This attachment began in our infancy. We would cry if people tried to separate us, even for the shortest of times; if one of us was scolded, the other would burst into tears. We would spend whole days playing at the same table, and we slept in the same bed.

This strong attachment seemed to grow as we did; it was strengthened by an incident which I shall tell you about. I was then sixteen, and my sister was fourteen years old. For a long time we had been aware that there were books which my mother carefully hid from us. At first we paid little attention to them, being profoundly bored by the ones used to teach us to read; but as we grew older, we became curious. On the first occasion when the forbidden cupboard was left open, we seized our opportunity and removed a small book which turned out to be The Loves of Madjnoun and Leila,11 translated from the Persian by ben Omri. This sublime work, which describes in ardent terms the joys of love, inflamed our young imaginations. We were not able to understand it perfectly, because we had never encountered members of your sex, but we tried out on each other its expressions. We learned to speak the language of these lovers, and resolved eventually to court each other in the way they did. I played the part of Madjnoun, and my sister took that of Leïla. First, I declared my passion for her by arranging flowers in a certain way; this is a sort of secret code much used throughout Asia. Then I made my glances eloquent, I prostrated myself before her, I kissed the ground where her feet had trod, I begged the gentle breezes to carry to her my amorous complaint; I even thought that I could set them alight with the ardour of my sighs.

Zubeida faithfully followed the lessons of the author and allowed me to meet her. I threw myself down before her, kissed her hands, and bathed her feet with my tears; my mistress began by resisting gently, then allowed me to steal some favours and finally abandoned herself altogether to my eager passion. Our souls seemed really to melt one into the other and even now I do not know what could make us happier than we were then.

I can’t remember for how long we enjoyed these passionate interludes, but in the end we allowed calmer sentiments to take their place. We acquired a taste for study, especially for the study of plants, which we pursued in the writings of the celebrated Averroës.

My mother, who believed that one couldn’t do too much to ward off the tedium of harem life, saw with pleasure that we had acquired a taste for occupying ourselves. She summoned from Mecca a saintly person whose very name, Hazareta, meant ‘most holy’. Hazareta taught us the law of the prophet in that pure and harmonious language which the tribe of Koraish12 speak. We could never grow tired of listening to her, and we learned by heart almost all the Koran. Then my mother taught us herself about the history of our family, and placed in our hands a great number of memoirs, some in Arabic, some in Spanish. How odious your law seemed to us, dear Alphonse! How we hated your priests and their persecutions! And how strongly we sympathized on the other hand with their many illustrious victims whose blood flowed in our veins!

Sometimes our hearts went out to Said Gomelez, who suffered martyrdom in the prisons of the Inquisition, sometimes to his nephew Leiss, who for a long time lived a primitive life in the mountains which was scarcely different from that of a wild animal. Such persons predisposed us to love men; we would have loved to meet some, and we would often climb up to our terrace to gaze from afar at those embarking on the lake of La Goulette, or those on their way to the baths at Hammam Nef. And if we hadn’t altogether forgotten the teachings of Madjnoun the lover, at least we did not rehearse them to each other any more. It even seemed to me that my love for my sister no longer had the character of a passion, but a fresh incident proved to me that I was wrong.

One day my mother introduced an older lady to us who was a princess from Tafilet. We received her as best we could. After she had left, my mother told me that she had asked for my hand for her son, and that my sister would marry a member of the Gomelez family. We were thunderstruck by this news, and our shock caused us to lose the power of speech. Then the misery of living apart from each other impressed itself with such force on our minds that we gave way to the most terrible despair. We tore out our hair, and filled the harem with the sound of our sobbing. Eventually these demonstrations of our distress became so extreme that my mother was alarmed by them and promised not to force us to do something contrary to our desires.