The Linguist and the Emperor

by Daniel Meyerson

  But what she does not take into account is the entire Bonaparte clan. They hate her. His brothers and sisters and his mother have remained in France and are watching out for the family’s honor in true Italian style . . . though, finally, it is from a friend that he will learn of the scandal.

  When he does, he weeps and rages. For a while, he is almost out of his mind with grief. He clutches Josephine’s sixteen-year-old son to him, whom he has made an aide-de-camp, ranting through the night to him about his beautiful, mercenary, sensual, faithless mother whose heavy rose perfume he always disliked and whose simplest gesture displayed more grace than that of any other woman he had ever known.

  Cursing Josephine and her lover and love itself, he writes a despairing letter to his brother declaring that life no longer has meaning for him. “My passion for glory is gone. I am sick of humanity. I have no more reason to live. At twenty-nine years of age, I am worn out.” The letter is intercepted on the Mediterranean by the British and published in the London newspapers.

  While it arouses spiteful laughter from one end of Europe to the other, it is impossible to read it without feeling his pain. It is as far from a “literary” letter as it is possible to be: the unpremeditated cri du coeur of a man who will never again be romantically vulnerable. Women will be told to be in his bed, undressed, by such and such an hour when he will either appear or not, depending on his mood.

  At this moment, though, he resembles nothing more than one of the crucified cupids in some Roman temple to Isis. At this moment, he cannot imagine the future or see himself ever reconciled to Josephine. He cannot conceive of the future Napoleon who will eagerly drag Josephine’s successor to his bed, an eighteen-year-old Austrian archduchess, sleeping with her even before the marriage ceremonies. At this moment he would be shocked by the Emperor Napoleon-to-be who will dress up as a maid and playfully serve the famous Parisian courtesan Mademoiselle George breakfast after a night of pleasure. Now the innocence and devotion of the Polish beauty Countess Walewska is unthought of. At this moment when his heart is breaking, what is the metaphor which comes to his mind? Troy! “It is Troy again . . .” In the depths of despair—Agamemnon!—in the outpouring of his disillusion, he invokes ancient warriors returning to faithless wives.

  For him, these figures from history are desert mirages: approached too closely, they recede and finally disappear, leaving their pursuer clutching the air. How much of what Napoleon sees in them is what he wants to see, what he needs to see? For what are they, these historical names that give him strength, that form and console and inspire and in the end destroy him?

  This Napoleon cannot allow himself to ask as he marches toward Alexandria on that stormy night in July—no more than Alexander the Great, that other young conqueror of Egypt, whose example obsessed Napoleon during the Egyptian campaign, could allow it to be asked two thousand years before. For during a furious drunken argument, when one of Alexander’s companions, Clitus, a man who had fought side by side with Alexander through many battles (even having saved Alexander’s life), shouts out damning words as friends tried to drag him away: “Kings steal the glory won by the blood of others!,” a line from Euripides, Alexander runs him through with his sword.

  It is a revealing moment in the psychological transformation of a “man of destiny” from any age, Alexander’s, Napoleon’s, or our own. And though one death more or less in the great struggle for the conquest of the world would not seem to matter so very much in the vast ebb and flow of history, the ancient historians (Arrian and Plutarch and Kleitarchos and Curtius) all dwell on it. It signals a crisis. It is the moment when Alexander is changed from what he was previously.

  Gone is the Alexander who had reproached his court poet for boiling eels during the campaign—“Do you think, Cleisthenes, that Homer boiled eels while Agamemnon performed his great deeds?”—and who could laugh at the answer: “And do you think, O King, that Agamemnon looked into Homer’s tent to see whether he boiled eels?”

  After Egypt, Alexander is for better and for worse, a god, troubled only by his need for sleep and sexual intercourse—both of which, he said, reminded him of death.

  Even in the days of its degradation, this divinity is felt in the city Alexander founds on the shores of the Mediterranean. As dawn breaks over the desert and Napoleon and his savants approach the ancient port they are filled with a sense of momentousness, of historical gravity, even though the Alexandria which had once dazzled the world is no longer there.

  Decayed and dusty, it is barely a city, its population decimated by yearly outbreaks of the plague and famine, now numbering less than seven thousand souls. Two thousand years earlier, three hundred thousand lived in the city proper and another seven hundred thousand in the area outside its walls. Its unpaved streets are strewn with filth and roamed by beggars and barefoot street urchins. Its palaces, libraries, temples have vanished. Even their ruins are gone, the very stones sunk beneath the earth or carted away. This Alexandria greets Napoleon’s eye.

  The Mamelukes have left the port to fend for itself, instead making Cairo their base. It is not a regular army the French face when they arrive, but a crowd of ragged, desperate men, women, and children who look down on them from the city’s only defense: ancient stone walls, weakened by time and neglect, though still rising forty feet.

  There is a long prologue to the assault. While Napoleon takes his time disposing his troops, crying kites circle overhead and the sun emerges in its full force, driving the weary and hungry soldiers wild with thirst. This will be a continual torment during the campaign that follows. The scorching heat is made worse by the fact that it is the season when the khamsin begins to blow—a strong, hot wind that sweeps in from the desert, darkening the skies with a haze of burning sand.

  General Kléber, a rough, plainspoken professional soldier in his fifties, a man who is vigorous and strong, is sent with his division to the north of the city, facing Pompey’s Gate. Though now he is a “citizen” general, fighting in the name of the republic, he had earlier fought for Louis XVI and, before that, in the Austrian army for Marie-Thérèse: To him it is all the same. There is no love lost between him and Napoleon, whom he publicly refers to as “the little bugger,” whose mistakes he is quick to catalogue and whose romantic vision of glory he scorns. Napoleon overlooks this insolence since he needs the man.

  Opposite Kléber’s troops, General Menou’s division takes up its position in the west. An ex-aristocrat, well educated, emotional, and high-strung, Menou is softer than Kléber, both physically and emotionally. He is also less competent. Though he too dislikes Bonaparte, he is loyal. Napoleon knows he can count on him.

  Finally, there is corpulent General Bon, deliberate in his actions. In the past he has been criticized for being too slow. Bon’s division draws up to the east of the city, at the Rosetta Gate, that is, facing the direction of Rosetta, a second port some thirty miles away. Devoted to the pleasures of the table, Bon is, despite his appearance, a fearless soldier. He will stick to Napoleon throughout the eastern campaign, finally losing his life at Acre as he hurls himself into the thick of battle to stop a French retreat. Because of his size, he especially suffers from the heat. But for all his impatience to have done with the assault, he waits until Napoleon is ready.

  On Napoleon’s orders a messenger approaches the city walls with a flag of truce and offers safety in exchange for surrender. The people laugh and jeer and pelt him with filth.

  Undiscouraged, Napoleon orders the messenger to return and try again. This time he is met with a volley of gunfire. General Bon has the bugles sounded and the soldiers, to the “terrifying shrieks and cries coming from the walls” as an officer, Savary, will write later, rush forward into the hail of rocks and gunfire.

  Within the first moments of the uneven battle, two French major generals are seriously wounded—an anomaly in French military history. A well-aimed rock hurled from the walls fells General Menou (whose soldiers surround and protect him), while General Kléb
er, directing operations at the base of the walls, is shot in the head and carried off the field.

  The soldiers manage to scale the high walls and beat back the defenders, a mixed mob with more spirit than strategy. Another military history anomaly: French soldiers battling veiled women who wield knives and throw rocks with deadly aim. Still, it is not long before the defenders, outnumbered and outfought, flee in disorder to a medieval fort in the heart of the city—the thin strip of land dividing the eastern harbor from the western.

  The fort holds out for that entire day, as Napoleon watches from a nearby height, giving orders and sucking on oranges, since no water can be found. Finally, as the moon rises over the sea, a group of soldiers use the beams from a ship as a battering ram and manage to breach the walls of the fort. Some defenders escape to sea on a fishing vessel, while the remainder are taken prisoner.

  The battle continues underground: In the catacombs where, in antiquity, Alexander’s Greeks buried their dead, there is fierce fighting beside the sphinxes and winged gods. And in the ancient cisterns as well—a vast underground labyrinth used to collect rainwater. Beams of light shine through the deep shafts and from time to time dispel the shadows where men hide up to their waists in water, ready to die if only they can bring down an infidel with them—a desperate struggle that ends in a French victory.

  The governor of the city surrenders, and Napoleon announces that the occupation of Alexandria will be a benevolent one. He hopes that the entire nation will hear of his magnanimity. He wants the people to rise up against the Mamelukes and welcome him as a liberator.

  Despite his proclamations, there are violent incidents throughout that day and the next. As a soldier, Private Millet, recalls: “We thought that the city had surrendered when suddenly a volley of musketry was fired at us as we were passing by a mosque. A general who happened to be there [Adjutant General Boyer of the general staff] ordered us to force the gate and to spare no one we found inside. Men, women, and children were bayoneted.”

  It is a brutal measure. Though Napoleon has not ordered it directly, he will take such measures again and again against the enemy, against his own soldiers in Europe, but especially here in Egypt where he seeks to dominate a country of two and a half million with thirty-eight thousand soldiers.

  Are diseased prostitutes endangering the health of his troops? Sew them into sacks and throw them into the Nile—at least a few to serve as a warning!

  Has a French doctor refused to treat plague-ridden soldiers? Dress him in a woman’s clothes and parade him through the streets. This causes a Frenchwoman, resenting the slur on her sex, to challenge Napoleon to a duel.

  When an Egyptian woman is raped and murdered, two French soldiers seen nearby are executed without trial. Are they innocent? It turns out they are indeed. Well, they are martyrs in the great cause of order.

  In his youth, Napoleon saw frenzied crowds break into Versailles and massacre the king’s Swiss guards, reverting to barbarism that would revolt the most hardened. He never forgot the spectacle of the unrestrained mob. If his orders are cruel, he would shrug, the cruelty is not wanton but in keeping with military and political necessity as he perceives them. In such matters, only severity succeeds, and for Napoleon success is the ultimate good.

  There are two dangers in considering such acts in the twenty-first century. The first is not putting Napoleon in his nineteenth century context, in the heroic historical tradition in which he saw himself.

  That is, of forgetting that Beethoven dedicated the Eroica to Napoleon in an outpouring of admiration (a dedication he “retracted” for political not moral reasons—being incensed on learning that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor); of forgetting that for Goethe, Napoleon’s spell was never broken; that for Hegel, Napoleon was the spirit of the times and that, for the youth of the nineteenth century, Napoleon was the supreme example of the heroic and the sublime.

  They saw in Napoleon not the man who could order prostitutes sewn into a sack but the patron of the arts and sciences, the reformer who preferred merit over birth, the Prometheus struggling to create a new world order. He is the conqueror who gallops through the desert, ascertaining the practicability of reviving a canal built by the pharaohs as one of his many measures to revitalize the desperately poor, oppressed, stagnant land. This canal would finally be built later on in the century by a Frenchman and with French finance; for Napoleon’s ideas will forever leave their mark on Egypt. In fact, it is especially after the French leave that the full force of his influence is felt.

  It is generally reported in contemporary accounts, in the Courier d’Egypte, for example, the newspaper established by the French in Egypt, that when the Rosetta stone was discovered, when a soldier, swinging his pickax, hit against something hard—a stone covered with writing in both Egyptian and Greek—“the significance of the find was immediately recognized.”

  But if this was so, if the men toiling in the heat and the dust did not simply ignore the heavy stone with its curious writing—it weighed three quarters of a ton—if they did not simply seek to finish up their work and seize whatever pleasures they could find, that was because of one man, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had from the first insisted on the dual purpose of this conquest: learning as well as power. And his exhortations had so permeated the consciousness of the entire French force—from the most distinguished savant to the youngest drummer boy—as to make the discovery of the stone an event of wonder among the men.

  Could the men who came after Napoleon have inspired that? The dull, gouty Louis XVIII, placed on the throne by France’s enemies? Or the brother who followed, Charles X, a man with even fewer ideas, a small, vengeful spirit, and a passion only for court etiquette?

  Yet still there are the crimes—there is no other name for them: a long, long list. Goya’s painting The Second of May is by itself enough to make one feel their horror and inhumanity: the immediacy of the scene Goya paints, the beauty and innocence of the faces, the wild-eyed yearning for life of the victims standing before French executioners. Once you see Napoleon’s victims, it is impossible to forget them.

  When that other great French statesmen, Cardinal Richelieu, died a century earlier, the pope at that time, a Barberini, Urban VIII, remarked while crossing himself: “If there is a God, Richelieu has much to answer for. But if not—if not—” he shrugged with a smile, “then he led a successful life.”

  Napoleon was too much of a romantic to be content with such a cynical epitaph, with such acceptance of the world as it is. He might sometimes affect a world-weary pose, but it does not encompass the full complexity of the man. He strove, always, from first to last, to re-create the world: to impose a glorious ideal on a resisting humanity! If he was cruel, it was the cruelty of idealism.

  No, Pope Urban’s epitaph did not fit him, he would have insisted, throwing his great achievements onto the scales, balancing them against the crimes and barbarities of war. This is the second danger in considering Napoleon: placing him in the heroic historical tradition in which he saw himself, ignoring the old saw: Never take a man at his own valuation.

  Napoleon had himself portrayed in a hundred different romantic paintings. In one, he crosses the Alps on a magnificent white horse instead of the donkey we know he rode and from which, moreover, we know he slipped more than once. Just so, he would have conjured up the words of one romantic poet or another to excuse his terrible crimes. Can much suffering be laid to his door? Well, then, “the cut worm forgives the plow.”

  It is a defense, indeed.

  But caveat emptor! Let the buyer beware! For as La Rochefoucauld reminds us: “Language was given to human beings that they might conceal their thoughts from others.”

  And even from themselves, we might add, especially when talking of that sacred monster, Napoleon Bonaparte.

  ON THE SECOND day of Napoleon’s occupation of Alexandria, the public baths are closed so that the French soldiers might do their laundry. They crowd into the crumbling building raised thr
ee centuries before as an act of piety. Beneath Quait Bey’s high medieval domes, under carved arches, cusped and foliate and stalactiform, the Frenchmen toss their lice-ridden clothes into huge boiling cauldrons, their cursing and laughter echoing off the stone walls.

  Among the many sketches by the artist Denon is one of the medieval bathhouse. He also draws the sagging quays of the harbor, and the shuttered houses of the deserted streets. He even manages to capture “the universal silence and sadness” that he writes about in his journal.

  As always, he is conscientious and hardworking when recording what he sees. For as an artist Denon has the technique that may be acquired in an academy, but none of the inspiration which cannot be taught. At fifty-one, he is a brilliant dilettante with a talent for living and an ability to laugh at fortune and its reversals.

  In his youth, he had aspired to be a diplomat and was attached to the French embassy first in Switzerland, then Italy, then Russia. His good looks and charm caught the attention of Catherine the Great. Whether he also won the all-important approval of her “tester,” Countess Bruce, is not recorded.

  Denon is a playwright and a raconteur. His short story Le Pointe de Lendemain (The Sting of the Morning After) won Balzac’s praise as “a school for married men.” He is also something of a pornographer: the etchings in his Oeuvre Priapique can be called nothing else. His eroticism finally gets him into trouble: as a lover of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame Pompadour, he becomes the official caretaker of her antique gems. It is an appointment that would have cost Denon his life during the Terror, if the great artist David had not saved him.