An Extract from ‘Star of the Morning’

Extract from Star of the Morning, The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope, from Chapter 12, ‘The Queen Orders Her Minister’

[NB. Footnotes and endnotes removed for this version]

Late in March 1814 Hester was thrown into agitation by the news that Vincent-Yves Boutin had just arrived in Sidon from Cairo, and was now in charge of France’s commercial interests in both Egypt and Syria.

It seems their mutual friend Nafissa may have tried to play match-maker, for she had asked Boutin to bring along with him a present for Hester, a pretty Muslim girl called Hanyfy, just thirteen (whom Meryon, with his eye for pubescent beauty, noted was ‘exceedingly well-made’.) But the human offering was sent up on a mule, to hand her new mistress a scrawled, curt note of a few lines.

Puzzled, Hester wrote Boutin not one but four letters over the space of as many days. Her first letter was lively and long, spilling over with enthusiasm to see him, adding with a possible hint of jealousy, that she would look after ‘your girl’ with care. She told Boutin she would not mind receiving him ‘at my little apartment in Sidon’ (the set of rooms at the khan (inn) she kept for when she was visiting) but that due to the plague, she wanted to avoid the city, and also his host, the French consul Alexis Taitbout, whom she judged ‘an irascible, untruthful drunk’. Instead, she pressed him to stay at Mar Elias, even though it would stir up gossip. ‘Come, a room awaits you, and you can stay as long as you need to get everything ready for your journey’.

As another enticement, she said she had something to tell him about Burckhardt, who was planning to explore regions south of the Sahara. She went on: ‘I plan to tell you something important, that I know will interest you,’ adding that she had been puzzling over some details which his ‘mathematical mind’ would be able to solve ‘within fifteen minutes’. Above all, she hoped he would trust her to offer him what advice she could about Syria. ‘I have spent enough time in this country to count myself as one of its inhabitants, and to know a number of people who might be useful to you,’ she told him.

Angling to find out where he planned to go, she asked if he might be soon passing through Tripoli. Perhaps he could ask the French consul there, whom she added pointedly was her ‘obliging friend,’ to send her some particular books? ‘I don’t like novels or French poetry,’ she said, ‘nor modern history, except anything to do with Louis XIV, Henri IV and the Empress Catherine.’ What she particularly craved was ‘anything on geography, botany, agriculture, politics and the history of different wars.’ She planned to travel again before long, she told him, ‘to Baalbek’ and ‘if the plague doesn’t stop me, perhaps I will become a Bedouin again…’

No answer made its way up the hillside. That she made this somewhat familiar overture, and expected a reply in kind gives us every reason to guess that in Cairo there had indeed been a genuine spark of mutual attraction. She struggled to interpret his silence. She sent down another letter, this one impatient and haughty. She had heard of a fresh outbreak of plague near Sidon; if so, he would soon be quarantined, she warned:

Your situation there strikes me as rather pitiful, and of course, if you stay, you won’t be able to make any journeys into the rest of the country. I’m not suggesting that you have to stay [with me] at the convent; I am too busy with my own affairs to try to understand someone so incomprehensible, but I can offer you a clean, pretty room in the village with a place for your mule… I’m not going to eat you…you are your own master to stay where you like.

She ordered Pierre to wait for three hours for an answer from ‘Monsieur Vincent’. He returned empty-handed. That same night, she sent down another note – from ‘the Queen.’ This was a tongue-in-cheek, sinister tease. ‘My Minister has his orders to return himself for an hour or a day, whichever pleases him.’ She promises him that she will tell him some nice stories which will amuse him. Would he like to gossip with her in her garden pavilion? Or will she have to threaten him, perhaps with a nod to her executioner, to make him pay her a visit?’

Unintentionally perhaps, Hester hit exactly on the real reason behind Boutin’s reluctance to see her: Lascaris. By now, the French consuls, as well as Boutin, suspected that Lascaris may have been courting the British side at her behest.

From the time Hester returned from Palmyra, an order was put out to the French consuls in Syria – issued directly from Talleyrand – to file reports on her movements. For the moment, Lascaris was being watched closely, and so was Hester.

A few days later, she made one last try. She told Boutin that she had received a bulletin about a great series of French victories, sent to her by special ‘tartar’ from Constantinople, news she was sure Taitbout would not have until the next ship from Cyprus arrived in at least a week’s time. Neither of them could have guessed that at the very moment Boutin hesitated to see her, the sound of artillery fire had reached Paris, and the Allies had begun marching in.

This time, within two hours, Boutin turned up on her doorstep with his belongings, wan and dusty. Seeing his surly, handsome face, Hester felt a shock of excitement but realized in the same instant he was in a bad state; his eyes were raw and inflamed, he looked tired and worn. He had contracted ophthalmia from his constant exposure to sand storms in the desert. As she studied his face, his cloudy blue-grey eyes, she saw him weighing everything, as though trying to decide what she knew. A startled Meryon was summoned. He advised Boutin to try to avoid looking at bright sunlight, and gave him a pair of his own green spectacles.

Shortly before Boutin’s visit, Hester said cryptically that Meryon had gone off to ‘stick himself up in the village,’ a ten minute stroll away. Whether she sent him away or not, he stayed there at his own expense. Meryon now exasperated her: ‘He had no delicacy,’ she complained, and plotted to find another doctor ‘to serve me in all capacities according to my taste’ as soon as she could. Is this a hint that Meryon had been unable to hide his disapproval that she wanted to invite the Frenchman into her bed?

Undoubtedly, Hester found much to admire about Vincent Boutin. She thought him brave, honorable and extremely clever. He could be silent; in her later letters to him, she teased him that he was ‘the master of listening’. Did he tell her that in Siwa, he had been beaten and imprisoned by the local chieftain? Or that he had been back to Arabia, and seen the Monastery of St. Catherine? Did he add that he had been as far as Yemen, to the Red Sea port of Mokha and the Hijaz? And that at Yambu, he had unexpectedly found one of Mehmet Ali’s sons, Toussoun, waiting for him, barring him from going any further into the interior to Medina or along the coast to Mecca?

Hester left him in no doubt of her great partiality for the French people. She certainly admired Boutin and believed him to be a man of honour and courage, even if she held his supreme commander at fault for brutalizing Europe. When she had been in Constantinople, Hester had clearly been charming and persuasive enough to sway the consul, Latour Mabourg, around to her point of view, and in Cairo, Drovetti and several of the French savants had been taken with her. In her presence once more, away from what was being said about her, Boutin seems to have softened towards her too. Every indication points to the development of a sudden and intense attachment – an infatuation – at least on Hester’s side.

In the end, Hester would find out about his past. He had grown up near Nantes, where at the Oratory, he was befriended by both Victor Hugo and his prefect, Joseph Fouché, who later recruited him. Having interrupted his engineering degree in Paris to enlist, he had served under Marshal Ney and General Kléber. After being wounded in the left knee by an Austrian musketball at Wagram, he turned his talents to establishing routes, surveying for bridges and devising defense reinforcements. Fast-tracked by Fouché, Boutin had been issued various roles, that of a diplomat in Constantinople, and a commercial attaché touring Algiers and Tunis. In Algeria, where Boutin spent only fifty-three days in 1808, the coastal map he drew up was so detailed and exact that by 1830, when the French invaded, it was still the best available. Unassuming he might pretend to be, but the former officer had been awarded the highest possible honours in France and Turkey.

Boutin seems to have tried to bore her, even to make her laugh, telling her she had no idea how desperate French merchants were to improve cotton and silk production, and that Syria was their next great hope. But as he glanced at her, he caught the disbelieving, slightly mocking expression on her face.

Typically, Meryon drew a discreet veil over the entire incident, not mentioning the fact of the visit to Mar Elias, noting however that the Frenchman arrived in Sidon on 28 March and ‘left the province’ on 6 April. Yet Boutin took one of Hester’s horses and one of her servants for his journey.

On the same day Boutin left, Hester dashed off a breezy letter to ‘dearest’ Bruce from her rooms at the khan in Sidon, where just a week before she had refused to go. She seemed unusually cheerful. She mentioned that ‘the very agreeable Mr. B’ had arrived, but that she ‘only saw him for five minutes’. Therefore Hester deliberately misled Bruce about the timing and extent of her relationship with Boutin. Why? She seems to have expected to see Boutin soon; over coming months, her letters would pursue him, suggesting numerous rendezvous. As he rode towards Aleppo, Boutin did not yet know that his mission was over. One week later – although the news would not reach Syria for many weeks – Napoleon abdicated.

The plague struck again, in early May. Meryon was called to the sickbed of an old man in Abra who ‘went to bed at 2, and by 8 was a corpse’. Within the space of several weeks, Meryon noted thirty cases of infection and twenty deaths. Immediate quarantine took effect in the kingdom, and Emir Bashir informed Hester that she should take any measures necessary to uphold it. But she was unable to stop many of the villagers from panicking, and some escaped to the hills, which were riddled with ancient caves; later their bodies would be found picked over by jackals. Within the next two months, some 360 people in surrounding villages died.

Soon Meryon retreated, fearing for his life, and ceased his visits. Hester visited some of the distressed families, and tried to do what she could for them. She was deeply traumatized at the suffering around her. ‘God knows why he thus afflicts mankind,’ she wrote.

I am so anxious about this subject I never felt the least afraid when I visited these people, I tell you quite the truth, but when I found the poor mother had made holes in the earth to bury her children, I could not stand that, yet I behaved well till I came home, and then I threw myself down in the corner.

In desperation she decided to try out a ‘serpent’s stone,’a bezoar, said to be from India, on a twelve-year-old boy, who she was certain was close to death. ‘It struck me that this stone might be useful in the plague, in sucking out the venom of bubos [sic], which would not break,’ she would later report to Banks, ‘at first I had experiments made by Turks, but as I feared they might deceive me, I was determined to interest myself in its effects.’ She had a ‘Turkish barber make a slight incision’ on one of the boy’s bubous, noting that when she applied the stone, it ‘stuck like a leech,’ clinging there for four hours, after which, as though sated, it fell off. Following the instructions she had been given, she placed the stone in a glass of warm milk; ‘it discharged its poison, the milk turned sour.’ Within a day, the boy improved; he was the only one in his large extended family to survive the plague. It did indeed appear to be a miracle. She made copious observations with the thought of interesting Banks, with the hope ‘that if there is ever a Society established to investigate the nature of the plague and to make experiments upon it, that you will admit me’.

As the plague abated, she continued adding to her papers for Banks. She was by now desperate to be assigned some kind of official role, and she trusted him to recognize that she wanted to gather information, not for ‘public conversation’ but so her discoveries ‘might rest with an unprejudiced, honorable set of men’. This was another strong hint. Hester particularly craved something she knew Banks could bestow if he was so minded: admittance to a society of scientists and travellers like the African Association. She would soon tell Banks she had heard that Burckhardt had by now reached the Kingdom of Dongola in Nubia: ‘Some day or other I shall follow his footsteps in that part of the world’.

She tried to lure Banks with assertions that she intended to preserve for posterity the traditional method of creating the famous Damascus blades, ‘made from aerolites and lumps of a particular metal’ – ‘in case the technique was lost’. She informed him she was growing him a tree from a cutting of what she had been told was ‘the mandrake tree spoke of in the Scriptures’. Then there was a strange fish, a type of carp that she had been told could be found only in certain high mountain springs within Isma’ili and Alawi territory, and that for six weeks in any given year they gave off strange excretions. ‘I am almost ashamed of speaking of their qualities,’ she told Banks coyly. ‘These fish render the water so dangerous for any man to drink…for he becomes positively mad for women.’ At that time of year, she reported, the pasha of Damascus sent up his guards to prevent villagers from drinking from the spring – but were not always successful. Now, she informed Banks that ‘a most active and clever French traveller who has lately left this neighbourhood and whom I knew in Egypt’ had promised to bring her some; soon, she told him, she would send them on for his collection.

This is revealing. Whatever tensions and undercurrents existed in her relationship with Boutin, he was obviously the sort of man she felt she could ask to find her a rare, aphrodisiacal fish. That such a search would take him deep into dangerous, politically contentious territory was another matter.

By 11 May she had sent a number of letters but still had nothing from Boutin. She wrote again, enclosing a news bulletin Barker had sent her. She summarised it: Lyons had fallen; General Blucher ‘was paying heavily for his preceding victories’ and the plague was raging in Constantinople and Smyrna. She ended with a playfully menacing flourish:

If you do not send me your news, I will cut off the heads of my Arabs for giving me nothing but uncertainty.

Adieu

Hester-Lucy Stanhope

P.S. The Queen orders her Minister not to pay attention to vague reports unless he receives her permission.

This time, Boutin responded immediately. He was in Aleppo. His letter was sharp, bristling with annoyance. ‘Apparently, Mylady, circumstances call me away to the Persian coast,’ he wrote coldly, and quite misleadingly. ‘Knowing you are surrounded by your allies, who I hope are more faithful than ours, gives me great pleasure. I see nothing of any great significance in any of the bulletins that your consul obviously accords so much weight. One has to consider the overall picture’. This was a new tone, as though he had learned something distasteful. Hester sent this letter back to him, gleefully underlining the last sentence, writing on the top, ‘That’s why, you naughty boy, I cannot wait to see you again’.

But she knew immediately that he referred to Lascaris, whom he had quite clearly expected to see. Lascaris had gone missing. The word was that he had fled Syria for Constantinople. That she had apparently deliberately neglected to tell Boutin of her dealings with him suggests she did indeed have something to hide. Now she replied, somewhat defensively, ‘I was once very taken up with your man, but I hardly need to make excuses when it is you who has benefited by my doing him a service’. It is not clear, from the curious ambivalence of this remark, quite what she means. How exactly, did she suppose Boutin might benefit from Lascaris’s disappearance? Given the fact that she had confided her plans for her proposed excavation to Boutin, and wanted to rely on his advice, had she also proposed that he assist her? Or was there far more than this at stake, as later events would suggest?

Now the subject was raised she protested her innocence. Lascaris had deliberately placed her in danger and embarrassed her, she explained, and the ‘whole incident’ with him was something she had decided to put out of her mind. She did feel some sympathy for the man, she insisted, but was quick to belittle him: ‘He is quite crazed, his brother in chains, almost dead’. She suggested to Boutin that if he went to Hamah, perhaps he might learn something of his whereabouts from Mariam, ‘the woman who calls herself his wife.’

Her answers would not satisfy Boutin. He now began to wonder how much, if anything, she had discovered about his own true mission.

A few days later, on 23 May, she wrote to Boutin again, as though unable to suppress the desire to tell him things, however inconsequential. She sent him packets of news bulletins, perhaps trying to cheer up him by saying: ‘I think you will find the Allies very badly placed.’ But any hard news was delayed by months. Although in Europe the game of war appeared to be over, the Queen and her would-be Minister had not yet reached a checkmate.

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