Astonished to hear her native language, the old woman answers that there are greater misfortunes than the one the white man names. She tells her horrors and faints. He carries her to a neighbouring house, feeds her, and flatters her beauty while regretting what he cannot recover. He was born at Naples, where they geld two or three thousand children every year. Some die, some gain a voice, some rise to offices of state. The operation succeeded. He was chapel musician to the Princess of Palestrina. To my mother, she cries. He weeps: the child he raised until six. Her mother lies four hundred yards off, torn in quarters under a heap of dead. His mission, sent by a Christian power, was a treaty for stores and ships to help demolish the commerce of other Christian governments. It is done. He will take her to Italy. Instead he conducts her to Algiers and sells her to the Dey.
The plague, having toured Africa, Asia, and Europe, breaks out in Algiers. She asks Cunegonde whether she has ever had the plague, and calls it worse than an earthquake. At fifteen, in less than three months, she has known poverty, slavery, daily rape, her mother's quartering, famine, war, and the plague. She does not die. The eunuch, the Dey, and almost the whole seraglio do. She is sold from Tunis to Tripoli, Alexandria, Smyrna, and Constantinople, then to an Aga of the Janissaries ordered to the defence of Azof. In a small fort on the Palus Meotides, famine obliges twenty soldiers who swore never to surrender to eat the two eunuchs. A pious Iman preaches that they should not kill the women all at once. Cut off a buttock of each, he says, and heaven will accept so charitable an action. They do it. A French surgeon later cures them and, as soon as the wounds heal, makes proposals. He says the like happens in many sieges, according to the laws of war.
A Boyard in Moscow makes her his gardener and gives her twenty lashes a day. When he is broken on the wheel with thirty more, she flees. She serves in inns from Riga to Rotterdam, old in misery, with half her posteriors, always remembering she is a Pope's daughter. A hundred times she is upon the point of killing herself, but still she loves life. In all those countries she has seen crowds who hold existence in abhorrence, yet she knew of only eight who ended it: three negroes, four Englishmen, and a German professor named Robek. She ends as servant to Don Issachar, placed near Cunegonde. She would not have spoken had she not been piqued, and had it not been customary to tell stories on a ship. She advises Cunegonde to collect each passenger's story. If there is one who has not cursed his life, they may throw her headforemost into the sea.
Coming Up in Chapter 13
Cunegonde takes the advice and the passengers tell their stories. They land at Buenos Ayres, where Governor Don Fernando d'Ibaraa, y Figueora, y Mascarenes, y Lampourdos, y Souza asks whether she is the captain's wife.
