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He spoke of himself indeed as "mended by ill-treatment" not unlike Tavernier, the famous traveller, said to have been radically cured of the gout by a Turkish aga in Egypt, who gave him the bastinado because he would not look at the head of the bashaw of Cairo. But Fizes was right after all in his swan-prescription, for poor Smollett's cure was anything but a radical one.
When Tavernier, a jeweller, visited the diamond mines of Golconda and Visiapour, he was informed that the sovereign of the country, for whose benefit they were wrought, had ordered all of them to be shut up except those which yielded the largest and finest stones. The other, it seems, were to the proprietor not worth the working.
Travellers in the ninth century describe muslins in India which were of such fineness that they might be drawn through a ring of moderate size; and Tavernier speaks of turbans, composed of thirty-five ells of the cloth, which would weigh but four ounces.
Tavernier, the French traveller, in the seventeenth century, gives us a similar description of the Kalmuks, some of whom at present are included in the Russian Empire. "They are robust men," he says, "but the most ugly and deformed under heaven; a face so flat and broad, that from one eye to the other is a space of five or six fingers.
M. Venot, now slackening, now hastening his pace, passed smilingly from group to group, as though bent on losing no scrap of conversation. "To think of poor dear Georges at Orleans!" said Mme Hugon. "He was anxious to consult old Doctor Tavernier, who never goes out now, on the subject of his sick headaches. Yes, you were not up, as he went off before seven o'clock.
According to Pietro della Voile, the Persians keep up the same ridiculous ceremony to this day. It is likewise, according to Tavernier, observed in the kingdom of Tunquin, where they imagine the moon to be, at that time, struggling with a dragon.
Like the art of Raymond Lully they are able to set people chattering about things they do not know. They are able to set fifteen-year-old Platos discussing philosophy in the clubs, and teaching people the customs of Egypt and the Indies on the word of Paul Lucas or Tavernier.
Your books will tell you that in the seventeenth century a traveler, Tavernier, saw in India an unmatched diamond which afterward disappeared like a meteor, and was thought to have been lost from the earth. You all know the name of that diamond and its history. It is the Great Mogul, and it lies before you. How it came into my possession I shall not explain.
In this particular, I imitate the gratitude of Tavernier, who was radically cured of the gout by a Turkish aga in Aegypt, who gave him the bastinado, because he would not look at the head of the bashaw of Cairo, which the aga had in a bag, to be presented to the grand signior at Constantinople.
Whilst Tavernier was accomplishing his last and distant excursions, a distinguished archæologist, Jean de Thévenot, nephew of Melchisedec Thévenot a learned man to whom we owe an interesting series of travels journeyed through Europe, and visited Malta, Constantinople, Egypt, Tunis, and Italy.
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