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When Orosman says to Zaire, whom he pretends to love with European tenderness, Je sais que notre loi, favorable aux plaisirs Ouvre un champ sans limite a nos vastes desirs: his language is still more indecorous than laughable. But the answer of Zaire to her confidante, who thereupon reminded her that she is a Christian, is highly comic: Ah! que dis-tu? pourquoi rappeler mes ennuis?
The East, with its sultans, its harems, its sultanas, and its jealousies, strongly arrested his imagination, and furnished the subjects of some of his finest pieces; witness Mahomet, Bajazet, Tamerlane, and Zaïre.
In the region of the great lakes, over all that vast country which feeds the market of Zanzibar, in Bornou and Fezzan, farther south, on the banks of the Nyassa and the Zambesi, farther west, in the districts of the upper Zaire, which the daring Stanley has just crossed, is seen the same spectacle ruins, massacres, depopulation.
These creatures had now found out a way of galling him to the very quick. In one walk, at least, it had been admitted by envy itself that he was without a living competitor. Since Racine had been laid among the great men whose dust made the holy precinct of Port Royal holier, no tragic poet had appeared who could contest the palm with the author of Zaire, of Alzire, and of Merope.
The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. He has never read Zaïre nor Phèdre. To those great German poets who have illuminated the last fifty years with a splendour to which this country has, for a long time, seen nothing comparable, Mr. Hunt is an absolute stranger.
Yet there is no reason why the waters should not be navigated, as proposed in 1816, by small steamers of good power, and the strong sea-breeze would greatly facilitate the passage. In older and more enterprising days merchant-schooners were run high up the Zaire.
To ascertain the truth on this point, an expedition was sent out under Captain Tuckey, an English naval officer who had given proof of intelligence and courage. James Kingston Tuckey was made prisoner in 1805, and was not exchanged until 1814. When he heard that an expedition was to be organized for the exploration of the Zaire, he begged to be allowed to join it, and was appointed to the command.
He looked at the Chief, at Bosambo, at the river all aglow in the early morning sunlight, at the Zaire, with her sinister guns a-glitter, and then back at the Chief. He was not well versed in the dialect of the Akasava, and Bosambo must be his interpreter. "Very serious offence, old friend," said Bones, solemnly; "awfully serious muckin' about with spears and all that sort of thing.
Zadig and Zaïre, Mérope and Charles XII. still linger, perhaps, in the schoolroom; but what has become of Oreste, and of Mahomet, and of Alzire? Où sont les neiges d'antan? Though Voltaire's reputation now rests mainly on his achievements as a precursor of the Revolution, to the eighteenth century he was as much a poet as a reformer.
This author has now become a renowned scientific man, and has renounced poetry. I had begged Perrin to give me a month's holiday, but he refused energetically, and compelled me to take part in the rehearsals of Zaire during the trying months of June and July, and, in spite of my reluctance, announced the first performance for August 6. That year it was fearfully hot in Paris.
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