The History of Court Fools. Dr. Doran

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СКАЧАТЬ He worked hard and reaped a large fortune. In the early part of his career, his masters treated him as a mere brutish buffoon, on whom they might play any trick. Sometimes they set him off in a gallop, mounted on a giraffe, or tumbled him headlong into a pond, to the danger of his life. The late Sultan Mahmoud had no stomach for such sorry jokes, and Abdi Bey devoted his capacity to keep his patron in good spirits by amusing him with smart sayings and pleasant stories. He must have been an incomparable fool in his time, or his masters must have been greater fools than he, for out of their imperial bounty, he contrived to save £150,000, which he left to his grateful and deeply-resigned heirs. It was nearly as much as the late Mr. Greenough made by the manufacture of lozenges—“ten a penny!”

      Abdi Bey has been called the last of the household buffoons. But this is not the case; for though the official fool has disappeared from Court, he is still to be found attached to families, or heads of families. We even meet with this rather impudent than merry fellow in the household of Christian Patriarchs. Only a few years ago, when the Nestorian Patriarch was flying, with a large number of his followers, from their would-be murderers in the mountains, they found refuge at Mosul, in the houses of the English Consul and the Rev. Mr. Fletcher. The latter gentleman, in his ‘Notes from Nineveh,’ so describes his reverence’s buffoon as to induce us to believe that to have much to do with him was really “no joke at all.” “My new guests,” he says, “were very orderly in their manners, though wild in their appearance. Only one decided quarrel broke out among them during their abode with me; and this was occasioned by a half-crazy old man who served the Patriarch in the double capacity of a domestic and buffoon. This worthy was addicted, like many of his countrymen, to the vice of intoxication; and having on one occasion partaken rather freely of the juice of the grape, he grew riotous, and addressed a reproachful epithet to one of his companions. The fiery nature of the mountaineer was excited, and he retorted in no complimentary terms. The old buffoon drew his dagger, and made a rush at his antagonist, who retreated into an inner apartment and shut the door. Nothing could equal the rage of old Yohanan at being thus baulked of his vengeance. Two or three times he burst from those who were restraining him, and drove his knife into the hard wood of the door. At length he was quieted, and after sleeping-off his drunkenness, appeared the next morning with a sober and abashed countenance.” I suppose old Yohanan was past being amusing, for we are subsequently told, that to raise the drooping spirits of the Patriarch, an itinerant Italian juggler was hired. At his tricks and witticisms the pious head of the Nestorian Church forgot the slaughter of his friends and the devastation of their and his homesteads. The saintly and sympathetic man laughed till he could hardly sit upright on his cushions, and only ceased then because some wonderful stroke of the juggler’s art induced him suddenly to suspect that such marvellous proficiency was only an inspiration of the devil.

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      By way of supplement to this Chapter, I will add a few short illustrations of the jester at other barbarous courts than those of the East;—and first, of “that beyond the Atlantic.”

      When Cortez first visited the court of Montezuma, he found there various instances of high civilization:—among others, light ladies, strong drinks, court fools, and a spirit of infidelity against the established church, inspired by an influence called the “Rational Owl.” The Aztec monarch resembled Heliogabalus in one respect;—“he had a museum,” says Brantz Mayer, in his excellent work, ‘Mexico, Aztec, Spanish, and Republican,’ “in which, with an oddity of taste unparalleled in history, there had been collected a vast number of human monsters, cripples, dwarfs, albinos, and other freaks and caprices of nature.” Bernal Diaz saw the monarch at dinner, and among the incidents recorded by the old Spaniard, is, that, “at different intervals during the time of dinner, there entered certain Indians, hump-backed, very deformed and ugly, who played tricks of buffoonery; and others, who they said were jesters.” The fashion of maintaining the latter was followed by the nobles. “The principal men,” says Acoste, quoted by Prescott, “had also buffoons and jugglers in their service, who amused them, and astonished the Spaniards by their feats of dexterity and strength.”

      Montezuma patronized rather the witty buffoons than the skilful jugglers. “Indeed, he used to say, that more instruction was to be gathered from them than from wiser men, for they dared to tell the truth.” Prescott adds in a note, founded on Clavigero, that “the Aztec mountebanks had such repute, that Cortez sent two of them to Rome, to amuse his Holiness, Clement VII.” This was only an exchange of personages of similar profession, for the European official house fool had already been imported into America. In 1519, at St. Jago, when Velasquez the governor was beginning to be suspicious of the designs of Cortez to supplant him, the two great men were walking together towards the port. As they passed on, the fool of the former called aloud, “Have a care, Master Velasquez, or we shall have to go a-hunting, some day or other, after this same captain of ours.” “Do you hear what the rogue says?” exclaimed the Governor to his companion. “Do not heed him,” said Cortez, “he is a saucy knave, and deserves a good whipping.” The hint of the fool, however, heightened the suspicions of his master; but how the latter was too slow of wit and action to profit thereby, is known to all who have read the graphic pages which tell of the conquest of Mexico.

      But neither Aztec nor Spanish monarch rivalled their less civilized brother of Monomotapa in this peculiar department of his household. Gallienus alone deserves to be mentioned, in this respect, with the African potentate, who never stirred abroad with less than five hundred official fools in his vast and noisy retinue!

      There were, as late as the last century, and there probably still linger on the Gold Coast, traditions of the mythological jester of Africa, Nanni, son of the Spider. His busy parent had spun all the human race from the thread of his bowels, and found no gratitude from the living produce of his labours. The Fetis seduced all creation to sin, and the Spider bethought him how to annoy the Fetis. With what little material he had left, he spun the last man, and educated him at his own paternal feet, on the edge of the domestic web. The tricks the father taught his boy were long the delight of polished and perspiring African tribes. Nanni was the ebony Owlglas of the land of Ham. He served the Fetis, but only as Jocrisse did his master, to his great vexation. Was Nanni commissioned to provide a chicken for dinner, he knew how, after devouring the bird himself, to replace bones and skin, and place it before his employer, the very model of a plump pullet. Was an egg ordered for breakfast, Nanni first sucked out the contents through a minute orifice, and filled up the shell with the finest sand. Nanni, too, was a married man, with numberless children, and more wives than “that Sardanapalus of Snobs,” Brigham Young. In a time of scarcity, when even a bean was worth more than its weight in gold, the hungry wives and offspring of Nanni drove him forth by their importunity, to seek food. He came upon a company of boys and girls who had been left by their father in charge of a quantity of beans, to dry and turn them in the air. Nanni leaped in among them, made them shriek with laughter at his jokes, and stamp with delight at his dancing. The latter exercise he concluded by rolling his well-oiled body among the beans, with which, sticking to him as he rose, he made off, after bidding the children look at his hands, to see that he carried nothing away with him. By repeating this feat, he nourished his household for days; and the alarmed owner of the precious vegetables could not account for their diminution from any account rendered by the young guardians. But detecting Nanni in the fact, the owner chopped off both his hands, as he lay rolling his greased body among the beans. The wit of the national jester had been grievously at fault, and his household becoming more hungry and angry than ever, his wives broke into open revolt, and eloped in a body, in search of another mate. But Nanni was beforehand with them in every respect; for taking the guise of a woodman, and having recovered his lost members, he met them in their flight, without being recognized by them. They told him of the fate of their husband, and of their intentions, concluding with a gentle hint that they were well enough inclined to accept a well-built young wood-cutter for their common husband. “No! no!” cried Nanni, “times are so very hard, that I have been obliged to dismiss forty-nine of my wives, and to live as well as I can with one!” This speech alarmed the ladies, who forthwith hurried homeward; but the active Nanni encountered them at the threshold, over which he would not allow them to pass till they had entered into stipulations whereby СКАЧАТЬ