I arrive, Gentlemen, at the epoch so suggestive of painful recollections, when the Agas of the Janissaries who had fled into Syria, having despaired of vanquishing our troops so admirably commanded, by the honourable arms of the soldier, had recourse to the dagger of the assassin.  You are aware that a young fanatic, whose imagination had been wrought up to a high state of excitement in the mosques by a month of prayers and abstinence, aimed a mortal blow at the hero of Heliopolis at the instant when he was listening, without suspicion, and with his usual kindness, to a recital of pretended grievances, and was promising redress.

This sad misfortune plunged our colony into profound grief.  The Egyptians themselves mingled their tears with those of the French soldiers.  By a delicacy of feeling which we should be wrong in supposing the Mahometans not to be capable of, they did not then omit, they have not since omitted, to remark, that the assassin and his three accomplices were not born on the banks of the Nile.

The army, to mitigate its grief, desired that the funeral of Kleber should be celebrated with great pomp.  It wished, also, that on that solemn day, some person should recount the long series of brilliant actions which will transmit the name of the illustrious general to the remotest posterity.  By unanimous consent this honourable and perilous mission was confided to Fourier.

There are very few individuals, Gentlemen, who have not seen the brilliant dreams of their youth wrecked one after the other against the sad realities of mature age.  Fourier was one of those few exceptions.

In effect, transport yourselves mentally back to the year 1789, and consider what would be the future prospects of the humble convert of St. Benoit-sur-Loire.  No doubt a small share of literary glory; the favour of being heard occasionally in the churches of the metropolis; the satisfaction of being appointed to eulogize such or such a public personage.  Well! nine years have hardly passed and you find him at the head of the Institute of Egypt, and he is the oracle, the idol of a society which counted among its members Bonaparte, Berthollet, Monge, Malus, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, Conte, &c.; and the generals rely upon him for overcoming apparently insurmountable difficulties, and the army of the East, itself so rich in adornments of all kinds, would desire no other interpreter when it is necessary to recount the lofty deeds of the hero which it had just lost.

It was upon the breach of a bastion which our troops had recently taken by assault, in sight of the most majestic of rivers, of the magnificent valley which it fertilizes, of the frightful desert of Lybia, of the colossal pyramids of Gizeh; it was in presence of twenty populations of different origins which Cairo unites together in its vast basin; in presence of the most valiant soldiers that had ever set foot on a land, wherein, however, the names of Alexander and