The wounded man was leaning on the shoulder of the Goddess of Reason. Behind them came the two hundred men whom Bonaparte had thought lost.
"Ah, my good friend," he said, pressing Roland's hand, "I was mourning for you. I thought you were lost. How the devil did you get out of it?"
"Raimbaud will tell you," said Roland, who was in a bad humor because he owed his life to an Englishman; "I am too thirsty to talk, I want something to drink."
And taking a glass full of water, which was standing upon the table, he emptied it at a single draught, while Bonaparte went out to meet the soldiers, all the more delighted to see them since he had never expected to do so again.
[CHAPTER XV]
VANISHED DREAMS
Napoleon, speaking of Saint-Jean-d'Acre at Saint Helena, said: "That paltry town held the destiny of the East. If Saint-Jean-d'Acre had fallen, I would have changed the face of the world."
This regret, expressed some twenty years later, gives an idea of the poignancy of what Bonaparte must have suffered at the time, when he realized the impossibility of taking Saint-Jean-d'Acre, and published the following order in all the divisions of the army.