Mother's Chronicles (Book 1)

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Mira Ismalun

Little Mirra's (with two r's) grandmother was quite a character. There was something very sparkling and beguiling in Mira (with one r) Ismalun. And Mother had her own share of it.

Mira Ismalun was born in Cairo in 1830, on December 18.

But the Ismaluns had also some roots in the old Ural-Altaic region of Hungary, and Mira Ismalun's father, Said Pinto, although Egyptian, traced back his roots to Spain. Protean winds blew over little Mirra's cradle, those from the Urals mingling with the mysteries of the Valley of the Kings and the fiery Iberia. Mother has many roots, very ancient roots, and perhaps extending everywhere. "I am millions of years old, and I am waiting," she said during these

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last years, with a look in her eyes that seemed to carry the burden of the world and all the resistances of her earthly children. It reminds us of Walter Pater's moving study on Mona Lisa, with whom Mother had strange affinities and shared a certain smile: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits . . . she has been dead many times and learned the secret of the grave.... 1830.

Mehemet Ali is Viceroy of Egypt. The Suez Canal has not yet been dug. The Pasha's armies are rebelling against the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. A feudalistic Egypt confronts the modern world while still remembering Bonaparte. But Bonaparte's tempest had possibly left something in the air, for Mira Ismalun, too, lost no time in casting off the iron collar.

At the age of thirteen, in the wise and well-bred fashion of those days, she married a banker, after meeting her fiancé on a boat on the Nile. "He offered

* Walter Pater, The Renaissance Studies in Art and Poetry (Macmillan,1912, p.130).

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me a diadem of great value and a little basket of strawberries," she recounts in her Memoirs, as delightful and funny as they are brief, which she dictated in French to her grandson, Governor Alfassa, when she was seventy-six years old. Our guess is that she appreciated the strawberries more than the diadem.

At the age of twenty she embarked for Italy, a daring act if we recall the situation of women in the Middle East more than a century ago. "I spoke only Arabic, wore my Egyptian dress and travelled alone with my two children and a governess, while my husband remained in Egypt. I was the first Egyptian woman to venture out of Egypt in this manner.... I was found positively ravishing," she notes all the same, "in my sky-blue Egyptian robe, embroidered all over with gold and real pearls." She also sported a "small tarboosh worn very low, with a big gold tassel.... But I didn't know the language, so I vowed to learn it quickly." Which she did, and French too, for this lady was decidedly unusual, indeed a personage.

She made the acquaintance of the Grand Duke, "who sent me flowers every day, as did Rossini, the

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composer. But although well-bred and even strict," she adds with ingenuity, coquetry blending with wit, "I was not insensitive to all these attentions."

As for her strictness, we don't know. But we do know how exceptionally well she understood life, loved it frankly, and was endowed with a very universal spirit for which narrow patriotic frontiers seemed a vain and cumbersome contrivance.

She sent her eldest son to a boarding school in Vienna, herself commuting between Cairo and Europe, and later dropped off a second, then a third, son at College Chaptal in Paris. "I was wild about Paris. My temperament and character being original, it seemed to me quite permissible to go about everywhere only with Elvire [her eldest daughter]. But as my attire was very elegant and rather conspicuous, wherever I went I attracted a great deal of attention."

But the attention was not due to her dress and her looks alone. For Mira Ismalun was no featherbrain. She read Renan, Taine, Nietzsche, Darwin. She was also endowed with a remarkable poise (exactly like Mother) and knew how to reconcile opposites:

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"One of my most consistent character traits has been to keep the head and heart in a constant, reciprocal equilibrium, thus avoiding to get involved in the excesses of either.... As for my finances, I took great care to balance my income with my expenditures." Finding out that back in Egypt the princesses in their harems were dying to know about Parisian life, she had the brilliant idea of combining the useful with the agreeable, and packed her suitcases with the latest creations from Worth, jewellery from rue de la Paix, perfumes and chronicles —thus defraying the expenses of her own extravagances. "Everywhere I went, I was hailed and catered to like a queen. My dignified air, my strict comportment, my stunning wardrobe and my lavish expenditures placed me on a veritable pedestal." She also brought back oil-paintings; for the little princesses were very eager to see their own portraits, with their full array of jewellery, faithful reproductions of their photographs by the finest Parisian artists. So it was that Mira Ismalun mingled with the Tout-Paris, the Paris of the artists and the atelier of Vienot and Edouard

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Morisset, who was to become the father of young Mirra's husband.

Mira Ismalun's understanding of life made her liberal-minded. She had little concern for narrow patriotic frontiers, nor did she allow herself to get bogged down in religion. She let her children pursue freely their own separate ways. For instance, when she realized that Elvire, her eldest daughter, had been converted to Catholicism by a very devout chambermaid, she never reproached her daughter, but promptly set about finding Elvire a husband with similar beliefs, because it made her very happy to do so. "I was the first person in Egypt," she observes, "who allowed her daughter to marry a Catholic [not an Egyptian, let us point out, but an Italian, to boot]. This was much frowned upon in our circle, and I was criticized; some family members even harboured resentment against me for a time. It was a civil marriage," she adds, the convivial side being never absent in her, "conducted at the Italian Consulate; the ceremony was quite lovely and intimate, and I wore a magnificent pearl-grey gown of faille. . . .

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After the ceremony Elvire, with her husband and their witnesses, went to the church, and I pretended not to notice anything. Very liberal in my ideas, I always felt the better for it."

The liberalness of ideas in France had struck a deep chord in her.

Then came the turn of her second daughter, Mathilde, who was destined to be Mother's mother. Mira Ismalun let her choose her own husband. Thus Mathilde Ismalun married a Turk by the name of Maurice Alfassa, a banker by profession. The marriage took place in Alexandria in 1874. "It was celebrated in grand style in the governmental palace," Mira Ismalun said in her charming way, "the Viceroy as well as all the Ministers attended. I had a magnificent gown and they found me more beautiful than my daughter."

Finally she settled down in France.

She stayed long enough in Egypt, however, to be present at the inauguration of the Suez Canal: "Monsieur de Lesseps came to fetch me with a cavalry escort." M. de Lesseps was an accomplished rider and his horsemanship had impressed even the Arabs. So,

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the two rode to the glittering reception given by Ismail Pasha in the recently built palace overlooking the new town on the canal bank, named Ismailia after the Khedive.

The canal was filled with the ships in which many crowned heads of Europe had sailed to the inauguration of the Suez Canal. But the pride of place went to the magnificent l'Aigle which had brought from France Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, along with Ferdinand de Lesseps. For it was indeed thanks to the royal backing that de Lesseps could complete his project.

But as they rode, M. de Lesseps' thoughts must have turned to his friend, prince Said, who had died before completion of the canal. In his stead, his nephew, Ismail Pasha (who had taken the title of Khedive when he ascended the throne), was now declaring the Canal open.

Mira Ismalun knew how tenaciously Ferdinand de Lesseps had held on to his project through many ups and downs. Had he, perhaps, inherited Napoleon Bonaparte's dream? In 1798 Napoleon had discovered

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the ancient canal of the Pharaohs, lost in the mists of time. Now it was 1869. How long dreams take to mature! So Mira Ismalun must have lent a very sympathetic ear to the sixty-four-year-old Ferdinand de Lesseps as he spoke to her of the images that flitted through his white-haired head:

—1854, November 15: A rainbow in the early morning sky, filling him with the hope of fulfilling his long-cherished dream. The ride on horseback to the camp of Prince Said, who succeeded his father, Mehemet Ali, as the Viceroy of Egypt. Obtaining his permission to dig the Suez Canal.

—1859, April 25: Taking hold of a spade and starting to dig near the bay of Pelusium. Passing on the spade to the team of his engineers and of about hundred men. Each in turn digging up a spadeful of earth. A quiet, unheralded beginning for an enormous project that took ten years to complete and an army of professionals working with heavy equipment.

—1869, August 15: The Red Sea joins the Mediterranean.

—1869, November 17: Today, the road to India

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is opened. A voyage of four months is now shortened to seventeen days.

Friends of such calibre had Mira Ismalun. Men capable of materializing their vision. And these men — and women —had a profound respect and admiration for her.

This little Arabian lady who took Paris by storm with her sky-blue pourpoint and her tarboosh tipped low, who read The Origin of Species and created havoc in the Grand Hotel, finally retired to Nice, where she spent the last years of her life, shuttling between the Mediterranean and the "calm shores of Lake Geneva." "After having frequented galas and theatres, swept through all the great capitals and spas, lived on intimate terms with celebrities —a grand existence in which I had no worry other than looking after my affairs and satisfying, if not my caprice, at least the legitimate desires of la belle vie —I had the wisdom to resign myself to a somewhat more modest and tranquil life. . . ." Her husband "generally" accompanied her, she notes prosaically. "He worshipped me," which does not surprise us.

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But the most unexpected in this impetuous and irresistible life, impatient of all frontiers, although emerging from the Valley of the Nile, is a sudden cry that broke from her lips at the end of this gala jouney, as though all limits were unacceptable to her, including those of death: "Frankly speaking, at seventy-six I scarcely like old age, life is still beautiful to me . . . and I proclaim with Goethe, 'Beyond the tombs, forward!' "

From such seed came Mother.

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