Chapter XII

The old woman encounters a eunuch who recognizes her as the young princess he raised in Naples until age six, and he tells her of his medical castration and service to the Princess of Palestrina.

The eunuch promises to take her to Italy but instead conducts her to Algiers and sells her to the Dey, marking a cruel reversal of her hope for rescue.

The old woman asserts that the plague is far more terrible than an earthquake, drawing a comparative judgment between two disasters.

The old woman catalogs her sufferings at age fifteen: poverty, slavery, ravishment, witnessing her mother's death, famine, war, and dying of plague in Algiers.

She survived the plague while the eunuch and Dey died; she was then bought and sold repeatedly by merchants across North Africa and the Mediterranean to Constantinople.

The Aga takes his seraglio to defend Azof against Russian siege; the Janissaries swear never to surrender despite being starved.

The Iman preaches that the Janissaries should cut off a buttock from each woman as needed, framing it as a charitable act that heaven will reward.

The women undergo the mutilation, the Iman applies balsam, and they nearly die before the Russians arrive and kill all the Janissaries.

A French surgeon treats the women's wounds, assures them such horrors are normal in war, and makes marriage proposals to the old woman once healed.

She falls to a Boyard who works her as a gardener; after he is executed, she flees Russia and becomes a servant in various European cities, aging in misery.

She repeatedly contemplated suicide but loved life too much, questioning the absurdity of clinging to an existence one detests, comparing it to caressing the serpent that devours us.

Across her travels in various countries and inns, she observed many people who hated their existence but found that only eight actually committed suicide.

She became servant to Don Issachar and was placed near Cunegonde; she is now resolved to share Cunegonde's fate.

She explains she would not have told her story except that Cunegonde prompted her and that storytelling is customary on ships to pass time.

She declares herself experienced and knowledgeable about the world, advising Cunegonde to encourage other passengers to tell their stories.