(ABACUS) The WILDER SHORES of LOVE , Lesley Blanch Lesley Blanch THE WILDER SHORES - OF LOVE (ABACUSJ First published in Great Britain by John Murray Ltd 1954 Published in Abacus by Sphere Books Ltd 1984 30-32 Gray's Inn Road, London WCIX 8JL Reprinted 1984 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. 'Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading For my husband, Romain Gary CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION I ISABEL BURTON 7 A Two-headed Pro.file JANE DIGBY EL MEZRAB. I3I Matrimonial Theme and l/ariations AIMEE DUBUCQ DE RIVER Y 197 A Message from a Glzost ISABELLE EBERHARDT 271 Portrait of a Legend BIBLIOGRAPHY 312 INDEX 317 I ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS WISH to acknowledge with gratitude, the generosity of all those people who placed their valuable time and knowledge at my dis posal. My thanks are especially due to General Catroux, for 'talking Sahara' on the subject oflsabelle Eberhardt. To Major Hartley-Clarke, for permission to quote from his collection of Burton manuscripts and correspondence. To Mr. Peter de Hunt, for the loan of unpublished Burton material. To Mlle Anne-Marie Bercher, for her companionship in a journey across Southern Tw1isia. To Mr.John Hilliard for permission to reproduce one of his photographs of North Africa. To Mrs. Osyth Leeston, for her patience in dealing with the manuscript in all its stages. To Monsieur Andre Dermen ghen, Director of the Bibliotheque du Gouvernement General of Algiers. To Canon Gibney of St. Mary Magdalene' s Church, Mortlake. To the Librarian and staff of the Foreign Office Library, and that of the Public Records Office. To the Director and Trustees of the Camberwell Public Library, for permission to reproduce photographs from Lady Burton's estate, now in their possession.• To the Chief Librarian and the Director of the Kensington Public Library for permission to study the Burton library and private papers. To the Curator of Leighton House, for permission to reproduce drawings from Sir Frederick Leighton's sketch-books. To Mr. Cox, late of the London Library, for his recollections of Burton. To the staff of each of those libraries where I worked while writing this book: The London Library, the Sorbonne, the Bibliotheque National and the Library of St. Genevieve. To tl1e New Yark Society Library where I am greatly indebted to Miss Helen Ruskill, and the Public Library of the City of New Y-ork. I wish to acknowledge my debt to E. M. Oddies' biography of Lady Ellenborough, published iti 1936, and also Mr. H. Morton's book on Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, pub lished in 1923, both of which provided much valuable material. Lastly, I wish to thank Professor Louis Massignon, for his indulgent encouragement and interest when this book was only a shadowy project scrawled on the back of an envelope, and the Cornhill Mag.1zine for the hospitality of its pages from the start. 'Love and Love always read from the same book, but not always from the same page. ' INTRODUCTION T HE four women who form the subject of this book might be described as northern shadows flitting across a southern land scape. All of them belonged to the West, to the fast-greying climate of nineteenth-century Europe where the twentieth century disintegration of women, as such, was already foreshadowed. Yet although of widely different natures, backgrowids and origins, all had this in common-each found, in the East, glowing horizons of emotion and daring which were for them, now vanishing from the West. And each of them, in her own way, used love as a means of individual expression, of liberation and fulfilment within that radiant periphery. There have been many women, particularly Englishwomen, who have been enthralled by the Oriental legend; who have followed the beckoning Eastern star wherever it led. On great voyages or little trips; as travellers or tourists; as eccentrics such as Lady Hester Stan hope, or Orientalists such as Gertrude Bell or Freya Stark. But the. women I have chosen are less intellectual, women whose achievements remained on a purely emotional plane and who, for all their daring, each saw the East from an entirely personal or subjective view-point. Aimee Dubucq, the gentle, inexperienced convent girl, in violent contrast to Isabelle Eberhardt, the chaotic Slav, mystic and voluptuary; Jane Digby, the wealthy, raffish divorcee, loving so many yet always retaining a curious innocence, a romantic idealism ; Isabel Arundell, the impoverished Victorian miss, loving with single-minded fury, biding her time, stifled in conventional living. All of them responded to a similar inward impulse to wpich the East offered fulfilment. * * * All these women were realists of romance who broke with their century's dream, to live it, robustly. At tl1at moment, romantic living, if embraced at all, was interpreted in terms of sighs and renun ciations. La Dame aux Camelias coughing out her lungs behind a , I Introduction lace-edged handkerchief. Chopin's music, played by Liszt, its strains floating out over the misty lakeside gardens of Como to mingle with the bells of some forgotten convent. Charlotte Stieglitz committing suicide, hoping thus to provide artistic stimulus for her second-rate husband. It was a pallid way of life, and between its negations and the alternative Victorian gentilities and pruderies, which gained, year by year, life, living-loving-was muffled, and womanhood itself became a scandalous secret. Between the coughing poets and the social and sociological taboos, it required great daring to snatch at the underlying richness which the East still promised. It was a time when the West was suddenly aware of the romantic aspects of the East. In the eighteenth century it had been seen as a fabulous back-drop; a stage setting for Mozart's L' Enlevement dt1 Serail, all toppling turbans and giddy goings-on in key with the elegant salons of Versailles or the Hofburg where it was first applauded. But even such tinkling echoes had died away by the time the nineteenth century dawned and Byron's verses were intoxicating an avid public. Now another, more sultry East was seen, although treated with an equal subjectivity. Mock heroics gave place to savage grandeurs. Travellers such as Prince Piickler Muskau returned with tales of chivalresque Arabs and the splendours of Oriental hospitality. Far away, across the steppes, Pushk.in luxuriated in the exoticism of Crimean legends, and was to be followed by Lermontov writing of Caucasian bandits. Presently, je\velled scimitars adorned even the most prosaic country houses and the Mamel11kes Waltz lay open on every pianoforte. lngres and Delacroix were covering huge canvases with voluptuous scenes where beneath the expanses of exoticism and local colour, the most disturbing realities of flesh and blood were apparent. And some women, such as my four subjects, must have been aware of this, even subconsciously. Instinctively they must have sensed the contracting horizons of their age and seen the cold light of reason dawning like a grey streak across the blue. It was to spread over the whole sky. But the romantic mirage could be still translated into reality, could still be lived-elsewhere; they turned Eastward trustingly. However, it must be admitted that in the turning they still expected and retained a degree of freedom unknown to Eastern women. Purdah, the segregation of the sexes, the veil ... these things they swept aside. Isabelle Eberhardt avoided the question by dressing as man. !l 2 Introduction Lady Ellenborough retained financial ind_ependence and was accord ingly accepted even more unquestioningly by her husband's tribe. Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, although for some years compelled to live entirely on Eastern terms, finally obtained her own. Of all four, it was perhaps Isabel Arundell, the brisk, the managing, the Anglo Saxon, who most nearly approximated to the traditional pattern of Oriental wifely submission. But each one of them seemed to sense in their passivity, far larger opportunities of self-expression as women than any left to their Western sisters. Perhaps, too, this very passiviLy offered something which was vanishing from the West, something to which they were all subcon sciously drawn. Repose : the Eastern climate of contemplation, of Kif, of nothingness, brought to its quintessential state of voluptuous, animal stillness was a state wholly alien to the West. Even leisure, an entirely different thing, was vanishing. From afar, a mighty whirring could be heard approaching: it was the roar and clatter of a million mechanical devices gaining momentum, forming i.µto an overwhelming uproar of ingenuity and efficiency: speed and action for their own sake. This onslaught was to hammer at Western mankind until there were nerves, but no senses left. Kif, contemplation, gilded opium pills and the drowsy peace of senses lulled by satiety ... these things the East still offered, and some, if not all of my subjects, were, I believe, aware of this. In the East, there was still 'world enough and time' to be women . ..:, If we consider the least free of all, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, a convent girl captured by corsairs and flung into the harem of the Grand Turk, we see that even in the Seraglio, as a slave, she had con siderably more freedom to be essentially a woman than many women now enmeshed in the complex 'mechanism of our economic ci~iliza tion. In writing of romantic women who turned towards the East it might be asked why I have not included Lady Hester Stanhope, the archetype, or doyenne of this band. She was not so much seeking fulfilment as a woman, as seeking escape from her own nature; she craved power rather than love. To me she !ilways remains a puppet, 3