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to have their fortunes told. The old woman made them sit beside her on the grass and gazed thoughtfully
at the palms of their hands for a long time. 'You,' she said, after a long pause, pointing at the cousin,
'will be an Empress. You, my girl,' pointing at Mlle du Buc, 'will be more than an Empress.' After this
Pythian pronouncement, she hobbled off, refusing to answer any more questions; and after a few days,
the girls are reported to have forgotten all about it.
Shortly afterwards, as the custom then was (and often still is), Mlle du Buc was sent to a convent in
France to be instructed in all the
arts d'agrément
suitable to her position. When her education was fin-
ished, a passage back to the Antilles was booked for her in a brigantine sailing from Bordeaux. A terrible
storm blew up in mid-Atlantic, and the vessel was driven back towards the east and, as it soon appeared,
far to the south of their home port. The captain managed to avoid shipwreck by steering his craft through
the Pillars of Hercules. They were no sooner in the Mediterranean than they were attacked by the Barbary
pirates who still plagued these waters, and the ship was taken as a prize to the Bey of Tunis, who kept
the cargo and sold the passengers as slaves. But he was so struck by the beauty of Mlle du Buc that he
withheld her from the general auction, and sent her—he was an old man—as a gift to his distant Suzer-
ain in Stamboul, the Grand Turk. Once inside the Grand Serail, she contrived to mollify or annihilate the
opposition among jealous co-wives and suborned eunuchs, and to penetrate without disaster the deep-
est intrigues of the seraglio—poisons, we know, the bowstring or the Bosphorus were the punishment
of the most trivial false move—and to attain the sole occupancy of the imperial alcove. The vapours of
legend now obliterate a decade or two of her life; at exactly the moment when Byron's hero, torn from
the arms of Haidée, and dragged by the Turks from his Aegean island, is flung into a Constantinopolitan
jail; escapes; and steals by night down the labyrinthine corridors of that very harem….Do these insub-
stantial figures collide in the dark? For Mlle du Buc de Rivry is now scarcely more solid than a myth.
The Turkish annals make no mention of her, and alas! Prince Cantemir, the historian, had died years ago.
Suddenly, half a century later, she becomes three-dimensional again in the pages of history as the Sultana
Validé—empress-mother of the Emperor Mahmoud II. But only for that bald line and a half of print; and
then vanishes for ever.
Her cousin, of course, was Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie.
The eruption of the Montagne Pelée and the total destruction of St. Pierre on the second of May, 1902,
was one of the worst volcanic disasters of modern times. This is how one eye-witness describes it: 'The
whole side of the mountain seemed to gape open, and from the fissure belched a lurid whirlwind of fire
which wreathed itself into vast masses of flame as, with terrible speed, it descended on the doomed town.
Before the true extent of the peril could be grasped, the fiery mass swept like a river over the town, and,
thrusting the very waters of the sea before it, set the ships ablaze.' The entire population was wiped out,
with the exception of a man called Syparis, a convicted murderer who owed his life to the resistance of
the massive walls of the condemned cell to the tide of lava. The eruption had announced itself for days in
advance by minor outbursts and showers of ash and an increase of heat, but the governor, thinking these
were transitory manifestations, had bolstered up the morale of the citizens, many thousands of them, by
cheerful speeches ('Now above all, don't panic'), and although the symptoms became every hour more
ominous, the inhabitants remained in their capital with pathetic and completely insane courage, till the
disaster broke on them with such devastating completeness and killed them all.
The inhabitants of Martinique still ascribe to this event nearly all the handicaps under which the island
now labours, for all that was precious morally, materially, intellectually and politically had been cent-
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