4th. You must carry with you in your memorandum-book, or at the tip of
your tongue, a good assortment of first-rate compliments of the season.
If these are spiced with a little scandal of your neighbours, or the
party you have just left, so much the better; they are more relished.
Now you are obliged to visit twenty or thirty families per diem; and you
are literally passing through doors, square-courts, and corridors,
crossing patios and quadrangles, walking up and down stairs, getting up
and sitting down from morning to night, during these three mortal days.
It will be seen then, that these Passover and Tabernacle visits are
tremendous affairs, and require Herculean strength to get through their
polite duties. They may be days of jovial festivity to Jews, but
certainly they are days of labour and annoyance to Gentiles.
But I must now give an account of one or two remarkable personages whom
we visited. The first was Madame Bousac, a Jewess of this country. Her
father was a grandee at Court in the days of former emperors, and the
greatest merchant of his time, and she represented as an aristocrat
among her people, a modern Esther, standing and pleading between the
Sultan and her nation. This lady is the only native woman in the
country, Mooress or Jewess, who has tact or courage enough to go and
speak to the Emperor, and state her request with an unfaltering voice
beneath the awful shadow of the Shereefian presence! Madame Bousac
accompanied the merchants to Morocco, to pay her respects to the
Emperor. Among other modest or confidential demands which the lady made
on the Imperial benevolence, was that of an advance to her husband of
ten thousand dollars. His Imperial Highness was immediately obliged to
give a formal assent before his court.
She then visited the Harem, and felt herself quite at home. All the
ladies, wives or concubines of the Emperor, waited upon her; and served
her with tea and bread, and butter.
The presentation of bread and butter and cups of tea, is said to be the
highest honour conferred on visitors, but why or wherefore I have not
heard.
Madame Bousac gave us some account of the Morocco harem, which we may
suppose is like that of Fez and Miknas. The number of these ladies was
some two hundred. They are all attired alike, except the four wives, who
dress a little more in the style of Sultanas. I am sorry to be obliged
to disabuse the reader of the romance and oriental colouring attached to
our ideas of the harem, by giving Madame Bousac's simile of those
angelic houries. This lady said, "they are like a string of
charity-school girls going to church on a Sunday morning."
Their penurious lord keeps down their pin-money to the lowest point, and
is not more liberal to his ladies than to his other subjects.
