Volume 81 / Part 2 / Book 3 — FROM PERA TO BUCHAREST.

The map of Europe sufficiently explains why Bucharest, by no means the smallest or least interesting capital in this division of the globe’s surface, is unquestionably the least visited and known. Situate beyond the lands of the Austrian, the Russian, and the Turk, it is remote from every place to which business or pleasure attracts travellers. Distant from frequented highways, the paths to it are long and wearisome. Down the Danube from Vienna, or up it from Constantinople, or across Roumelia and Bulgaria, with rough and savage posting, are the three best but still untempting routes. And in Western Europe, people generally know and care extremely little about Moldavia and Wallachia, provinces concerning which little has been written, save in the ephemeral pages of newspapers. The late war has done something to improve our acquaintance with them; but still there exists concerning them an enormous amount of ignorance, even amongst persons otherwise well informed. It is not long since we met with such persons, who imagined a Hospodar to be sort of savage chief, dressed in sheep’s-skin, and took Boyards to be minor barbarians, inhabiting caves, and living by plunder and the chase. This is far, indeed, from the fact. The Moldo-Wallachians are amongst the greatest ramblers of our time; there are few members of the upper classes who do not quit their own country for some weeks or months every year, and those who have met with them in Vienna and Paris, and in their favourite summer haunts, the baths of France and Germany, will have found them to be usually people of much external polish, of luxurious habits and profuse expenditure, speaking French fluently, and (although often with a bad accent and a deficiency of refinement) almost as their native tongue, and anxious to elevate their race and country in the eyes of foreigners, who, they well know, are little acquainted with and apt to depreciate them. At home they are a good-natured, courteous and hospitable people, to whom a stranger needs but slight introduction to be sure of friendly welcome and attention. And if the introduction be a special one, or the foreigner’s qualities, name or position, recommend him particularly to the notice, and open to him the heart, of the Danubian magnate, he will find himself feasted, caressed, and cherished to an unbounded extent; he will be bidden to repasts savoury of the skill of exotic artists; he will be supplied with horses and escorted to promenades, and made welcome at whatever hour he present himself, and made acquainted with all the pretty women and eligible men in the country—bans, vorniks, logothetes, postelniks, or by whatever other uncouth-sounding titles they may be known. Certainly whoever goes to the Principalities with the idea that he is proceeding to an uncivilised and unpleasant country, will be most agreeably surprised before he has sojourned there three days. The rural districts may not much interest him; the roads, or their absence, may provoke his malediction, and he will not be very loud in praise of the inns; if he enter by way of Galatz, he will doubtless pronounce that flourishing town to be the ugliest and most wearisome place in which ever the convenience or caprice of the Austrian Lloyds’ Steam Company compelled a disgusted traveller to lose forty-eight hours; the small country towns will hardly attract him much, unless it be those which, like Giurgevo, are memorable for actions of war; but the capitals, and especially Bucharest, will offer him pleasures, amusements, and even comforts he did not anticipate when plunging into this frontier land of the Christian and the Turk. The Wallachians have a local proverb to the effect that he who once drinks of the water of the Dumbrovitza, will never drink of any other. The Dumbrovitza is a turbid, narrow, poplar-and-willow-fringed streamlet that flows through Bucharest, valueless for navigation, and having waters of no very pleasant flavour or attractive limpidity; but the metaphor is more transparent than the stream, and intimates the seductions of the gay, idle, insouciant, dissipated, and, if truth must be told, wicked capital of Wallachia.

Even in our luxurious day, wanderers beyond railways, and into regions little trodden, occasionally find ample cause for complaint of miscalled houses of entertainment. The inns about the Lower Danube are rather of a savage sort, and those at Giurgevo and Galatz, especially at the former place, are decidedly bad; a Spanish posada is not exactly the kind of hostelry one would select for a long sojourn; even in comfortable Germany, when one gets off the main tracks, one often finds rough commons and hard quarters in the small towns and village gasthaüser. But I suppose there is no inn in the world, ranking as the first in a capital city, from which a person of ordinary palate, patience, and purse, feels more rejoiced to escape than from the much-trumpeted Hôtel d’Angleterre, at Pera, Constantinople. Doubtless the author of Eothen little thought, when vaunting the activity, resources, and polyglot accomplishments of his travelling attendant, that he was providing future fame and custom for one of the most detestable caravanserais to which, for want of a better, Englishmen ever thronged. Missiri’s hotel, the best in Pera, is one of the worst and dearest in Europe. Small rooms, bad wines, unwholesome dinners of a bastard French description, enormous charges, and gross impertinence, constitute the programme of an establishment which, during the war, was so overwhelmed with custom that it frequently rejected, in one morning, as many guests as would have filled it from cellar to garret. The notion had got abroad that it was the only possible inn in Pera; that at all the others you were poisoned, and plundered, and flea-bitten to an unendurable extent; in short, that it was the correct house of resort. When an idea of this kind takes root amongst Englishmen, argument and proof are alike in vain to eradicate it. The truth is that there were other hotels, very little, if at all worse, than that of Angleterre, and where, if the dining-room was rather smaller, the civility was certainly much greater. But this was not credited; and the English flocked to Missiri’s, until no Englishman who could possibly find room—though it were but a shakedown in a subterranean suite, to which lastcomers were consigned—would go elsewhere, because at Missiri’s alone was he sure to find his acquaintances and countrymen. So that the hotel had literally the pick of the innumerable English passing to and from the Crimea, or abiding for a time in Constantinople. It was in the position of a dealer who finds ten times as many buyers as his stock will supply, and who sells at his own price, delivering his goods with a grumble and a snarl, as if he reproached himself at the last moment with not having been more extortionate. The cool insolence with which this great, crowded, noisy, comfortless tavern rejected every species of complaint, however well founded, bidding malcontents to go farther and fare worse, the unblushing assurance with which the most exorbitant charges were defended and maintained, the grudging surliness with which the merest trifle was conceded when out of the established routine of the house, the impertinent opposition frequently made to the private arrangements of guests, caused one to sigh for the comforts and civility of an English village inn or French provincial hostelry—each fifth-rate in its own country; but oh! how superior in all essentials to the best hotel at Pera!

From this, most joyfully, on a morning early in May, did I turn my steps, followed by two porters bearing my moderate baggage, and descend that precipitous and perilous street which, its surface agreeably varied by loose paving-stones, dead rats, and deep holes, is the most direct route to the Bosphorus. The journey is not fifteen minutes long, but one passes through much variety. The upper part of the street is rather busy. First comes the Russian embassy, then scraping and cleaning preparatory to the reception of a new ambassador. It was used, during the war, as a hospital for French officers. A little lower down are the English postoffice and the French army post; also some French buvettes or wineshops, with inscriptions on their windows and walls, such as one sees at the barriers and in the faubourgs of Paris, announcing the excellence and price of the wine and absinthe vended within. A hotel succeeds to the English post, and just opposite to it are some tottering uninhabited houses, such as there are many of in Pera, uselessly encumbering ground of immense building value, and threatening to fall into the balconies over the way. Below this the street gets narrow, and assumes a solitary and mysterious aspect. Armenian families dwell here; and here, as may be known by the close latticeshutters that defend every opening, are the houses of Mussulmans. No sign of life at door or window, and few passengers in the street. You meet perhaps a porter toiling up with one of those tremendous loads, which Turks alone have the power and knack of bearing; his sinewy brown legs bare, and the sweat raining from his shaggy eyebrows; further on, you come upon a group of British cavalry officers, just across from Scutari, upon luncheon and lounging intent; lower down you overtake a commissariat official in blue uniform, with velvet facings, rosy, and inclined to corpulence, as commissaries should be, and not unfrequently are. He is in command of a small party of soldiers, escorting a string of Turks, laden with specie for the Crimea. Then you are in your turn overtaken by one in staff uniform, mounted on a handsome Arab, too good to be knocked about amongst these abominable pavements and holey places, and followed by an interpreter in cap of red and gold. It is the gallant and popular Major B—— one of Charles James Napier’s Scinde lambs, who reigns supreme over the depot of the Turkish Contingent on the Bosphorus, and is on his way to Stamboul to smoke the pipe of peace and hold converse of grave import with the worthy Seraskier Mehemet Rushdi Pasha—one of the few honest and disinterested statesmen, be it said en passant, of whom Turkey at the present day can boast. And now a short turn to the left and another to the right take us through a series of old-clothes shops, in and outside of which is exhibited the most extraordinary collection of cast-off garments and ancient rags that the eccentric fancy of a crazy painter ever threw together. Houndsditch would stare aghast at the motley museum of toggery, to which all the nations of the earth have contributed. Then we got into Pipe Street; so christened from the occupation of its inhabitants, who are seen sitting in their open shops, which are exactly like wooden boxes with one side taken out, kneading and moulding red clay, and gilding and carving it with much cunning, and fashioning cherry and jasmin sticks, and fitting mouthpieces of glass and amber, and so composing the tchibouk—instrument well beloved by Turks, and well enough suited to a sedate people, sedentary in habits and composed in motions, but ill adapted to Western vivacity and briskness, and a very sorry exchange for the commodious cigar. After passing Pipe Street, one gets into the region of strong scents. We will give a wide berth, if you please, to that butcher’s shop which forms the corner; but, wide though it be, it suffices not, and we are nearly knocked down by the whiff that overtakes us. We pass a block of grimy, tumbledown houses, at whose open windows and doors are seen what we at first take to be a party of boys in gaudy masquerade dresses. They are Armenian women, tawdrily attired, for the most part in jackets and loose trousers, having upon their heads fantastical caps of gaudy embroidered cloth, and in their mouths large paper cigars. This street is known amongst the British, and particularly the maritime portion of the population of Pera, Galata, and Tophaneh, as Kummupjonni Street, a name on whose etymology we are pondering when we are enveloped and assailed by such a diabolical and horrible stench that all reflection and reasoning are at once expelled from our head. It is like passing Death’s laboratory, just as a bottle of Concentrated Essence of Cholera is broken. How anybody can live for a day within a thousand yards of this dreadful exhalation appears miraculous. Yet the neighbourhood is densely peopled, and the author of the perfume, a fabricator of a mess of faded vegetables soaked in fetid vinegar—a preparation much approved and consumed by the Turks—stands in his shop looking healthy and comely, and seemingly unaffected by the miasma he evokes from a sort of sewer into which the superfluous acids and steaming residue of his cauldron flow through a greasy grating. We fly with a shudder, the effluvia pursuing us, and it is hours before the reminiscence entirely leaves our nostrils, chased thence by the fresh breezes of the Euxine.

The Ferdinando Primo, Austrian Lloyds’ steamer, advertised to sail at noon that day, was smoking at her anchorage hard by Seraglio Point when I pushed off from the dilapidated jetty of Tophaneh. As my caïque neared her I saw there was no need for hurry, or chance of her sailing at the appointed time. She was environed, besieged, blockaded, by a flotilla of the miscellaneous craft that swarm in the Golden Horn. Of all places in the world, I believe Constantinople, its harbour and environs, to be that which affords most studies for the painter, whether his taste be for landscape, groups, physiognomy, or buildings, and there were a thousand to be found here in the congregation of boats and miscellany of races that pressed, splashed, rubbed, ground, screamed, scolded, and swore against the sides of the slovenly Austrian craft, whose decks were a chaos of lumber and a hive of humanity. My two athletic and picturesque Greeks, in their red skull-caps, loose shirts, and short trousers of striped muslin, their berry-brown breasts and magnificent legs bare, their splendid mustaches—which a British Guardsman would have thought cheap at a twelvemonth’s pay—twisting out, like the tendrils of a vine, on either side of their classical countenances, drove the nozzle of their slender skiff into a narrow opening in the outer line of boats and lighters, which were five or six deep around the steamer, following up the intrusion by a volley of those colloquial amenities common amongst the boatmen, porters, robbers, beggars, and canaille of Constantinople—that is to say, amongst nine-tenths of the entire population of that most disreputable capital and its suburbs. The Billingsgate of the Bosphorus must be heard and understood for its richness to be appreciated; its furious vehemence makes every stranger wonder that it so rarely leads to blows. In the case of my oarsmen it did not even lead to a passage to the vessel’s gangway. Turkish women, looking like bundles of particoloured rags cast into the bottom of boats, scarcely vouchsafed a glance of their calm serious dark eyes at the noisy intruders; lightermen opposed to us the passive resistance of their heavy-laden barges; three dirty-faced English merchant sailors, extricating themselves from the press, brought their heavy broadbottomed ship’s-boat against the bows of our caïque, making her lose what little vantage she had gained, at which I thought my Greeks would have torn out their mustaches, or committed suicide on the spot, or done some other desperate deed in the excess of their frantic fury. And here, before quitting Constantinople, perhaps, and I hope, for ever (for Stamboul, which in Turkish estimation is but one remove from Paradise, is a most detestable residence to a civilised Christian), I will just destroy a popular delusion, originating, I believe, with Byron, with respect to the convenience and agreeableness of the “light caïque,” that description of boat being about the most uncomfortable I am acquainted with. I do not here refer to fine, roomy, eight-oared caïques, in which you sit on well-cushioned benches and with perfect convenience, six or eight persons if you please, whilst in front of you are your eight or ten rowers, and in rear, on an elevated poop, the helmsman with an umbrella, at sight of which parasol, and of the multitudinous oars, and at the general aspect of the whole, the guards turn out wherever you pass, and arms are presented to you all the way up the Bosphorus, no matter who or what you are, because you might be a pasha, punctilious in matters of etiquette, in which case the soldiers might get the stick for omitting the proper forms. But to keep up a craft of this sort, with its numerous crew, is no slight expense, and is usually done only by ambassadors, by wealthy Turkish functionaries, and by contractors for the supply of the army in the East. Therefore, in speaking of caïques, I refer to the common sort, hired for the trip or day by ordinary people, and having one, two, or three rowers. In these cranky things you sit down on rugs or cushions of questionable purity, your head on a level with the gunwale, your body forming the letter L, since your legs are stretched out before you, and your back kept bolt upright by the perpendicular front of the poop. The only way to be tolerably comfortable in these boats is to sit cross-legged, like a Turk, a posture to which few Europeans ever habituate themselves. In hot weather you lose the breeze, owing to your being so low in the boat, whilst the glare of the sun is terrific; in winter, if there is the least sea on, you are sure to get a ducking, and may not improbably get capsized, for although the boatmen on the Bosphorus are generally skilful, the caïque is unsafe from its extreme sharpness and narrowness, and no year passes without accidents, especially between Constantinople and Scutari.

The arrangements of the Austrian Lloyds, up the Danube from Constantinople to Vienna, are certainly not better than are to be expected from a company enjoying a complete monopoly. Now that the Danube is open, it is to be hoped, for the sake of the public, that an opposition line will be started. This would be a considerable undertaking, and of course the Austrian company would do its utmost to impede and embarrass its competitor’s operations; but still I think that a good line of foreign boats might, by energy and perseverance, overcome all difficulties. The Austrian Lloyds is not in favour with the public, and its present system can please none but the shareholders, who annually divide large profits. Its prices are extremely high, and the accommodation it offers is very indifferent. Now that Paris is less than sixty hours’ railway from Pesth, the route to Constantinople by the Danube ought to be able to compete with that by Marseilles or Trieste. Doubtless many persons, especially of those who fear sea-sickness, would prefer it to Mediterranean and Adriatic buffetings, if in other respects it offered the same advantages as the passage by sea. At present the Danube route is fully thirty per cent dearer than that by Marseilles. It is at best but a long and tedious journey up or down the Danube; and when to its monotony and weariness are added the very worst style of German cuisine (such as prevails on board most of the boats), and a system of sleeping accommodation by which the passengers are ranged on a double row of shelves, in a stifling atmosphere replete with entomological torments, and with one washing-basin for each thirty persons—and this for five or six days together—travellers unused to roughing it will be apt in preference to risk the swell in the Gulf of Lyons, the smart gales that sometimes blow off Sicily’s shores and amongst the isles of Greece, and the heavy gusts not unfrequent in the Sea of Marmora. Then in summer the boats on the Danube do not run often enough. The fast boat (and the slow ones are out of the question for persons going any distance, and serve only for goods and aborigines) runs but once a-week, and is consequently often so overcrowded that people are compelled to sleep on sofas and tables, and even on deck. This I myself have seen. On such occasions the officers of the boat are in the habit of selling their cabins for the voyage at very handsome prices. And the boats are also badly timed. You wait never less than one, generally two, sometimes, I was there assured, three days at Galatz, where the sea-boat from Constantinople leaves you, and the river-boat takes you up. All this surely requires amendment, now that there is so great an increase of intercourse between Eastern and Western Europe. Such amendment would perhaps be made by the Austrians if they once saw their present monopoly as carriers seriously menaced. Austria has long been jealous of maintaining influence in Moldo-Wallachia; and the general opinion in those principalities is that she will do her utmost to filter her way into the country, and gain a permanent footing there by appropriating as many public establishments, such as railroads, banks, and lines of fluvial navigation, as she can get into her hands. The more suspicious see in these projects a hope and design of ultimate annexation; but this must be so remote a prospect, that it is more reasonable to attribute them to the expectation of present profit.

I was informed, on landing at Giurgevo, that a little old gentleman, of imperious air, and with a full white beard, who seemed to be keeping everybody in motion for his own special service, was one of the greatest boyards in Moldavia. This was the first opportunity I had had of observing a boyard on his own dunghill, and I thought I ought to have felt more impressed upon the occasion. I confess I should have taken him for an old Jew, possibly for a dealer in cast-off raiment. I now learned that the beard was the distinguishing mark of the boyard, and of this I had further proof as I proceeded towards Bucharest. That city was the destination of three or four of my fellow-travellers from Galatz, and we at once informed ourselves as to the best means of getting there. A diligence would start immediately, we were told, so we hastily devoured a bad breakfast, and were in readiness to start; not so the diligence, which was shown to us standing near the inn, and looking as unlike a move as if it had merely been placed there to ornament the neighbourhood. Occasionally a Tartar-looking personage, fantastically clothed in sackcloth, emerged from a tumbledown shed, approached the vehicle, gazed at it admiringly, and then again disappeared. After this had been repeated at intervals for about an hour and a half, eight horses, or rather ponies, entangled in a quantity of rope-work, were brought into the yard and attached to the diligence, which was evidently an old German carriage, deemed past work in its own country, but still good enough for the Danubian Principalities; still there were no signs of loading our luggage, but presently appeared a cart, in which we were informed it was to be transported. In most countries, but especially in the East, imprudent is the traveller who suffers himself to be separated from his kit, and we protested accordingly, but in vain. The diligence had its full complement of passengers, and that it should also carry their baggage, and reach Bucharest that night, or without a breakdown, was entirely out of the question; so, after stipulating that the cart should keep up with the diligence, we were fain to submit to the unsatisfactory arrangement.

It is but forty-two miles from Giurgevo to Bucharest, and as we started before eleven o’clock, and were told that we should change horses twice on the road, we thought ourselves justified in believing the assurance given us that we should reach the latter place by five in the afternoon. Our team was not a very promising one. The eight horses, of all sizes, and in most diversified harness, some of the leaders being without bits, were driven by two wildlooking postilions in sheepskin caps, and started off at a good pace. But all sign of a road disappeared almost as soon as we got out of Giurgevo. There was a mere wheel-track across the plain. For some distance our course lay through pastures, where grazing is allowed on payment of about a zwanziger, or eightpence English, per head of cattle, for six months. When we got off the level and upon an undulating surface, our way was through little copses, and the track was frequently so narrow that the oak saplings almost brushed into the carriage as we passed. The road was nowhere very picturesque, but here and there it was pretty enough, and the woods were thickly fringed with wildflowers; not, however, in the profusion that existed when I again travelled along the same track at the beginning of July, when we drove literally through fields of blossom, marigolds, and hollyhocks, and purple flowers growing like lavender, and feathery grey flowers, and beds of pinks. Then, however, I journeyed through the densest clouds of that insidious white dust which is one of the plagues of Bucharest and its environs. Now, a shower the night before had soaked the soil, which is there of a sticky tenacious nature, so entirely without admixture of stones and pebbles that I do not believe you could gather a bushel of these on the whole road from Giurgevo to Bucharest. In winter the ground is so deep that there is almost an end to travelling, except in light carriages with many horses, and the transport of merchandise and produce is nearly suspended; this is owing to the want of roads, of which but very few miles have been made in Wallachia during the whole period of Prince Stirbey’s hospodarship, although large sums have annually been set aside for the purpose. In winter, tracks, passable enough in summer, become quagmires. This was not the case on the day of our journey, but still there was mud enough to retard our progress, and we got on but slowly, looking anxiously out for a relay. At last we ascertained that we should change horses but once, instead of twice or three times, and glad were we when, after crossing a bridge over a shallow stream, we pulled up at a road-side inn. We looked for fresh posters, but none appeared; we were invited to alight, and presently the truth transpired, which was that we were to go right through to Bucharest with the same eight weary garrons, and, to enable them to perform this feat, we were to halt for a time where we now were. This was a nuisance, but grumbling was useless. I was amused, and perfectly astonished, at the plan adopted to invigorate our cattle for their second long stage. After they had devoured a copious feed of corn, they were freed from all harness, and driven like so many oxen into the river. After unlimited drink and much splashing and soaking, a mounted man rode into the river on the other side, and drove them out, and they came scampering, capering and kicking up to the diligence, and submitted themselves to be rubbed down and harnessed with the usual docility of Moldo-Wallachian horses.

It was a Sunday, a hot and beautiful day, and the inhabitants of the straggling village were making the most of the holiday. The inn, a mere road-side winehouse and baiting place, which a few weeks later was sacked and partly destroyed by a detachment of Austrian soldiers that was marching through, was full of peasants eating and drinking. The sound of music and festivity, a short distance off, attracted us, and we soon came upon a wedding-party, dancing and making merry outside the dwelling of the bride’s family. The dance that seemed most in favour was neither graceful nor diversified in its figures; the dancers formed a circle, holding hands, and alternately closed in and spread out, increasing or diminishing the circumference. This seemed the whole of the dance, which, however, was nearly broken up by such an event as the approach of four or five strangers, one of them an officer in uniform, and another having a rather luxuriant beard, which immediately caused him to be taken for a boyard of the first feather. The women seemed bashful—they were certainly shy and not pretty, and it struck me that some of them would have been the better for soap and water. Their dress, which was that common amongst their class in Wallachia, consisted of a shirt, fastened round the neck and completely covering the upper part of their persons. From the waist downwards they were dressed like the women of nearly all countries—that is to say, they wore a lot of petticoats—but, above the waist, the chemise was their only covering. This costume has rather a striking effect, until one gets used to it. To very well made women, who do not require the support of the corset—and many such are to be found amongst the Wallachian peasantry—it is far from unbecoming, since it displays the contour and graces of the form far better than any artificial tightening; but in the case of women past a certain age, and who have been addicted to child-bearing, stays are missed, and the coup d’œil is by no means satisfactory. The shirt is sometimes of a material which, without being indecently transparent, allows a slight flesh tint to transpire; but these shirts are usually thickly sprinkled with stars or other devices worked in gold or silver, and this is, I believe, considered the strict national costume. The usual ornaments of the women of the lower classes are gold and silver coins, and even the mixed metal piastres. They are pierced and strung, and worn as necklaces, and also in the form of a sort of cap or broad circlet over the hair. In full dress, a Wallachian peasant girl thus usually carries her dowry on her person. The temptation of these rosaries of ducats and dollars sometimes proved too strong for the virtue of the Austrian occupants of the Principalities, and many stories did I hear, too many of them well authenticated, of poor girls being stripped of their little fortune by the rude hand of a brutal Kaiserlich. To judge from the quantity of coin, chiefly Turkish and Austrian, displayed, by the ladies of the wedding-party, they were rather well-to-do people of their class. The bride wore several of the large gold Turkish coins, as big as Spanish ounces, to say nothing of a quantity of smaller money. She was brought up to be shown to us, quite as a matter of course, and kissed the hand of our bearded companion, who, admonished by some little murmur of Backshish! that reached his ears, had to requite the compliment in specie. Backshish is quite as much in favour in the Christian provinces on the Danube as in any other part of Turkey. I must say that, even if the bride’s kiss had been on his lips instead of his hand, it would hardly have been worth the money, for she was an ordinary-looking damsel, much surpassed in beauty by many of her bridesmaids and companions. Doubtless she was lovely in the eyes of the bridegroom, a sheepish but good-tempered-looking young fellow, who seemed immensely gratified by the honour of our visit, and especially by the condescension of the pseudo-boyard. We were given to drink, and for aught I know, so rapidly did our popularity increase, we should have been invited to supper, had not much whip-cracking, and jingling, and shouting, warned us that our carriage was ready and our time up. Our horses had had an hour and a half’s rest, thanks to which they managed to perform the rest of the journey, and brought us, soon after eight of the clock, to the barrier of Bucharest the well-beloved.

The undulating nature of the ground on which Bucharest is built renders it difficult to obtain from any point of the environs a full view of the city. One of the best I have seen is a lithograph published at Vienna, taken from the river bank, and having the metropolitan church, which stands on an eminence, in the centre of the picture. After passing the barrier, one proceeds for a considerable distance over open ground, diversified with gardens, but sparingly sprinkled with houses, and giving little the idea of a town. Indeed, except in the very heart of the place, in the great principal street, the Mogosöe, in the Leipsick street and a few other shop streets, the Wallachian capital has much more the look of a large straggling village than of a city. It seems as if pains had been taken to avoid the compactness which, as economising distances, is generally held desirable in a large town. It is full of gardens and enclosures, and of open spaces of waste ground. Every house of any size and pretensions has a garden, and usually a large one. The effect produced is very rural and pleasing; the masses of brick and mortar are few, foliage and flowers are everywhere. Earthquakes being of no unfrequent occurrence here (although some years have elapsed since one occurred sufficiently violent to do much damage), few houses are built more than one story high. Thus it is easy to understand that Bucharest, with a population of 100,000, or according to the highest estimate 120,000 souls, includes within its barriers an area said to be equal to two-thirds of that of Paris. Were it a commercial place, the distances would be extremely inconvenient; as it is, and for the mere purposes of social intercourse, the inhabitants spend a very large portion of their time in carriages, the more so as it can hardly be said that there is any particular quarter prescribed by fashion as the residence of the upper classes, who are scattered in very opposite directions. If it be true, as Sam Slick says, that the way to estimate a capital is by its private carriages, Bucharest should rank pretty high, for there, more than anywhere else, is a carriage almost a necessary of life; and as the expense of keeping it is not great, forage being abundant and horses cheap, most families in easy circumstances have at least two vehicles—one for the husband, the other for the wife. When there is only one the lady generally takes it, and the husband contents himself with a hired birja—a light calèche, drawn by two horses, which you engage by the day or hour. In most places this mode of engagement would imply a very moderate rate of speed; but the birja-drivers, most of whom are Russians, spurred by the hopes of a backshish, go at an astonishing rate, and a foreigner is more apt—until he becomes aware of their skill in driving and of the unfrequency of accidents—to check their speed than to urge them to increased haste over the broken pavement and many holes and round the sharp corners of the streets of Bucharest.

One sees few old buildings in Bucharest, the last bad earthquake having upset nearly all the lofty and ancient fabrics. There are many large handsome houses, but the style of building is generally plain. The eye with difficulty gets accustomed to the strange contrasts met with at every step. Hard by spacious mansions, the residence of wealthy boyards, one almost literally stumbles over low Bulgarian huts, constructed half above and half under the ground. There are generally large courts in front of the better class of houses, and down one side of them frequently extends a range of low mean buildings, used as stables and offices, which shock the eye by their juxtaposition to the principal and handsome edifice. The streets are of extraordinary irregularity, and a stranger is long in learning his way about the town; the more so as he rarely walks, the mud in winter, and the dust, heat, and distances in summer, putting that mode of locomotion nearly out of the question. The badness of the pavement, and its total absence from a great portion of the streets, is accounted for by the size of the town, which would require an enormous paving rate to be levied on its comparatively scanty population. Moreover, in Wallachia, and especially under its recent ruler, money levied for useful public objects has but too often been diverted from its original destination, and scandalously misapplied, sometimes to purposes of political corruption. And even where public works have been executed, it has been at an exaggerated cost, explicable only by a system of robbery unparalleled elsewhere than in the East. Thus the very handsome opera-house, quite worthy of a first-rate European capital, filled the pockets of architects and contractors, and government officials, and might have been erected three or four times over for the sums that were embezzled and swallowed up in its construction. The exhospodar Stirbey, in the sort of justification he has recently published, boasts of this theatre as one of the benefits conferred on Bucharest during his reign. As far as the fact of its erection goes, there it stands, to speak for itself, an extremely handsome house, luxuriously fitted up, with lobbies, staircases, and saloons on a magnificent scale, and whose only fault is that, in their anxiety for an imposing effect, the designers have made the boxes so lofty that it never looks well filled. But touching the cost, Prince Stirbey is mute, although it is well known in Wallachia how monstrous it was, and how large a portion of it was absorbed by the most barefaced peculation.

It is not only as regards the buildings composing it, but in a thousand other respects, that Bucharest is par excellence the city of contrasts. Some of the most striking of these are vividly summed up in a few lines by the late French Consul-general at Bucharest, M. Poujade, in one of his interesting contributions to the Revue des Deux Mondes.^[5] “One sees,” he says, “palaces, or at least handsome hotels, and frightful hovels; carriages from the workshops of Binder or Clochez, drawn by coachmen in sumptuous livery, and enormous Transylvanian carts, enclosing a population like that of Noah’s Ark, and drawn by eight, ten, twenty horses or mares, with their colts playing around them at full liberty; fiery high-bred Russian and Hungarian horses, and huge red-eyed buffaloes; elegant men and women dressed according to the latest Parisian fashion, and peasants in much the same costume as the Dacians wore two thousand years ago; dirty Albanians perambulating the streets selling braga (a fermented drink), and shops in which are displayed the bonbons of Boissier, and the gastronomical delicacies of Potel and Chabot; monks smoking their pipes at the winehouse, and on the tombs, in the cemeteries that exist in the very heart of the town, side-by-side with gypsies, and with itinerant musicians (laoutari) dressed in long flowing cloaks, the violin, mandoline, or pandean-pipes suspended to their girdle, ready to sell their services at a baptism, a marriage, or a burial. Oriental life, which is departing, and European life, which replaces it, are here associated, and succeed each other as in a panorama.” This is a very well dashed-off glimpse of Bucharest, with true and lifelike tints, like one of Preziosi’s capital aquarelles of Constantinople streets. Such contrasts and details might be multiplied almost infinitely; for the physiognomy of Bucharest has a thousand different faces, both by day and by night. The gypsies alluded to by M. Poujade are a singular feature of the sketch, tawny wild figures dwelling by preference like ghouls in the graveyards, housing themselves also under ragged canvass on those desert plots of ground which abound in Bucharest, or taking up temporary quarters in the shells of unfinished houses. A stranger, unacquainted with their dialect, can gain but little insight into their usages and customs. Borrow should go amongst them; he would find a rich field for observation. They work, many of them, as bricklayers; the women hang about, tawny dishevelled creatures, with infants tugging at their yellow breasts. The children, when a little older, are almost like the young of animals. You are driving down the busiest street of Bucharest on a sultry summer noon. You have just passed an elegant carriage with a pair of spanking bays; a most correct coachman on the box; a strapping chasseur, bearded, befeathered, and sword-bearing, in the rumble; within, a couple of princesses (the Wallachians freely translate their native titles into the highest current in Western Europe) attired in the last fashions from Longchamps: the whole turn-out would be perfectly in place in Hyde Park or the Bois de Boulogne. From the door of a shop full of cravats, perfumery, and other “nouveautés de Paris,” the mere sight of which transports you to Regent Street or the Boulevards, a couple of dandies with well-waxed mustaches have just waved to you a yellow-kid salutation. Twenty paces further, in a shallow recess of the street, you come to a bronze pump, under and around which are collected a group of gypsy urchins, nearly of the same colour as the metal, with thin legs, prominent abdomens, and monkey features, and all as naked as they were born. It is hard to believe that any more exact link than this will ever be found between man and the baboon. The creatures are in a state of perfect animal enjoyment. The thermometer is at 100° in the shade at the very least, and they are rushing in and out of the gush of bright cold water from the fountain, their dingy bodies sparkling in the sun, their monkey features grinning like chimney-piece ornaments. Their bath over, they will run naked through the streets to where their mothers’ kettle boils, and lie down to sleep in the dust, in the shadow of a tombstone. One is tempted to think that, in that climate, a cool pump, a shady nook, and the absence of raiment, constitute the perfection of human happiness.

I believe that every foreigner who visits Bucharest in the fine season carries away with him a most agreeable impression of the place. In winter, when the snow lies deep, and the streets are sloughs, and the wolves prowl hungrily in the fields around the town, and occasionally risk themselves in the suburbs and carry off a stray child, the attraction may be less, even though that is the gay season, when balls and suppers abound, and masquerades occur almost every night. But in early summer, before the scorching sun has embrowned the foliage and driven away the wealthier of the inhabitants, nothing can be more agreeable than this rural city, belted with pleasant meadows and promenades, and nestling in a net-work of gardens and a bower of vines. During my two months’ stay I saw many English and French pass through, chiefly officers from the Crimea or Constantinople, who chose that route home; and all seemed delighted with their visit, and appeared to depart with regret. Bucharest is a city of idleness, and life there is arranged so as to while away as agreeably as possible the superabundant leisure. The usual dinner-hour is three or four o’clock, and after that meal many persons go to take ice or a stroll in a large and delightful public garden in the centre of the town—also a benefit bequeathed to Bucharest by Prince Stirbey’s administration, at the cost of the unrequited labour of thousands of unfortunate serfs. The best society, however, frequents this garden but little, or remains there but a short time, proceeding, about seven o’clock, to the agreeable drive known as the Chaussée, a road out of the town which is a continuation of the main street, with plantation and a garden on either side, and further on, an avenue of trees separating it from luxuriant pastures. It is here that an idea is best formed of the luxury and wealth of Bucharest, whither, in fact, nearly all the rich people of the province repair to spend their money. On the Chaussée assemble the fashionables of the Wallachian capital, a few of the men mounted on fine horses, but most of them, and all the ladies, in elegant carriages of Vienna and Paris build. This, of a summer evening, is the focus of flirtation, and the source and centre of not a little scandal. After a few turns up and down, at as rapid a pace as the throng of vehicles will permit, the ladies generally draw up by the side of the footpath, and either alight and walk, or receive visits in their open carriages. Amongst the crowd of dashing equipages were conspicuous, this last summer, those of the hospodar, known from afar by the scarlet liveries of the servants, and those of the foreign diplomatic agents, most of them with chasseurs or richly attired Albanians. The numerous Austrian uniforms added to the animation of the scene, some of the young staff-officers driving handsome curricles and tilburies, whilst the crowd was completed by the humble but ubiquitous birja. As the daylight waned, the crowd diminished, although, in the fine summer evenings, not a few promenaders remained till after dark, strolling amongst the trees, or seated in the carriages, enjoying the pleasant coolness; and here and there vacant vehicles, whose absent owners were well known, afforded pretext of malicious comment to lingering scandal-mongers. Towards nine o’clock, the Chaussée was generally nearly deserted, and, on driving into town, many of the carriages might be seen drawn up at the door of the Tortoni of Bucharest, from which excellent ices and refreshments were brought out to the fair occupants. A few, braving the heat, would thence proceed to the theatre, where a French company had replaced the Italians; whilst the men betook themselves to the Rouman Circle, a newly established club, or proceeded to join parties of a few friends, a sort of Spanish conversational tertulia, which replace, when the season of gaiety is over, assemblies of a more numerous and pretentious description.

Night in Bucharest is not without peculiarities which forcibly strike the stranger. For those persons who insist upon pedestrian exercise, it is the best time for a stroll, for although the heat often but partially departs with daylight, the dust is less, and moreover at evening, the Chaussée, the avenues to it, and some of the principal streets, as well as those leading to the Tchismedjiou or public garden, are watered in a sort of primitive way, by men with carts who draw off the water into churn-shaped tubs and dash it over the thirsty soil and heated pavements. Of a clear warm night, when the streets and gardens are bathed in the bright silver light of a Wallachian moon, the people of Bucharest may be said to live in the open air. Every window is open, and they stand outside their houses or gossiping at the doors. They are an early-rising population, and by eleven the streets are nearly deserted and stillness reigns. One very curious practice which prevails is that of sleeping in the streets. Walking along between ten and eleven one warm dark evening (gas is unknown in Bucharest, and oil lamps are dim, few, and far between) I suddenly found myself trampling upon cushions. On investigation, the soft substance proved to be a mattress. Fortunately no one was as yet sleeping on it. It occupied the whole width of the narrow pavement, and I stepped off into the carriageway. Just then a man issued from an open door, with a coverlet on his arm; he was making his bed. Several other beds were arranged in succession close to the walls of the houses; it was an al fresco dormitory. Doubtless in a hot climate the plan has its advantages, securing fresh air and avoiding troublesome domestic insects. The risk of being trampled upon is small in a city where scarcely a soul is seen in the streets after midnight. I was informed, just as I was leaving Bucharest, that these out-of-door slumberers are chiefly Jews, there very numerous, and that they have a summer festival which lasts about a fortnight and commemorates the passage of the desert by the children of Israel, during which they do not sleep under a roof, and that a tradition exists amongst them that a child conceived during that period will be the Messiah. This tale was told me by Christians, and I by no means vouch for its correctness, but it is curious, and I was afterwards sorry I had not had time to ascertain positively, by inquiry of the Wallachian Hebrews, whether such a custom and belief really exist amongst them.

Many of the street-sleepers have a small dog beside their couch, which rushes out, barking furiously, if one inadvertently steps too near its master’s couch. The precaution must, one would think, be as destructive of slumber as it may be useful against marauders, the more so as the bark of the vigilant sentry is usually echoed by that of numerous vagrant curs of all breeds and sizes which at night infest the streets of Bucharest, and frequently molest the pedestrian. It is very difficult to throw stones at these animals, for there are none to be had, as the benighted and exasperated stranger frequently finds when, returning late to his lodging, he is beset by dogs of every description, from the diminutive yelping terrier to animals of a really formidable size and deep-mouthed aggressive bark, and stoops to seek a missile. These wild ownerless dogs, formerly so numerous and even dangerous in Constantinople, but now greatly thinned and wholly daunted there by the deadly blows and rough usage they have received at the hands of French soldiers and British mariners, are still plentiful at Bucharest, where, however, they can hardly be considered dangerous; at least I never heard of their devouring a human being in the latter place, as they have occasionally been known to do in the Turkish capital—especially when the said being had thought proper to take an overpowering quantity of strong drink and to lie down in the gutter to sleep it off; but still they are numerous, bold, and noisy enough to alarm a timid person, and one sometimes hears the affrighted scream of a belated child or woman beset by these persevering plagues. They are more troublesome than bloodthirsty; but, although the noise they make is a most sleep-destroying nuisance, nobody seems to think of taking measures to expel them, even from his own premises. At the hotel where I lived, half-a-dozen of them had taken up their quarters in the large courtyard round which the house was built. Some of them were supposed, I believe, to belong to hostlers or hangers-on about the establishment; but I could not find out that their putative owners took any charge of them, and certainly they did not prevent them from raising the most diabolical din at hours when the inmates of the hotel might be supposed buried in sleep, or at least courting it. The gates of the yard were often left open; street-walking dogs would sneak in, predatorily minded and lured by the rank odours of the Wallachian kitchen, and desperate conflicts were the frequent result, the said canine encounters being attended with an amount of barking, snarling, howling, and yelling, enough to waken the dead. I do not believe it woke the Bucharestians, although the complaints of the sleepless strangers staying in the house were loud and frequent.

Beside the dogs, the most lively and noisy creature in the streets of Bucharest of a night is the watchman or chinny-accolo, a compound word which I write as pronounced, and possibly with much offence against correct orthography. The newcomer to the Wallachian capital, returning home late, is startled by the sudden apparition of a dilapidated figure which emerges from a dark nook or crazy sentry-box, strikes a heavy staff upon the pavement and hoarsely shouts chinnyaccoloooo! the last syllable being drawn out ad libitum, and relinquished as if with regret. Then the figure usually repeats the chinny, with a short exasperated stress on the first syllable, as if he were angry with or insisting upon something. The foreigner has a vague idea that this discordant and unintelligible cry is of the nature of a Qui vive? or Who goes there?—as in fact it is—but, observing that the vociferator has no firearms, and consequently cannot requite silence with a shot, and being moreover in total ignorance how he should reply, he usually walks quietly on; and the guardian of the night, perceiving that he is not a member of the dangerous classes, retreats into his nook and suffers him to pass without further question. The Moldo-Wallachians are an inoffensive and honest race—even now, that they have been to a certain extent demoralised by foreign military occupations—crime is not frequent amongst them, and the chinnyaccolos have little to do. Now and then they make a charge upon an unusually noisy troop of dogs, but their principal employment seems to be that of covering up the sleepers upon the pavement, when restless slumbers, the result perhaps of an unquiet conscience or a heavy supper, may cause them to toss their blankets abroad.

As, if I remember rightly, Murray’s Hand-book for Turkey, by no means the best of his collection, is extremely brief and unsatisfactory in its notice of Bucharest, I may perhaps be rendering a service to persons whom this imperfect sketch of its attractions may induce to pay a summer visit to that pleasant city, if I devote a few lines to the subject of hotels. In the first place, it is to be observed that furnished lodgings are not to be had in Bucharest,—at least they were unobtainable in the spring and summer of 1856; but that was perhaps owing to the number of Austrian officers who were billeted upon the houses of the inhabitants. Unless, therefore, you had a friend to give you quarters, you had no resource but to stop at an hotel. The best of these is the Hôtel de Londres, a large house built expressly for an inn, and where one finds good and lofty apartments, clean and tolerably well-furnished, at high prices; but Bucharest, especially since the war, is by no means a cheap place. The hotel is of enormous size, and full of long galleries and spacious landing-places. The rooms are without bells, and the mode of summoning the servants is original and inconvenient. On each landing-place is a bell-rope, below which is a dial-plate, having around it the numbers of the neighbouring rooms. When you require anything you have to issue forth from your apartment, ring this bell, once for waiter, twice for boots, thrice for chambermaid, and turn the needle of the dial to the number of your room. But it frequently happens that before the servant answers your call, somebody else gives a pull at the rope, and shifts the needle to his number; so that you soon find that the only way of getting attended to is, after ringing, to lie in wait at your door, and, on the appearance of the slave, to rush out, collar him drag him into your room, and release him only upon his solemn promise to do what you require before he even looks at the dial. This is not a comfortable state of things; but bell-hangers are scarce in Wallachia, and domestics generally bad. Even in the better class of private houses, good attendance is secured only by keeping what in England would be considered an unreasonable number of servants for the requirements of the family. The Wallachian domestics are lazy, and imported foreigners soon rival them in this respect. I tried the experiment of hiring one of the latter sort, but found he would do nothing but sleep in the porter’s lodge, and, when compelled to work, took sick immediately; so I was compelled to get rid of him, and to revert to the system of lying in ambush for waiters. Upon the whole, however, one may be worse put up than at the Hôtel de Londres, where there is great civility, and a desire to oblige; but hotel-keeping is a science that has still much progress to make in the cities of Moldavia and Wallachia. I cannot say much for the cooking; and the Hôtel de France, in the Mogosöe Street, is in that respect considered superior, and passes for a first-rate French restaurant, although in Vienna or Paris it would be set down as a gargote, and indeed a good dinner is to be obtained there only by ordering it beforehand, and paying rather more than you would for a sumptuous banquet at the Trois Frères.

Early in the month of June, in a cloud of dust and a blaze of heat, commenced and concluded the annual mosh or fair of Bucharest. The articles exposed for sale were not calculated to give an exalted idea of the manufacturing progress of the province, whose best reliance for prosperity is evidently upon its agricultural produce. The staple commodities were wicker-baskets, of a wearisome monotony of form, pots of red earth, not even glazed, and the rough-hewn, churn-shaped buckets here universally used, in houses, baths, for street-watering, &c. Anything more primitive than these various articles cannot be imagined; they are just what one might expect to find amongst a newly-discovered tribe of Indians, which, lurking in a remote corner of the backwoods, had avoided all intercourse with the pale-faces. Any idea of ornament seems utterly alien to the minds of the peasants who manufacture these useful but uncouth objects, which are brought to town in carts as antediluvian as themselves,—clumsy, heavy vehicles, roofed in with boughs. The only other things I could discover in the fair which were manifestly native productions (the toys and trumpets smelt of Germany), were rings of coarse, coloured glass, to thrust over the hand and wear as bracelets, much the sort of thing one might look for upon the ebon arm of the Queen of the Cannibal Islands, or dangling from the obtuse snout of some central-African slave-dealing sovereign. There were also chimney-piece ornaments formed of clay, and representing zoological monsters, of which traditions may possibly have been handed down from the days of the Dacians. Shows there were, too: a camel ridden by a monkey, and a gentleman who sat upon the topmost of a pyramid of bottles, and balanced plates upon his nose and chin; and, in the corner of a tent, the emanations from which were far from fragrant, Punch, the ubiquitous, set up his house, attracted a delighted audience, and went through the celebrated drama of his serio-comic existence, slightly varied from the English version, but including even a larger amount of domestic dissension, violent deaths, and desperate struggles with the enemy of mankind; the whole winding up with the appearance of a monstrous head—a cross, apparently, between a Skye terrier and a snapping turtle—which caught the reprobate Polichinello by the nose, and dragged him screaming into the showman’s box. The streets of the fair were formed of huts of branches, some of them neatly enough made, and comprising two rooms, but which quickly lost their fresh verdant aspect, the foliage becoming embrowned by the sun, and coated with dust. Inside these wigwams a promiscuous throng ate, drank, cooked their food, danced, slept, suckled babies, played upon rude musical instruments, and contrived to exist in an atmosphere and amongst odours that might have stifled an habitual inhabitant of a slaver’s hold, or a daily passenger through the richest streams of Galata. The mere smell of the sausages dropping their unctuous superabundance into the wood-fires over which they grizzled, was a week’s dinners to a hungry man. Except in the evening, when the beau monde, deserting the Chaussée, drives to the fair, the attendance is almost exclusively of the lower orders,—peasants in their round sheepskin caps and antique costume, which has scarcely varied since Trajan’s day, many of them stalwart, fine-looking men, with features telling of their Italian origin; women in more various attire, not generally very becoming, although one head-dress, consisting of a thin white shawl gathered over the head, with the ends drooping behind, is not ungraceful. The most original and characteristic female dress there worn was the one I have already described,—the shirt, often of a fine and transparent texture, sprinkled with stars or sprigs worked in gold or silver, whilst round the waist are fastened petticoats and a variety of coloured aprons, worn both before and behind. Besides the peasantry, Wallachian soldiers in their ugly uniforms, nursemaids with children, and a few white-coated Austrians, made up the morning attendance at the fair. On the last day the fun terminated with an evening entertainment annually given by the Aga or prefect of police, in a space enclosed with hedges and flags, and lighted with coloured lamps, where music played, and people walked about and ate ices under tents, and where the hospodar came, with gorgeous liveries and a numerous escort, to admire his own portrait hung up in a marquee, and where the aga himself narrowly escaped apoplexy from the violence of his exertions and effervescence of his hospitality; and people who had no tickets jockeyed the sentries, leapt the ditches, and got in through gaps in the hedges, until at last (this being essentially a popular festival) every one was admitted who chose to walk in; and ragged boys and Wallachian “roughs” were seen elbowing boyards of fabulous lineage, and making disorderly and destructive onslaughts upon trays of sweetmeats; and, finally, everybody got extremely dusty and tired, and began to wish he had not come, and to long to escape; and there was a general rush for everybody’s carriage, which nobody could find, and people betook themselves to bed, and the mosh was at an end in Bucharest for that year.

At the period of my arrival in the Principalities, the Moldo-Wallachians were in a fever of impatience to get rid of the Austrian occupation, to them most odious. The war was over, and they could not understand why a foreign army should still be imposed upon them, occasioning them great expense and still greater annoyance. Absorbed by domestic considerations, they did not appreciate or even discern those important European ones which induced the Allies to maintain an Austrian force on the Russian frontier until the terms of the Treaty of Paris should be carried out. Much as they themselves have suffered from Muscovite bad faith and encroachment, their exasperation at the prolonged presence of their detested military guests blinded them to the probability that Russia might seek to evade the conditions she had agreed to. It must be owned that the conduct of the Austrian army of occupation had been such as to explain the furious eagerness of the Moldo-Wallachians for its departure. Its bearing had certainly not been that becoming friends and allies in peaceable provinces inhabited by an extremely docile and quiet race. Had the imperial legions conquered the country after fierce opposition, and found themselves surrounded by scowling foes, whose hatred was to be kept from dangerous manifestation by fear alone, their conduct might have been comprehensible. But when they arrived there was no particular ill-feeling towards them, and they had only themselves to thank for the bitter one which afterwards arose. The general order by which, at the end of last May, the Emperor of Austria congratulated his army in Moldo-Wallachia on its military spirit and endurance of privations, excited the laughter of all who were aware of the real circumstances of the case. There was little to endure for troops whose requirements and exactions were so great as to constitute a most onerous burthen on the people; and it is but a poor military spirit that is testified by cruel ill-treatment of unoffending civilians. At the very time that the order appeared, no one could pass a few weeks in the Principalities without becoming convinced, by personal observation, that the general tone and demeanour of the Austrian soldiery in their intercourse with the people were overbearing and aggravating, and that the least show of opposition led to brutality and violence. The people of those provinces are neither dogged nor disobliging; a word, if they understand it, generally suffices to procure obedience where it is due; but they are not particularly quick of comprehension, and, on the other hand, the Austrians were prone to exact more than they were entitled to, and to enforce, by blows, unreasonable demands or illunderstood orders. If the behaviour of the officers was better, although this was by no means invariably the case, few of them took pains to restrain their men, but looked on with indifference and without interference. Of this I could cite many examples which came under my own notice, and others vouched for by indisputable testimony. On one of the first days of June, an old white-haired Wallachian peasant was driving a cart through one of the most frequented streets of Bucharest, when he somehow got in the way of an Austrian soldier similarly engaged. He was immediately assailed in the fiercest manner, thrown to the ground, and violently beaten. A German shopkeeper, standing at his door, witnessed this cruelty and appealed to an officer who was passing, entreating him to check it. “Das geht mich nicht an”—it is no business of mine—was the cool reply, and the soldier was left to satiate his fury. As for the bystanders interfering, none would think of doing so, for the Austrians invariably carry their side-arms, and instances are abundant of their promptitude in using them against unarmed and defenceless persons. The Turkish soldiers in the provinces used not to carry their bayonets and sabres when off duty, but just before the return of Stirbey from Vienna to Bucharest, and within a month afterwards, no less than sixty-nine of them were wounded by Austrians, and it was found necessary to authorise them to wear their side-arms. Last summer, a well-known English officer, who holds high rank in the Turkish service, was riding in the suburbs of Bucharest, in a sort of half uniform, but without arms, when he overtook an Austrian soldier, carrying his musket sloped over his shoulder and protruding far behind him. As he passed, the man made a sudden movement of his body, which caused the musket to swing round and strike the officer a violent blow. This was doubtless unintentional, but the blow was so sharp that the officer involuntarily apostrophised the man in English, forgetting that he would not understand him, and asked him what he meant. Instead of apologising, the soldier looked steadily at him and fixed his bayonet. There was nothing for it but to ride on, and complaint to the fellow’s superiors would have been of little avail. About this same time there occurred, at the Wallachian town of Busco, an outrage in which three civilians were wounded, and whose circumstances were rather curious. An Austrian soldier drank in a wine-shop, and, notwithstanding the host’s opposition, left it without paying and ran off. He was pursued, and, being somewhat intoxicated, he ran into a mill-stream, where he would have been drowned but for the exertions of his pursuers. Other soldiers came up, and the rescuers were sabred; because, argued these military sophists, if their comrade had not been pursued he would not have run, and consequently would not have fallen into the water and nearly lost his life.

I had scarcely set foot in Moldavia when, at Galatz, numerous instances of Austrian misconduct were related to me, my informants being some of the principal local authorities, and their statements being corroborated by a foreign consul, who was by no means ill-disposed to the Austrians, and indeed took a more favourable view of their general conduct than almost any other person I met with in the Principalities. But regard to truth compelled him to admit that of the incidents in question. A battalion had arrived two days before, to take its quarters in the town, and on such occasions there were invariably complaints to the civil authorities from persons who had been wounded or beaten by the soldiers. It was no uncommon practice with them to accept money in lieu of lodging from the persons on whom they were billeted, and then to go and insist violently on admission into quarters to which they had no claim. Instances were cited of gross misconduct on the part of officers. On two different occasions these gentlemen, having had billets assigned them in two of the best houses in the place, refused to accept the comfortable rooms allotted to them, and insisted on occupying the apartment of the lady of the house. Compliance being refused with the caprice of one of them, he forgot himself so far as to draw his sword, and finding the door of the room he coveted locked, he endeavoured to kick it open. The mistress of the house, the Countess P—, behaved with great spirit. “Put up your sword, sir,” she said; “your Emperor did not give it you to be thus used.” It was very rare that the least redress could be obtained for such insults and outrages, any more than for the many grave offences against person and property, the robberies and murders, that were clearly brought home to Austrian soldiers. In Wallachia especially, the perpetrators of such crimes were certain of impunity; for Prince Stirbey, long devoted to Russia, had become the tool of Austria, by whose influence he hoped to be maintained in power after his term of office should have expired. Had he done his duty as ruler of the Principality, he would have made such forcible representations as must assuredly have led to a diminution of the evil. Instead of this, with him whatever the Austrians did was well done, and the strongest proofs of their excesses, frequently laid before him, were by him smothered and suppressed. This was notably the case with respect to a disgraceful affair that occurred on the 31st May at Buseo, a town on the road from Bucharest to the Wallachian frontier. A body of Austrian lancers, marching through, required carts for their baggage. Some slight delay occurred in providing them, and this being reported to the officer commanding, he is said to have replied: “You have got arms; take carts.” Thus licensed, the Austrians seized some carts which were just leaving the town, laden with the baggage and military-chest of a Wallachian regiment; the slender baggage-guard, although it made little show of resistance, was mercilessly sabred, and some civilians and soldiers without arms were also cut down. The prefect of the town was beaten and ill-treated, and the officer commanding the Wallachians, who reached the place after the affray was over, was charged and ridden down by the playful Austrians. Prince Stirbey’s body-surgeon, sent over specially to look to the wounded, reported, with the counter-signature of an Austrian surgeon, that there were twenty Wallachians wounded, some very dangerously. Amongst the twenty men there were upwards of a hundred and twenty wounds; showing the deliberate cruelty and ferocity of the Austrians, for not one-third of the wounded were armed when they were thus barbarously assailed. The report of the medical men was seen by various persons in Bucharest; the indignation was general, and was shared and vehemently expressed even by some of the hospodar’s own household and clique; it was thought impossible that so shameful a massacre should be overlooked; nevertheless, no steps were taken to obtain the punishment of the guilty. The first remark of the officer who replaced the Wallachian minister-of-war, then absent, was, that the Wallachians were wrong—that they should humour (ménager) the Austrians. Stirbey said it was an unfortunate affair, and forbade the newspapers to speak of it; and so it was hushed up, as all similar occurrences had invariably been.

Abandoned by their prince and natural protector to the tender mercies of foreign intruders and tyrants, the Wallachians testified their hatred and anger by the only means in their power. They excluded the Austrians from their society, and refused to have any intercourse with them. The offensive strangers were sent to Coventry; only in a very few houses was an Austrian uniform ever seen, and those were the houses of persons known by their connection with or partiality to Austria, and who got little credit with their fellow-countrymen by their deviation from the rule tacitly but generally laid down. The Austrians knew that they were detested, and requited the aversion shown them by being as insolent and disagreeable as they could. For all parties it was a most uncomfortable state of things, resulting in constant mutual annoyances. In June, the Austrian infantry regiment of Constantine gave an entertainment to General Coronini, then commanding in chief in the Principalities. Marquees were pitched on a grassy plain, at a short distance from Bucharest, and there were bands of music, rifle-practice, fireworks, and other amusements. Numerous invitations were distributed, but scarcely any Wallachians went, and the consequence was a lamentable deficiency of ladies. A Wallachian nobleman of high rank, and notorious for his Austrian addictions, gave a dinner to General Coronini before his departure. It was not thought necessary to inform all the persons invited of the occasion of the banquet; probably because it was thought that, if they knew it, some of them would refuse to attend. The consequence was that a portion of the guests, upon seeing whom they were assembled to honour, considered that a trick had been played them; and one of them, a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished families of the country—not of Fanariot origin, but of pure Rouman blood—kept his seat, and left his glass untasted, when the health of the Austrian commander was proposed. I might cite many other examples of the bad feeling and petty warfare between Wallachians and Austrians. The physical superiority being all on the side of the armed foreigners, it was seldom that force was opposed to their aggressions. The only instance I remember was in the case of a plucky little French architect, settled at Bucharest. Some soldiers in his house ill-treated his servant-maid and child, and upon his interfering, one of them raised his arm as if to strike him. But the Frenchman, although a very small man, was a master in the science of the savate; his blood was up, and he cared nothing for odds. A tremendous kick in the belly laid one soldier on his back; another was knocked into a well in the yard, and a third kicked out of the place. In short, the Frenchman completely cleared his premises, but, for some time afterwards, he was obliged to have a sentry to protect his house, for the Austrians came to force their way in and massacre him.

The murder, in cold blood and broad daylight, by a party of Austrians, of one of the French soldiers in charge of the telegraph, was followed by a serious investigation, and the guilty persons were severely punished. This was a lesson which doubtless had its effect. At about the same time the number of Austrian troops in the Principalities was diminished by the departure of several regiments. Stirbey also was removed from power, to the great and universal joy of the Wallachians, and was succeeded by Prince Alexander Ghika, a man of very moderate capacity, but well-meaning and honest, and who certainly is incapable of shielding or conniving at Austrian misconduct. Since then outrages have been much less frequent, and the Moldo-Wallachians do not appear to have particular grounds of complaint. A foreign military occupation is of course, and must inevitably be, to a certain degree, a burthen and a nuisance to the country that undergoes it.

Independently of the very sufficient reasons already exposed, the people of the Principalities had, or believed themselves to have, a strong political motive for desiring the departure of the Austrian army. A project for the union of the two provinces under a foreign prince had been put forward, and was ardently advocated and agitated by persons who imagined that they saw in its realisation the regeneration of their country. To this project the Austrian government was understood to be decidedly opposed; the Austrian political agent at Bucharest declared his disapproval of it in the most public and contemptuous manner, and with that overbearing insolence of tone which the subserviency of the hospodar emboldened him upon all occasions to assume; the Austrian officers, including a body of engineers and their assistants, then occupied in making a trigonometrical survey of the country, were generally accused of inciting the lower orders against the Union. Such opposition to a plan which they somewhat hastily believed would prove a panacea for all the many griefs they have so long suffered under, greatly increased the irritation of the Moldo-Wallachians. Their minds were set upon the Union, and dazzled by visions of the prosperity and power it was to bring in its train. They already beheld Rouman nationality restored and established on a firm basis, and an agricultural Belgium arising in the East, which should rival that of the West in good government, tranquillity, and wealth. They beheld the men of their race, of whom several millions now dwell in Transylvania, Bukovina, the Banat, and Bessarabia, and also in Podolia, Hungary, and Macedonia, flocking back to the provinces whence many of them originally emigrated, and supplying the labour which alone is wanted to make Moldo-Wallachia the granary of Europe. There can be no question that the Roumans have preserved their nationality to an extent that is surprising, when we consider the bloody struggle they have had to maintain against Turks and Tartars, Poles and Magyars, and the numerous races amongst which they have been scattered, often in far inferior numbers. There seems to be an innate sentiment of nationality amongst the lower orders, of which they themselves have not the intelligence. In emigration (and, owing to the oppressions of foreign armies and native chiefs, emigrations have been frequent and extensive) they preserve their native usages, often even when bad, sooner than adopt foreign ones. The same is the case with their language. In Bulgaria, Transylvania, and elsewhere, they still speak the Rouman. One of the most intelligent and distinguished of living Wallachians, John Ghika, now governor of Samos, estimates the Rouman race (in an interesting pamphlet, published at Paris under the anagrammatic pseudonyme of G. Chainoi) at nearly twelve millions. Of these, barely five millions dwell in Wallachia and Moldavia, where there is not only room for, but need of, at least double the population. In presence of these facts and figures, the chiefs of the national party in these provinces built up a scheme, of which the principal heads were: the union of the two Principalities into a constitutional monarchy, under a foreign prince not belonging to the royal family of any one of the countries bordering on Moldo-Wallachia,—that is to say, neither Austrian nor Russian; the independence of the new kingdom to be guaranteed by the European powers; a standing army sufficiently strong to defend the frontier in case of foreign aggression, at least until such time as succours might arrive from the guaranteeing powers. And that the rights of Turkey might not wholly be lost sight of, it was proposed to continue paying her the tribute to which she is entitled, or to buy it off by a sum once paid down. Thus constituted, it was argued, Moldavia and Wallachia would form a much more solid bulwark for Turkey against Russian aggression, than they do in their present unsettled dependence.

This is the rose-colour view of the question of the Union taken by the politicians of the Principalities, and especially by a knot of ardent young men who would fain apply political theories imbibed during their education and residence in foreign countries, and for which they do not perceive that their own is not yet ripe. Nearly a year ago they had gone so far as earnestly to discuss what prince should be placed over them, and warmly to debate whether one or two legislative chambers were preferable. Their eagerness blinded them to the fact that it would be scarcely possible to form an electoral constituency worthy of the name. The peasants, who compose the great mass of the population, are ignorant and degraded to a degree which renders them wholly unfit to be intrusted with the freeman’s rights of voting. They are by no means naturally vicious or destitute of good qualities, but these have had neither fair play nor cultivation. The Danubian serf—for, although nominally emancipated, he is no better than a serf—has been systematically oppressed and trampled upon. He is wholly uneducated, accustomed to blind obedience, unrequited toil, and many stripes—in fact, a slave. To give him a vote would be to place it at the disposal of the boyard on whose estate he lives. There exists, certainly, a class of small proprietors, especially in the mountainous parts of Wallachia, which might be taken advantage of as a sort of link between the ignorant and too often drunken peasant and the higher ranks. The artisans and people of the towns might also have votes, but at the best it would be a lame business, and it would be hard to prevent the real influence from being concentrated in the hands of the boyards, who hitherto have shown themselves anything but disposed to ameliorate the condition of their inferiors, and who would thus have it in their power to impose upon the constitutional sovereign such measures as were most to their own advantage. Before seeking to establish in so backward a country as Moldo-Wallachia that constitutional liberty for whose permanent enjoyment so few of the most civilised kingdoms of Europe have as yet shown themselves ripe, a vast deal has to be done by a government of a more absolute nature. The intellectual progress of the people—or, it should rather be said, their escape from utter moral darkness—needs to be facilitated by juster dealing and material improvements. Schools and roads are wanted, and a ruler who will check with a strong hand the oppressions and cruelties of the boyards, and the villanies of the middlemen and usurers to whom the unfortunate boor sells his future labour for bread and brandy. The earnings of the peasants, especially of those composing what are called the second and third classes, are so small that their existence appears a miracle. In the event of failure of crops, murrain amongst cattle, or any other of the serious but not unfrequent calamities to which agriculturists are liable—also in the event of a military occupation, which is worse than hail or rot—the most fortunate class of peasants cannot expect to pull through the year without incurring debt. As to the man of the lowest class, he is invariably and at all times in debt. He gets small loans from the Jew and Greek middlemen, at enormous interest, which is added to the capital every two or three months. His only means of payment is by labour, for which his taskmaster, profiting by his misery, credits him at a very low rate, until, from less to more, he sinks into the condition of absolute serfdom, and finds his whole year’s toil the property of another.

To examine in detail the social and political condition of the Danubian Principalities, would cover much paper, and probably be of small interest to English readers; but it may be possible to give in short compass a clear general notion of their position relatively to Turkey. The original treaties by which they accepted the protection and suzerainty of the Porte, and which date from the sixteenth century, have long since been infringed and set at naught. According to these treaties, a tribute was to be the sole acknowledgment of Turkish supremacy; the Sultan was forbidden to interfere in the local administration, and the provinces were to elect their own princes. In defiance of this contract, the elective right was long ago set aside, the odious rule of the Greeks of the Fanar was introduced, and the post of hospodar became the prize of the highest bidder. The office became so profitable, owing to the unscrupulous means of enriching themselves resorted to by these Fanariot princes, that it was soon the object of eager competition. A system of intrigue and bribery was introduced which gave rise to continual changes in the government of the Principalities, and accustomed the Porte to look upon them as farms to be let to the highest bidders. The Greek farmers were deposed and recalled whenever the offers and promises of others of their countrymen appeared more advantageous.

“From the period at which this system was introduced, to the beginning of the present century,” says Wilkinson (whose work, although now of old date, will be found valuable by persons desirous of tracing from an early period the not uninteresting history of the Principalities),^[6] “being a space of ninety years, Wallachia alone has passed through the hands of forty different princes, independently of the time it was occupied by the Russians, from 1770 to 1774, by the Austrians and Russians from 1789 to 1792, and by the Russians, again, from 1806 to 1812. The evils which naturally arose from such a state of things weighed so heavily on the two nations, that the court of Russia, already authorised by the treaty of Kainardjik^[7] to interfere in their behalf, insisted at the peace of Jassy, in 1792, that the Porte should engage to maintain the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia in their respective stations for the space of seven years, and should not molest them in any manner previously to the expiration of that term.”

In the sequel this agreement was by no means regularly observed, and its frequent infractions by Turkey led to continual remonstrances from Russia. The former power had long completely lost sight of the obligations imposed upon her by her treaties with the Principalities, and no stronger proof of this can be adduced than her cession to Russia, by the treaty of Bucharest, in 1812, of nearly half Moldavia, from the Dniester to the Pruth, now forming the Russian province of Bessarabia, a portion of which has been restored by the recent treaty of Paris. According to the capitulations, which to this very day are legally in force, the Porte had no more right to dispose of that territory than it had to grant the temporary sovereignty of the provinces to the greedy and venal Greeks of the Fanar. But the stipulated immunities and autonomy of the Moldo-Wallachians had long been disregarded and trodden under foot; they could do nothing against the power of Turkey; and Russia, whilst seeming to sympathise with them, joyfully beheld, in the oppressive and illegal conduct of their suzerain, a means of herself acquiring influence amongst them, and perhaps of eventually bringing them under her own rule. To do this she reckoned upon the services and assistance of her party amongst the boyards, the majority of whom, although claiming to be old nobility, are of mushroom origin and Greek descent. For the last 150 years the services of the boyards are to be sought, not in the patriotic annals of their country, but in the archives of the Fanar or of St Petersburg. It was from those amongst them devoted to Russia, and including Bibesco and Stirbey, upstart names now held in abhorrence in Wallachia, that were selected the members of the commission appointed, at the close of the war that commenced in 1828, to draw up, under the superintendence of Kisseleff, the Organic Regulations or new Constitution of the Principalities. This constitution professed to vindicate and insure the rights of the peasantry; but, although plausible enough in the letter, the manner in which it practically worked may be inferred from the new and extensive emigration that quickly followed its promulgation, and from the wholesale departure of rich Bulgarian colonies, which, encouraged by the just rule of Gregory Ghika, had settled in Wallachia previously to 1828.

From the date of the treaty of Adrianople until the commencement of the late war, Russia was all-powerful in the Principalities, and that period, of nearly a quarter of a century, is marked by repeated acts of base submission on the part of Turkey, humiliating to herself, and treacherous to the provinces to which she had promised protection and the maintenance of their rights. In 1839 a firman granted to Russia the right of controlling the acts of the Rouman National Assembly. In the same year Alexander Ghika was dismissed from the hospodariat, because he was displeasing to Russia. In 1844, the Wallachian Assembly was suspended for having rejected a project of law by which the monopoly of working the mines of the province would have been secured to a Russian company. Finally, in 1849, the Porte subscribed the Sened of Balta Liman, by which she upset all the institutions of the Principalities, and made a Russian commissioner their legislator and administrator.

For a period extending far beyond the memory of the oldest man amongst them, the Moldavians and Wallachians have thus been the sport of rival and intriguing powers. They have been deceived and oppressed by the Porte, and sold again and again to the best bidder; they have been the prey of the vilest Greek adventurers, who have done their best to introduce amongst them their own principles of falsehood and corruption; they have been taxed and squeezed by successive foreign rulers, who saw in their brief period of power only a favourable opportunity of filling their pockets; they have been harassed and impoverished by foreign military occupations, which ceased only to be renewed. Russia, whilst affecting, with crocodile tears, to commiserate and deplore their unhappy condition, has secretly fomented their vexations, griefs, and miseries, in hopes of their ultimately throwing themselves into her arms. The triumph of the Allies has at last delivered them, at least for the time, from these conflicting and noxious influences, and given them hopes that Europe will do something to secure their future welfare. Something ought to be, and it is to be hoped will be, done for them; but important considerations may render it impossible to grant them all that they, carried away, after long suffering, by the prospect of a brighter future, desire and demand. There should be secured to them the opportunity and means of moral and material improvement, and as much liberty and self-government as they are fitted to enjoy and able to make good use of. Their sudden elevation, after they have so long been sunk in degradation and almost in slavery, into a constitutional kingdom on the model of Belgium or Piedmont, whilst the most sagacious amongst them possess as yet scarcely the rudiments of political education, would be at best, and setting apart considerations of European policy that oppose themselves to it and demand due weight, a hazardous experiment, and one which for their own sakes it may be thought hardly advisable to try, since it is of a class that has hitherto been found more fertile in failures than in successes. It is one which the majority of the powers who are to decide upon the question are not likely to risk. Russia is understood to be favourable to the project, but that alone is a sufficient reason for regarding it with mistrust. She doubtless reckons on the powerful influences and successful intrigues she might bring to bear on a young kingdom adjoining her own frontier. France has somewhat ostentatiously put herself forward as an advocate of the Union under a foreign prince; but it is now more than suspected that Russian arguments have had undue weight with certain prominent members of the French government and advisers of the French Emperor. England, Austria, and Turkey, and also Sardinia, will oppose the dangerous scheme, and with good reason; for although the Moldo-Wallachians, who have an abundantly high opinion of their own capacities and merits, imagine that, were their wishes complied with, they should within a very short time offer to Europe the edifying example of an Oriental Belgium, it is feared by those who know them best that there would be at least as great a chance of their scandalising it by the deplorable spectacle of a second Greece.

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