off the ship by Duroc, who forbade her access to Napoleon but pensioned
her off with the gift of a country mansion.
What did Napoleon achieve in his fourteen months in Egypt? From
the viewpoint of immediate French interests, almost nothing. Nearly
40,000 troops, many of them elite units, who would have been better
employed on the battlefields of Europe, were gradually diminished in
numbers by endless and ultimately pointless battles against Mamelukes
and Turks. By aiming at Malta he brought the Russians into the
Mediterranean ambit and by striking at Egypt he brought the Royal Navy
back into the Levantine seas. It is not too much to say that the Egyptian
adventure uniquely allowed the Turks and Russians, those traditional
enemies, for once to make common cause.
Even if Napoleon had not failed beneath the walls of Acre, it is difficult
to see what the end result could have been. The idea of a link-up with
Tippoo Sahib and the Mysores was dealt a death blow by the great
victory at Seringapatam by General Harris and the Wellesley brothers in
the spring of I799· French losses in battle and from disease were high,
and were not compensated by hoards of loot, as in Italy, since there was
no way to transport looted artefacts back to France. A few privileged
members of the officer class doubtless enjoyed a degree of sexual freedom
they could not have had in France. Only long-term and indirectly, in the
shape of a burgeoning European intellectual interest in Egyptian history
and culture, can one see benefits from the three-year sojourn of the
French.
For Napoleon himself it was a different matter. By the time his
propaganda machine had winnowed the details of the military campaigns,
his very real martial achievements in Egypt had been apotheosized. He
himself throve in Egypt and, even if we accept that his diet was
immeasurably superior to that of his men, it is surely significant that he
remained untouched by plague. His health in fact was never better than
during 1798-99; he rid himself of all ailments for a time, only to find
them returning when he got back to Europe. He loved the sights, sounds
and smells of the Arab world and felt an instinctive sympathy for the
culture of the Arabs and the folkways of the sheikhs and fellahin. He told
Madame Remusat that he loved aping Alexander the Great by putting on
eastern garb and that the East appealed uniquely to his sensibility:
In Egypt I found myself freed from the obstacles of an irksome
civilization. I was full of dreams. I saw myself fo unding a religion,
marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my
hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs. In my