"Then up sail and away!" cried Bonaparte. "This is to be no naval affair, but the army of the Bey awaits us.""Tell the band to play a Wagner march," he whispered, hastily, to his aide-de-camp. "It'll make the army mad, and what we need now is wrath."So began the battle of the Pyramids. The result is too well known to readers of contemporary history to need detailed statement here. All day long it raged, and when night fell Cairo came with it. Napoleon, worn out with fatigue, threw himself down on a pyramid to rest.
"Ah!" he said, as he breathed a sigh of relief, "what a glorious day!
We've beat 'em! Won't the Directory be glad? M. Barras will be more M. Barrassed than ever." Then, turning and tapping on the door of the massive pile, he whispered, softly: "Ah! Ptolemy, my man, it's a pity you've no windows in this tomb. You'd have seen a pretty sight this day. Kleber," he added, turning to that general, "do you know why Ptolemy inside this pyramid and I outside of it are alike?""I cannot guess, General," said Kleber. "Why?""We're both 'in it'!" returned Napoleon, retiring to his tent.
Later on in the evening, summoning Bourrienne, the victor said to him:
"Mr. Secretary, I have a new autograph. If Ptolemy can spell his name with a 'p,' why shouldn't I? I'm not going to have history say that a dead mummy could do things I couldn't. Pnapoleon would look well on a state paper.""No doubt," said Bourrienne; "but every one now says that you copy Caesar. Why give them the chance to call you an imitator of Ptolemy also?""True, my friend, true," returned Napoleon, in a tone of disappointment. "I had not thought of that. When you write my autographs for the children of these Jennylukes--""Mamelukes, General," corrected Bourrienne.
"Ah, yes--I always get mixed in these matters--for the children of these Mamelukes, you may stick to the old form. Good-night."And with that the conqueror went to sleep as peacefully as a little child.
Had Bonaparte now returned to France he would have saved himself much misery. King of fire though he had become in the eyes of the vanquished, his bed was far from being one of roses.
"In a climate like that," he observed, sadly, many years after, "I'd rather have been an ice baron. Africa got entirely too hot to cut any ice with me. Ten days after I had made my friend Ptolemy turn over in his grave, Admiral Nelson came along with an English fleet and challenged our Admiral Brueys to a shooting-match for the championship of Aboukir Bay. Brueys, having heard of what magazine writers call the ships of the desert in my control, supposing them to be frigates and not camels, imagined himself living in Easy Street, and accepted the challenge. He expected me to sail around to the other side of Nelson, and so have him between two fires. Well, Idon't go to sea on camels, as you know, and the result was that after a twenty-four-hour match the camels were the only ships we had left.
