The Napoleon of the People | Page 4

without it doing him any harm whatever.
There now, my friends, was that natural, do you think?
The Mamelukes, knowing that we were all on the sick-list, want to stop
our road; but it was no use trying that nonsense with Napoleon. So he
spoke to his familiars, who had tougher skins than the rest:
"Go and clear the road for me."
Junot, who was his devoted friend, and a first-class fighter, only takes a
thousand men, and makes a clean sweep of the Pasha's army, which had
the impudence to bar our way. Thereupon back we came to Cairo, our
headquarters, and now for another story.
Napoleon being out of the country, France allowed the people in Paris
to worry the life out of her. They kept back the soldiers' pay and all
their linen and clothing, left them to starve, and expected them to lay
down law to the universe, without taking any further trouble in the
matter. They were idiots of the kind that amuse themselves with
chattering instead of setting themselves to knead the dough. So our
armies were defeated, France could not keep her frontiers; The Man
was not there. I say The Man, look you, because that was how they
called him; but it was stuff and nonsense, for he had a star of his own
and all his other peculiarities, it was the rest of us that were mere men.
He hears this history of France after his famous battle of Aboukir,
where with a single division he routed the grand army of the Turks,
twenty-five thousand strong, and jostled more than half of them into the
sea, rrrah! without losing more than three hundred of his own men.
That was his last thunder-clap in Egypt. He said to himself, seeing that
all was lost down there, "I know that I am the saviour of France, and to
France I must go."
But you must clearly understand that the army did not know of his
departure; for if they had, they would have kept him there by force to

make him Emperor of the East. So there we all are without him, and in
low spirits, for he was the life of us. He leaves Kleber in command, a
great watchdog who passed in his checks at Cairo, murdered by an
Egyptian whom they put to death by spiking him with a bayonet, which
is their way of guillotining people out there; but he suffered so much,
that a soldier took pity on the scoundrel and handed his flask to him;
and the Egyptian turned up his eyes then and there with all the pleasure
in life. But there is not much fun for us about this little affair. Napoleon
steps aboard of a little cockleshell, a mere nothing of a skiff, called the
/Fortune/, and in the twinkling of an eye, and in the teeth of the English,
who were blockading the place with vessels of the line and cruisers and
everything that carries canvas, he lands in France for he always had the
faculty of taking the sea at a stride. Was that natural? Bah! as soon as
he landed at Frejus, it is as good as saying that he has set foot in Paris.
Everybody there worships him; but he calls the Government together.
"What have you done to my children, the soldiers?" he says to the
lawyers. "You are a set of good-for-nothings who make fools of other
people, and feather your own nests at the expense of France. It will not
do. I speak in the name of every one who is discontented."
Thereupon they want to put him off and to get rid of him; but not a bit
of it! He locks them up in the barracks where they used to argufy and
makes them jump out of the windows. Then he makes them follow in
his train, and they all become as mute as fishes and supple as tobacco
pouches. So he becomes Consul at a blow. He was not the man to doubt
the existence of the Supreme Being; he kept his word with Providence,
who had kept His promise in earnest; he sets up religion again, and
gives back the churches, and they ring the bells for God and Napoleon.
So every one is satisfied: /primo/ the priests with whom he allows no
one to meddle; /segondo/, the merchant folk who carry on their trades
without fear of the /rapiamus/ of the law that had pressed too heavily
on them; /tertio/, the nobles; for people had fallen into an unfortunate
habit of putting them to death, and he puts a stop to this.
But there were enemies to be cleared out of the way, and he was not the
one to go to sleep