There is another Martinique memory, which one cannot pass over in speaking of the creole beauties of former days. Robert, a tiny village on the southeast coast, has a legend which once gave it quite as much distinction as Trois-Islets. Robert, or at least one of its suburbs, claimed to be the birthplace of another lovely creole, who became, it was alleged, no less a personage than the Sultana-Validé of Selim III. More than one historian seems to have given credit to this story, M. Sidney Daney, in his 'Histoire de la Martinique,' even published her portrait, with the inscription beneath: 'Aimée Dubuc De Rivéry, Sultana-Validé, et mère de Mahmoud II.--A pretty face, with hair powdered and combed back after the early fashion of the eighteenth century, and that soft roundness of lines suggesting the ripeness of sixteen years,--when the slender child is just passing into the beauty of womanhood. The legend is said to have inspired a novel, which I was not able to find in the colony; it is perhaps long out of print. The pages of M. Sidney Daney,[1] who treats the story as a historical event, probably form the best authority for it. According to this writer Mademoiselle Aimée Dubuc Dérivry was born on the Pointe Royale plantation at Robert in December, 1766,--three years later than Josephine. She was the child of one of the oldest and most distinguished creole families of Martinique. She was sent to France at an early age to be educated, and passed several years in a convent school at Nantes. At the age of eighteen she was called home, and embarked from the same port in charge of a governess. The vessel was attacked and captured by an Algerian corsair, and Aimée, her governess, and other passengers were taken to Algiers and sold as slaves. The beauty of the young creole attracted the notice of the Dey, who, desiring to gain the friendship of the Sultan, bought the girl and sent her as a present to Selim III at Constantinople. There, it was alleged, she became first the favorite, and afterward Sultana-Validé--as the mother, in 1785, of Mahmoud II, who ascended the Ottoman throne in 1808. Such is the legend, in its briefest possible form.