APPENDIX TO the CHAPITRE III

N 1. - Description of the harem of Agra.

All the details given in this chapter show that former ( ancient ? ) kings of brahmanique India were hardly more jealous women of their harem than the Indian husbands were him, generally, of his wives.

We find even there the sweetness and the apathy of the Indian character.

There are there otherwise Moslems of India, partially origin Afgane or Mongol.

They keep ( guard ? ) strictly his women, and the harems of their princes were and are very watched even today.

We can judge it by the capacities of the seraglio which forms part ( party ? ) of the Tagus of Agra, Versailles of the Mongolian emperors, whom we prefer to the palace of Louis XIV, although he ( it ? ) cost less than hundred millions, instead of a half-billion.

The harem consists of two parts ( parties ? ) adjacent the one to the other one, but the perfectly different; the one is occupied by the Moslem women, for the most part of Cachemiriennes which are white as European.

Other one is occupied by Indian women, and was probably built on the model of the harems of former ( ancient ? ) kings of the country.

The Moslem harem lines, on one of its sides, the magnificent garden of the palace. Everything is marble; in the floor, we notice some holes of the coal nuts of lord there Split, when he ( it ? ) took the citadel of Agra ( the Tagus).

Rooms ( Chambers ? ) are four square meter cells; they have each, on the opposite site in the garden, having seen on the landscape and on the Joumma, an opening closed by a fence cut from the marble, which prevents from seeing nothing the outside.

There is also, in every room ( chamber ? ), on another face, small opening by which we introduced the food of the recluse, and which we closed then.

These rooms ( chambers ? ) form two groups which separates a rather big landing, which served for the recreation of the women during two hours a day.

The swing was very used among these ladies.

The Indian harem is, as all the houses of the natives, arranged in the form of convent around a rather big oblong yard.

Quite all around, in the floor, are small rooms ( chambers ? ) preceded by porticoes and by balustrades looking onto the yard.

This arrangement allowed to let to the women the freedom circulate under porticoes and visit between them, freedom which did not have the foreign women of the other harem, doubtless the slaves.

The inner courtyard of the Indian harem served for the theatre performances and the other scenes of jugglers, acrobats, and also for the religious ceremonies.

The women attended these representations, pressed on the balustrades of porticoes and without that one pût to have no communication with them since the yard.

On the opposite site of the garden, in front of the foreign harem, were the baths of the seraglio, the wealth and the beauty magnificent.

The gold, in thick blades, artistically worked or in delicate nets, runs ( roams ? ) everywhere on the boxes of ceilings and marble walls of walls.

To go ( surrender ? ) to the bath, the favourites had to cross the garden, one of the most beautiful of the world, all the paths of which are paved marble and flowerbeds of which are strewed with vast white marble ponds with fountains.

Certain hours of the day were reserved for the women of the harem for their walk in the garden where they were alone.

The cicerone shows to the guests a long subterranean corridor ( lane ? ) which comes down ( falls ? ) from the garden at the edge of Joumma, and he explains that, towards his ( her;its ? ) extremity, we brought ( shot ? ) down the guilty or too old women, and that then their bodies were thrown ( cast ? ) to the river.

We so got rid of old women because the harem had not been enough to accommodate these uselessness, and because it was not advisable that women, having been the favourites of the emperor, pussent to live somewhere else that in his ( her;its ? ) palace or in the death.

N 2. - The life of the seraglio.

By means of a French naval officer, an European woman escaped from the seraglio of Constantinople. Demanded by the sultan, she declared that she would rather kill than to return there.

However Lady Montagu, Sévigné of the English, gave us to the XVIIIth century, in his ( her;its ? ) _Lettres_ so interesting, a very graceful description of the life and the pleasures of the women of the seraglio to the intimacy of whom it was admitted ( supposed ? ) in its feminine quality of the ambassador of England near the sultan. The picture ( table ? ) which she ( it ? ) draws is far from being sad. The dances and the games after the bath would seek the paintbrush of an artist.

Maybe Lady Montagu saw only the beautiful sides, and she conversed only with the privileged, as the mother of the ruling sultan about whom she speaks a lot. Maybe the seraglio declined with the power of the sultans.