The odalisques told with pleasure and excitement how Aimée had reached Constantinople and on being received by the Chief Eunuch at the Gate of Felicity had fainted away.

At first she had fought against everyone in the harem and the fate that awaited her.

Then when she had talked with the Kizlar Aga, who at that time was a moderate and humane man, her thrifty French mind had realised what a splendid fate might await her.

Obediently she passed through the Academie d’Amour and became perfect in every seductive art her Royal Master’s jaded appetites might demand.

Everyone wanted to tell Yamina the end of the story.

When Aimée Dubacq de Rivery was escorted to the Sultan, she found that he was not ‘a terrible Turk’ but a cultivated voluptuary.

To him Aimée seemed a creature apart – her blonde beauty and her Western intellect delighted him.

Very soon the old witch’s prophecy began to come true.

Aimée was known as ‘Naksh, the Beautiful One’ and was firmly installed as the Sultan’s favourite.

When her son, Mahmoud, was born, Aimée found herself the key figure in the succession to the Ottoman throne. When the old Sultan died, his nephew became Sultan Salim III and relied on Aimée’s support behind the scenes.

He developed an enthusiasm for everything that was French and Aimée’s power was almost unsurpassed.

But the intrigue and violence in the Seraglio was only waiting.

Sultan Salim died fighting against those who would destroy him together with Mahmoud, Aimée’s child.

But his death led the way for Mahmoud to become Sultan and once again Aimée was in power.

For years she fought for him, directed him, guided him and became in the process one of the most powerful women the Ottoman Empire had ever known.

As Sultan Valideh she reigned supreme and it was always said that the reason Napoleon Bonaparte got nowhere when he wooed the Sultan was that Aimée hated him.

She was the cousin of the wife he had divorced, the Empress Josephine, and they had been companions in Martinique.

For thirty-three years the little French girl from Martinique knew great triumphs and glories.

When she was dying in 1817, a Priest was called to the Convent of St. Antoine in Pera. There he administered the last sacraments to an unknown woman and as she died he gave her absolution.

The sole witness of the scene, a bearded man, flung himself down beside the bed weeping.

It was the ‘Successor of the Prophet’, the ‘Master of Masters’, the ‘Sultan Giaour’ crying out to Allah for the loss of his beloved mother.