Napoleon's for, with a foot in both camps, he could not see any reasons
for disharmony and was impatient with complaints from either side.
Intending as he did to found an Egyptian Institute, he turned the deck of
his ship into a kind of floating university, where daily seminars were held
on a wide variety of topics.
It was now that Androche Junot, Napoleon's chief aide, first revealed
the qualities that would eventually lead to his fall from his master's
favour. Two years younger than Napoleon, the twenty-seven-year-old
Junot was already showing signs of a world-weary cynicism, verging on
nihilism, that was more appropriate to a much younger man. He had not
always been thus: when his father asked sceptically after the siege of
Toulon in 1793, 'Who is this unknown General Bonaparte?' Junot had
replied: 'He is the sort of man of whom Nature is sparing and who only
appears on earth at intervals of centuries.'
Junot never entirely lost his hero-worship of Napoleon but, almost as
compensation, he was devastatingly sardonic and philistine about
virtually everyone and everything else. During one of the first shipboard
'seminars', which Napoleon expected his officers to attend, he was
discovered asleep and snoring loudly. When aroused he was unrepentant:
'General, it is all the fault of your confounded Institute: it sends everyone
to sleep, yourself included.' Always ready to poke fun at the academicians
on L 'Orient and with a pronounced taste for levity, he once made a pun
on Lannes's name, pronouncing it as l'iine (ass). 'General,' he said, 'why
hasn't Lannes been made a member of the Institute. Surely he ought to
be included on his name alone.' Junot was now beginning to irritate
Napoleon. After all, the scene with Josephine in March was really his
fault, for Josephine dismissed her personal maid Louise Compoint for
sleeping with the philandering Junot. It was in revenge for this that
Compoint came to Napoleon and spilled the beans about Hipployte
Charles, the Bodin Company and Josephine's infidelities.
On 9 June the French fleet reached Malta. On paper this should have
been a formidable obstacle, as the city of Valletta had walls ten feet thick
and was defended by fif teen hundred guns and three hundred Knights of
the Order of StJohn of Jerusalem. But a combination of demoralization
and the corrupting gold of Napoleon's secret agents had done its job well.
The two hundred Knights of French origin resented the fact that the
French Grand Master de Rohan had been succeeded by the Prussian
Hompesch and let it be known they would not oppose their compatriots.
Hompesch, a defeatist, seeing the scale of external and internal opposition
ranged against him, surrendered after token resistance of a day. This was
marcin
(Marcin)
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