Bonaparte walked quickly through the rooms, tapping the yellow top of his boot with a whip he held in his hand.  As he passed along with hasty steps he repeated these words:  “The fortifications are destroyed.  Fortune was against me at St. Jean d’Acre.  I must return to Egypt to preserve it from the enemy, who will soon be there:  In a few hours the Turks will be here.  Let all those who have strength enough rise and come along with us.  They shall be carried on litters and horses.”  There were scarcely sixty cases of plague in the hospital; and all accounts stating a greater number are exaggerated.  The perfect silence, complete dejection, and general stupor of the patients announced their approaching end.  To carry them away in the state in which they were would evidently have been doing nothing else than inoculating the rest of the army with the plague.  I have, it is true, learned, since my return to Europe, that some persons touched the infected with impunity; nay; that others went so far as to inoculate themselves with the plague in order to learn how to cure those whom it might attack.  It certainly was a special protection from Heaven to be preserved from it; but to cover in some degree the absurdity of such a story, it is added that they knew how to elude the danger, and that any one else who braved it without using precautions met with death for their temerity.  This is, in fact; the whole point of the question.  Either those privileged persons took indispensable precautions; and in that case their boasted heroism is a mere juggler’s trick; or they touched the infected without using precautions, and inoculated themselves with the plague, thus voluntarily encountering death, and then the story is really a good one.

The infected were confided, it has been stated, to the head apothecary of the army, Royer, who, dying in Egypt three years after, carried the secret with him to the grave.  But on a moment’s reflection it will be evident that the leaving of Royer alone in Jaffa would have been to devote to certain death; and that a prompt and, cruel one, a man who was extremely useful to the army, and who was at the time in perfect health.  It must be remembered that no guard could be left with him, and that the Turks were close at our heels.  Bonaparte truly said, while walking through the rooms of the hospital, that the Turks would be at Jaffa in a few hours.  With this conviction, would he have left the head apothecary in that town?

Recourse has been had to suppositions to support the contrary belief to what I say.  For example, it is said that the infected patients were embarked in ships of war.  There were no such ships.  Where had they disembarked, who had received them; what had been done with them?  No one speaks of them.  Others, not doubting that the infected men died at Jaffa, say, that the rearguard under Kleber, by order of Bonaparte, delayed its departure for three days, and only began its march when. death had put an end