A toast to free spirits

An unconventional life for a desert fox

Trophimowsky encouraged non-conformism, and gave Isabelle an eclectic education, which included six languages, metaphysics and chemistry. He did not stand in the way of her occasional adventures dressed as a boy, or the growing interest in Islam she shared with her mother. By the 1890s, the de Moerder household had acquired a number of Moslem friends, and Isabelle was corresponding with a French officer stationed in the Sahara. Augustin had been in the Foreign Legion and remained in North Africa. In 1897, the household moved to Bone in Algeria, where Isabelle and her mother converted to Islam, and lived in the Arab section of town.

Not long after settling, Madame de Moerder died, which affected Isabelle greatly. Before a lack of money forced her temporary return to Europe, she bought a horse and galloped off towards the desert dressed as an Arab man, wandering for as long as she could. This was to set the tone for the rest of her life.

[ ... ]

In the desert, the contradictions of Isabelle's life came to the fore. She adopted the persona of an Arab man, calling herself Si Mahmoud, wandering incessantly and earning a meagre income as a journalist. She was despised by the European community, but became a valued adviser to the French administration. It was known that she was a woman, certainly by the string of Arab lovers she took, but she was accepted by the Arabs as a man. A European acquaintance said of her, "she drank more than a Legionnaire, smoked more kif than a hashish addict, and made love for the love of making love".

Isabelle Eberhardt: The Personification of Romance

“Africa ingests and assimilates everything that is hostile to it. Perhaps it is the Predestined Land from which the light that will regenerate the world will one day emerge!”
-Isabelle Eberhardt

“One very graceful impression is that of sunset over the port and the terraces of the upper town, and the gay Algerian women; a whole playful world in pink and green on the slightly blue-tinted white of the uneven and disorderly terraces. It's from the little lattice window of Madame Ben Aben that you discover all this.”
-Isabelle Eberhardt, Excerpts from Her Journals


Described by some as a desert queen in men’s clothing, by others as “too lazy to live,” the life and writings of Isabelle Eberhardt has captivated the imaginations of dreamers throughout the past century. Eberhardt was a female writer who penetrated deep into the heart of Algerian culture and society at the peak of French colonization, and left behind a legacy that has lived on in multiple biographies, movies, and the continual reproductions of her own writings. This is the legacy of a liberated women who lived a life outside of the constraints of both Arabic and Western values, and seemed to touched that far flung notion of unabashed freedom. From the pages of her diaries, one can discerned that Eberhardt was truly a romantic heroin cast adrift in a divine tragedy upon the seas of the great Sahara, as well as a ground breaking character who walked a path without predecessor.


Isabelle Eberhardt in brief

Today, went to see a sorcerer, lodged in a tiny shop on one of the streets in the upper part of town, among the dark stairways along rue du Diable. Was convinced of the reality of that incomprehensible and mysterious science of magic.... And what horizons, at once far-reaching and obscure, this reality opened up to my mind, what a sense of calm as well, firmly demolishing any doubt!

Of late, the feeling of calm and melancholy has returned. Unquestionably, Algiers is one of the cities that inspires me, especially certain parts of town. I'm happy with our present neighborhood, with our house too, after that horrible dump on rue de la Marine. Here, if it weren't for the unending, boring, and thankless work, and the problems and anxieties of our present situation, I would have a few days of peace, contemplation, and productivity.

How is it that the imbeciles the "world" and literature are teeming with can claim there is nothing Arab about Algiers? I, who've seen many other cities, experience some of the purest impressions of the Orient here.

One very graceful impression is that of sunset over the port and the terraces of the upper town, and the gay Algerian women; a whole playful world in pink and green on the slightly blue-tinted white of the uneven and disorderly terraces. It's from the little lattice window of Madame Ben Aben that you discover all this.

The bay of Algiers is, along with that of Bone, the prettiest, most deliciously intoxicating corner of the sea I've ever seen. How far we are here from disgusting Marseilles, with its ugliness, its stupidity, its rudeness, and its moral and material filth! In spite of the crowds brought here by a prostituted and prostituting "civilization," Algiers is still a lovely city, and it's easy to live here.

Yet, seeing the corpse of Zeheira, the Kabyle woman who threw herself down a well in the impasse Medee to escape a marriage she hated, borne on a stretcher covered with rough gray cloth, cast a mourning veil, heavy and dark and indefinable over this luminous Algiers for days on end.

The more I study--very badly and too quickly--the history of North Africa, the more I see that my idea was correct: Africa ingests and assimilates everything that is hostile to it. Perhaps it is the Predestined Land from which the light that will regenerate the world will one day emerge!

During the landing at Sidi-Ferruch in 1830, a peaceful looking old man approached the French camp. All he said was the following: "God is God, and Mohammed is His prophet!" He then went off and no one ever saw him again. That man had come to announce something that no one understood ... it was the permanence of Islam, there, on the bewitching soil of Africa.


Isabelle Eberhardt quotations

"A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places."

"For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all."

"I am not afraid of death, but would not want to die in some obscure or pointless way."

"The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character."

"I am full of the sorrow that goes with changes in surroundings, those successive stages of annihilation that slowly lead to the great and final void."