By Baron Gros (Face Page 208)
The celebrated picture ‘Les Pestiférés de Jaffa’ by Baron Gros, now in the Louvre, has been the subject of much acrimonious controversy. The picture was ordered by Napoleon when First Consul, and excited extravagant enthusiasm on its exhibition in the Salon in 1804. Artists placed a palm-branch over it, and the public covered the whole frame with wreaths. It is, in fact, a large unattractive canvas, devoid of any exceptional merit either of composition or colour. It shows Napoleon accompanied by some of his staff standing among the plague-stricken soldiers in the interior of a mosque. One of the men is raising his right arm, so as to expose the bubo in his armpit, and Napoleon is laying his fingers on it.
There is also in existence a rough sketch,[196] which shows that Gros at the outset intended to present his subject differently. Napoleon, like St. Louis in the modern fresco in St. Sulpice, holds in his arms the body of a plague victim, which an Arab helps him to support. The general’s impassive features contrast strongly with the frightened appearance of his attendants.
Each of these two representations would seem to be actual historical occurrences during Napoleon’s campaign in Syria. Plague had broken out among the troops in Jaffa, where Napoleon had established a large hospital, and the generals had issued an alarming report as to its spread. It was Napoleon’s purpose to restore the moral of his army, which had been seriously affected by the outbreak. Norvin[197] represents Napoleon as visiting all the wards, accompanied by the generals Berthier and Bezzières, the director-general Daure, and the head doctor Desgenettes. Napoleon spoke to the sick, encouraged them, and touched their wounds, saying, ‘You see, it is nothing.’ When he left the hospital, they blamed his imprudence. He replied coldly, ‘It is my duty, I am the general-in-chief.’ This studied indifference to the contagion, coupled with the fine behaviour of the head doctor Desgenettes, who inoculated himself with plague in the presence of the soldiers and applied to himself the same remedies as he prescribed for them, successfully accomplished Napoleon’s purpose. The account of the incident given in a letter[198] by Comte d’Aure is slightly different. It runs, ‘He did more than touch the buboes: assisted by a Turkish orderly, General Buonaparte picked up and carried away a plague patient, who was lying across a doorway of one of the wards: we were much frightened at his acting thus, because the sick man’s clothing was covered with foam and the disgusting discharge from a broken bubo. The general continued his visit unmoved and interested, spoke to the sick, and sought in addressing them with words of consolation, to dissipate the panic that the plague was casting on their spirits.’ Bourrienne,[199] Napoleon’s secretary, however, says, ‘I walked by the general’s side, and I assert that I never saw him touch any of the infected.’
The Duc de Rovigo in his Memoirs practically corroborates the Comte d’Aure. He says: ‘In order to convince them by the most obvious proof that their apprehensions were groundless, he desired that the bleeding tumour of one of his soldiers should be uncovered before him, and pressed it with his own hands.’ Desgenettes and General Andréossy, who were both present, confirm Rovigo and Comte d’Aure as against Bourrienne.
Napoleon’s secretary carries the narrative a stage further. He says that only sixty of those in the hospital had plague, and that as their removal involved a risk of infecting the whole army, Napoleon deliberated with his staff and the medical men, and decided to put them out of their misery by poison. Bourrienne says that he does not know who administered the poison, but that there was no question of their destruction. Bourrienne’s statements on any subject, as is generally recognized, need careful sifting, but out of the mass of conflicting testimony the plain fact would seem to emerge, that Napoleon did suggest that the death of some seven or eight, who were bound to die, should be accelerated, so that they might not infect the whole army. Napoleon himself, at St. Helena, did not deny this, and defended his action on the ground of humanity, stigmatizing the story of wholesale poisoning as an invention.
APPENDIX[200]
The statement of Thucydides, that all other diseases took on the similitude of the dominating pestilence, is one that reappears constantly in the literature of epidemic disease. We have already noted the frequent concurrence of plague and typhus, leading such acute observers as Diemerbroeck and Sydenham to believe that the one disease might be transformed into the other. The same close association of relapsing fever and typhus was constantly noted, and we know now that the explanation lies in the fact that each disease is transmitted by the body-louse, as plague is transmitted by the flea. Bearing in mind the close and constant association of these and other acute infectious fevers it is no matter for surprise that they should have been regarded as states and stages of one pestilential process, differing from one another, not in kind, but only in degree. As Bacon says, ‘putrefaction rises not to its height at once.’