ir triumph more assumed
than ever. I can place implicit confidence in the discretion of my
servants--who wait on us like mutes in a seraglio: consequently
Kondje-Gul and I are as free as possible. When I want to go out with
her, I pay a short visit to my wives, and after a quarter of an hour's
talk, leave them and go off in my carriage, in the recesses of which my
darling reclines. Now you see what a simple device it is and how
ingenious; still it involves a certain amount of constraint for me, and
an isolation hard to endure for Kondje-Gul. She reads and devours
everything that I bring her in the way of books; but the days are long,
and Mohammed, with his time taken up by the others, cannot accompany her
out of doors. I therefore conceived the idea of taking her away from the
harem altogether, and thus relieving her of the contemptuous insults
which my other silly women still find opportunities of inflicting upon
her. The difficulty was to procure a chaperon for her, some kind of
suitable and reliable duenna whom I could leave with her in a separate
establishment; this duenna has been found.

The other day Kondje-Gul and I were talking together about a little
house which I had discovered in the upper part of the Champs Elysees,
and of an English governess, who seemed to me to possess the right
qualifications for a pretended mother:

"If you like," said Kondje-Gul, "I can tell you a much simpler
arrangement."

"Well?" I replied.

"Instead of this governess whom I don't know, I would much rather have
my mother. I should be so happy at seeing her again!"

"Your mother?" I exclaimed with surprise; "do you know where she is
then?"

"Oh, yes! for I often write to her."

She then told me all her past history, which I had never before thought
of asking her, believing that she had been left alone in the world. It
afforded me a complete revelation of those Turkish customs which seem so
strange to us. Kondje-Gul's mother, as I have told you, was a
Circassian, who came to Constantinople to enter the service of a cadine
of the Sultan. Kondje-Gul being a very pretty child, her mother had, in
her ambitious fancy, anticipated from her beauty a brilliant career for
her. In order to realise this expectation, she left her at twelve years
old with a family who were instructed to bring her up better than she
could have done herself, until Kondje-Gul was old enough to be sought
after as a cadine or a wife.

This hope on the part