Slimen Ehnni survived the flood and died two years later of a respiratory disease.
In 1914 Augustin De Moerder committed suicide in Marseilles.
General Louis Hubert Gonsalve Lyautey gradually tightened the screws against Morocco until the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912. Lyautey became the first resident general of Morocco, was later made a marshal, and in 1917 served briefly as war minister in France. He was elected to the French Academy and died at the age of eighty in 1934.
Much is known of Isabelle Eberhardt's life, but there are great holes which only fiction can now fill.
The best sources are her own writings, and it should be noted that many passages in this book paraphrase her descriptions of events, her own psychological states and desert terrains.
Particularly valuable are her journals, published as Mes Journaliers (Paris, 1923) which cover several years and are especially detailed on the period 1900-1901–the Souf, the stabbing and its aftermath.
The three books which were put together and heavily edited by Victor Barrucand are also useful: Dans L'Ombre Chaude de L'Islam (Paris, 1905), rich in material on her stay in Kenadsa; Notes de Route (Paris, 1908) which deals mostly with her impressions of the Sud-Oranais; and Pages D'Islam (Paris, 1908) containing many short journalistic pieces and her moving defense of vagabondage.
Au Pays des Sables (Paris, 1944) contains some of her short fiction and also documents that illuminate various periods in her life. As for her novel, Le Trimardeur–it is best forgotten.
It would take pages to separate the blend of fact and fiction in this book. For example, though she did write a letter to Augustin on Christmas Eve, 1895, the letter quoted here is not the same, but a composite of several letters, with the addition of fictional material. The same is true of the dialogue at the Constantine trial, and events such as her first meeting with Eugène Letord which actually took place under other circumstances at another time.
But some of the more amazing things happened much as they are reported here: the saga of her brothers who were mixed up with anarchists and opium (according to Trophimovsky, Vladimir was tortured by Prozov); the attack at Behima; the suicide pact in Ténès; the flash flood; and even the incident with the fictional "Desforges."
There have been many biographies, mostly bad. René-Louis Doyon was the first serious writer to deal with her, and in his Précédés de la Vie Tragique de la Bonne Nomade (Paris, 1923) he established the first accurate chronology of her life. Another good book is Cecily Mackworth's The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt (London, 1950)–accurate, well-written, though lacking in footnotes to the many sources from which the material has been drawn. Of the recent French biographies, Françoise Eaubonne's La Couronne de Sable (Paris, 1968) is quite good, but unfortunately marred by an absurd speculation: that Isabelle was the illegitimate daughter of Arthur Rimbaud.
Though there are several streets named after her in Algeria, very few young people in France have ever heard of Isabelle Eberhardt, and she is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. But there was a time when she was something of a legend, a sort of French T. E. Lawrence with a feminist dimension. Now I hope interest in her will be revived, both because of this novel, and also the publication of some of her stories, excellently translated by Paul Bowles.
In the autumn of 1974 I traveled to Algeria to retrace her footsteps. The country has changed enormously, of course, but one gets a sense of the desert as it must have been at the turn of the century simply by turning down any one of a thousand ragged pistes. Then one must stand in awe of her bravery and her love of the road.
I had no trouble getting to Beni-Ounif, Figuig (in Morocco), Kenadsa, El-Hammel or any of the rest of those hidden places in North Africa where she spent her time. One sees young people wearing granny glasses and Che Guevara T-shirts in El Oued today, but there is still sand in the streets, and the palms are still grown in deep basins called cuvettes.
I met there with the local writer-historian whose grandfather had been caid in Isabelle's time. "She was strong and svelte, built like a gazelle," he said, and then showed me the ruins of her house, the hospital, the Arab Bureau (now the prefecture) and the house in Behima where she was stabbed.
Ténès, like so many of the coastal towns in Algeria, has the shuttered decayed look of a place hastily deserted by the French. There is a small private beach around the mountain to the east where I imagined Isabelle and Slimen trying to fulfill their suicide pact.
As for Aïn Sefra, I was there seventy years to the day after the famous flood. The river was bone dry and the Algerian army now occupies the old barracks and hospital on the heights (not so high as I had thought). Aïn Sefra is set in a stunning country of red earth and sand, and at sunset the light coats the mountains with an indescribable glow.
After a long chain of complications I found her tomb. It is a simple raised monument set apart from the other graves. "Si Mahmoud," it says in Arabic, and then in French: "Isabelle Eberhardt, wife of Slimen Ehnni, dead at 27 in the catastrophe at Aïn Sefra, October 21, 1904." Nothing else, but the tomb faces Mecca like the rest, and is extremely eloquent in this weed-choked cemetery facing the dunes.
After she died Lyautey wrote: "She was that which attracted me more than anything else. A rebel." She rejected Western culture–the virtues of logic, lucidity, science, proofs. She was attracted to mysticism, poetic leaps of the soul, disguise, erotic love, mad rides across the sand. She was the quintessential wanderer, a troubled, moody vagabond who tried to live in total freedom, re-creating herself according to her dreams. She was fearless in pursuit of what she was, afraid of nothing except that she might harm someone else. Once I learned of her I found it impossible to put her out of my mind, and thus this fantasy, in which I have tried, like other historical novelists, to use fiction as a mans of approaching truth. WB (Tangier, 1973-1975)