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It is the ordnary mode of sitting among the Turks. The dalk, or dilk, is a garment made of patches and shreds worn by darweshes; the epithet dolk-posh, "a dalk wearer," denotes a "darwesh," or "mendicant." Ispahan was once a fine city. In the time of the Chevalier Chardin, nearly two centuries ago, it was pronounced by that traveller to be the largest in the world.
Colour had become a conventional abstraction; design, of the most artificial sort, the prime requisite for a sounding reputation. The unobtrusive art of Chardin, who went to nature not to books for his inspiration, was not appreciated. He was considered a belated Dutchman, though his superior knowledge of values ought to have proved him something else.
The decoration of the room consisted mainly in French engravings from Watteau and Chardin, in one or two fine black lacquer cabinets and in a number of jars and vases of Chinese porcelain, some standing on the floor and some on shelves, the neutral-tinted walls a background to their bright, delicate colors. Mrs. Upton was an appropriate center to so much ease and beauty.
Johann Wisch has committed suicide in his cell; his accomplice, who had absconded, will be sentenced in default. "Wisch, formerly an army contractor, was an honest man and highly respected, who could not survive the idea of having been the dupe of Chardin, the storekeeper who has disappeared."
Mosquitoes swarm in certain places and seasons, preventing sleep and irritating the traveller almost beyond endurance. A poisonous spider, a sort of tarantula, is said to occur in some localities; and Chardin further mentions a kind of centipede, the bite of which, according to him, is fatal.
There, behind the tradesman's counter, she seemed rather a dancing nymph, a bacchante of the opera, stripped of her lynx skin and thyrsus, imprisoned, and travestied by a magician's spell under the modest trappings of a housewife by Chardin. "My father is not at home," she told the painter; "wait a little, he will not be long."
After one of these reconciliations he received the formal promise of a place in the Academy of Belles-lettres on the first vacancy. "It would pay," he said, "the keep of a horse." His position, so far as it went, was a good one, and Clement Chardin des Lupeaulx flourished in it like a tree planted in good soil. He could satisfy his vices, his caprices, his virtues and his defects.
Like Claude, like Chardin, he stands somewhat apart; but he has distinctly the romantic inspiration, constrained and regularized by classic principles of taste. He is the French Correggio in far more precise parallelism than Lesueur is the French Raphael.
Maillet mentions tents as things of course, in an account he gives of an Egyptian officer's taking the air with his lady in the neighbourhood of Cairo; and Chardin says, that Tahmasp, the Persian monarch, used to spend the winter at Casbin, and to retire in the summer three or four leagues into the country, where he lived in tents at the foot of Mount Alouvent, in a place abounding with cool springs and pleasant shades; and that his successors lived after the same manner until the time of Abas the Great, who removed his court to Ispahan.
When Chardin returned to France in 1670, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, with the barbarous persecutions which resulted from it, had chased from their country great numbers of artisans, who, taking refuge in foreign countries enriched them with our arts and manufactures.
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