Chapter XI · FEZ. (continued 3)

On the left bank of the river there were about two thousand foot-soldiers, some lying on the ground, some standing about in groups. In the square enclosed between the walls and the river, the artillery; four guns were firing at a mark; behind the guns stood some soldiers, and a tall figure in white—the Sultan. From the place where I stood, 321however, I could scarcely distinguish his outline. He seemed from time to time to speak to the artillerymen, as if he were directing them. On the opposite side of the square, near the bridge, there was a crowd of Moors, Arabs, and blacks, men and women, people from the city and country-people, gentlemen and peasants, all assembled together, and waiting, I was told, to be called one by one before the Sultan, from whom they wished favor or justice; for the Sultan gives audience three times a week to whosoever wishes to speak with him. Some of these poor people had, perhaps, come from distant places to complain of the exactions of the governor, or to beg for pardon for their relatives in prison. There were ragged women and tottering old men; all the faces were weary and sad, and upon them could be read both impatient desire and dread to appear before the prince of true believers, the supreme judge, who in a few minutes, with few words, would perhaps decide the fate of their whole lives. I could not see that they had any thing at their feet or in their hands, and for this reason I believe that the reigning Sultan has discontinued the custom, which formerly existed, of accompanying every petition with a present, which was never refused, however small, and consisted sometimes of a pair of fowls or a dozen of eggs. I walked about among the soldiers. The boys were divided into companies of thirty or forty each, and were amusing themselves by running after one another 322and playing a sort of leap-frog. In some of these groups, however, the diversion consisted in a sort of pantomime, which, when I understood its meaning, made me shudder. They were representing the amputation of the hands, decapitation, and other kinds of punishment, which they had doubtless often witnessed. One boy represented the caid, another the victim, and a third the executioner; the victim, when his hand was cut off, made believe to plunge the stump into a vessel of pitch; another pretended to pick up the hand and throw it to the dogs; and the spectators all laughed.

The gallows-bird faces of the greater part of these youthful soldiers are not to be described. They were of all shades of color, from ebony black to orange yellow; and not one of them, even among the youngest, had preserved the ingenuous expression of childhood. All had something hard, impudent, cynical, in their eyes, that inspired pity rather than anger. No great perspicacity is necessary to understand that they could not be otherwise. Of the men, the greater part of them were dozing, stretched out on the ground; others were dancing negro dances in the midst of a circle of spectators, and making all sorts of jokes and grimaces; others, again, fencing with sabres, in the same way as at Tangiers, springing about with the action of rope-dancers. The officers, among them many renegades, who were to be recognized by their faces, their pipes, and a certain something of superior care 323in their dress, walked about apart, and when I met them, turned their eyes away. Beyond the bridge, in a place apart, about twenty men, muffled in white mantles, were lying on the ground, one beside the other, motionless as statues. I drew near, and saw that they all wore heavy chains on wrist and ankle. They were persons condemned for common offences, who were dragged about by the army, and thus pilloried in the sight of all. As I approached they all turned, and fixed upon me a look that made me retreat at once.

I left the soldiers, and went to rest myself under the shade of a palm-tree, on a rising ground, whence I could command the whole plain. I had been there but a few minutes, when I saw an officer detach himself from a group, and come slowly toward me, looking carelessly about him, and humming a tune, as if to avoid notice. He was a short, stout man of about forty, wearing a sort of Zouave dress, with a fez, and without arms.

When I saw him near, I had a sensation of disgust. Never have I seen outside of the assize court a more perfidious countenance. I would have sworn to his having at least ten murders on his conscience, accompanied by assaults on the person.

He stopped at a couple of paces from me, fixed two glassy eyes upon me, and said, coldly, “Bon jour, monsieur.”

I asked him if he were a Frenchman. “Yes,” he replied. “I am from Algiers. I have been here 324seven years. I am a captain in the army of Morocco.”

Not being able to compliment him on his position, I kept silence.

“C´est comme ça,” he continued, speaking quickly. “I came away from Algiers because I could not bear the sight of it any more. J´étais obligé de vivre dans un cercle trop étroit” (he meant, perhaps, the halter). “European life did not suit my tastes. I felt the need of change.”

“And are you more contented now?” I inquired.

“Most content,” he answered, with affectation. “The country is lovely, Muley-el-Hassan is the best of sultans, the people are kind, I am a captain, I have a little shop, I exercise a small trade, I hunt, I fish, I make excursions into the mountains, I enjoy complete liberty. I would not go back to Europe, you see, for all the gold in the world.”

“Do you not wish to see your own country again? Have you forgotten even France?”

“What is France to me!” he replied. “For me France has no existence. Morocco is my country.” And he shrugged his shoulders.

His cynicism revolted me; I could scarcely believe it; I had the curiosity to probe him a little more deeply.

“Since you left Algeria,” I asked, “have you had no news of events in Europe?”

“Pas un mot,” he answered. “Here nobody knows any thing, and I am very glad not to know any thing.”

325“You do not know, then, that there has been a great war between France and Prussia?”

He started. “Qui a vaincu?” he asked, quickly, fixing his eyes upon me.

“Prussia,” I replied.

He made a gesture of surprise. I told him in a few words of the disasters that had befallen France,—the invasion, the taking of Paris, the loss of the two provinces. He listened with his head bent down and his eyebrows knit; then he roused himself and said, with a kind of effort, “C´est égal—I have no country, it is no affair of mine,” and he bent his head again. I observed him steadily, and he saw it. “Adieu, Monsieur,” he said, abruptly, in an altered voice, and walked quickly away.

“All is not dead within him yet!” I thought, and was glad.

Meantime the artillery had ceased its fire, the Sultan had retired under a white pavilion at the foot of a tower, and the soldiers began to defile before him, unarmed, and one by one, at about twenty paces one from the other. As there was not beside the Sultan, or in front of the pavilion any officer to read the names, as with us, in order to certify the existence of every soldier on the rolls (and I am told there are no rolls in the army of Morocco), I could not understand the purpose of the review, unless it was for the Sultan’s amusement; and I was tempted to laugh. But, upon second thoughts, the primitive and poetic idea in the sight of that African monarch, high-priest, 326an absolute prince, young, gentle, and in all simplicity standing three hours alone in the shadow of his tent, and three times in every week seeing his soldiers passing before him one by one, and listening to the prayers and lamentations of his unhappy subjects inspired me instead with a feeling of respect. And since it was the last time that I should see him, I felt a sudden rush of sympathy toward him as I turned away. “Farewell,” I thought, “handsome and noble prince!” and as his gracious white figure disappeared for ever from my eyes, I felt a sensation in my breast as if, in that moment, it had been stamped upon my heart.

The ninth of June: the last day of the sojourn of the Italian Embassy at Fez. All the Ambassador’s demands have been conceded, the affairs of Ducali and Schellal arranged, visits of leave-taking made, the last dinner of Sid-Moussa submitted to, the usual presents from the Sultan received: a fine black horse, with an enormous green velvet saddle embroidered with gold for the Ambassador; gilded and damascened sabres to the officials of the Embassy; a mule to the second dragoman. The tents and boxes were sent forward this morning, the rooms are empty, the mules are ready, the escort awaits us at the gate of Nicchia del Burro, my companions are walking up and down the court, expecting the signal for departure, and I, seated for the last time upon the edge of my imperial bed, note down in a book upon my knee my last impressions of Fez. 327What are they? What is left at last at the bottom of my soul by the spectacle of this people, this city, this state of things? If my thought penetrates at all under the pleasing impressions of wonder and gratified curiosity, I find a mingling of diverse sentiments, which leave my mind uncertain. There is a feeling of pity for the decay, the debasement, the agony of a warlike and knightly race, who left so luminous a track in the history of science and art, and now have not even the consciousness of their past glory. There is admiration for what remains in them of the strong and beautiful, for the virile and gracious majesty of their aspect, dress, demeanor, and ceremonies; for every thing that their sad and silent life retains of its antique dignity and simplicity. There is displeasure at the sight of so much barbarism at so short a distance from civilization, and that this civilization should have so disproportionate a force in rising and expanding, that in so many centuries, and always growing on its own ground, it has been unable to cross two hundred miles of sea. There is anger at the thought that, to the great interest of the barbarism of this part of Africa, the civilized states prefer their own small local and mercantile interests; and diminishing thus in the minds of this people, by the spectacle of their mean jealousies, their own authority and that of the civilization which they desire to spread, render the undertaking always more difficult and slow. Finally, there is a sentiment of vivid pleasure, when 328I think that in this country another little world has been formed in my brain, populous, animated, full of new personages who will live forever there, whom I can evoke at will, and can converse with them, and live again in Africa. But with this glad feeling comes another which is sad, the inevitable sentiment that throws a shadow over all our serene hours and drops a drop of bitterness into all our pleasures—that which the Moorish merchant expressed when he demonstrated the vanity of the great efforts of civilized people to study, to seek, to discover; and then this beautiful journey seems to me only the rapid passage of a fine scene in the spectacle of an hour, which is life; and my pencil drops from my hand, and a dark discouragement takes possession of me. Ah! the voice of Selam calls me! We must go, then. To return to the tent, to the warlike manœuvres, the wide plains, the great light, the joyous and wholesome life of the encampment. Farewell, Fez! Farewell, sadness! My little African world is again illuminated with rose color.

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