The Linguist and the Emperor (5 page)

Napoleon’s saving grace is the secrecy in which he has cloaked the expedition. The secretary of the navy himself did not know its destination until hours before the departure. In fact, at first a completely different scheme had been planned: All along France’s coast preparations had been made for an invasion of Britain, a direct assault across the Channel which was to have been launched that spring. Though this plan is abandoned, the preparations are kept up as a smokescreen.

Such an invasion would have been in line with Napoleon’s boldness. There is nothing the young general shrinks from: He will cross the Alps with an army on sleds and pack donkeys, he will attack when he is outnumbered and outflanked, he will gamble and win time and again when the odds are against him. However, at least at this stage in his career, his boldness is tempered by a keen appreciation of military realities.

An invasion across the Channel would fail. “The way to strike at England is through Egypt,” he lectures the Directors of France (lawyers and an ex-Abbé with little military experience), unfolding a global strategy in which British trade routes are cut off, the British hold on India is destroyed, Britain is isolated, then defeated.

“And the nation that defeats Britain could rule the world!” he continues with a wildness that makes the Directors wonder if he is mad: “After Egypt, I shall march upon Damascus and Aleppo, increasing my army as I go . . . for I shall announce to the people the overthrow of the tyrannous pashas. Then with overwhelming forces, I shall take Constantinople [Istanbul], making an end of Turkey, and found a new and great empire. This will bring me immortal fame. Perhaps I shall then make my way home through Adrianople or Vienna, after annihilating the House of Hapsburg.”

The five sober Directors are right to wonder. There is, of course, more than a little madness, grandiosity, and megalomania in Napoleon’s plan: “I am the instrument of Providence. She will use me as long as I accomplish her designs, then she will break me!” He rants on, talking of cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Suez in the place where the ancient one of the pharaohs had been, describing a hundred fantastic projects from curing Egypt’s plague-ridden people to improving its beer!—all the while he urges the hesitating lawyers not to delay: “You do what you have to do and do it quickly. Be ruthless about it!”

They know that this inspired soldier means what he says, for hadn’t he saved the Directory in its early days by turning cannon on the demonstrating crowds, leaving a broad swathe of men and women lying dead in the streets? “A whiff of grapeshot,” he muses afterward, “would have saved the King . . .”

But if Napoleon is mad and in his madness capable of anything, there is an eminently sane man listening to him along with the Directors. Foreign Minister Talleyrand agrees with the general, at least as far as Egypt is concerned. As for the rest—the world—“There is time,” Talleyrand shrugs in his discreet and diplomatic way.

Talleyrand is an uncompromising realist and will never really understand Napoleon’s worldview. He is a wily aristocrat who flees the revolution at just the right time and returns at the correct moment as well. A handsome, cultured man of forty, with catlike agility and elegant manners, he always lands on his feet.

For him, glory is a word for schoolboys. The conquest of Egypt is a practical step, an expedient démarche and nothing more. But Napoleon, like Alexander the Great, goes to Egypt to find out if he is a god. The general wants to be an immortal, to have immortal fame. And the painters, sculptors, poets, playwrights he commissions at every turn, the boatsful of scholars he takes with him are all part of this quest.

“The true conquests, those that will never be forgot-ten are those that are wrested from ignorance!” Napo-leon declares, a statement crucial to understanding the philosopher-soldier that he is. With scholars in tow, he claims Egypt in the name of knowledge. It is his plan to study everything about this forgotten land, its flora and fauna, its birds, its fish, and even its insects, to understand its diseases, to chart its deserts and to sketch its crumbling antiquities in order to enlarge mankind’s knowledge of itself.

“In Egypt, at the crossroads of Asia, Europe, and Africa, knowledge flourished at the dawn of time,” one of the savants writes later on, describing the feeling of his colleagues for the country. “Here Homer, Lycurgus, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato came to learn the sciences, religion, and the laws.”

As much as the present, it is this past of Egypt that Napoleon wants for his own. From the moment he reaches her shores, he will struggle like a man possessed to obtain it. If a languor descends on his soldiers who suffer from the unbearable heat, he urges them on, sets them a thousand tasks to perform when they are not fighting, hitches them to the guns during forced marches when their animals drop in exhaustion. Napoleon himself holds men in his arms in the pesthouse who are dying of plague; the moment becomes a famous painting. Napoleon is looking up, he is always looking up in the paintings as if communing with the gods, indifferent to danger, in love with fate.

“The sciences are the glory of the human mind, the arts bequeath noble deeds to our offspring,” proclaims this creator of academies on warships, this greatest lawgiver since Justinian, and this god who will practice any bloodshed or brutality he pleases. Are not gods above the law? Thousands of prisoners will be slaughtered during the eastern campaign since he does not have enough food to feed them. At the suggestion of freeing them, he goes into a rage. “Free them?” He shakes his fist at an appalled officer who opposes him. “If that’s the way you feel, go, hide away in a monastery and never come out!”

Bloodstained, godlike, cruel, artistic, philosophic, and immoral, he proclaims, “The French people would rather win a great mathematician, painter, or other man of note than win the wealthiest of provinces.” He makes this boast not knowing that Fate is listening and will take him at his word. For if he will have an intellectual triumph in Egypt—page after page of the twenty-three volume
Description of Egypt
is edited in his own hand—it will come with a crushing military defeat: the first in his career.

This is still in the future. The present finds him haranguing the stolid lawyers (and one ex-Abbé!) of the Directory, hurling phrases at them in his passionate and irresistible way—though they try to resist. They listen and they doubt.

For they are practical men who recoil from this wild-eyed fanatic with his long hair and his scraggly looks, his pallor, his weary eyes and visionary speeches whose every other word is
glory
and
might.
It is Talleyrand who wins the day by making a few reasonable observations, pointing out that such a scheme had been contemplated since the time of Louis XIV—only there had always been one difficulty or another in the past.

Reassuringly, the handsome Talleyrand is a man who cares more for pleasure than for glory, and more for money than either. Throughout his career, he demands huge bribes—whether he is foreign minister during the Directory, or under Napoleon, or after Napoleon, too (for he will last and last and last).

He always gets the fabulous sums he requires, for his recommendation carries weight—as it does now when he agrees with Napoleon that Egypt is ripe. What does it matter that the country belongs to the Ottoman Empire whose sultan is an ally of France? Such trifles can be left to the diplomats while Napoleon wins the war.

A deal is struck: Talleyrand himself will go to Istanbul to negotiate—though once Napoleon has left for Egypt, the Foreign Minister stays comfortably at home. He understands that what the Directors really want is to get Napoleon out of the way. The popular young hero is a threat to their power. Let the sultan send troops to crush the arrogant madman! Let him return defeated. Better yet, let him fall in battle on the desert sands.

Bonaparte’s victories have made him overbearing. Has the revolution been won for such a brute to rule France?
Thus, the Directors whisper among themselves, taking dark counsel with their Foreign Minister. Publicly, though, they praise Napoleon, and none with more feeling than the soft-spoken Talleyrand:

“All France will be free—with only the exception of Napoleon. That is his destiny . . . To carry the burdens of France . . .” Such is Talleyrand’s style: eloquent and insincere. One day, in a rage over his treachery and betrayal, Napoleon will call Talleyrand
Shit in a silk stocking!

For the time being the two are friends. Talleyrand embraces Napoleon on the eve of his departure. With a soft kiss of Judas, he speeds him on his way.

THIRTY-EIGHT THOUSAND
men—the Army of the Orient as Napoleon calls it—leave France, together with one woman. Pauline Fourès, a newly married lieutenant’s wife, cuts off her long blond hair, straps on a breast-flattener borrowed from nuns and pretends to have been a drummer boy in the Italian war. In the chaos onboard she can easily wander to and fro without attracting much attention—as can a Bourbon spy named D’Entraigues, a follower of the beheaded Louis and of his gouty brother, also Louis (the XVIII), the so-called “legitimate” ruler of France, who sits spinning webs in exile in London.

The soldiers leave France on a fleet of four hundred transports with an escort of thirteen heavily armed ships of the line and seven frigates, easily maneuverable craft. The boats carry seventy-five siege guns and mortars, ninety field guns, 1230 horses and leave from five ports of embarkment to rendezvous at sea.

And though the men of war are impressive, the transports onto which the soldiers are crowded are a motley collection of merchant vessels, fishing boats, and pleasure boats pressed into service at the last moment. Whatever floats will do.

It is a fighting force assembled with remarkable speed as well as secrecy, a feat achieved through the energy of one man: Napoleon. The impatient general has given the near bankrupt Directors of France no peace:
Money
and
men
is his constant cry. He has even gone back and ruthlessly plundered a second time all the provinces he has snatched from Austria and added to France. “The Hapsburg Empire,” he shouts contemptuously at the defeated Emperor’s envoy, “is an old serving woman used to being raped!”

Millions of francs are stolen from the “liberated” Italian territories and a forced “loan” is arranged from the Pope and from the new Helvetic (Swiss) Republic as well. Thousands of men are recruited for service all along the coast, and dishonest contractors are threatened with drastic punishment for delays. These same dishonest contractors are lining the pockets of Napoleon’s new wife and the lover she has already taken, a dandy named Hippolyte Charles. With curled hair and a wardrobe of all the latest fashions, he has won Josephine’s heart. And the two are war speculators as well as lovers.

Charles, with his elegance and his cynical witticisms, is more pleasing to Josephine than the earnest and romantic Napoleon. During her months in the shadow of the guillotine, she vowed that if she survived, she would live for pleasure, a vow that she has begun to fulfill.

A month before Napoleon’s departure, the affair almost comes to light. A maid, dismissed by Josephine, vengefully tells Napoleon everything. Josephine denies the charges and her husband believes her because he wants to. He pays her debts, he sends her jewels and ardent letters, he takes her children for his own, enrolling her daughter in an expensive school and arranging for her son (who is only a few years younger than her new lover) to accompany him to Egypt. Napoleon would have taken her to Egypt as well, but a balcony collapsed under her and she has been confined to bed for months. She means everything to him. But at this stage for the sensual Creole with her memories and her many lovers, her marriage to the lovesick soldier is a financial arrangement, nothing more.

“I embrace every part of you, my vulture,” he muses in a never-sent letter, “but are you faithful to me?”

Another farce, not a domestic one, is quickly to follow. For the expedition’s first port of call is Malta, an island in the Mediterranean that has been ruled by a medieval crusading order, the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, for almost three hundred years.

Under the protection of the tsar, headed by a German grand master, the knights tyrannize the island’s native population. They have long since ceased to do any fighting themselves. The thousand cannon on its massive battlements are unused and rusty. And the ten-foot-thick fortress walls mean nothing. The gates are quickly opened by corrupt knights Napoleon has taken care to bribe.

Fearful of the pursuing British, Napoleon quickly takes what he has come for. Chest after chest of treasure is carried out from vaults under the order’s church. The grand master is banished, a small force is left to rule in the name of France and the expedition to Egypt is once again on its way.

What is the nature of this land to which we are going?
is a topic Napoleon proposes to his scholars (at least those who are not belowdeck with seasickness) for that night’s debate.

And when that is finished, another question:
Is
there
life
on
other
planets?
And another:
Is
there
any
truth
in
premonitions?

Finally, as the wine flows and tongues loosen, the question:
Is there God?

Question: Are the people of the Egypt more sensual than others? “A beautiful woman who dies is not given to the embalmers in Egypt,” says Herodotus, “until her body has begun to decay . . .”

Question follows question as in the mist and the dark, the British Fleet passes the French, barely seventy miles away.

THE EGYPT TOWARD
which Napoleon and his fleet are sailing is a land ruled by slaves.

As children they have been taken by force from remote villages in the Caucasus and raised by the Turks for one purpose and one purpose only: war.

With no past and no future—they may never marry or have children—they are trained night and day how to live on horseback, to wield their magnificent jeweled scimitars, to look death in the face without flinching; and while riding at full gallop, to bend down and, with one stroke, decapitate a bull held in place by their teacher. Such is their instruction in the art of war.