Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (31 page)

Sadly, the world’s first ultra-marathoner is thought to have succumbed to dysentery and heat exhaustion. The stones marking the site of his burial were buried by the construction of the Aswan dam, the building of which made the canals of Egypt stagnant.

Word of the Nile was spreading. With the establishment of publishing houses and an increasingly informed readership, attention turned to all that was exotic. One avid reader of anything about the East, and about the country of the mighty Nile, was a young Corsican artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte.

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Queen of the Nile

A weak person loves the weakness of the strong
. Nubian proverb

Europe had not forgotten the Nile – there is a steady stream of travelogues appearing throughout the eighteenth century by the likes of James Bruce, Jan Potocki and Richard Pococke. It took Napoleon, however, to bring the Nile fully back into the European mind. He wanted to be Alexander the Great, only Greater, and Alexander had conquered Egypt and the Nile before turning his attention to India. Napoleon would do better; he aimed to take Egypt, then the Levant, and finally wrest India from the calculating British.

Napoleon saw the river as the lifeblood of Egypt. He said, ‘If I were to govern this country not one drop of water would be lost to the sea.’ This same quotation was used 150 years later by the Greek Egyptian engineer Adrian Daninos to support construction of the Aswan high dam – one lasting impact of Napoleon’s short-lived invasion of Egypt. This quixotic expedition also led to the birth of the Egyptology we know today, dragging Egypt from its long slumbers under Ottoman rule. Napoleon’s soldiers uncovered the Rosetta Stone, thus starting
the process of finally decoding hieroglyphics; and the influx of French
savants
led to a scientific interest in the Nile, the first barrage across the river and ultimately to the Suez Canal.

And Napoleon did it all without his beloved Josephine. When he went to Egypt to conquer the Nile in 1799 he imagined he would be there with Josephine. They had tried for a child but none was forth-coming. The cunning Josephine suggested that a cure at the spa of La Plombières might aid conception rather better than a fifty-four-day journey by sea to Alexandria. Napoleon was very unhappy about this but grudgingly allowed her to remain in Europe.

Josephine, however, had no intention of taking a rest cure in the Vosges Mountains; not even the famous
glaces Plombières
could tempt her. Instead she stayed in Paris and continued having an affair with a young man called Hippolyte Charles. Napoleon, who up to this point had never been unfaithful to Josephine, was grief stricken by the news. And it wasn’t the first time. In Italy he had threatened to kill Josephine when he discovered her affair with a young adjutant called . . . Hippolyte Charles. He had Charles dismissed from the army. Now it seemed that she had been spotted in a private box in the theatre with Charles, that that charming Charlie had given her a little dog and had even been seen in her carriage. Not that Napoleon believed any of this at first. As a successful general he was surprisingly trusting, but his friend and long associate General Junot assured him most forcibly that it was true. Bonaparte was furious and sad and then furious again: ‘Josephine! You should have told me. To have been so fooled. I will exterminate that race of jackanapes and dandies. As for her – divorce! A blazing public divorce!’

Instead he conquered Egypt. Call it being in denial. To take his mind off things still further, Napoleon intended to do a lot of reading during his campaign. The camp library he insisted on taking with him included his favourite poets such as Ossian and Tasso, forty ‘English Novels’, Homer, Ariosto, Plutarch, works on geography, travel and history such as Fontenelle’s
Worlds
and Cook’s
Voyages
, treatises on fortifications and fireworks (their more deadly variants, one assumes), Voltaire, Goethe and, listed in his own hand under ‘Politics’: the Bible, the New Testament, Koran, Vedan (sic) [the Vedantas], Mythology, Montesquieu’s
De l’esprit des lois
.

Was it prescience that led him to list works of religion, once he had headed east, to their very source, as works of politics; or perhaps in his
messianic drive religion was more use to him than the endless arguments that pass for much of politics? When leaving France he remarked to his secretary, Louis de Bourrienne, ‘Europe is a molehill. There have never been great empires and revolutions except in the East.’ On arrival he wrote to his brother Joseph, ‘Egypt is richer than any other country in the world in corn, rice, vegetables and cattle.’ His ambitions were clear when he was asked how long he would stay: ‘A few months or six years; all depends on circumstances . . . if all goes well, it will enable me to get to India.’

Meanwhile he had his books. Often he preferred to be read to: his secretary reported, ‘if I read poetry he would fall asleep; but when he asked for the “Life of Cromwell” I counted on sitting up pretty late’.

We have travelled from Islamic Cairo to the source of the Blue Nile, then with Bruce we have found ourselves back in Cairo, where the River Mamluks were still in power, albeit now under the auspices of the Ottoman Turks, who had conquered them in 1517. (Egypt would remain somewhat nominally an Ottoman state until 5 November 1914.) With their antique weapons and ancient tactics the Mamluk rulers of Egypt were soon to be outgunned. Napoleon fought his way from Alexandria to Cairo and there his army squatted, starved of entertainment and women.

A young accompanying officer, Niello Sargy, who later wrote up his experiences in Egypt, recalled: ‘The common women were horrible. But the Beys, the prominent Mamluks of the country, had left behind some pretty Armenians and Georgians, whom the generals grabbed for the so-called good of the nation.’ Napoleon, spurned by Josephine – who continued to refuse to accompany him east – may well have been sensitive to the notion that an Eastern potentate must have a harem. He knew now, thanks to his confidant General Junot, that Josephine was serially unfaithful not just with Charles, but also with his own powerful friends. While it has often been true that an Eastern potentate would have the right to annex any woman, this was far from always being the case. Rulers such as Saladin often married the widows of friends or relatives to provide security for these women in old age – and in any case their first boast would be of children rather than their wives. Napoleon was a European and not so self-assured – he wanted a trophy wife. Perhaps, too, he was thinking of the last European conqueror of Egypt – Julius Caesar. He needed his own Cleopatra. The highest-status women were the Caucasian mistresses of the deposed Ottoman rulers. Napoleon
‘relaxed at first with some of the women of the beys and Mamluks. But finding with these beautiful Georgian women neither reciprocity nor any charm of society, he smelled a void in all of them, and missed all the more the lascivious Italian and friendly French women.’ Did the abandoned women of the beys really give Napoleon the cold shoulder? Or did he, with his generals cavorting with the locals, desire to go one better and get a
bona fide
French woman?

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: