She bequeaths to history a passionate story: how she killed her mother whom she found sleeping with her fiancé; and how she then came to Egypt and had fallen deeply in love with her new husband, Ptolemy III. “Brave girl, a splendid crime it was that won you your prince,” the Alexandrian poet Callimachus sings.
More important than her story—for Champollion—she leaves behind her name: Berenike (or Berenice), one of the four royal Ptolemaic names, Berenike, Arsinoe, Ptolemy, Cleopatra. It will be repeated again and again, century after century, in various combinations and with sundry epithets, weaving a tapestry of sound that Champollion later unravels on obelisks and papyri and tombs and monuments.
What are the accidents by which our past is remembered! Berenike cuts off her beautiful hair to safeguard her husband’s life and a priest at the temple steals it for his sensual pleasure! If the hair had not been stolen; if the queen had not found out about it (having taken her victorious husband to the temple to show him her sacrifice); if the royal couple, enraged, had not decreed death for all the priests (since which one was the fetishist-thief could not be determined); if the court astronomer Conan had not been so imaginative, if he had not saved the day by declaring that it was a god, none other, who had taken her flowing tresses and arranged them in the sky, would Champollion and his rival Thomas Young both have been so quick to guess that signified “Berenike”? Would her name—written not only on stone, but in the heavens as well—have so quickly come to mind?
The Coma Berenike, the hair of Berenice!
It is not only on the linguists, on Young and Champollion, that these ancient stars shed their light, but on the awed French soldiers as well. They feel the solemnity of the moment as they march across the vast, empty plain among the pyramids and tombs.
Call it awe, call it a dream or an illusion which takes hold of everyone here. Even in daylight, even when the sun comes out in all its strength and scorches both the victorious and the vanquished, even then the echoes of time can be heard and the weight of the past is palpable.
Marching quickstep—103 paces per minute and in close line formation—a unique feat achieved by Napoleon’s severe discipline and drilling—the men prepare for battle.
“Soldiers!” Napoleon addresses them with a rhetoric as grand as the occasion requires: “From the height of these monuments, forty centuries of history look down upon you . . .”
There is the sound of trumpets and drums. The band begins to play the Marseillaise, but it is interrupted by the strange trilling of Oriental music, of tambourines and flutes, and savage battle cries.
Through the haze of sand and sunlight comes the sight of thousands upon thousands of men galloping across the plain on horseback. The Mamelukes have arrived.
“WHEN THEY FOUGHT an enemy, the Romans sought to crush him with the weight of the world,” Bonaparte had told his generals beforehand. “We will do the same.”
But as rank upon rank of splendid horsemen cross the plain toward the waiting Frenchmen—Napoleon has opted for a stationary line of defense in the face of Murad’s vastly superior cavalry—it seems suddenly that the “weight of the world” is on the Mameluke’s side.
Fall in! the cry goes up at the sight of Murad’s troops, as the moment for which Napoleon has been long preparing arrives.
The men have already taken up their positions, the infantry forming five large hedgehogs or squares six ranks deep with heavy artillery (eighteen pounders) placed at each of the corners.
Inside these squares are stationed the scanty and inadequate French cavalry, held in reserve. An order for them to charge would be a futile last resort, they know, and would only be given in the face of general disaster.
Napoleon has commanded that the men wait until the galloping horsemen are mere paces away. They are to remain immobile and unflinching in the face of the shock attack—the Mameluke specialty—and then they are to fire in unison, remaining in position for the next wave of riders.
The great question is whether the squares will hold in the face of the violent Mameluke charges.
“So furious was the Mameluke onslaught,” the military historian, Harold, observes, “that the mortally wounded horses were carried by their sheer momentum inside the French ranks where they were finished off with bayonets and rifle butts . . . The least break in discipline [by the French] hundreds of miles south in this foreign country would have meant certain annihilation.”
Again and again, the Mamelukes charge, daring and courageous in their desperation.
With the cries of the dying in their ears, with the booming of the guns and the exploding shells drowning out the commands of their officers and even the signals of the trumpets and drums, the Frenchmen stand fast.
If the strain on the French soldiers is terrible, the slaughter of the Mamelukes is equally merciless. Thousands fall in the first hour of the engagement alone, their bejeweled turbans and splendid swords glittering in the sun.
The French restraint is so complete that not even the rich booty tempts them from their squares.
Charge after charge fails until the Mameluke horsemen must leap over mounds of the dead. The “rabble” rounded up from Cairo and the hapless farmers, the fellahin with their clubs—also pressed into service—try to clear a path for the mounted warriors, but it is impossible.
As the day wears on, a mere remnant remains of the thirty thousand who at dawn had swaggered forth to war. It becomes obvious to the Mamelukes that the shabby-looking foreigners in their unglorious squares have cold-bloodedly won.
Dazed and broken, the survivors, Murad bey among them, begin to flee. They try to cross the Nile and return to Cairo from behind whose walls they hope to mount a defense.
Napoleon orders his men to pursue and the retreat becomes a massacre during which the death of the Mameluke leader Murad goes almost unnoticed. Desperate men crowd onto river boats that sink under their weight. Those who try to ford the river on horseback are easily picked off by the Frenchmen on shore.
One Frenchman holds back from the fray, sitting astride a camel and watching. He makes remarks to his young aide-de-campe, Josephine’s son, speaking to him rapidly and harshly and with an Italian accent (for General Bonaparte is, after all is said and done, a Frenchman by courtesy).
Already, he is making plans for the occupation of Cairo, dictating notes about sanitary measures to prevent the plague; ways to light the dark city at night; and—almost as imperturbable as the Sphinx in whose presence the historic battle has been fought—he even has the sangfroid to consider, as the last of the Mamelukes either flee or drown, whether it will be feasible to build windmills along the banks of the Nile.
As an ironic postscript to the Battle of the Pyramids, it must be recorded that a solitary windmill is built. It will end up serving a far different purpose from the one Napoleon envisions. For in one of those strange genealogies of history, it will stand useless and futile at the outskirts of Cairo until the 1950s when the Coptic patriarch, forced out of his monastery by the socialist Nasser, takes up residence here.
From an upper chamber, the holy man blesses the faithful who flock to the windmill from all over Egypt. Beneath its unmoving arms, he chants prayers to the dog-headed saints who have replaced the dog-headed gods of Egypt. He takes in an army of beggars and lepers and tends to their needs, teaching, by example, a lesson Napoleon would have scorned: that the meek will inherit the earth. Or if not the earth, at least a ruin in a land that does not lack for ruins. For by the 1950s that is all that remains: the ruins of a windmill built by a general who is practical, ruthless, brilliant, and as mad as Don Quixote. A general who, for all his mistakes—and Egypt will be one of them—will be hailed as emperor.
But even as Napoleon proceeds toward Cairo, even as he sketches plans for windmills and street lamps, Admiral Nelson is circling back to destroy the entire French fleet moored off Alexandria. Cutting off all means of supply to France’s army, Nelson thus ensures that the French surrender in Egypt will only be a matter o
f time.
“ASK ME FOR an image of civilization,” wrote the philosopher Seneca, “and I will give you the sack of a great city.” This is what all Cairo fears as news of the disaster spreads: There is no one left to defend it.
Murad bey is dead and Ibrahim bey has headed south with his followers. Even the foreign soldiers of fortune—Greeks and Italians mostly—are gone, taking with them the sultan’s emissary along with his pleasure boat. They disappear downriver where the foreign soldiers and the pasha and his troupe of singers and musicians and dancing girls are never heard from again.
Whoever is able to, flees. Many are cut down or enslaved by the Bedouins who await them in the desert. The rich and the poor, the young and the old, the healthy and the infirm all panic. Young boys lead blind Koran-reciters. Black eunuchs lead veiled harem-women along the way. Donkey carts filled with European treasures are dragged behind them: porcelain and mirrors and harps; and four-poster beds on which have been painted naked nymphs and obscene, lustful satyrs; and trompe-l’oeil cupids riding lions who roar with delight.
Whirling dervishes dance in the streets while storehouses are looted and prisons are emptied and mosques call the faithful to prayer.
THE FALL OF Cairo makes the French masters of Egypt. Now Bonaparte’s main conquest will be himself. He will try to forget Josephine and console himself with others, to recover from his loss and heal his wounded pride.
Of course he has responsibilities and decisions and duties. He is just as pressed as before. But though events continue to unfold with as much drama and intensity as before, the pattern remains the same.
A full-scale rebellion in Cairo, for example, is put down with military severity: a cruelty surpassing even that of the Mamelukes which he had so deplored. There is a side campaign into Palestine, torturous and difficult from its beginning to its plague-ridden end.
But what does Napoleon think of as he enters the Tivoli: the theater and dance hall the French have created in Cairo for their pleasure?
Is it the demonically cunning Djezzar who had defeated him at Acre with the trick of a second wall? The first gave way and when the French poured through the breach, they were slaughtered in the enclosure.
Or does he recall the unaccountable rebellion of the Egyptians (whom he has treated so well, he exclaims)?
It is more likely that Napoleon muses over the woman at his side, the beautiful blond Pauline Fourès, the young wife of an artillery lieutenant. A stowaway who came to Egypt to be with her husband, she is nevertheless in her element with the general. He only turns to her after his disappointment in a series of dusky beauties, first local Egyptian girls (whose “imperfections” offend him); and then Abyssinian slaves with whom he tries to forget.
Still and all, women light or dark do not console him. He is bitter.
When General Bonaparte returns from Egypt, he locks himself in his room, giving strict instructions that Josephine not be allowed in the house.
Surprised by his sudden appearance in France, she is still on her way back to Paris. However, when she arrives, she brushes aside the servants, who are all on her side, and weeps all night before her husband’s locked door. By morning, he has capitulated and forgiven her betrayal.
It is a well-known story. Josephine confides it to her close friends. Servants listen to everything behind their doors. Napoleon himself later recounts it to a courtier after everything is over—war and passion and glory—and he is living on the island of his exile. He adds with a rueful smile that he had inscribed To Destiny on the wedding brooch he gave her, not To Love . . .
For all his ruefulness, it is Josephine’s name that is on his lips during his death agonies. It is “Josephine, divine Josephine” he calls for and not “the brood mare,” as he refers to the Austrian archduchess he later marries, obsessed with founding a dynasty.
But to call for your beloved on a remote volcanic island during convulsions is one thing. To pay her bills when you are in a state of perfect health is another. For during her husband’s absence in Egypt, the “divine” Josephine has been busy with more than romantic infidelities. She has spent some 1.5 million francs for dresses, jewels, and furnishings. She decides to keep this matter from Napoleon, having one of her friends in the government pay it with funds put aside for medical supplies for the army.
This comes to light, however—as financial subterfuges have a way of doing sooner or later (in this case, it is sooner)—during Bonaparte’s second conquest of Italy. The “fools” at the Directory had lost Italy while he was away in Egypt, and now he must conquer it again. There are shortages of bandages and medicine and no hospital tents to ease the agonies of the dying. Napoleon is furious when he discovers why.
Denon, who continues to follow Napoleon after Egypt, helps calm him and shrug off the matter. The artist is grateful to Josephine, she has been a patroness of sorts, convincing the reluctant Napoleon to take Denon along on the Egyptian campaign and in general trying to help further the artist’s career.
But it is not only a question of Denon’s gratitude. His natural sympathy is in any case with Josephine, since his perspective is ancien régime. His milieu is the bal des prostitués where nobility mingle with the deliciously low, where all the whores of Paris, male and female, are guests of honor. What does a lover matter? What do two? And as for Josephine’s extravagance, he argues, what could be more natural? Compared to that of others he has known, Madame Pompadour and Mme. du Barry and Marie Antoinette, it is nothing.
The artist proves a good advocate for her with the angry, wounded Napoleon, the older man relating a thousand and one tales of the courts where in his heyday he had been an intimate—those of Louis XV and Louis XVI, and of Catherine the Great and of Napoleon’s fellow military genius and hero, Frederick the Great.
Denon holds up Frederick, completely indifferent to bourgeois morality, as a model. Told during a tour of inspection why a soldier was in chains—bestiality with a horse—Frederick’s famous reply was: Fools! Put him in the cavalry! Denon also points to a Bourbon prince as an example of rational sangfroid. Finding his wife in bed with her lover, the royal merely turned away and murmured, What, monsieur! Without being obliged? Napoleon, however, is still too much the romantic—and the Italian—to take such matters lightly.
His ideal is a different sort completely. Earlier, when the aggressive, intellectual, and large-bosomed Madame de Staël had stalked him at one of Tallyrand’s salons, gazing at him intently and asking: Who do you consider the perfect woman, general? Napoleon had replied without a pause: My wife . . .
The intellectual and politically astute de Staël does not attract him. He loves the faithless Josephine with a tempestuous, disappointed, angry love, though his ideal is something else again! It is the malleable and insipid Austrian archduchess he later marries, dutiful and docile and little more than a child. It is his innocent, wide-eyed Polish mistress, also little more than a girl.
It is an eternal “moment” he is smitten with: the moment when the frightened bride weeps in the (Aldobrandini) Wedding: an ancient fresco he becomes obsessed with bringing back to France, though Pius VII somehow manages to keep it in Rome.
In the painting, a curly-headed youth—the bridegroom’s messenger?—leans against a wall, waiting as a sensual Venus, half-nude, sits next to the bride, comforting her, perhaps informing her of what is soon to be.
Josephine is not the bride of the ancient wedding. Still, she is able to hurt Napoleon as no one else can, to draw on deeply buried feelings in him.
After Egypt, he learns to love her again and to forgive her, reclaiming a part of himself which he, emperor and “Man of Destiny,” is otherwise unable to acknowledge—his weakness, his humanity.
Chapter Twelve
The Divine Crossword Puzzle
DURING THE REIGN of the “inglorious” Louis XVIII, nothing is possible anymore, everything is over . . . such is the feeling, the spiritual malaise, which settles over France, over Europe.
While on a ho
t summer’s afternoon in Egypt:
The French consul in Egypt, Bernadino Drovetti, an Italian by birth, sits in his wooden-frame house in Alexandria conducting a hearing, a kind of preliminary investigation. The surroundings are informal: the consul’s small menagerie runs wild in the garden—ostriches and baboons and a giraffe (brought up from the Sudan by the naturalist St. Hilaire and soon to become a celebrity in France as Europe’s first giraffe). Those who cannot crowd into the house listen to the proceedings from the porch that surrounds the unimposing building, for this is a much-talked-about case.
The atmosphere is somber since, for all the informality of the surroundings, Drovetti’s decision is binding and the case is one of life and death.
Strictly speaking, the consul is an unlikely man to serve as judge. Though he has studied law in his youth and therefore by default is better qualified to preside than the other foreign consuls, still he himself is, if rumors are to be believed, as criminal as the accused. This would be a certain Dr. Duzcap, an Italian who had run away from Istanbul with the wife of a wealthy Armenian banker and then possibly murdered her for her jewels.
While Drovetti, with his large mustache and terrible flashing eyes, judges Duzcap, trying to disentangle rumor from fact, the European community also judges the judge—in whispers, naturally, and with innuendos. Too powerful to confront openly, he is said to be involved in every kind of immoral scheme.
A dealer in antiquities, he is a man who manages to acquire great collections and then to sell them for a fortune—statues, papyri, jewelry. The collection in Turin which Champollion studies for months had been sold to the prince of Savoy by Drovetti, an immensely valuable collection like others the consul has offered for sale.
He will stop at nothing to get the pieces he wants, so it is said. His methods are deplorable. If twenty ancient alabaster vases are found in a tomb, he will see to it that half are smashed to bring up their price. If an obelisk catches his eye, he will have it hurled down and its pyramidion (top portion) broken off to make it easier to dispose of, etc.
The Linguist and the Emperor Page 16
