ance to words of praise. The first was on the occasion of showing to a foreigner the splendid pavilion under which his sarcophagus was ultimately to be suspended on chains, when he spoke warmly of the work of his architect-builder; and the second when he despatched his grand vizier, Ben Aisha, to the magnificent Louis XIV to ask the hand of his daughter, the beautiful Princess Conti, in marriage. It may be that the royal child of France did not care to accept the hand of a ruler who had, according to the authority of Busnot, the monk, a harem of five hundred wives. Incidentally, the principal and most powerful figure among all these royal consorts was Lalla Aisha, a dominating Negro woman who had been a former slave of Sultan Er-Rashid. A descendant of one of the collateral branches of the family of Mulay Ismail, whom I met while wandering through the ruins of the sultan's palaces, told me that this warlike and cruel giantess protected the interests of the blacks and induced her royal husband to gather about him the Negro guard, through which she later dominated him by her ability to incite the soldiers to revolt, if she so willed. The second in the favor of the ruler was Lalla Aziza, an English-woman who had been made a slave, had accepted Islam and had achieved a great influence in Maghreb. The dream of each suffering and persecuted individual, even of the condemned, was to be able to meet Lalla Aziza when she came to the Medina, when the unfortunate one would fall upon his face to beg her intercession for him with the sultan.
During one of my subsequent excursions Into the palace quarter of the Medina I was hailed by some women
