Jerusalem: The Biography

Now the Frenchman could revel in the squalid sacred mysteries of the shrines. Yet this enthusiastic gourmand, who gave his name to his recipe for steak, relished the banquets he shared with his famously plump Franciscan hosts, feasting on ‘lentil soup, veal with cucumbers and onions, broiled kid with rice, pigeons, partridges, game, excellent wine’. Armed with several pistols, he retraced every step of Jesus while mocking Ottoman monuments (‘not worth notice’) and the Jews who were ‘covered in rags, sealed in the dust of Zion, with vermin that devoured them’. Chateaubriand was astonished to ‘behold these rightful masters of Judaea living as slaves and strangers in their own country’.

In the Sepulchre he prayed on his knees for half an hour, his eyes ‘riveted to the stone’ of Jesus’ tomb, dizzy with the incense, the clash of Ethiopian cymbals and chanting of the Greeks, before kneeling at the tombs of Godfrey and Baldwin, those French paladins who had defeated Islam, ‘a religion hostile to civilization that systematically favoured ignorance, despotism and slavery’.

The Franciscans awarded Chateaubriand the Order of the Holy Sepulchre in a solemn ceremony. As they encircled the kneeling vicomte, attaching the spurs of Godfrey to his heels and knighting him with the Crusader’s sword, he experienced an almost ecstatic joy:

If it is considered that I was at Jerusalem, in the Church of Calvary, within a dozen paces of the tomb of Jesus Christ, and thirty from that of Godfrey de Bouillon, that I was equipped with the spurs of the Deliverer of the Holy Sepulchre; and had touched that sword, both long and large, which so noble and so valiant an arm had once wielded, I couldn’t remain unmoved.⁵

On 12 October 1808, an Armenian sacristan fell a sleep by the stove in the Armenian gallery on the second floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The stove caught fire, burned him to death and then spread. The Tomb of Jesus was destroyed. In the ensuing chaos, the Christians invited Hassan al-Husseini, the mufti, to campin the courtyard of the Church to prevent looting. The Greeks accused the Armenians of arson. England and Austria were fighting to contain the apparently invincible Emperor Napoleon so the Greeks, backed by Russia, were able to consolidate their control over the Church. They built the rococo aedicule that stands around the Tomb today. They celebrated by smashing the graves of the Crusader kings: Chateaubriand, now back in France, was the last outsider to see them.^* A Muslim mob attacked the builders restoring the Church; the garrison mutinied, and the Butcher’s successor and son-in-law, Suleiman Pasha – who was known as the Just (though anyone would have seemed clement after his predecessor) – captured the city: forty-six rebels were executed, their heads decorating the gates.⁶

As the real Jerusalem decayed, the imaginary Jerusalem ignited Western dreams, encouraged by Napoleon’s nasty little Middle Eastern war, the decline of the Ottomans – and the book that Chateaubriand wrote when he got home. His Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem

set the tone of the European attitude to the Orient with its cruel but inept Turks, wailing Jews, and primitive but ferocious Arabs who tended to congregate in picturesque biblical poses. It was such a bestseller that it launched a new genre and even his valet, Julien, wrote his memoirs of the trip.^* In London, Sir Sidney Smith’s boasting about his Levantine exploits caught the imagination of his royal mistress – and inspired the most absurd of royal tours.

CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK AND HESTER STANHOPE:

QUEEN OF ENGLAND AND QUEEN OF THE DESERT

Princess Caroline, estranged wife of the English Prince Regent (later King George IV), was much taken with the dashing Smith, and regularly invited his cousin, Lady Hester Stanhope, niece of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, to provide cover for their brazen affair.

Lady Hester loathed the coarse, deluded and lecherous Princess Caroline, who showed off to Smith by ‘dancing about, exposing herself, like an opera girl’ and even gartering below the knee: ‘an impudent woman, a downright whore! So low! So vulgar!’ Caroline’s marriage to the Prince Regent had been a disaster and the so-called ‘Delicate Investigation’ into her love-life at that time later revealed at least five lovers including Smith, Lord Hood, the painter Thomas Lawrence and various servants. But Smith’s stories of Acre and Jerusalem at least found their mark: both women quite separately decided to travel to the East.