[CHAPTER XVII]
WHEREIN WE SEE THAT BONAPARTE'S PRESENTIMENTS DID NOT DECEIVE HIM
The French arrived at Jaffa on the 24th. They stayed there the 25th, 26th, 27th and 28th. Jaffa was indeed a city of misfortune for Bonaparte.
The reader will remember the four thousand prisoners whom Croisier and Eugene de Beauharnais had taken, who could neither be fed, nor sent to Cairo, and who had to be, and were, shot.
A graver and still more lamentable necessity awaited Bonaparte on his return. There was a hospital at Jaffa for plague-stricken patients. There is a fine picture by Gros, at the Musée, which portrays Bonaparte in the act of touching the plague stricken at Jaffa. The picture is none the less beautiful because it represents an occurrence which did not take place.
Here is what M. Thiers says. We who are only petty novelists are sorry to find ourselves again in opposition to that giant among historians. It is the author of "The Revolution," of "The Consulate and the Empire" who is speaking.
When he reached Jaffa, Bonaparte blew up the fortifications. There was a hospital there for plague-stricken patients. It would have been impossible to carry them away. They would have been exposed to inevitable death had they been left where they were, either from sickness, hunger or the cruelty of the enemy. Therefore Bonaparte told Dr. Desgenettes that it would be much more humane to give them opium than to allow them to live; to which the doctor made the much-lauded reply: "My trade is to cure, not to kill." The opium was not administered, and this occurrence served to propagate an outrageous slander which has now been refuted.
I humbly beg M. Thiers's pardon, but this reply credited to Desgenettes, whom I knew as well as I did Larrey and all of the "Egyptians"—I mean my father's companions in the great expedition—is as apocryphal as that of Cambronne.
God forbid that I should slander (that is the word which M. Thiers used) the man who illuminated the first half of the nineteenth century with the torch of his glory; and when we come to Pichegru and the Duc d'Enghien, the reader will see whether I simply repeat infamous echoes.