A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby (Text only)

by Mary S. Lovell

  Saturday September 25th. A day never to be forgotten. A divan was assembled of 50 or 60 persons of different tribes, and Medjuel sent for Ouadjid in the midst of them, and firmly pronounced ‘teleigbu telaths cie tadjaret ha by telalhe’ [1 pronounce thee divorced three times]. She, Ouadjid, was firmly unflinching hearing the sentence.

  At Medjuel’s request, or suggestion, I afterwards went and gave her my Sowali [probably a specific piece of jewellery, i.e. a silver bracelet]. What stupid weakness! But the awful fear of … his repenting and regretting her – even as a housekeeper – took possession of me and I recalled her, and permitted her to remain in my tent with the Binnaat [young girls]. Am I in my right mind?

  On the following day, to the shrill joy-cries of the women’s zagharit, Jane rode away from the tents to return to Horns, leaving Medjuel to follow several hours later. They settled in the new house and Jane worked hard to make it a home, but it was an unhappy period for them both. So many things lay between them, and each time people from the tribe came they sought to tell her things she would rather not know. In her notebook she made lists in Arabic and coded French of questions to ask Medjuel when he returned:

  Why were you so unhappy the day her brother came to the tents and you heard her? To be so unhappy you must have loved her immensely? Far more than you ever did me? And she must have seen it and known it.

  Is it true that Mohammed threatened to kill her if you did not divorce her? And that hurried the divorce at last?

  When Yusef Redouan asked, ‘Is she divorced? how did you answer? As if you regretted her and had done it for my sake, or that you were tired of her?

  Why did you so hurry for me to give her my Sowali?

  You did not say anything to her to make her think you would take her back?

  … I do not think I want to live for long with this uncertainty and jealousy.

  Jane suspected Medjuel had not forgotten Ouadjid, and she could not decide whether she was justified or whether her anxiety was the inevitable jealousy of an ageing woman for a much younger husband. In fact, it would transpire that Medjuel’s feelings for Ouadjid ran deep, but fortunately Jane would never be sure of this, and after the divorce he never returned to Ouadjid.

  In the winter of 1869 Jane and Medjuel moved to Damascus, where the ‘compact new house’ on a quiet tree-lined road next to an old mosque in the Khassab district was incomplete but ready for occupation.

  22

  The Burtons

  1870–1871

  Jane had not written to her family since the previous winter and when Kenelm wrote, concerned for her safety, she replied as though everything had been normal,

  Damascus

  1 February 1870

  My dearest Kenelm,

  Our very long stay in the desert last year, must in part account for my unusual silence. For 8 months we never put our foot in a town and the disturbed state of the desert, constant suspicion of treachery on the part of the Government, and feuds, and alerts among the Bedouin tribes have made the roads, and means of communication quite unsafe for the past year. Even now a plan of the government to circumscribe the Arabs within, or rather without, the boundaries of Tadmor and other frontiers of the Syrian Desert is, I think, useless and will not answer their expectations. In one of these feuds the Sheikh was wounded, and well nigh killed, but I am thankful to say his wound is healed …

  The large house is no longer mine. The kiosque in which we now live here, is in the former stable yard … and not finished yet as to plastering and painting etc. I am quite vexed about it. Our new Consul here is Captain Richard Burton who went to Mecca, and his wife who is very agreeable. You know Eugénie has left me for good now and lives ‘tired and drooping’ in France? Her place is filled by [Marie] a Swiss German from Engadine of about 30; a good painstaking girl, but of course not so clever as Eugénie as to dressmaking etc.

  I forgot whether I told you that the Sheikh has received an award from the Sultan, for his bravery and loyalty in the fight and capture of Hassan Bey [during] his attempt at insurrection last year but this is all; the long promised pecuniary indemnities for our, and our tribe’s great losses are not yet forthcoming!1

  Shortly after this letter Edward and Theresa’s daughter Lena visited Damascus on honeymoon after her marriage to Lord Ashburton, wishing to see the aunt about whom she had heard much. The desert was too dangerous to allow the couple to go to Palmyra but Lena was luckier than Emmie Buxton, for she met Medjuel and took home a favourable account of her aunt’s exotic husband. She was the only member of the family ever to meet him. ‘Carl Haag sent me the “illustrated” with Medjuel’s portrait,’ Jane wrote to her brother, ‘but not a bit like, as Lena will tell you. He is, I think, much better looking.’2

  The arrival in Damascus of Richard Burton, the renowned explorer, was of longer-term importance to Jane. He had arrived at the consulate on 1 October 1869 like a breath of fresh air. His adventurous and energetic wife Isabel bustled into the city three months later. It is to Isabel Burton’s gossipy writing that we are indebted for the best description that exists of Jane and Medjuel’s new home, the house that Jane had built in her former stableyard.

  From another visitor we know that it was ‘outside the town and surrounded by trees and gardens with narrow streams of running water, and paths full of old English flowers’. Like her former home, it was cool and green with pigeons and turtle doves fluttering about in the trees, and it was built in three wings around a courtyard like the one at Horns.3 It had not, apparently, the spacious guest quarters of Jane’s former house, but it was not inconsequential, which is the impression she conveys by the word kiosque.

  the house is made noticeably by its projecting balcony-like windows and coloured glass. [At the] large wooden gateway, we are received by twenty or thirty Bedouins of the tribe of Mezrab, lounging in the archway, and a large Kurdish dog which knows its friends and will let me pass … Downstairs a reception room is hung with arms and trophies; on the right … are the stables.

  The court presents a picturesque appearance with the thoroughbreds tethered here and there to the trees eating piles of cut grass. A fountain plays in the middle. On the other side is the reception house for any of the tribe who happen to come into the town, also the bath-house, the conservatory, and the house and playground for the fowls, amongst which [are] curious snow-white geese with curling feathers, turkeys, ducks, poultry, pigeons, guinea hens and other pets. The whole is fronted and surrounded by a choice flower garden. Upstairs is a suite of apartments which is elegance itself. Family and home treasures and little reminiscences of European life, old china and paintings are mingled with Oriental luxury …

  The master of the house, a Bedouin Sheikh, Sheikh Mijuel [sic], is a small man, with a most pleasing face, piercing black eyes, gentlemanly manners and a charming voice. He speaks the beautiful Bedouin-Arabic … these soft, guttural utterances are very attractive to those who admire the Eastern language.4

  When the Burtons first arrived in Damascus, Jane was, said Isabel, the only other English resident of note in the city. Besides these three were Isabel’s English maid and four British missionaries, and some thirty other Europeans attached to French, Italian and Russian embassies and missions. The two women took to each other and became friends, and when both were in Damascus they met regularly, but they each left it periodically for months at a time to go – as Isabel put it – ‘gypsying’.

  Isabel often called on Jane, bringing with her anyone she especially wished to impress. One of these was Amy Fullerton-Fullerton, who later wrote of her experiences in A Lady’s Ride through Palestine and Syria and recalled meeting Jane (referred to as ‘the Princess’, Medjuel having been introduced to her as ‘a Prince of the Desert’): ‘We found the Princess in an English morning wrapper, just concluding her déjeuner … the Prince’s manners were gentle and quiet.’5

  As wife to the consul, Isabel held her weekly ‘at home’ every Wednesday, at their house in the foothills of the Jebel Kaysun
at Salhiyeh rather than at the consulate. Most visitors would hurry away from Salhiyeh in the late afternoon, in order to be within the city wall by sunset when the gates were closed for the night; but Jane always remained, said Isabel, ‘for she, like myself, lives without the gates, and she has no fear … though she has twice had a little skirmish going home … She helps me in the afternoon to receive, and dines afterwards, almost every Wednesday; that is my great intellectual treat.’6

  There was another member of this party – Jane’s friend Abd el Khader – who made up the foursome at a weekly rendezvous for dinner.

  We would go up to the roof, where it was prepared and where the … cushions of our divan were spread about and have our evening meal. And after that we would smoke our narghiles and talk, and talk, and talk, far into the night … I shall never forget the scene on the housetop, backed as it was by the sublime mountain, a strip of sand between it and us, and on the other three sides was the view of Damascus, and beyond, the desert.

  It was wild, romantic and solemn; and sometimes we would pause in our conversation to listen to the sounds around us – the last call to prayer on the minaret-top, the soughing of the wind through the mountain gorges, the noise of the water-wheel in the neighbouring orchard.7

  The conversations – about philosophy and politics, history and travel – were conducted in many languages, for all were multilingual. Richard Burton said that Jane was ‘out and out the cleverest woman’ he ever met: ‘there was nothing she could not do. She spoke nine languages perfectly, and could read and write in them. She painted, sculpted, was musical and her letters were splendid. And if on business there was never a word too much, or too little.’8

  It was from Jane that Isabel learned a great deal about the lives of harem women, about which she wrote in her books, explaining coyly that she had abridged the information because on such a subject ‘minute detail would not be suitable for English girls’.9 Isabel’s husband learned a great deal more. Richard Burton’s experience of the East had enabled him to penetrate Mecca, but even he had not the facility of access to the closely guarded life of the harem. Nor indeed, in the eighteen months she spent there, had Isabel. Furthermore, though she casually boasted of spending two or three days at a time with a harem, she spoke only words and phrases in Arabic with extremely limited conversational facility, and no Turkish. In her book she admitted that when she visited harems she had to ‘first obtain permission’ to take her dragoman, Hannah Misk, with her, ‘blindfolded, as translator’.10 No harem woman would have discussed intimacies through a male interpreter, even one so old and venerable as Mr Misk.

  But Jane, who was a constant friendly visitor to harems up and down the country, knew all there was to know. She not only lived among the women in the desert, she was a frequent house-guest at Turkish harems and those of high-ranking Arabs. She had travelled between Damascus and Homs with harems for safety and comfort, and needed no interpreter. Her diary reveals that she acted as a sympathetic listener and counsellor, attended weddings, births burials. She was distressed when young girls were sold into what she considered to be physical slavery for a few hundred pounds, sometimes to gain the favour of a social superior. She knew all the hopes, fears, jealousies and frustrations of the women, and the arts of love they used to maintain their status, and of which they spoke of freely to her, even – to Jane’s disapproval – in front of their children.

  Jane’s knowledge of these ‘arts of love’, the sexual practices of Middle Eastern women about which Richard Burton questioned her at great length, provided a basis for his unique treatise on the sexual life and thought of the Muslim and formed part of his translation of the Arabian Nights, especially the most contentious ‘Terminal Essay’. It also provided him with information used as footnotes in the controversial manual of sexual instruction, The Perfumed Garden (a translation of which he was working upon when he died). Burton’s biographer remarked upon the relationship between Jane Digby and Richard Burton. They were, he said,

  unique, both of them in the history of adventurous travel. This artistic, independent woman, a brilliant linguist and musician … her knowledge of general Arab life almost equalled his own, her acquaintance with the female side far exceeded it and many were the evenings they spent on the leafy logia at Salhiyeh, talking under the stars … he questioning her on the female Arab customs, on the sex intimacies of the harem …

  How much of the knowledge of Moslem female sexual psychology which was later embodied in the famous Terminal Essay to the Arabian Nights came from the lips of Jane Digby one can only guess, but knowing the vigorous secrecy surrounding the harem … and remembering the minuteness of Burton’s descriptions, we must conclude that it was much.11

  Burton’s monumental annotated translation of Arabian Nights was, not surprisingly given the date of its publication (sixteen volumes appeared between 1885 and 1888), printed ‘for private subscribers only’ to avoid prosecution, and was an immediate success. At the merest suggestion of the word ‘pornography’, Burton retaliated with the story of Dr Johnson’s reply to the lady who complained that there were rude words in his dictionary: ‘Madam, you must have been looking for them!’ An emasculated ‘library version’ of the Arabian Nights (excluding the ‘Terminal Essay’) was published after Burton’s death by Isabel. Among her husband’s papers Isabel found the manuscript of The Perfumed Garden and immediately burned it, insisting that it was incomplete and that no one else was capable of completing it as her husband intended.12

  The first summer of the Burtons’ residency in Damascus, 1870, was full of incident. According to Isabel Burton, the desert was in an uproar, and they and their entourage were often attacked or menaced on their tours around the country. Her journal entries are borne out by Burton’s businesslike reports to the Foreign Office. From Jane’s diary it appears no worse than usual – constant raids and danger had become so commonplace to her that she only bothered to record detail if she or Medjuel was directly involved. Her comments were thus reduced to statements such as ‘the roads are too dangerous for travel at present’.

  The Mezrab tribe suffered losses of animals and tents after several raids in succession by the Mowali and Hadiden tribes, but these are recorded only in passing by Jane, and without descriptive comment. However, when the Mezrabs attempted to recover their property, they were driven back by the Weis Pasha and his army of 150 heavily armed soldiers, and to this Jane reacted indignantly. The encounter also entailed both Jane and Medjuel having to return to Homs by order of the Wali, for she was now seen as having as much responsibility for the Mezrabs in any formal negotiation as her husband.

  The coolness following the divorce of Ouadjid had thawed, and once again Jane rode confidently at her husband’s side. However, the rumours surrounding their relationship remained, for Isabel Burton heard them: ‘Gossip said that he [Medjuel] had other wives, but she assured me he had not.’13

  The couple remained in Homs negotiating terms for the tribe until Medjuel was arbitrarily arrested and flung into jail. Knowing she had no entitlement to official protection, Jane nevertheless called upon the assistance of Richard Burton, as a friend, to achieve Medjuel’s release, and he complied. ‘To my great delight,’ she wrote, ‘Medjuel returned here on August 4th, not having been even to his tent.’ While Jane was at Horns, her new Swiss maid, Marie, contracted typhus in Damascus and died.

  Sheikh Mohammed ebn Dukhi, who a decade earlier had robbed Jane of some £3,000 worth of camels and goods, and had subsequently been bankrupted in counter-raids, now embarked upon a series of plundering raids using connections in the corrupt Turkish administration to evade arrest. He attacked the Mezrabs and carried off tents and camels, as well as seven valuable mares. Medjuel led a retaliation raid, and while she waited for news of this in September Jane wrote to Kenelm, but as usual she never bothered her family with her anxieties:

  I wished to answer your letter full of interesting family news, long ago, but I, and everyone here, have been literally pr
ostrated by the heat which has been intense this year. Added to this we have had a vast deal of disagreements with the hostile tribes in the desert and with the new arrangements that the Ottoman Government are making with regard to the Arabs wishing to fix them, each tribe in a district and if possible to induce or force them to cultivate. For example they wished to transport us, the Mezrabs, bodily to the banks of the Euphrates, far beyond Tadmor. It was only by my begging and praying our Governor General Reschid Pacha, that we escaped, as we have properties at both Damascus and Horns.14

  Medjuel recovered four of the seven precious mares, and in return for the remaining three – already disposed of by ebn Dukhi – he took a dozen others of inferior breeding, for with the loss of revenue from Palmyra the mares were vital to the trading economy of the tribe as breeding stock. But the stolen camels and tents had been sent off deep into the southern deserts. These too were of importance to the tribe, and Medjuel was grimly determined to retrieve them.

  In November 1870 Isabel Burton attended the wedding of the Wali’s daughter with Jane – looking, said Isabel, ‘like a beautiful oriental queen’ – and the wife of the Italian consul. All three wore European ballgowns at the request of their hostess. Their hooped skirts, tiny nipped-in waists and off-the-shoulder sleeves trimmed with rosebuds and ribbons raised many questions by the women of the harem. ‘Are you not cold being thus uncovered? Is it true that strange men dance with you one after another, and put their arms around your waist? Do you not feel dreadfully ashamed?’ Jane had brought a cashmere shawl to cover her shoulders when the women joined the men, but her two younger companions had to don their capes in order not to shame the men by such a display of nakedness.15