In Europe, _the religious_, though living under a very different rule, refer all the passionate tenderness of their soul to God; each of them finds, however, some mode of husbanding a part of it for some holy image of her choice, some concealed relic, which belongs to her alone; she addresses secret prayers to it, she perfumes it with incense which she carries away from the high altar; it is her aside worship. In the East, those other inhabitants of cloisters, the odalisks, have no worship but love, and in the endearments of that love they can prostrate themselves but before one alone; but there, as everywhere else, the idol is concealed in the shadow of the temple; they have their fetishes, their dreams, their fraudulent loves, their loves of the head, if we may so designate them. It is perhaps necessary for human nature thus to give the most decided counterpoise to its thoughts, in order to preserve the equilibrium of the soul, to protest in a low tone against that which we loudly adore, to oppose a shadow to a reality. It is true that where lovers are concerned, the shadow sometimes assumes a form and the reality evaporates. Be this as it may, Djezzar had returned to Baïla, and the latter, more assured than ever of her power, made him expiate his late infidelity by her caprices and her extravagances. They wondered in the Harem to see the Pacha of Shivas, before whom every thing trembled, bow before this handsome slave, so frail, so white, so delicate, whom he might have broken by a gesture or a word. The rumor of it spread even to the city, where it was whispered that Djezzar would turn Jew if Baïla wished it. This Ali-ben-Ali, surnamed Djezzar, or the Butcher, was, however, a terrible man. Originally a page in the palace of the Sultan, and brought up by Mahmoud, he had not participated at all in the civilizing ameliorations the latter had endeavored to introduce into his empire. The decree of Gulhana had found him the opponent of all reform. Assured of a protection in the divan, which he knew how to preserve, he sustained himself as the type of the old pachas, of whom his predecessors, Ali of Janina and Djezzar of Acre, were the paragons. He especially redoubled his barbarism when a philosophical breeze from Europe endeavored to breathe tolerance over his country.