Kindle Notes & Highlights
"None of the Emperors of Hindustan," wrote an Urdu scribe afterwards, "were ever brought into Delhi in such state as Sikander Sahib!"
Boigne is not remembered, it is due to the neglect of English historians, who busied themselves with epics of their own countrymen; but he was a legend in his own time, and had Sindhia lived, and de Boigne not returned to Europe, it is conceivable that the British would never have got a permanent foothold in northern India.
But the name of de Boigne is still honoured in Savoy, the de Boigne fountain still plays in Chambery Square, and the descendants of Sindhia's French General and his Persian lady still live in the castle of Buisson Rond.
The Nawab was fascinated by balloons. Once, as punishment to a barber (one of the fifty personal barbers) who had nicked him, he attached the unfortunate man to one of the balloons with which Martine was experimenting. "Borne rapidly aloft and carried off at a great pace across country", the barber landed safely on an Englishman's property, but took to his heels and was never seen again.
If fifty personal barbers should be considered superfluous, what can be said for the four thousand gardeners who looked after the palace gardens, and the several hundred cooks in the royal kitchens? The Nawab was also a man of sporting tastes: he kept a thousand dogs trained for hunting, and 300,000 fighting cocks and pigeons. One of his favourite sports, introduced by a certain Colonel Mordaunt, was the racing of old women in sacks. The Nawab said he had never found anything so enjoyable.
