After Ali Pasha the personality of Fuad Pasha interested me especially. This tall, stately man, with refined, thoroughly European manners, who, with his sparkling wit and humorous _aperçus_, was more like a Frenchman than a Turk, and, as was generally known, had risen from being a simple military doctor to the highest State dignity, was now one of the three first reformers. Although fair and patriotic, he does not appear to have taken his position very much in earnest. He was complacency itself, but his sarcasm did not even spare the sacred person of his sovereign; and once, on the occasion of an illumination, when I happened to be in his suite, I heard him say, "Yes, it is light everywhere; darkness only reigns in our State cassa."
Many of his _bon-mots_ are still in circulation; as, for instance, his remark to an inquisitive diplomatist, who, in going through the house, wanted to open the door of the harem: "Monsieur, vous n'êtes accredité qu'à a Porte--au delà vous n'avez pas de droit." It is told of him that when he was Ambassador Extraordinary at Madrid, and sat at table next to the Queen, who drew his attention to the emblem of friendship displayed on the Spanish-Turkish flag on the ham, he said, "Madame! je reconnais volontièrement l'emblème de l'amitié--mais comme Musulman, je ne peux pas reconnaître la neutralité du terrain." In those days I managed to make quite a collection of his Turkish and French _aperçus_ and poems, for he had inherited the poetic vein from his father, the celebrated Tzzet-Molla, who had had the audacity to write a satire against Sultan Mahmud, and for punishment had been banished to Köchük Tchekmedje. There he wrote his beautiful poem, "Mihnetkeshan" ("The Sorrowful"), in which the affectionate father recommends his two sons with rhyming names, Fuad and Reshad, to God's special protection. Fuad also gave his sons names that rhyme, for they were called Nazim and Kiazim. Fuad remained the lifelong, faithful friend of Ali, whose intellectual superiority he gladly acknowledged, without, however, altogether sparing him the darts of his sarcasm. Towards me Fuad Pasha was always most gracious, only he thought that my thirst for knowledge, without showing any practical results, rather resembled the craving of a hungry man for a glass of water, and he often quoted to me the Persian lines: