As he went farther with the Jacobins than it was pleasant to remember, so he probably went farther with the Mahometans than he cared to admit; for he certainly prevailed upon the priesthood to do that which was forbidden by the Koran unless he was a convert. They officially directed the people to obey him and pay him tribute. Nor is there any doubt that the leaders among the priests liked him well enough, personally, to watch over his personal safety. General Kléber, who succeeded him in command, neglected to pay the chiefs those attentions Napoleon had lavished upon them, and in turn they neglected him. To this, perhaps, his assassination was due.
Regarding Egypt as a colony to be developed, rather than a conquest to be despoiled, Napoleon devoted every attention to civil affairs. He reorganized the administration, conforming as nearly as possible to established customs. He set up a printing-press, established foundries and manufactories, planned storage dams and canals to add to the cultivable soil, organized an institute, and started a newspaper. He sent his savants abroad to dig, delve, excavate, explore, map the present and decipher the past of Egypt. Napoleon himself used his leisure in visiting historic places and making plans for the material progress of the benighted land. He discovered traces of the ancient canal connecting the Nile with the Red Sea, and formed the resolution of reopening it. He himself located the lines for new canals. He crossed the Red Sea ford which the Israelites used in fleeing from bondage, and, staying too long on the opposite shore, was caught by the rising tide, and came near meeting the fate of Pharaoh and his host. More self-possessed than Pharaoh, Napoleon halted when he realized his peril, caused his escort to form a circle around him, and each to ride outward. Those who found themselves going into deeper water drew back, followed those who had found fordable places; and, by this simple manœuvre, he deprived needy Christendom of a new text and a modern instance.
While on the farther shore Napoleon visited the Wells of Moses, and heard the petition of the monks of Sinai. At their request, he confirmed their privileges, and put his name to the charters which bore the signature of Saladin.
A terrible blow fell upon him in August when Nelson destroyed the French fleet in the famous battle of the Nile. There is doubt as to who was to blame for this calamity. Napoleon cast it upon Brueys, the French admiral who lost the battle; and Brueys, killed in the action, could not be heard in reply. He had drawn up his ships in semicircle so close to the shore that he considered himself comparatively safe, protected as he was by land batteries at the doubtful end of his line.
But Nelson, on the waters, was what Bonaparte was on land—the boldest of planners and the most desperate of fighters. He came up at sunset, and did not wait till morning, as Brueys expected. He went right to work, reconnoitred his enemy, conceived the idea of turning his line, getting in behind with some of his ships, and thus putting the French between two fires. The manœuvre was difficult and dangerous, but succeeded. Nelson rammed some of his ships in on the land side of the amazed Brueys, who had made no preparations for such a manœuvre. Caught between two terrible fires, Brueys was a lost man from the beginning. It was a night battle, awful beyond the power of description. When it ended next day, the English had practically obliterated the French fleet; Napoleon was cut off from Europe. When the news reached him, he was stunned, almost crushed; but rallying immediately, he wrote to Kléber, “The English will compel us to do greater things in Egypt than we had intended.”
Desaix conquered Upper Egypt; organized resistance to the invaders ceased for the time, and from the cataracts to the sea Napoleon held the valley down. The administration began to work smoothly, taxes seemed lighter because more equitably distributed, and the various enterprises Napoleon had set on foot began to show some life. He enrolled natives in his army, and formed a body of Mamelukes which afterward appeared so picturesquely in France. Two young Mamelukes, Roustan and Ibrahim, given him by one of the pachas, became his personal attendants, and served him faithfully till his power was broken in 1814.
The ruin of the fleet was not the only grief of Napoleon in the months which followed. Junot had acted the part of the candid friend, and had revealed to Napoleon the secret of Josephine’s infidelities. Captain Hypolite Charles had reappeared in the absence of the husband, and was now living with the wife at Malmaison. So openly was this connection kept up that the Director, Gohier, a friend of Josephine, advised her to divorce Napoleon and marry Charles. The first shock of Junot’s revelation threw Napoleon into a paroxism of wrath, then into a stupor of despair and dull disgust with everything. Then, by a reaction, natural, perhaps, to a man of his temperament, he threw himself into libertine excesses. Prior to this period his morals, considering the times and the temptations, had been remarkably pure. Henceforth he was occasionally to give himself a license which scandalized even the French officers. Scorning subterfuge and concealment, he became as bold as any born king, a rake by divine right, in the shamelessness of his amours. He appeared in public at Cairo with Madame Foures, his mistress, riding in the carriage by his side; and if Bourrienne tells the truth on Napoleon, and Carlyle tells no lie on Peter the Great, the one was about as obscene as the other while the lustful impulse prevailed.
CHAPTER XVII
Carefully as Napoleon had cultivated the native authorities, deferred to prejudice and custom, and maintained discipline, native opposition to French rule seems to have been intense. A revolt in Cairo took him by surprise. It had been preached from the minaret by the Muezzins in their daily calls to prayer. It broke out with sudden fury, and many Frenchmen were slaughtered in Cairo and the surrounding villages. Napoleon quelled it promptly and with awful severity. The insurrection, coming as it did upon the heels of all his attempts at conciliation, filled him with indignant resentment, and, in his retaliation, he left nothing undone to strike terror to the Arab soul. Insurgents were shot or beheaded without mercy. Donkey trains bearing sacks were driven to the public square, and the sacks being untied, human heads rolled out upon the ground—a ghastly warning to the on-looking natives. Such is war; such is conquest. The conquered must be tamed. Upon this principle acted the man of no religion, Napoleon, in Egypt, and the Christian soldier, Havelock, in Hindustan. The Christian Englishmen who put down the Indian mutiny were as deaf to humanity as was the Deist who quelled the revolt in Cairo. Like all the cruelty whose injury society really feels, the crime is in the system, not the individual. War is war; and as long as Christendom must have war to work out the mysterious ways of God, we must be content with the thorns as well as the fruits. If it be a part of the white man’s burden to exterminate black and brown and yellow races to clear the way for the thing we call Christian civilization, Napoleon’s course in Egypt was temperate and humane. Upon all his deeds a blessing might be asked by the preachers who incited the soldiers of America, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, in the wars of the year 1900; and the chaplains who went, on good salaries, to pray for those who shot down Filipinos, Chinamen, or even South African Boers could just as easily have given pious sanction to the murders-in-mass committed by Bonaparte.