The beys’ wives were certainly smarter than their deposed husbands, or one was. Ibrahim Bey, the Egyptian ruler under the Ottomans, had all the Europeans in Cairo imprisoned in his island palace on the Nile when Napoleon landed. This was the same palace on Roda that centuries earlier had been the headquarters of the River Mamluks (whose descendants, in a few years, would meet a grisly end).
Ibrahim Bey then gave the order for the Europeans to be executed. His wife, Zuleyha Hanem, intervened with the argument that a saying of the Prophet had predicted that the French would seize Egypt. She then hid the captives on her side of the palace until such time as they could escape to safety. Bonaparte, to his credit, did not attempt to seduce her as a reward – he awarded her with a writ of safe conduct and a personal guard. Wily to the last, Zuleyha used her writ to slip out of Egypt and join her husband in Syria.
In his drive to find a woman, Napoleon tried once again – sending out an order that the six most attractive women in Cairo be brought to Alfi Bey’s former palace, which he had commandeered. According to de Bourrienne, ‘their ungraceful obesity displeased him and they were immediately dismissed’. His tastes, perhaps, had been spoilt by Paris.
In Paris, revolution in fashion had followed the overthrow of the monarchy. It was the period of ‘naked fashions’, which even Jane Austen noted in faraway Hampshire in 1801, remarking in a letter upon a ‘Mrs Powlett [who] was at once expensively and nakedly dress’d’. The nakedness referred to the almost transparent muslin dresses that mimicked, in their unornamented simplicity, the garb of women in the Greek city states of ancient times. Gone were the corsets, false breasts, padded bottoms; gone was the hair daubed in ‘extraneous matter’. In was the ‘snow-white drapery’, though as one contemporary observer put it, ‘some thoughtless females indulge in the licence of freedom rather too far, and show their persons in a manner offensive to modesty’.
Such a woman was Pauline Fourès, born Pauline Bellisle on 15 March 1778, admirably suited to demonstrating the latest Parisian fashions as she was a dressmaker and milliner by trade; by birth she was the daughter of a cook and a clockmaker. She was also an adventuress who looked good in a uniform. When her honeymoon with Lieutenant Jean-Noël Fourès was interrupted by his call-up for the impending invasion of Egypt, she vowed to join him and, dressed in his Chasseurs jacket, stowed away on board La Lucette bound for Alexandria with the French fleet – along with, well dispersed on sister ships, the 300 other women who were supposedly not allowed. But 300 women don’t go far among 25,000 soldiers . . .
Once in Cairo Pauline reverted to female dress. She would not have worn much lingerie – in its original meaning of fine linen collars, cuffs, fichus, frills; she would have relied on her own figure with insubstantial pink underclothes showing through her white muslin dresses, slit at the side so that a glimpse of pink stocking could be caught by any passing world-conquering general. The dresses would be cinched under the bosom, to show off the breasts to greater effect, with a lowered neckline. Indeed some Parisian beauties were known to dispense with any breast covering at all. Pauline Fourès, certainly at first, would not have gone that far.
It was her husband, the crudely ambitious Lieutenant Fourès, who insisted that Pauline attend the officers’ parties that were happening all over Cairo. The 300 real French women looked rather mannish since, as Sargy observed, to get on board ship to Cairo ‘only a few who dressed up as men got through’. These rough-handed ladies, many of whom were cooks and laundresses, now ‘shone in the midst of the army’. Pauline must have outshone them all. She was twenty years old, brown haired and dark eyed. She was described as petite, kind, a little plump (but evidently not obese), spiritual. She had enough education to speak easily, to supply the flirtation and wit the French soldiery so missed.
After Pauline had agreed, in order to advance her husband’s prospects, to attend an officers’ party, it was not long before she was in high demand. Lieutenant Fourès couldn’t believe his luck. He began to receive invitations to the gala balls intended for the highest ranks, the most favoured commanders. Pauline danced with everyone. It was what her husband had ordered. What was the point of her having stowed away in a dark damp cabin if not to be of some use to her husband? She told him, ‘I came here only because I love you.’ Eventually, inevitably, she attracted Napoleon’s attentions. He asked for a dance. He complimented her on her bonnet. She had made it herself? Her hair, too, he admired, so free of the unguents and potions favoured by the Circassian women. Hardly the chat-up lines of a master seducer, but, as befitted a world leader, he allowed one of his generals to complete the operation. Junot cornered Pauline and told her, ‘You would have to be very cruel and insensitive to refuse the gift of his heart.’ Junot, who apparently had never been quite right after receiving a head wound in Napoleon’s Italian campaign a couple of years earlier, then said that her husband could expect a great promotion if she acceded to Napoleon’s desires. Pauline refused, admirably expostulating that she would be contemptible in her own eyes if she agreed to such a thing. Besides, such a rapid promotion would be embarrassing and obvious to everyone.
Junot smiled his slightly damaged smile and reported back to his master: ‘It’s not going to be easy.’
Napoleon was now ‘inflamed and dreaming of means to possess the object of his desires’. The new ruler of the Red Nile desired a companion with all the passion that that river inspires.
Napoleon invited Lieutenant Fourès and his wife to lunch at Alfi Bey’s old palace. There were five places set; Junot was already present. A trumpet fanfare announced the arrival of the new ruler of all Egypt, together with General Berthier. Napoleon engaged the young lieutenant (who was around the same age as himself, twenty-nine) in polite chat about his career, making a rather forced attempt to be friendly. Towards the end of the meal Napoleon placed his hands to his brow. This was the agreed signal. Junot leant across Pauline and deliberately knocked a demi-tasse of coffee down her brilliant white dress. Making a great fuss of her, Junot suggested she change clothes in a neighbouring room. She demurred. ‘There is water there, you can at least save the dress,’ he suggested in a kindly tone. He showed her the way and returned to the table. Apparently tired, Napoleon now took his leave with Berthier, while Junot opened a bottle of brandy and began talking intimately and amusingly with the flattered lieutenant. Meanwhile Napoleon had made his way swiftly into Pauline’s room by another door. He wasn’t a master strategist for nothing.
Napoleon threw himself down on his knees to announce his love, but Pauline, ‘realising immediately what he wanted of her, resisted the conqueror, broke out in tears, and seemed not at all interested in him’.
Lieutenant Fourès was in a tricky position. His attempt to get in his superior’s good books had gone rather too well. One can imagine the conversation in the carriage home:
Her: ‘He tried to seduce me!’
Him: ‘Are you sure?’
Her: ‘Sure?’
Him: ‘Well. He’s a man.’
Her: ‘Is that all you can say? He tried to force me.’
Him: ‘All right. He’s a monster!’
Her: ‘I said as much. I said I would never be unfaithful. Whatever happened.’
Him: ‘What did he say? Did he mention me?’
Her: ‘No.’
Him: ‘Not at all?’
Her: ‘No. But what about your prospects? Your promotion? I feel bad.’
Him: ‘To hell with them. We will return to France and live as paupers. With our honour intact.’
Her: ‘That is what I said to him exactly!’
Him: ‘You did?’
Her: ‘And I said if you found out you would most likely ask for satisfaction . . .’
Him: ‘You suggested to the commander of the army in Egypt that I would challenge him to a duel?’
Her: ‘Yes, I did.’
At this point Lieutenant Fourès probably leant forward, cradled his head in his arms and whimpered for mercy.
Bonaparte was touched by her innocence but kept up the attack. A stream of love letters and fine gifts found their way to her. Many more heated conversations must have followed in the Fourès household. After a lengthy siege, Pauline Fourès relented and became Napoleon’s mistress.
7 • The stone
‘The land of my fathers!’ said the louse remaining on the bald head.
Sudanese proverb
Meanwhile at the very end of the Nile, in the town of Rashid on the right-hand channel that drains with little ceremony into the Mediterranean, the influence of Napoleon was being felt. In Rashid, better known to us as Rosetta, the local Turkish fort, built in the fifteenth century, was being improved and better fortified. All kinds of stone, any that could be found lying around, was used to strengthen walls. Recycling the stone of former buildings had always happened in Egypt. Memphis, it is said, was used to build Roman Cairo; and the cover stones of the Pyramids provided Islamic Cairo with some of its best stone. In the ground of Rosetta a stone with three kinds of script was about to be rammed into the wall of the fort when a young lieutenant of engineers noted its singular appearance. He reported it quite casually to his commanding officer, who knew at once its importance and sent it to Cairo strapped to the back of a camel (the roads were generally too poor for carts, though Napoleon improved them, of course). One of Napoleon’s 167 savants, the men who had accompanied the invader to study every aspect of Egypt (so igniting the new subject of Egyptology), Michel Ange Lancret, studied it in detail as the mysterious rock, a piece of diorite (it was thought later to be basalt, a mistake made because of the wax coating it was soon to receive), lay in state in a palace in the Ezbekiya area of Cairo.
Let’s muse on that side of Napoleon for a moment and get back to the stone later. Have there been any other invaders in history who insisted on studying the people and place they were invading? Though some argue that the effect of Napoleon was purely destructive, his desire for knowledge, for its beneficial increase, cannot be questioned. Most invader types think they know it all already. Cromwell wasn’t about to start learning Gaelic when he started rampaging round Ireland. Hitler didn’t go into the Ukraine with a microscope and a butterfly net. The only ones who did, that spring readily to mind, were those other Nile invaders the Arabs, who brought with them a culture that would, through the translation of Aristotle and a new openness in enquiry, kick-start the Renaissance. Interestingly it was an Arab scholar who, nearly a thousand years before the Rosetta Stone was decoded by a Frenchman, would discover the meaning of the majority of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, knowledge that would be lost in the West until the nineteenth century.
By bringing his savants, it was almost as if Napoleon sensed that the Nile required more respect than a mere ragtag invasion. His interest is not commercial, it is military – he wishes to conquer the East and strike at England’s power in India. His eye is on glory. But to justify such action he needed also to increase knowledge. In the same way, an explorer justifies his love of adventure by bringing back news and scientific data from places that are dangerous to visit. Perhaps it is no surprise that Napoleon’s scholarly invasion of the Nile should have had far more lasting effect than his military one. The desire to control, it seems, always defeats itself in some way, whereas the desire to understand can lead to greater alignment with events and with nature, ensuring prolonged usefulness.
Napoleon’s scholar who first saw the stone recovered at Rosetta knew it was extraordinary. It was decided that the thing would be best shipped to France to be studied in the Academy.
8 • The great Cairo balloon fiasco
The fool thinks that wherever he sleeps is home. Egyptian proverb
The Rosetta Stone was fated, though, to move in a mysterious way. Part of it involved Nicolas-Jacques Conté, the inventor of the modern pencil, the Conté crayon, and several rather unsuccessful balloons.
Any modern visitor to Luxor has the chance to see the Nile and the fabulous temples from the privileged position of a balloon, usually at sunrise. These are giant hot-air machines, with a booster pack of propane roaring their blue flames upwards from within the twenty-five-person basket. From up there the temples look like smashed cake decorations, lightly dusted with corrosive sand. Your fellow passengers get slightly hilarious, perhaps anticipating the promised cold Luxor beer at the end of the flight. Some, like me, might be hiding their nerves – in 2009 one of these monsters hit a mobile-phone mast and crashed, seriously injuring sixteen people. When the burners are switched off the silence is palpable. Gradually, as the novelty wears off, sound creeps to your ears; you notice the rustle and creak of the cables, the squeak of the canopy above. Someone asks if they can smoke – as a joke – and they are told it’s fine, go ahead: bluff called, no one tries it.
As the sun rises it cracks the horizon, like some elemental wink, and floods everywhere with light and warmth. You cannot miss the Nile, as the fast-moving sunlight reveals its perfectly looped bends. The intense green band of palm trees higher up on the west bank contrasts with bright yellow sand and the faint grey-green of the river. It looks like a loose rope that has been half buried in nature, needs tightening, pulling clear of the enfolding ground. Thankfully the balloon doesn’t burst. Even before the 2009 accident, they haven’t all been as safe. The very first balloon attempt was at the hands of Conté, army officer, favourite of Napoleon, artist, inventor and the man who covered the Rosetta Stone in wax. This was after Napoleon and Pauline had made a special visit to see it.
Napoleon said of Conté, ‘he is a universal man, with taste, understanding and genius, capable of creating the arts of France in the middle of the Arabian Desert’. Conté had dabbled in both hydrogen and hot-air balloons in France. He was eager in Egypt to overawe the locals with the magic of the occident. Napoleon had already tried this with his savant Claude Berthollet, who demonstrated the latest experiments in magnetism and chemistry to a group of Islamic scholars. They remained impressively unimpressed. When they were asked for their comments, Sheikh El-Bekri said, ‘Can he make me be in Morocco and here at the same time?’ Berthollet replied that he couldn’t. ‘Oh, then, he is not even half a sorcerer!’
The balloon, it was intended, should restore the wow factor to French techno-superiority. Conté worked day and night to get his apparatus ready, though he was distracted by another project that Napoleon had pressed upon him: to produce an exact copy of the script on the Rosetta Stone. Conté was unsure how to do this and focused instead on what he did know about – balloons. He ordered the printing of notices publicising the event. They read: ‘On Friday 21st we intend to fly a vessel (balloon) over al-Ezbekiya lake by means of a device belonging to the French people.’
On the appointed day in front of 100,000 people in Ezbekiya Place the contraption was readied. The envelope of the balloon Conté was extremely proud of – he had arranged for it to be made in red, white and blue by the skilled tailors who worked in the tent bazaar in Cairo. This envelope was held open by the use of a stout pole. Suspended beneath was a cylindrical basket containing a large cauldron filled with oil. From this a giant wick extended. With much hurrahing and noise of trumpets the wick was lit.
Abd al-Rahman Al-Jabarti, the Arab scholar who chronicled Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, wrote, ‘The smoke sought to rise to its centre but finding no escape, so it drew the apparatus aloft with itself. They cut the ropes and it soared into the air . . . then it began to sail with the wind for a very little while.’
But disaster was at hand. Just as an earlier experiment had led to a balloon catching fire in the desert, this time the heat from the huge wick had burned through the ropes securing it in place. Al-Jabarti continued, ‘the bowl fell with the wick and the cloth sail followed suit. The French were embarrassed by its fall. Their claim that this apparatus is like a vessel in which people sit and travel to other countries in order to discover news and other falsifications did not appear to be true. On the contrary it is like the kites which household servants build
for festivals and other happy occasions.’
Another own goal for the boastful Gauls.
Conté turned his attention to the mysterious stone and how to record its message most perfectly. His experience of printing made it obvious – the stone, with its graven words and images, could be used as a printing block. Daubed in wax (which remained until 1999 when it was finally cleaned up), the stone was set in a clever invention of the irrepressible Conté. Using the great weight of the stone (over fifteen hundredweight), he set it in a frame so that it could be tilted on to a sheet of paper. Inking the stone with a roller, the weight pressed down on the paper causing an image to be printed. Large numbers of copies were made and distributed, enabling anyone to have a go at cracking the secret of the stone.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 24