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.
It was here that I observed the scientific fellowship I’d enlisted in, and I couldn’t blame the brilliant assembly for regarding my own membership somewhat dubiously. Mystic secrets? Berthollet told the assembly I’d encountered an ‘artifact’ I hoped to compare to others in Egypt. Bonaparte announced I had theories about ancient Egyptian mastery of electricity. I said vaguely that I hoped to bring a fresh eye to the pyramids.
My colleagues were more accomplished. Berthollet I have already mentioned. In terms of prestige he was matched only by Gaspard Monge, the famed mathematician who, at fifty-two, was the oldest of our group. With his great shaggy brows that shaded large, bagged eyes, Monge had the look of a wise old dog. Founder of descriptive geometry, his scientific career was superseded by a ministerial one when he was asked by the Revolution to rescue the French cannon industry. He promptly had church bells melted down to make artillery and wrote The Art of Manufacturing Guns. He brought an analytical mind to everything he touched, from creating the metric system to advising Bonaparte on what art to steal from Italy. Sensing, perhaps, that my own mind was not as disciplined as his, he adopted me like a wayward nephew.
‘Silano!’ Monge exclaimed when I explained how I’d come to be on the expedition. ‘I crossed his path in Florence. He was on the way to the Vatican libraries, and muttered something about Constantinople and Jerusalem as well, if he could get leave from the Turks. Just why, he wouldn’t say.’
Also famed was our geologist, whose name, Deodat Guy Silvain Tancrede Gratet de Dolomieu, was longer than my rifle barrel. Renowned in sedate academic circles for having killed a rival in a duel at age eighteen when he was apprenticed to the Knights of Malta, Dolomieu at forty-seven had become independently wealthy, professor of the school of mines, and discoverer of the mineral dolomite. A devoted wanderer with a great mustache, he couldn’t wait to see the rocks of Egypt.
Etienne Louis Malus, a mathematician and expert in the optical properties of light, was a handsome army engineer of twenty-two. The sleepy-eyed, booming-voiced Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, thirty, was another famed mathematician. Our orientalist and interpreter was Jean-Michael de Venture, our economist was Jean-Baptiste Say, and our zoologist was Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, who had the peculiar idea that the characteristics of plants and animals could change over time.
The most raffish and mechanically ingenious of our group was the one-eyed balloonist, forty-three-year-old Nicolas-Jacques Conte, who wore a patch over the orb destroyed in a balloon explosion. He was the first man in history to use balloons in military reconnaissance, at the battle of Fleurus. He’d invented a new kind of writing instrument called a pencil that didn’t require an inkwell, and carried it around in his waistcoat to sketch out machines constantly occurring to his inventive mind. He had already established himself as the expedition’s tinkerer and inventor, and had brought along a supply of sulfuric acid that would react with iron to make hydrogen for his silk gasbags. This element, lighter than air, was proving far more practical than the earlier experiments of lifting balloons with heat.
‘If your plan to invade England by air had made sense, Nicky,’ Monge liked to joke, ‘I wouldn’t be vomiting my guts out on this rolling bucket today.’
‘All I needed were enough balloons,’ Conte would counter. ‘If you hadn’t hogged every sou for your cannon foundries, we’d both be having tea in London.’
The age was alive with ideas for warfare. I remembered that my own countryman, Robert Fulton, had just in December been turned down by French authorities after proposing an idea for an underwater warship. There were even proposals to dig a tunnel under the English Channel.
These learned gentlemen and staff officers would gather for what Napoleon called his instituts, in which he would pick a topic, assign the debaters, and lead us in rambling discussions of politics, society, military tactics, and science. We had a three-day debate on the merits and corrosive jealousies of private property, an evening discussion on the age of Earth, another on the interpretation of dreams, and several on the truth or utility of religion. Here Napoleon’s internal contradictions were plain; he would scoff at the existence of God one moment and anxiously cross himself with a Corsican’s instinct the next. No one knew what he believed, least of all he, but Bonaparte was a firm proponent of the usefulness of religion in regulating the masses. ‘If I could found my own religion I could rule Asia,’ he told us.
‘I think Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad got there before you,’ Berthollet said dryly.
‘This is my point,’ Bonaparte said. ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all trace their origins to the same holy stories. They all worship the same monotheistic god. Except for a few trifling details as to which prophet had the last word, they are more alike than different. If we make plain to the Egyptians that the Revolution recognises the unity of faith, we should have no problem with religion. Both Alexander and the Romans had policies of tolerating the beliefs of the conquered.’
‘It’s the believers who are most alike who fight most fervently over differences,’ Conte warned. ‘Don’t forget the wars between Catholics and Protestants.’
‘Yet are we not at the dawn of reason, of the new scientific age?’ Fourier spoke up. ‘Perhaps mankind is on the verge of being rational.’
‘No subject people are rational at the point of a gun,’ the balloonist replied.
‘Alexander subdued Egypt by declaring himself a son of both Zeus the Greek and Amon the Egyptian,’ Napoleon said. ‘I intend to be as tolerant of Muhammad as of Jesus.’
‘While you cross yourself like the pope,’ Monge chided. ‘And what of the atheism of the Revolution?’
‘A stance doomed to fail, its biggest mistake. It is immaterial whether or not God exists. It simply is that whenever you bring religion, or even superstition, into conflict with liberty, the former will always win over the latter in the people’s mind.’ This was the kind of cynically perceptive political judgement Bonaparte enjoyed making to hold his intellectual weight against the learning of the scientists. He enjoyed provoking us. ‘Besides, religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.’
Napoleon was also fascinated in the truths behind myth.
‘Resurrection and virgin birth, for example,’ he told us one night as the rationalist Berthollet rolled his eyes. ‘This is a story not just of Christianity, but of countless ancient faiths. Like your Masonic Hiram Abiff, right, Talma?’ He liked to focus on my friend in hopes the writer would flatter him in newspaper articles he sent back to France.
‘It is so common a legend that one wonders if it was not frequently true,’ Talma agreed. ‘Is death an absolute end? Or can it be reversed, or postponed indefinitely? Why did the pharaohs devote so much attention to it?’
‘Certainly the earliest stories of resurrection go back to the legend of the Egyptian god Osiris and his sister and wife Isis,’ said de Venture, our scholar of the East. ‘Osiris was slain by his evil brother Seth, but Isis reassembled his dismembered parts to bring him back to life. Then he slept with his sister and sired her son, Horus. Death was but a prelude to birth.’
