Chapter 62To Tunisia — TunisNACH TUNESIEN — TUNIS
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
So I travelled to Tunis, which my foot trod for the first time. At the beginning I saw only all that French metropolitan life, the giant hotels and cafés, the boulevards. And was bitterly disappointed! Then enthusiasm for the “souks,” the Tunisian bazaar and merchant vaults, took hold of me with mounting force. I never tired of roaming them at every hour of the day. And the adjoining lanes, unfalsified and genuine, the narrow ones into which no ray of sun penetrates. Then the Jewish quarter1 conquered me, with its view into the coloured, mostly blue-tinted colonnaded courtyards and pitch-black corners. And within them the feverish life and bustle of the Tunisian Jews. I also took part in a circumcision feast in a rich Jewish family. The magnificent folk costume of the Jewish women, with its little golden slippers, baggy trousers and the wide coloured silk mantle veiling the whole figure from the head down, is already scorned by the youngest generation, who find themselves handsomer in European silk blouses. A pity! Many Jewish women are very beautiful, only they grow all too stout with the years.
Then, with some difficulty, I got inside the Tunisian harems of rich merchants and lawyers. The women did not let my visit disturb them in the henna-dyeing of the nails on their feet and hands. And I stretched my feelers out further and further. With the kavass of the German consul-general, and the kavass's Italian wife, I pushed into the decaying suburban palaces of forgotten princesses and experienced very piquant details there. The servant's wife was seated beside me on the princely sofa and was served coffee along with me. Being an Italian, she adapted quite well to the new situation.
Count Hardenberg2, the consul, also showed me various wonderful Moorish courtyards in the Alhambra manner, belonging to the Bey's highest officials.
The Bardo, the Bey's museum, delighted me with its outstanding ancient Greek bronzes, dredged up from the lagoons off Tunis3; and so did the dreamlike beauty of the old Moorish rooms of applied art.
And Carthage! How often I drove across to the museum with its wonderful stone sarcophagus lids. “The Priestess of Tanit4,” a delightful Greek work of art, had a speaking likeness to Helga. — Abbé Delattre, the creator of the museum, took me round himself in the world he had made and dug out around monastery and cathedral. And how full of atmosphere it was to wander in the ruins, of which admittedly relatively little is still standing, or rather has not yet been dug out. And yet, how one could dream in the solitude. I was once again in my element and enjoyed it to the full. In the Belvédère garden, the great city park, I painted the blossom-spun ruins of the old Arab bath and took pleasure in the “Coubba,” the old, wonderfully Moorish pavilion up on the height. And how strange were the ancient Jewish cemeteries with their finely chased marble slabs lying flat.
But the Tunisian night life above all! I often went with my guide through the blackest alleys of the black labyrinth and looked at the wild Moorish beauties, the Bedouin women. All the tribes and towns of Tunisia were represented here in the service of Venus Vulgiviga.
Often I also drove out to El Kram, the little seaside resort where Count Hardenberg had a summer place with his family. We liked to sit on the beach and enjoy beautiful sunsets.
And then, on the strength of my letters of introduction, I had got my way and was to visit the harem of the “Beyla,” the wife of the Bey of Tunis. It was hard to bring off, for in twenty years no European woman had been let in.
The woman was a Circassian5 — no longer young, but still with clear traces of great beauty and with unmistakable intellectual superiority. She was in baggy trousers and a jacket of soft silk, without a single ornament. (I was ashamed that for her sake I had hung myself with jewellery like a sleigh-horse.) She had been taken by the Bey out of his uncle's harem after his uncle's death, while she was still quite young. At the time she consented only on condition that his French mistress leave Tunis. And only after that woman's departure did she deign to become the Bey's principal wife. She spoke not a word of French; her stepson was the interpreter. She seemed to take a liking to me and was tireless in her questions. What astonished her most were my journeys round the world and my unrestricted freedom. I believe she suppressed a sigh. Then she described to me in glowing colours the beauties of the wild country and of the aqueducts of Zaghouan (unfortunately I was not to get there); it had probably been one of her chief journeys. Women in Moorish robes of blue and red silk embroidered with gold, her serving women (but not “secondary wives,” as I had believed at first), served the sweet thick coffee in little golden bowls.
At parting the Beyla embraced me with warmth. It seemed to me that a tear glimmered in her eyes. “La princesse vous envie,” “The princess envies you,” said the princely interpreter.
A French general and his wife had escorted me, the general only as far as the door of the reception hall, which was unfortunately altogether European and bombastic. The Bey's splendid gala carriage took us back to the railway station at La Marsa. It was all done with much ceremonial pomp. Thousands were crowded into the great courtyard of the palace. They were waiting for their free ram, which was given out by the government on that day, once a year. This was in the same La Marsa in whose wild dunes, a few days later, I was lured astray by a rather dull-looking Arab and (had workmen not come along the road) would probably have been robbed and butchered just as a Frenchwoman was, barely a year earlier, in the wilderness of Bullareggia. Yes, children and have a special guardian angel6.
But best of all I liked Sidi Bou Said! How often I was up there with the lighthouse keeper, painting. There were glorious motifs there. There is a legend that the great Arab saint, Sidi Bou Said, was really Louis XI7 of France, who had withdrawn there into solitude. At any rate — he could not have chosen a more paradisal corner of the earth. It is one of the loveliest spots on earth up there; the cloven summit of Bou Cornin, which saw Carthage rise and pass away as well, looks darkly out over the waters of the much-curved coasts. Their wonderful bays shimmer across with countless white domes against grounds of dark blue velvet cypress. And a cemetery lies up there with nothing but pale dry thistles in the white sand and with white gravestones that stand out shining against the deep blue of sea and sky — a symphony of white and blue.
The ancient bathing resort of Corbous has come back to life as well. It lies obliquely opposite Carthage. Even in antiquity Corbous had much-visited hot baths and a splendid beach. There are countless excursions into the mountains there, one always finer than the last.
But once I had grazed Tunis bare, I was driven on towards further deeds. I also wanted to see all the famous Roman excavations.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the Jewish quarter — The Hara, the Jewish quarter of Tunis, west of the medina. The Hara held one of the oldest Jewish communities in North Africa. Almost nothing she describes here still exists: the quarter was condemned as a slum and largely cleared and rebuilt in the middle of the twentieth century, and the community that filled it left after 1948. Her few sentences on the costume are therefore worth more than they look — an outsider's note, made by a painter who was counting the details, on the exact decade in which the women stopped wearing it.
- ↑Count Hardenberg — Not identified here. A Count Hardenberg as German consul-general in Tunis in these years is not confirmed in this project — the Hardenbergs were a large family and the name alone does not settle it. He is not a passing acquaintance in her account: he takes her through the houses of the Bey's officials, and she goes out repeatedly to his summer place at El Kram. The German Foreign Office's own consular lists, in the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts in Berlin, would name whoever held the post, and would date the visit at the same time.
- ↑dredged up from the lagoons off Tunis — Wrong, and the correction is useful. The Bardo's Greek bronzes are the cargo of the Mahdia wreck, found by Greek sponge divers in June 1907 at some forty metres, in open sea off Mahdia about two hundred kilometres down the coast from Tunis, and brought up between 1907 and 1913 under Alfred Merlin. Nothing was dredged out of the lagoon at Tunis. The salvage was still going on as she stood there: the bronzes she admired had been in the museum only a few years, and some of their companions were still on the sea floor. (The Mahdia wreck)
- ↑The Priestess of Tanit — The sarcophagus of the winged priestess. A marble sarcophagus lid from the Punic necropolis of Sainte-Monique, carved in the fourth or third century BC and one of the most famous things ever found at Carthage. Delattre dug it up himself in 1902–03, so she was looking at it within a decade of its discovery, guided by the man who found it. It is Punic work in an entirely Greek manner, which is why she takes it for Greek and is half right. (The Sainte-Monique necropolis)
- ↑a Circassian — Almost certainly Lella Kmar (1862–1942), who was consort to three beys in succession. Born in the Ottoman imperial harem, of Circassian origin, and sent as a gift by Sultan Abdülhamid II to the Bey of Tunis, she married Muhammad III as-Sadiq in 1877, Ali III in 1883, and Muhammad V an-Nasir in 1908 — each marriage ending with the bey's death. She was about fifty when Preuschen sat with her, which matches “no longer young, but still with clear traces of great beauty,” and she was known for exactly the political intelligence Preuschen registers. Preuschen has the shape of the story right and the people wrong: the bey who took her, still young, out of a dead predecessor's harem was Ali III in 1883, a quarter of a century before an-Nasir married her. She lived at La Marsa, where this visit ends. (Lella Kmar)
- ↑children and have a special guardian angel — A word has dropped out of the sentence. The German reads »Ja, Kinder und haben einen besonderen Schutzengel«, which is not a sentence. The proverb behind it is Kinder und Narren haben einen besonderen Schutzengel — children and fools have a special guardian angel — and the missing word is the one she was applying to herself. Whether the loss happened in the 1926 printing or later in the text's descent is not something we can settle from the edition we have.
- ↑Louis XI — Her slip: the legend is told of Louis IX. Saint Louis, Louis IX, died of disease outside Carthage in 1270 on the Eighth Crusade, and the story has him surviving instead, converting, and living out his life on this hill as a Muslim holy man. It cannot be true on the dates alone: the saint of the village, Abu Said al-Baji, died in 1231, when Louis IX was a boy of seventeen and four decades before he ever came to Africa. She is repeating what the guides told visitors, and getting the numeral wrong on top. (Abu Said al-Baji)