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In the mean while I continued to work there as before, and as I had the charge of every thing I had no doubt that, some day or another, I should find means of quietly disposing of my incumbrance. The next spring, I was busy pumping off from one cask into the other, according to our custom, when the aga of the janissaries came in. He was a great wine-bibber, and one of our best customers.
Of all the advertisements of small-pox hospitals, inoculation, etc., which appear in the newspapers through the eighteenth century, none is more curious, more comic than this from a Boston paper of 1772: "Ibrahim Mustapha Inoculator to his Sublime Highness & the Janissaries: original Inventor and sole Proprietor of that Inestimable Instrument, the Circassian Needle, begs leave to acquaint the Nobility & Gentry of this City and its Environs that he is just arrived from Constantinople where he has inoculated about 50,000 Persons without losing a Single Patient.
Ah! but now it was the turn of the Grand Vizier and all the other conspirators to be amazed. The Janissaries who had been placed by the side of the popular leaders never budged from their seats, and not one of them drew his weapon at the given signal. Such inertia was so inexplicable to the initiated that Kaplan Giraj remained standing in front of Halil paralyzed with astonishment.
Such persons, however elevated by flattery, arrogance, and self-opinion, must be sensible that whether covered or not by positive law, in some way or other they are accountable even here for the abuse of their trust. If they are not cut off by a rebellion of their people, they may be strangled by the very janissaries kept for their security against all other rebellion.
And since 1618, when the Janissaries first elected their own Pasha, and practically ignored the authority of the Porte, the traditional fellowship with France, the Sultan's ally, had fallen through, and French vessels now formed part of the Corsairs' quarry.
The Jew protested his ignorance, and appealed to me: I, of course, pretended the same. "Well, then," replied the aga, "we will soon see. Let thy Greek send for his tools, and the cask shall be opened in our presence; then perhaps thou wilt recognise thine own knavery." Two of the janissaries were despatched for the tools, and when they arrived I was directed to take the head out of the cask.
On June 5, 1827, the Greek garrison of the Akropolis marched out on terms. It looked as if the Greek effort after independence would be completely crushed, and as if Sultan Mahmud would succeed in getting his empire under control. In September 1826 he had rid it at last of the mischief at its centre by blowing up the janissaries in their barracks at Constantinople.
As he spoke, he rushed, sword in hand, upon the Turks, and, driving them back, succeeded in barricading himself in his apartments. Presently a troop of janissaries from Koutaieh, ordered to be in readiness, advanced, hauling up cannon, and a stubborn combat began. Mouktar's frail defences were soon in splinters.
Still greater rascalities were carried on on the right bank of the Rhine. Gauthier robbed from Coblentz down to the Prussian frontiers." These allegations are confirmed by Goerres in a pamphlet, "Results of my Mission to Paris," in which he says, "The Directory had treated the four departments like so many Paschalics, which it abandoned to its Janissaries and colonized with its favorites.
It may, indeed, be wondered at that he and his Janissaries should be allowed to retain all their ill-gotten booty, under the name of private property; but Count de Bourmont, though not without talent, was essentially a weak man, and was in this instance overreached by the wily Moor.
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