Well, while Napoleon was attending to his business inland, where he intended to do some splendid things, the English, who were always trying to make us trouble, burned his fleet at Aboukir.  But our general, who had the respect of the East and the West, who had been called “my son” by the Pope, and “my dear father” by the cousin of Mahomet, resolved to punish England, and to capture the Indies, in payment for his lost fleet.  He was just going to take us across the Red Sea into Asia—­a country where there were lots of diamonds, plenty of gold with which to pay his soldiers, and palaces that could be used for etapes—­when the Mody made an arrangement with the Plague, and sent it down to put an end to our victories.  Then it was, Halt, all!  And everybody marched off to that parade from which you don’t come back on your feet.  Dying soldiers couldn’t take Saint Jean d’Acre, although they forced an entrance three times with noble and stubborn courage.  The Plague was too strong for us; and it wasn’t any use to say “Please don’t!” to the Plague.  Everybody was sick except Napoleon.  He looked fresh as a rose, and the whole army saw him drinking in pestilence without being hurt a bit.  How was that?  Do you call that natural?

Well, the Mamelukes, who knew that we were all in ambulances, thought they’d bar our way; but they couldn’t play that sort of game with Napoleon.  He turned to his old fire-eaters—­the fellows with the toughest hides—­and said:  “Go clear the road for me.”  Junot, who was his devoted friend and a number one soldier, took not more than a thousand men, and slashed right through the army of the pasha which had had the impudence to get in our way.  Then we went back to Cairo, where we had our headquarters.

And now for another part of the story.  While Napoleon was away France was letting herself be ruined by those government scalawags in Paris, who were keeping back the soldiers’ pay, withholding their linen and their clothes, and even letting them starve.  They wanted the soldiers to lay down the law to the universe, and that’s all they cared for.  They were just a lot of idiots jabbering for amusement instead of putting their own hands into the dough.  So our armies were beaten and we couldn’t defend, our frontiers.  The man was no longer there.  I say “the man” because that’s what they called him; but it was absurd to say that he was merely a man, when he had a star of his own with all its belongings.  It was the rest of us who were merely men.  At the battle of Aboukir, with a single division and with a loss of only three hundred men, he whipped the great army of the Turks, and hustled more than half of them into the sea—­r-r-rah—­like that!  But it was his last thunderclap in Egypt; because when he heard, soon afterward, what was happening in France, he made up his mind to go back there.  “I am the savior of France,” he said, “and I must go to her aid.”  The army didn’t know what he intended to do.  If they had known, they would have kept him in Egypt by force and made him Emperor of the East.