I like to watch this careless, boisterous, gay crowd of Marseilles. It is just a little like the port of Échelles du Levant with its variegated costumes, its dirt, which the sun makes bearable, and the continual cries and quarrelling among men of all nations.
All my trunks are packed and ready, and it is with joy and not without regret that I see I have no hatbox. Not that I care for that curious and very unattractive invention, the fashionable hat, but it is the external symbol of liberty, and now I am setting it aside for ever. My tchatchaff is ready, and once we have passed the Piræus I shall put it on. How strange I shall feel clad again from head to foot in a black mantle all out of fashion, for the Turks have narrowed their tchatchaffs as the Western women have tightened their skirts. It will not be without emotion, either, that I feel a black veil over my face, a veil between me and the sun, a veil to prevent me from seeing it as I saw it for the first time at Nice from my wide open window.
Yet what anguish, what terrible anguish would it not be for me to put on that veil again, if I did not hope to see so many of those I have really loved, the companions of my childhood, friends I know who wanted me and have missed me. Even when I left Constantinople, you know under what painful circumstances, I hoped to return one day.
“The world is a big garden which belongs to us all,” said a Turkish warrior of the past; “one must wander about and gather its most agreeable fruits as one will.” Ah! the holy philosophy! yet how far are we from ever attempting to understand it! Will there ever come a personality strong enough, with a voice powerful enough to persuade us that this philosophy is for our sovereign being, and that without it we shall be led and lead others to disappointments?
During the time I was away yonder, I believed in the infallibility of new theories. I had almost completely neglected the books of our wise men of the East, but I have read them in the libraries of the West, where I have neglected modern literature for the pleasure of studying that philosophy, which shows the vanity of these struggles and the suffering that can follow.
I am longing to see an old uncle from the Caucasus. When we were young girls he pitied us because we were so unarmed against the disenchantment which inevitably had to come to us.
“You are of another century,” we said to him. “You reason with theories you find remarkable, but we want to go forward, we want to fight for progress, and that is only right.”
Ah! he knew what he was talking about, that old uncle, when he spoke of the disenchantment of life.
“You are arguing as I argued when I was a little boy, and my father gave me the answer that I have given to you. My children,” he continued, “life does not consist in always asking for more: believe me, there is more merit in living happily on as little as you can, than in struggling to rise on the defeat of others. I have fought in all the battles against the Russians, and had great experience of life, but I remind you of the fact merely lest you should think me a vulgar fatalist in the hands of destiny. I, too, have had many struggles, and it was my duty.”