The monks of the Convent of St. John the Baptist, in the wilderness of that name, received the travellers with sincere cordiality. Lamartine left there a part of his caravan, going on only with the Arabian and Egyptian guard. They confined their movements to visiting places in the suburbs, made historic by traditions of the New Testament.
He pays a deserved tribute to the Turks for their management of the “Holy Sepulchre.” Instead of destroying it, they had preserved everything, maintaining strict police regulations, and a silent reverence for the place which the Christians were far from manifesting. While the intolerance of the various sects would lead the triumphant party to exclude its rivals from the place, the Turks are impartial to them all.
The Mussulmans are the only tolerant people, he stoutly affirms. Let Christians ask what they would have done if the fortunes of war had delivered to them the City of Mecca and the Kaaba.
On the thirtieth of October, the caravan set out for the river Jordan and the Dead Sea. On returning to the neighborhood of Jerusalem, Lamartine received a letter from his wife that determined him to forego the extending of his journey into Egypt. He went back to Bayreuth, arriving the fifth of November.
Autumn in that country has the warmth, the renewing of vegetation and other conditions, like spring in the northerly climates of the temperate zone. Lamartine had purchased Arab horses of superb quality while in Palestine, and one for his daughter. It was at the end of November that he took her out for her first excursion with the animal. The air was exhilarating and the mountain scenery in its most attractive guise. In an ecstasy of excitement the young girl declared it the longest, most beautiful, most delightful ride that she had ever taken.
It was also the last. On the second of December she was taken suddenly ill and died the next day. The parents were overwhelmed with grief. The last hope of their house was thus cut off in the glad days of adolescence.
They remained at Bayreuth through the winter. On the fifteenth of April they set out for their return homeward and sailed for Constantinople.
Lamartine interspersed his narrative of this voyage with reflections upon what he observed and meditated. “I would like to sail all the while,” says he, “to have a voyage with its chances and distractions. But what I read in my wife’s eyes goes deep into my heart.[6] The suffering of a man is nothing like that of a woman, a mother. A woman lives and dies in one sole thought, or one solitary feeling. Life for a woman is a something possessed; death, a something lost. A man lives with everything that he has to do with, good or bad; God does not kill him with a blow.”