What had they come to that accursed land for?—a land which had successively devoured all who tried to conquer it, since the days of Cambyses until the time of St. Louis. Had they come to found a colony? What was the good of leaving France, where the sun warmed a man without scorching him up,—France with its lovely forests, its fertile plains,—for this heaven of brass, this shadeless desert, these burning plains? Did Bonaparte want to shape a kingdom for himself in the East, after the fashion of the old Roman proconsuls? He might at least have asked his generals if they were willing to be the heads of this new satrapy. Such schemes might have succeeded with ancient armies composed of freed men and slaves, but not with the patriots of 1792, who were not the satellites of one man but soldiers belonging to a nation.
Were these recriminations simply murmurs wrung from them by their present hardships? Or were they already the undercurrent of rebellion against the ambitious spirit of the hero of the 18th Brumaire? Maybe those who took part in that gathering could not themselves have answered these queries. But they were repeated to Bonaparte as grave attacks upon his authority by a general who had been the loudest in his reproaches against the motives of the general-in-chief and the first to appreciate the good flavour of my father's melons.
Be that as it may, it was at Rhamanieh, beneath my father's tent, that there began that opposition to which Kléber gave so much strength and countenance.
On the 12th the flotilla reached Rosetta, under command of Perrée, chief of the division.
He was on board the Cerf.
Bonaparte put on board Perrée's ship a regular Institute of scientific men: Monge, Fourrier, Costa, Berthollet, Dolomieu, Tallien, etc.
They were to ascend the Nile parallel with the French army; their horses would help to complete a small body of cavalry.
We know how that flotilla was driven by the wind faster than the army could march, that it was attacked by the Turkish fleet and fired at from both banks of the Nile by the fellahs. Sussy, who later became comte de Sussy, took a leading part in the conduct of operations, and had his arm broken by a ball during the battle.
Bonaparte, hearing the firing of cannon, intervened just in time to save the fleet from utter destruction, reaching the scene of battle over the bodies of 4000 Mamelukes at Chebreis.
Eight days later, Bonaparte fought the battle of the Pyramids. Four days after the battle of the Pyramids—that is to say, on the 25th July, at four in the afternoon—Bonaparte made his entrance into Cairo.