm and serene. ”

“ The newly-departed soul, in the puny shape of a sickly boy, has been placed, naked, in one scale, while the opposite groans under a monstrous heap of swords, daggers, poisoned bows, love-letters, and portraits of females, who had been the victims of his fierce desires. ”

“ The old blood remains fresh on the ground, crying for other blood to blot it out. The deed of wrong begets children in its own likeness. The first sin produces an 'Arâ,' a Curse-Spirit, which broods over the scene of the wrong, or over the heart and perhaps the race of the sinner. ”

“ To conclude I would like to mention that group of beautiful fairy tales in which the motive of the persecuted beauty is dealt with, a motive, the erotic basis of which is very clear. One can hardly go wrong if one conceives of the persecution as a sexual rivalry; the persecutor will do some harm to the heroine with the object of preventing her marriage with a prince. ”

“ Is it not in the nature of vulgar souls always to call an enemy evil? And should we call Eros an enemy? The sexual feelings have that in common with those of pity and worship that one being gratifies another by his own enjoyment—we do not too often meet with such a benevolent arrangement in nature. And we actually revile it and spoil it by an evil conscience! ”

“ This hareem is a most exceptionally happy one. There is only one wife in it, the two elder ladies being sisters-in-law to the bride, and unmarried. They all seem to live together in peace and happiness. Unfortunately, this is only the exception, which always goes to prove the rule, [229] that hareems are not the abode of peace. How can there be peace when the heart is full of jealousy and hatred? ”

“ Bringing into frightful collision those who are bound by sacred ties—changing natural love into unnatural, deep-rooted, unspeakable hate—arming blood against kindred blood—and making the innocent a parricide. ”

“ To reason, justify, to apotheosize evil, to establish its ritual, to show the excellence of it—is this not worse than to commit it? To adore the demon, or love evil, the abstract or the concrete term of one and the same fact. ”

“ As of old the victims of the Inquisition, waking or dreaming, beheld ever before them the instrument of their torture, so before this woman’s racked and half-numbed mind panoramically passed, an endless pageant, the incidents of the night which had cut her off from living men and women. ”

“ Yet I awoke as if from some terrible dream, of demons, fiends, with horrible forms and faces and some accursed men wrangling and fighting over a beautiful innocent childlike girl, with none to help her, neither God above, nor angels, nor women, or men. ”

“ When all the higher and holier passions of the human heart are aroused in a struggle—when the barbarian is at your door with the torch of the incendiary in one hand, and the uplifted sword of diabolical revenge in the other,—feeling is an important element in the real drama that is passing before the eyes of the beholder. ”

“ The hero of this strange and solemn romance, inheriting a melancholy and superstitious mental constitution, becomes in middle age the victim of a deep, and tranquil because deep, fanaticism. A demon in human form, perceiving his state of mind, wantonly experiments upon it, deepening and intensifying it by a fearful series of illusions of sight and sound. ”

“ The states in which we transfigure things and make them fuller, and rhapsodise about them, until they reflect our own fulness and love of life back upon us: sexuality, intoxication, post-prandial states, spring, triumph over our enemies, scorn, bravado, cruelty, the ecstasy of religious feeling. But three elements above all are active: sexuality, intoxication, cruelty; all these belong to the oldest festal joys of mankind, they also preponderate in budding artists. ”

“ The sexual life of men as well as of women offered an especially fruitful field for the activity of the devil and of his infernal companions. Thus, it was a favorite trick of the ruler of hell and of his subordinate demons to assume the shape of the husband or lover of this or that female, and, under this mask, to assume rights which should be permitted only to the husband. ”

“ But there are two sorts of madness, the one that which the revengeful Furies send privily from hell, as often as they let loose their snakes and put into men's breasts either the desire of war, or an insatiate thirst after gold, or some dishonest love, or parricide, or incest, or sacrilege, or the like plagues, or when they terrify some guilty soul with the conscience of his crimes ”

“ If the life must come, it will come, and if it cannot fulfil itself as a hare, then it will appear as something else. If you say that you create life, I, the poor beast which you tortured, tell you that you are a presumptuous liar. ”