Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

  Young, without any Coptic, and calling it ‘the amusement of a few leisure hours’ really broke the back of translating hieroglyphics – and it was very impressive compared to the fourteen years Champollion had so far wasted.

  Young worked out that the encircled characters, or cartouches, were real names and that the hieroglyphs had phonetic values, and he got most of these right for the hieroglyphs he translated – such as those for ‘Ptolemy’ and ‘Berenice’. Unfortunately his knowledge of Chinese undid him. In Chinese, foreign words and names are spelt phonetically; the rest are represented by pictogram characters. And in Chinese a special mark, similar to the encircling of a name cartouche in hieroglyphics, indicates a foreign word. Young gave up the struggle, and moved his butterfly mind to something else – publishing his findings in the 1819 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  Which Champollion most surely must have read, though he never acknowledged his debt to Young – who in the true, even-handed and rational spirit of academe denounced Champollion’s work as error prone, misguided and plain wrong. Translation: I want a name-check please.

  Armed with Young’s insights Champollion broke new ground. He studied hieroglyphs from older times with cartouches that could not have been foreign. His huge breakthrough (which occasioned another fainting fit) was to work out that the symbol O which looked like the sun (as in Chinese, which was helpful this time) might be pronounced Ra, as this was the Coptic word for ‘sun’. This gave him Ramses – the name of the greatest Pharaohs in ancient Egypt. From then on, using Coptic and cryptic analysis, he worked out in two years the whole hieroglyphic language.

  The fact that Coptic was written using Greek characters plus four demotic characters for sounds not in Greek must surely have been a big clue that demotic and Coptic were very similar. And since demotic was demonstrably a simpler version of hieroglyphics, why did it take so long for a supposed fluent speaker of Coptic to work out the connection? Young took a few hours and Champollion many years to arrive at similar conclusions. It was only when Champollion used Coptic that real progress was made. I suspect that he learned his Coptic rather later than he claimed, perhaps after he had read Ibn Wahshiya’s ground-breaking ninth-century text.

  12 • Battle of the Nile deux

  Evil neighbours hold against each other the number of times the spade was borrowed. Nubian proverb

  Not another battle! Since we have, in a kind of Borgesian conceit, decided that the only real result of Napoleon’s invasion was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, it seems a little much to have another battle of the Nile. But this is a book of bloody encounters, so perforce we must tell the tale. Those who don’t like descriptions of fire and cannonade, skip to the next section.

  Nelson may have effectively sealed the fate of the French expedition to Egypt almost before the invasion had really begun. But that did not mean Napoleon couldn’t turn the tables later. Indeed he very nearly succeeded in breaking out of the Middle East during his Syrian campaign. If he had, it might have been a French Empire in India, not a British one.

  But before he could do this there was another battle of the Nile to be fought. Napoleon was advancing on Cairo from Alexandria and it was decided by the ruling Ottoman elite that a stand should be made on the Nile on the west bank opposite Bulaq in central Cairo. Yes, we forget that though he was fighting the British, or they were fighting him, Egypt was under Ottoman rule, or rather Mamluk rule under Ottoman dispensation. Napoleon had to beat the Turkish Egyptian forces first.

  Meanwhile the rest of the French army were marauding their way up the side of the Nile from the delta. At every village and town they met opposition. In one hamlet an aide-de-camp got too far ahead of the supporting troops. A woman carrying a baby in her arms, perhaps to distract attention, got close enough to put both his eyes out with a pair of dressmaking shears she had concealed beneath her veil. General Berthier was so incensed by this display of cunning that he had her shot on the spot, the baby handed to a bewildered peasant bystander.

  One of Napoleon’s tenets of invasion, and how he managed to run such enormous armies, was the principle that soldiers must feed themselves by living off the land they passed through, or by taxing the food of the native land they were invading. Either way his principle was never to pay unless it was expedient to do so. In the early part of the campaign it was easier to buy wheat than steal it, though in one village an army storekeeper and his servant were attacked by Egyptian Bedouin who burned their bodies, having tied them to a tree. A furious Napoleon, rather in the manner of the Nazis at Oradour in his native France 140 years later, ordered that the whole village be razed and the people executed by shooting or the sword. It was especially irrational as the fellahin villagers would have seen themselves as different to, and not responsible for, the action of the nomadic Bedouin.

  When a priest attached to the army was asked to look at some manuscripts cached in a pigeon loft he pronounced them ‘books of magic’. This may have been the case, as such things did exist, but his subsequent order to torch the lot was hardly in keeping with Napoleon’s stated mission to learn everything he could about this strange land.

  Naturally such behaviour was deeply unpopular with the Egyptian fellahin, a people notorious for their obstinacy and close guardianship of their land and its produce. In any case, when they did try to trade, the French often found their money useless, and they had no Egyptian money yet, but quickly discovered that the buttons on their uniforms were preferable to coins. The notion spread and soon every soldier had denuded his coat of buttons. François Bernoyer, the former tailor turned quartermaster, wrote that it was with some disappointment that only the uniforms of artillerymen and carabiniers yielded acceptable currency; these had polished brass and copper buttons, while the chasseurs and infantrymen had wood.

  By the time the army reached Cairo in July 1798 their uniforms were so ragged, and so unacceptably hot, that Napoleon ordered Bernoyer to distribute a new uniform made of cotton: an indigo habit-veste that buttoned straight down the front and unbleached linen trousers, dyed blue for the infantry. In September cotton greatcoats were also issued in anticipation of cooler nights ahead. Everything was made by local craftsmen, including a novel headdress – a peaked helmet made of sheep’s hide dyed black with folding flaps to protect the ears and neck – later to be made popular by the Foreign Legion. On top of this rather warm headgear was a woollen crest dyed in different colours for each brigade. When the army went to Syria these hats came into their own as protection against the cold mountain winds.

  The French army was deployed along the western bank of the river while the river boats fought the decisive part of the action midstream. Things were going against the French. Rear Admiral Perrée, chief of the flotilla, reported that ‘The Turks were doing more harm than we were doing them . . . our ammunition would soon be exhausted.’ The army was still too far inland to be of much help. The Turks, or Ottoman Egyptians, wrote Bourrienne, seized the most powerful of the French brigs and ‘massacred the crews before our eyes. And with barbarous ferocity showed us the heads of the fallen men.’ Perrée sent a message to Napoleon begging for help. That moment, in a stroke of luck of the kind enjoyed by the young Bonaparte, the sail of the Turkish flagship commanded by Commodore Kürdlü caught fire. The generous fore and aft mainsail rippled with flame, fragments of burning shrouds even setting fire to Nileside palm trees. The fire reached the main magazine and a double boom of immense volume, followed by a veritable water-spout, signified that the main magazine, stuffed full of gunpowder, had detonated – killing all the crew and the Commodore himself. This was a great psychological blow to the Turks, who had rallied and were gaining at that moment. In confusion they lessened their attack and took stock of the situation.

  At the moment of this accidental hiatus Napoleon’s land-based troops arrived after their long wearying journey from the sea. Forsaking a pincer action that would have captured all the Mamluk slave troops, Bonaparte drove straight towards the Nile to save hi
s flotilla. When the Turkish sailors saw the advancing army they upped anchor and departed hastily across the river to Cairo. The defeat was decisive – it was only a matter of days before the whole occupying army of Mamluk slaves and Ottoman Turkish beys, who had controlled Egypt since 1517 (the Mamluks serving various leaders since the ninth century), would be ousted by the twenty-nine-year-old Frenchman.

  13 • The end of the affair

  Truth, even a snake comes to it. Egyptian proverb

  The effect of the French occupation on the women of Cairo was evident first of all in the clothes they wore. It was reported at the time, ‘The French would bring out Muslim women and girls barefaced in the streets and it became widely known that wine was being drunk and sold to the troops.’ The outrage was a little misplaced. Certainly women were throwing aside the veil, but early nineteenth-century Cairo was no hotbed of virtue even before the French arrived. According to the contemporary commentator Al-Jabarti, Frenchmen sought to please their women and avoided contradicting them even if the women cursed or struck them. No doubt he was annoyed to see local women walking and laughing in the streets protected by French soldiers. Even more disgruntled, he adds, ‘women order and forbid, laying down the law’. Cairo, known for centuries as a pleasure town, a reputation it still enjoys today among visitors from the Gulf, was in some ways in the position of Thailand during the Vietnam War: a local culture of prostitution fanned into something of an epidemic through the presence of so many French soldiers. Niello Sargy wrote that he was surprised how few brawls took place, ‘despite the whoring that went on’. Close to Bonaparte’s lodgings in the Alfi Bey palace, drunken French soldiers broke into a harem, the non-public part of a house. An officer went to break up the mayhem as ‘already a great number of inhabitants had assembled before that mansion expressing loudly their indignation’. Inside he discovered ‘soldiers of different regiments giving themselves over to all the excess and brutality that a long privation could, while not excusing it, at least allow us to understand’. The soldiers were chased from the mansion, but even so the gang rape of the odalisques, or concubines, provoked a large public demonstration.

  The problem was that prostitution in Cairo had become something of an art form, with the woman performing music, dancing and generally taking as long as the man desired. This style of courtesanship continued after the French had left, a style followed by such famous characters as Kuchuk Hanem, with whom, fifty years later, the novelist Gustave Flaubert was much smitten. But for the time being things became rough and ugly. The printer and savant Antoine Galland remarked, ‘One saw girls of twelve putting themselves, completely nude, in the middle of a square for a few coins.’

  Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, Pauline Fourès’ husband had been despatched down the Nile to get him out of the way. Lieutenant Fourès got as far as the port at Rosetta but then went AWOL, returning to plead with his wife. Arriving at night in the darkened city he made his way to the civilian quartermaster Bernoyer’s house. He was distraught to find that his wife had moved in with Bonaparte and was living in an apartment next door to his. The amiable Bernoyer, touched by the man’s distress, offered to speak with one of Pauline’s friends the next morning. The mission was a failure: Pauline refused to meet her husband, saying that all bonds between them had been broken – as she had predicted – by his overweening ambition. The end of their relationship was all his fault, she said; again and again he had refused to listen to her. Fourès, on receiving this news, became hysterical. Bernoyer had to restrain him from bursting in on her private apartment. He sent a message saying that Lieutenant Fourès was capable of anything – even suicide. Pauline sent by return a dry riposte: ‘Calm down. I know my husband well enough to be certain he will not cause a scandal, nor will he commit any crime. He cherishes life too much to sacrifice it so lightly . . . he should return to his post as soon as possible, since you know that Bonaparte wants to be obeyed’ – and here there was a hint of threat – ‘especially when his orders concern service to his army.’

  Bernoyer tried to encourage him by suggesting that back in France there were many more women he could find to replace the unfaithful Pauline. Fourès was not convinced; but, broken and slinking back to the port like a low cur, he waited to hear from his leader and usurper Napoleon Bonaparte. Perhaps Pauline had mentioned something, but Napoleon himself issued the orders for Fourès, instructing him to visit Malta, Italy and then Paris, where he was to deliver some papers to Paul Barras. This must have been his own wry way of getting his own back: Barras had cuckolded him with Josephine. But there was a reward, too, in the arrangement; he asked Fourès to pick up papers and newspapers from his brother Joseph Bonaparte – a very useful contact to be offered. And the payoff – not a few silver coins but 3,000 francs ‘to defer expenses’.

  With Fourès out of the picture, the affair took off. Pauline was seen covered in jewels and sumptuous clothing. She took to wearing Bonaparte’s clothing, even his uniform – or else Bernoyer supplied her with one that was identical: a blue coat with a high collar embroidered with red and gold, lapels generously decorated with gold oak leaves, a black cravat over a white cretonne shirt, voluminous red sash tied gaily at one side, white riding jodhpurs and turned-over riding boots. She created quite a sensation. On her head she displayed her milliner’s skill by tying a tricolore sash into a fabulous bonnet. The troops called her ‘La Générale’ or ‘Clioupatre’. Instead of her husband getting a promotion and a new uniform (and there is no evidence from the records that he ever advanced higher than lieutenant), it was Pauline herself who was promoted. She rode an Arab stallion outfitted for her sole use and was accompanied by Bonaparte’s aides-de-camp. One of these was Josephine’s son, who understandably was a little put out at the way his stepfather was behaving. His annoyance reached a pitch when he was forced to ride behind a coach containing Pauline and Bonaparte as they went for an evening ride. ‘Not able any longer to bear the humiliation, I went to General Berthier to ask that I be transferred to a regiment. A rather lively scene passed between my stepfather and me as a result of that action; but he ceased at that moment his rides in the coach with that lady.’ Bonaparte may have retreated but he did not give up. He and Pauline were set on conceiving a child; had it happened, he would almost certainly have divorced Josephine.

  But no child was forthcoming. Fourès now returned to the scene. There is some confusion about whether he made it to France or not. In one story his ship is intercepted by the English who, discovering the transparent flimsiness of his mission, unearth the fact that they have Napoleon’s lover’s husband on board. To confuse the great conqueror further, they sent Fourès back to Egypt. Whatever the truth, on his return Fourès was put in a rage when he discovered just how far his wife had gone, from a shy and retiring hat maker to the talk of the town. He demanded to see her and told all who would listen that he would take a sabot (a clog from her native Pyrenees region) to her comely backside. Pauline was not intimidated: she demanded a divorce ‘to protect myself against his brutality’. In eight days, thanks to Sartelon, Napoleon’s commissionaire in Egypt, the marriage was dissolved.

  Pauline blossomed as a mistress of the salon. Her picnics at the Pyramids, site of Napoleon’s great victory the previous year over the Mamluk army, were the gayest and most eagerly attended gatherings. She took tuition in that native lute-like instrument the oud and, by all accounts, was most proficient. She also learnt the harp, its calming tones so welcome to Napoleon, whose victory in Egypt was gradually looking like stagnation. Blockaded by the British, unable to defeat the Ottomans in Syria, he received word that France was itself in a dangerously vulnerable state. Telling Pauline that he was simply going ‘up the delta’ for a few days, he did a midnight flit back to Paris. The man who would conquer Europe and burn Moscow was too afraid of his girlfriend to tell her he was leaving her. He did write a letter explaining things, and Pauline, with her instinct for survival, installed herself as the mistress of Napoleon’s successor in
Egypt, General Kléber. She is said to have grown skilled at telling false diamonds from the real. When offered a diamond she would, and this must have been hard to carry off with style, let a drop of water fall on to its surface and move it around with a hat pin. If the gem was glass or paste the water spread, if a real diamond it remained as a globule.

  Pauline returned to France in 1800, shortly before the French gave up their occupation of Egypt. In 1801 she married a well-placed retired officer, Henry de Ranchoup, a marriage secured through Napoleon’s advice to Ranchoup. She never again met Bonaparte, except once, at a ball, in 1811, a year after he finally divorced Josephine and married Marie Louise of Austria. Probably he and Pauline did not dance on that occasion.

  As a wedding present Ranchoup was given the consulship in Santander and in 1810 he was sent to Sweden. Pauline stayed in Paris, becoming one of the great salon hostesses of the time. She painted, played the harp and wrote three novels: Lord Wenworth (1813), Aloïze de Mespres (1814) and then, after a long gap – coincident with Napo leon’s defeat and exile and death – Une Châtelaine du XIIème Siècle (1834). Of the 112 works in Napoleon’s library on St Helena there were no novels by his former mistress.

  Ranchoup died in 1826. To restore her fortunes Pauline went to Brazil to start a venture buying tropical hardwoods in partnership with a retired Imperial Guards officer. She succeeded, and in 1837 returned to France to live a rich and eccentric later life. She took up smoking, was notorious for bringing her lapdog into church and kept, in her orangerie, a troop of small monkeys. She died aged ninety-one, in 1869, the year the Suez Canal, the work of another Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, was finally opened.

  I went searching for the palace of Alfi Bey and the apartment occupied by Pauline Fourès. It was in the Ezbekiya neighbourhood, a place now known for its enormous outdoor second-hand book market. Of the palace nothing remains – though the name lives on in the traditional restaurant Alfi Bey’s, which is to be found in Alfy Street just opposite the raunchy bellydancing club the New Arizona. A little bit further along is one of my favourite hostelries, the Windsor Hotel bar; I popped in to drink to the extraordinary career of Napoleon’s Cairo mistress Pauline Fourès.