The Linguist and the Emperor (11 page)

Within the first moments of the uneven battle, two French major generals are seriously wounded—an anomaly in French military history. A well-aimed rock hurled from the walls fells General Menou (whose soldiers surround and protect him), while General Kléber, directing operations at the base of the walls, is shot in the head and carried off the field.

The soldiers manage to scale the high walls and beat back the defenders, a mixed mob with more spirit than strategy. Another military history anomaly: French soldiers battling veiled women who wield knives and throw rocks with deadly aim. Still, it is not long before the defenders, outnumbered and outfought, flee in disorder to a medieval fort in the heart of the city—the thin strip of land dividing the eastern harbor from the western.

The fort holds out for that entire day, as Napoleon watches from a nearby height, giving orders and sucking on oranges, since no water can be found. Finally, as the moon rises over the sea, a group of soldiers use the beams from a ship as a battering ram and manage to breach the walls of the fort. Some defenders escape to sea on a fishing vessel, while the remainder are taken prisoner.

The battle continues underground: In the catacombs where, in antiquity, Alexander’s Greeks buried their dead, there is fierce fighting beside the sphinxes and winged gods. And in the ancient cisterns as well—a vast underground labyrinth used to collect rainwater. Beams of light shine through the deep shafts and from time to time dispel the shadows where men hide up to their waists in water, ready to die if only they can bring down an infidel with them—a desperate struggle that ends in a French victory.

The governor of the city surrenders, and Napoleon announces that the occupation of Alexandria will be a benevolent one. He hopes that the entire nation will hear of his magnanimity. He wants the people to rise up against the Mamelukes and welcome him as a liberator.

Despite his proclamations, there are violent incidents throughout that day and the next. As a soldier, Private Millet, recalls: “We thought that the city had surrendered when suddenly a volley of musketry was fired at us as we were passing by a mosque. A general who happened to be there [Adjutant General Boyer of the general staff] ordered us to force the gate and to spare no one we found inside. Men, women, and children were bayoneted.”

It is a brutal measure. Though Napoleon has not ordered it directly, he will take such measures again and again against the enemy, against his own soldiers in Europe, but especially here in Egypt where he seeks to dominate a country of two and a half million with thirty-eight thousand soldiers.

Are diseased prostitutes endangering the health of his troops? Sew them into sacks and throw them into the Nile—at least a few to serve as a warning!

Has a French doctor refused to treat plague-ridden soldiers? Dress him in a woman’s clothes and parade him through the streets. This causes a Frenchwoman, resenting the slur on her sex, to challenge Napoleon to a duel.

When an Egyptian woman is raped and murdered, two French soldiers seen nearby are executed without trial. Are they innocent? It turns out they are indeed. Well, they are martyrs in the great cause of order.

In his youth, Napoleon saw frenzied crowds break into Versailles and massacre the king’s Swiss guards, reverting to barbarism that would revolt the most hardened. He never forgot the spectacle of the unrestrained mob. If his orders are cruel, he would shrug, the cruelty is not wanton but in keeping with military and political necessity as he perceives them. In such matters, only severity succeeds, and for Napoleon success is the ultimate good.

There are two dangers in considering such acts in the twenty-first century. The first is not putting Napoleon in his nineteenth century context, in the heroic historical tradition in which he saw himself.

That is, of forgetting that Beethoven dedicated the
Eroica
to Napoleon in an outpouring of admiration (a dedication he “retracted” for political not moral reasons—being incensed on learning that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor); of forgetting that for Goethe, Napoleon’s spell was never broken; that for Hegel, Napoleon was
the
spirit of the times and that, for the youth of the nineteenth century, Napoleon was the supreme example of the heroic and the sublime.

They saw in Napoleon not the man who could order prostitutes sewn into a sack but the patron of the arts and sciences, the reformer who preferred merit over birth, the Prometheus struggling to create a new world order. He is the conqueror who gallops through the desert, ascertaining the practicability of reviving a canal built by the pharaohs as one of his many measures to revitalize the desperately poor, oppressed, stagnant land. This canal would finally be built later on in the century by a Frenchman and with French finance; for Napoleon’s ideas will forever leave their mark on Egypt. In fact, it is especially after the French leave that the full force of his influence is felt.

It is generally reported in contemporary accounts, in the
Courier d’Egypte,
for example, the newspaper established by the French in Egypt, that when the Rosetta stone was discovered, when a soldier, swinging his pickax, hit against something hard—a stone covered with writing in both Egyptian and Greek—“the significance of the find was immediately recognized.”

But if this was so, if the men toiling in the heat and the dust did not simply ignore the heavy stone with its curious writing—it weighed three quarters of a ton—if they did not simply seek to finish up their work and seize whatever pleasures they could find, that was because of one man, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had from the first insisted on the dual purpose of this conquest: learning as well as power. And his exhortations had so permeated the consciousness of the entire French force—from the most distinguished savant to the youngest drummer boy—as to make the discovery of the stone an event of wonder among the men.

Could the men who came after Napoleon have inspired that? The dull, gouty Louis XVIII, placed on the throne by France’s enemies? Or the brother who followed, Charles X, a man with even fewer ideas, a small, vengeful spirit, and a passion only for court etiquette?

Yet still there are the
crimes—
there is no other name for them: a long, long list. Goya’s painting
The Second of May
is by itself enough to make one feel their horror and inhumanity: the immediacy of the scene Goya paints, the beauty and innocence of the faces, the wild-eyed yearning for life of the victims standing before French executioners. Once you see Napoleon’s victims, it is impossible to forget them.

When that other great French statesmen, Cardinal Richelieu, died a century earlier, the pope at that time, a Barberini, Urban VIII, remarked while crossing himself: “If there is a God, Richelieu has much to answer for. But if not
—if not—
” he shrugged with a smile, “then he led a successful life.”

Napoleon was too much of a romantic to be content with such a cynical epitaph, with such acceptance of the world as it is. He might sometimes affect a world-weary pose, but it does not encompass the full complexity of the man. He strove, always, from first to last, to re-create the world: to impose a glorious ideal on a resisting humanity! If he was cruel, it was the cruelty of idealism.

No, Pope Urban’s epitaph did not fit him, he would have insisted, throwing his great achievements onto the scales, balancing them against the crimes and barbarities of war. This is the second danger in considering Napoleon: placing him in the heroic historical tradition in which he saw himself, ignoring the old saw:
Never take a man at his own valuation.

Napoleon had himself portrayed in a hundred different romantic paintings. In one, he crosses the Alps on a magnificent white horse instead of the donkey we know he rode and from which, moreover, we know he slipped more than once. Just so, he would have conjured up the words of one romantic poet or another to excuse his terrible crimes. Can much suffering be laid to his door? Well, then, “the cut worm forgives the plow.”

It is a defense, indeed.

But
caveat
emptor!
Let the buyer beware! For as La Rochefoucauld reminds us: “Language was given to human beings that they might conceal their thoughts from others.”

And even from themselves,
we might add, especially when talking of that sacred monster, Napoleon Bonaparte.

ON THE SECOND
day of Napoleon’s occupation of Alexandria, the public baths are closed so that the French soldiers might do their laundry. They crowd into the crumbling building raised three centuries before as an act of piety. Beneath Quait Bey’s high medieval domes, under carved arches, cusped and foliate and stalactiform, the Frenchmen toss their lice-ridden clothes into huge boiling cauldrons, their cursing and laughter echoing off the stone walls.

Among the many sketches by the artist Denon is one of the medieval bathhouse. He also draws the sagging quays of the harbor, and the shuttered houses of the deserted streets. He even manages to capture “the universal silence and sadness” that he writes about in his journal.

As always, he is conscientious and hardworking when recording what he sees. For as an artist Denon has the technique that may be acquired in an academy, but none of the inspiration which cannot be taught. At fifty-one, he is a brilliant dilettante with a talent for living and an ability to laugh at fortune and its reversals.

In his youth, he had aspired to be a diplomat and was attached to the French embassy first in Switzerland, then Italy, then Russia. His good looks and charm caught the attention of Catherine the Great. Whether he also won the all-important approval of her “tester,” Countess Bruce, is not recorded.

Denon is a playwright and a raconteur. His short story
Le Pointe de Lendemain
(
The Sting of the Morning After
) won Balzac’s praise as “a school for married men.” He is also something of a pornographer: the etchings in his
Oeuvre Priapique
can be called nothing else. His eroticism finally gets him into trouble: as a lover of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame Pompadour, he becomes the official caretaker of her antique gems. It is an appointment that would have cost Denon his life during the Terror, if the great artist David had not saved him.

The kindness is uncharacteristic of David. The politically astute David had managed to become not only a member of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety but, for two weeks, its president. During this time he feverishly condemns everyone: fellow artists and former patrons alike. Over four hundred death sentences bearing David’s signature survive, perhaps most tragically, one for the gifted young poet Andrea Chénier, who goes to the scaffold cursing the cruel artist.

It is a mystery then why David—the creator of severe, neoclassical paintings such as
The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons
and
The Oath of the Horatti,
examples of Roman courage meant to inspire the revolutionary youth—would stoop to save an artist such as Denon. A dilettante still working in the frivolous prerevolutionary fashion, Denon’s ideals were
Cupid Stealing a Nightgown from a Sleeping Maiden
and
The Swing,
a painting in which a husband pushes his wife on a swing while her lover, hidden in the bushes, peeks up her skirts.

With a few cruel strokes of his pen, David is able to capture Marie Antoinette on the way to the guillotine: hands tied behind her, back straight, features ugly with suffering as she stares ahead with unseeing pride. The sketch is characteristic of David. If Denon had drawn it, it would have been his nature to choose the trivial moment just before Antoinette enters the executioner’s tumbrel: to draw her as she calls for her favorite plum-colored shoes and squats to pee next to a wall. Such is the difference between the two artists.

For whatever reason, David saves Denon, having his name taken off the list of the expatriates, a euphemism for the condemned, and putting the artistic ex-lover of Madame Pompadour to work designing uniforms for the revolutionary guard.

This is done with Denon’s usual verve and style. He has talent, though not genius. He never created great epic canvasses for Napoleon like David’s, never achieved the daring of David’s
The Death of Marat
or the intensity of David’s self-portraits. Denon’s self-portrait, though irresistible for its joie de vivre, is all surface. A lesser artist but a better man than David, Denon’s achievement will be of a different kind.

During his stay in Egypt he will tirelessly, heroically produce thousands of accurate sketches under the most difficult circumstances, drawing unknown temples and forgotten ruins, recording wall after wall of hieroglyphs. These will be of crucial importance for the new discipline being born.

Accompanying the army six hundred miles into southern Egypt, he endures thirst, hunger, scorching heat, and the fatigue of forced marches—hardships which overcome many a younger man.

Undeterred by danger, time and again he will remain behind after his comrades leave to finish a drawing, sometimes escaping death by the skin of his teeth. The unevenness of one sketch, he explained, was due to a shoot-out with a marauder who had suddenly appeared in the desert. Another time, during one of the innumerable desert skirmishes, he risks his life to save that of a black child, mutilated and left to die on the steps of an ancient temple. He will adopt this boy and eventually bring him back to France.

Denon has courage and a devil-may-care attitude. The insouciance that brings him to Egypt in the first place then gets him into a hundred-and-one scrapes . . . starting from the very beginning, from that hot bright day in July (laundry day in the army) when, hearing that his ship, the
Juno,
is anchored offshore, he decides to row out and retrieve a change of clothes and his belongings.

Since soundings of the harbor have not yet been taken, a process requiring some two weeks, no one knows whether the water is deep enough to accommodate the heavy ships, so the fleet lies exposed at Abukir Bay, some twenty miles to the east. Denon sets out in search of the skiff or rowboat that he’ll need, and perhaps a companion to go with him, first stopping off at headquarters to see what can be found.