“I have not always had the eyes scarred and bordered with scarlet; my nose has not always touched my chin, and I have not always been a servant. I am the daughter of Pope Urban X and the Princess of Palestrina. [See the extreme discretion of the author; there was until now no pope named Urban X; he is afraid of giving a bastard to a known pope. How circumspect! What a delicacy of conscience! – This note of Voltaire is posthumous. The last pope named Urban is Urban VIII, who died in 1644] I was brought up to fourteen years in a palace to which all the castles of your German barons would not have served as a stable; and one of my robes was better than all the magnificence of Vestphalia. I grew up in beauty, in graces, in talents, in the midst of pleasures, respects, and hopes: I already inspired love; my throat was forming; and what a throat! White, firm, cut like that of the Medici Venus. And what eyes! What eyelids! What black eyebrows! What flames glittered in my two eyes, and effaced the scintillation of the stars! as the poets of the quarter told me. The women who dressed and undressed me fell into ecstasy, looking at me from the front and from behind; and all men would have wished to be in their place.
“I was betrothed to a sovereign prince of Massa-Carrara: what a prince! As handsome as I, kneaded with sweetness and pleasure, shining with spirit and burning with love; I loved him as one loves for the first time, with idolatry, with passion. The nuptials were prepared: it was a pomp, an unheard-of magnificence; there were festivals, carousels, and continuous opera-buffa; and all Italy made for me sonnets, of which there was not a single one of passable. I was touching at the moment of my happiness, when an old marquise, who had been mistress of my prince, invited him to take some chocolate from her; he died in less than two hours with frightful convulsions; but it is only a trifle. My mother, in despair, and much less afflicted than I, wished to tear herself away for a time from a so fatal stay. She had a very beautiful land near Gaeta; we embarked on a galley in the country, gilded like the altar of St. Peter’s in Rome. Here it is a corsair from Sallee, who swooped down and boarded us. Our soldiers defended themselves like the soldiers of the pope; they all kneeled down, throwing their arms, and demanding from the corsair an absolution in articulo mortis.
“Immediately they were stripped naked like monkeys, and my mother, also our daughters-in-waiting, and myself. It is an admirable thing the diligence with which these gentlemen undress the world; but what surprised me more was that they put, to all, the fingers in a place where we women usually allow to put cannulas only. This ceremony seemed very strange to me: this is how one judges everything when he has not left his country. I soon learned that it was to see if we had not hidden some diamonds there; it is a custom established from immemorial times among the polished nations rushing scour the sea. I have known that the religious knights of Malta never fail there when they take Turkish men and women; it is a law of the law of people which has never been derogated from.
“I will not tell you how hard it is for a young princess to be led a slave to Morocco with her mother: you conceive enough of all that we have to suffer in the corsair ship. My mother was still very beautiful: our maids of honor, our simple maids had more charms than we can find in all Africa: as for me, I was ravishing, I was the beauty, the grace itself, and I was a maid: I was not long time; this flower, which had been reserved for the handsome prince of Massa-Carrara, was taken away by the corsair captain; he was an abominable Negro, who still believed to do to me a lot of honor. Certainly it was necessary that the Princess of Palestrina and I should be strong enough to resist all that we experienced until our arrival in Morocco! But let us pass; these are things so common that do not worth the trouble.
“In Morocco was swimming in blood when we arrived. Fifty sons of the Emperor Muley Ismael each had their party; which produced fifty civil wars, blacks against blacks, blacks against swarthy, swarthy against swarthy, mulattoes against mulattoes: it was a continual carnage throughout the whole extent of the empire.
“Scarcely had we landed than blacks of a faction hostile to that of my corsair presented themselves to deprive him of his booty. We were, after the diamonds and the gold, what he had most precious. I witnessed a battle such as you never see in your European climates. The northern nations have not the blood sufficiently ardent; they do not have the rage of women to the point where it is common in Africa. It seems that your Europeans have milk in their veins; it is vitriol, it is fire that flows in those of the inhabitants of Mount Atlas and neighboring countries. They fought with the fury of lions, tigers, and snakes of the country, to know who would have us. A Moor seized my mother by the right arm, the lieutenant of my captain held her by the left arm; a Moorish soldier took her by one leg, one of our pirates held her by the other. Our daughters found themselves, in a moment, drawn to four soldiers. My captain kept me hidden behind him; he had the scimitar in his hand, and killed all that opposed his rage. Finally I saw all our Italian women and my mother torn, cut off, massacred by the monsters who disputed them. The captives, my companions, those who had taken them, soldiers, sailors, blacks, tanned, white, mulattoes, and at last my captain, were all killed, and I remained dying on a pile of dead. Such scenes took place, as is well known, in the extent of more than three hundred leagues, without being missing the five prayers a day ordered by Mahomet.
“I rid myself with great difficulty of the crowd of so many bloody corpses piled up, and dragged myself under a large orange tree on the edge of a nearby brook; I fell in terror, weariness, horror, despair, and hunger. Soon afterwards my overwhelmed senses gave way to a sleep that was more faint than repose. I was in this state of weakness and insensibility, between death and life, when I felt pressed for something that was agitating on my body; I opened my eyes, saw a white man, with a good look, who sighed, and who said between his teeth: ‘O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni!'”
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