Disraeli: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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       5 TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES

      ‘We ate; we drank; we ate with our fingers, we drank in a manner I never recollect – the wine was not bad but had it been poison…it was such a compliment for a Moslemin that I must quaff it all…we quaffed it in rivers. The Bey called for the Brandy…we drank it all – the room turned round.’

      ‘THIS ROCK’, wrote Disraeli of Gibraltar, ‘is a wonderful place with a population infinitely diversified – Moors with costumes radiant as a rainbow or an eastern melodrama…Jews with gaberdines and skullcaps, Genoese, Highlanders [of the garrison] and Spaniards.’¹

      ‘In the Garrison Library’, he told his father, ‘are all your books’, adding archly, ‘it also possesses a copy of another book, supposed to be written by a member of our family, and which is looked upon at Gibraltar as one of the masterpieces of the nineteenth century. You may feel their intellectual pulse from this. At first I apologised and talked of youthful blunders and all that, really being ashamed; but finding them, to my astonishment, sincere, and fearing they were stupid enough to adopt my last opinion, I shifted my position just in time, looked very grand, and passed myself off as a child of the sun, like the Spaniard in Peru.’²

      He had arrived at Gibraltar with William Meredith in the middle of June 1830 and had soon been presented to General Sir George Don, the acting governor of the fortress in the absence of its official governor, the Duke of Kent.

      Don was ‘a very fine old gentleman almost regal in his manner,’ so Disraeli wrote. ‘He possesses a large private fortune, all of which he here disburses, and has ornamented Gibraltar, as a lover does his mistress.’³

      So often drawn to women older than himself, Disraeli was much taken with Lady Don, who was ‘without exception one of the most agreeable personages [he] had ever met, excessively acute and piquante…To listen to her you would think you were charming away the hour with a blooming beauty in Mayfair; and, though excessively infirm, her eye is so brilliant and so full of moquerie that you quite forget her wrinkles. All in all,’ he added with characteristic hyperbole, she was ‘the cleverest and most charming woman [he] had ever met’.⁴

      As well as Government House, a former convent, where he introduced his visitors to his favourite drink, champagne and lemonade, Sir George enjoyed the use of ‘a delightful Pavillion…at the extreme point of the Rock’ as well as a villa at San Roque. He suggested that, having enjoyed his hospitality at these places, his guests should make an excursion into Spain, a venture which foreign tourists seldom undertook since the few posadas offered little apart from a roof for the night and plenty of bugs. But the scenery was ‘most beautiful’ and, although the terrain was infested with robbers and smugglers, these miscreants, so Disraeli was assured, ‘commit no personal violence but lay you on the ground and clean out your pockets. If you have less than sixteen dollars they shoot you. That is the tariff and is a loss worth risking.’ In the event, Disraeli and Meredith were not troubled by these bandits; but on their return to Griffith’s Hotel in Gibraltar they encountered two Englishmen who had been robbed of all their possessions in a village through which they also had passed a day or two earlier with their French guide and manservant, an excellent cook and ‘celeberated shot’ who, so Disraeli said, ‘could speak all languages except English of which he [made] a sad affair’.

      He is fifty but light as a butterfly…He did everything, remedied every inconvenience, and found an expedient for every difficulty. Never did I live so well as among these wild mountains of Andalusia, so exquisite is his cookery…

      You will wonder how we managed to extract pleasure from a life which afforded us hourly peril for our purses and perhaps for our lives, which induced fatigue greater than I ever experienced, for there are no roads and we were never less than eight hours a day on…two little Andalusian mountain horses.⁵

      Disraeli ended his long letter to Bradenham by sending his fondest regards to his ‘beloved Sa’ and ‘a thousand kisses’ to his ‘dearest mother’. ‘Tell Ralph I have not forgotten his promise of an occasional letter…And tell [Washington] Irving [whose Legends of Alhambra was to be published shortly] that he has left a golden name in Spain.’

      Disraeli and Meredith were themselves so taken with Spain that they stayed there for two months, far longer than they had originally intended. In the middle of July, they went to Cadiz where ‘Figaro [was] in every street, and Rosina in every balcony’.⁶ And, towards the end of the month, they were in Seville, where Disraeli wrote to his father to tell him that, while his health had improved and the ‘fearful heat’ of Seville suited him, the improvement was ‘very slight’ and his recovery would, at best, be ‘a long affair’. He was even more pessimistic in a letter from Granada to his mother, to whom he complained about the palpitations in his heart and head which were followed by ‘an indescribable feeling of idiocy’ and ‘for hours’ he was ‘plunged into a state of the darkest despair’.

      He was worried also by what he took to be incipient baldness: ‘I am sorry to say my hair is coming off, just at the moment it had attained the highest perfection, and was universally mistaken for a wig, so that I was obliged to let the women pull it to satisfy their curiosity. Let me know what my mother thinks. There are no wigs here that I cd wear. Pomade and all that is quite a delusion. Somebody recommends me cocoa-nut oil, which I cd get here, but suppose it turns it grey or blue or green?’

      In her reply, Sarah told him that ‘Mamma advises him to try Coca-Nut or anything’. She was sure that she could arrange for him to be sent a wig.⁷

      In a letter to his mother, he said that if he were a Roman Catholic he would enter a convent, ‘But as I am a member of a family to which I am devotedly attached and a good Protestant I shall return to them and to my country, and to a solitary room which I will never leave. I shall see no one and speak with no one. I am serious. Prepare yourself for this.’

      The tone of the rest of his letter, however, belied this gloomy prognostication. Although, as he said, ‘rather an admirer of the blonde’, he wrote enthusiastically of Spanish ladies, ‘their glossy black hair and black mantillas, their gleaming eyes and dignified grace’. He wrote also of the delicious fruits of the Peninsula, of paella, ‘the СКАЧАТЬ