And why not? Here at Toulon, he had risen from captain of artillery to brigadier general in days after situating the cannon that drove the British and the royalists from the city. He had survived the Terror and a brief stint in prison, married a social climber named Josephine whose first husband had been guillotined, helped slaughter a counterrevolutionary mob in Paris, and led the ragtag French army to a series of astounding victories over the Austrians in Italy. His troops had warmed to him as if he were Caesar, and the Directory was delighted by the tribute he sent their bankrupt treasury. Napoleon wanted to emulate Alexander, and his civilian superiors wanted his restless ambition out of France. Egypt would serve both just fine.
What a hero he looked then, long before his days of palaces and cream! His hair was a shock of black across his forehead, his nose Roman, his lips pursed like a classical statue’s, his chin cleft, and his eyes a dark, excited grey. He had a flair for addressing troops, understanding the human thirst for glory and adventure, and carried himself in the way we all imagined heroes should stand: torso erect, head high, eyes on a mystic horizon. He was the kind of man whose manner, as much as his words, persuaded that he must know what he is doing.
I was impressed because he’d clearly risen by merit, not birth, which fit the American ideal. He was, after all, an immigrant like us, not really French, having come from the island of Corsica to the barracks of a French military school. He’d spent the early years of life wanting nothing more ambitious than his homeland’s independence. By all reports he was a middling student in all but mathematics, socially awkward, lonely, without a mentor or powerful patron, and faced upon graduation with the daunting upheaval of the Revolution. Yet while so many were bewildered by the turmoil, Bonaparte thrived on it. The intelligence that had been smothered by the rigidities of military school erupted when the need was for improvisation and imagination, when France was under siege. The prejudice he’d encountered, as a rustic islander from third-rate nobility, melted away when his competence at meeting crises was demonstrated. The diffidence and hopelessness of adolescence had been shed like a clumsy cloak, and he’d worked to turn awkwardness to charm. It was the unlikely Napoleon who’d come to embody the idealism of the Revolution, where rank was won by ability and there was no limit to ambition. Though conservatives like Sidney Smith couldn’t see it, this is where the two revolutions, American and French, were alike. Bonaparte was a self-made man.
Yet Napoleon’s relationship to individuals was one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. He’d developed undeniable charisma, but it was always practiced – shy, removed, wary, tense – as if he were an actor playing a role. When he looked at you it was with the brilliance of a chandelier, energy emanating from him like a horse radiates heat. He could focus with an intensity both flattering and overwhelming – he did it to me a dozen times. Yet a moment later he’d swing his entire attention to the next person and leave you feeling as if a cloud had passed in front of the sun, and seconds after that he might disappear into himself even in a crowded room, staring just as intently at the floor as he had at you, eyes downcast, lost in thought and a world of his own. One Parisian female had described his brooding countenance as the type one dreaded meeting in a dark alley. There was a thumb-stained copy of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther that he carried in his pocket, a novel of suicide and hopeless love that he’d read six times. I would see his dour passions play out at the Battle of the Pyramids, in triumph and in horror.
It took eight hours for the last ship to parade by, the tricolour streaming from every mast. We’d reviewed a dozen ships of the line, forty-two frigates, and hundreds of transports. The sun was already low when our flagship finally set out like a mother duck after her brood. The fleet covered two square miles of water, the larger warships shortening sails to let the smaller merchant tubs keep pace. When the other convoys joined us we covered four square miles, plodding at little more than three knots.
All but the veteran sailors were miserable. Bonaparte, knowing he was prone to seasickness, spent much of his time in a wooden bed suspended by ropes that stayed level during the ship’s rolls. The rest of us were queasy whether standing or trying to sleep. Talma finally didn’t have to imagine sickness, he had it, and confided several times that he was almost certainly near death. Soldiers didn’t have time to reach the upper deck and lee rail to heave out their guts, so buckets filled to overflowing, every ship reeking of vomit. L’Orient ’s five decks were crammed with two thousand soldiers, one thousand sailors, cattle, sheep, and so many supplies that we squeezed, rather than walked, from bow to stern. Ranking savants like Berthollet had cabins of red damask, but they were so small it was like occupying a coffin. We lesser intellectuals made do with closets of damp oak. When we ate, we were packed so tightly on benches we barely had room to raise hand to mouth. A dozen stabled horses stamped, whinnied, and pissed in the hold, and every bit of clothing was damp. The lower gun ports had to be closed against the swells, so it was dim below, making reading impossible. We preferred to stay topsides anyway, but the sailors working to drive the ship would periodically become exasperated at the crowding and order us back down. Within a day everyone was bored; within a week we all prayed for the desert.
Added to the discomfort was the anxiety of watching for British ships. A firebrand named Horatio Nelson, already missing an arm and an eye but no less enthusiastic for it, was reputed to be hunting us with his squadron. Since the Revolution had stripped the French navy of many of its best royalist officers, and since our lumbering transports and gun decks were jammed with army supplies, we dreaded any naval duel.
Our chief distraction was weather. A few days out we had a squall, complete with flashes of lightning. It set L’Orient rolling so badly that the cattle bawled in terror and anything unsecured became a slurry of debris. Within hours it was calm again, and a day later it was so hot and stifling that pitch bubbled from the deck seams. The wind was inconstant and the water stale. My memory of the voyage is of tedium, nausea, and apprehension.
As we sailed south, Bonaparte had the habit of inviting the scholars on board for after-supper discourses in his great cabin. The scientists found the rambling discussions a welcome diversion, while his officers used them as an excuse to nap. Napoleon fancied himself a savant, having used political connections to get himself elected to the National Institute, and liked to claim that if he were not a soldier he would be a scholar. The greatest immortality, he claimed, came from adding to human knowledge, not winning battles. No one believed his sincerity, but it was a nice sentiment to express.
So we met, in a low-beamed chamber with jutting stern cannon that waited on their carriages like patient hounds. The canvas-covered floor was a black-and-white checkerboard like that of a Freemason lodge, based on the old tracing board of the Dionysian architects. Was a French naval designer a member of the fraternity? Or had we Masons simply appropriated every common symbol and pattern we could find? I knew we had taken stars, moon, sun, scales, and geometric shapes, including the pyramid, from ancient times. And the borrowing could go two ways: I suspect Napoleon’s later adoption of the industrious bee as his symbol was inspired by the Masonic symbol of the hive that his brothers would have told him about.