ague was too
strong for us; there was not even time to say "Your servant, sir!" to
the Plague. Every man was down with it. Napoleon alone was as fresh as a
rose; the whole army saw him drinking in the Plague without it doing him
any harm whatever.

There now, my friends, was that natural, do you think?

The Mamelukes, knowing that we were all on the sick-list, want to stop
our road; but it was no use trying that nonsense with Napoleon. So he
spoke to his familiars, who had tougher skins than the rest:

"Go and clear the road for me."

Junot, who was his devoted friend, and a first-class fighter, only takes
a thousand men, and makes a clean sweep of the Pasha's army, which
had the impudence to bar our way. Thereupon back we came to Cairo, our
headquarters, and now for another story.

Napoleon being out of the country, France allowed the people in Paris
to worry the life out of her. They kept back the soldiers' pay and all
their linen and clothing, left them to starve, and expected them to
lay down law to the universe, without taking any further trouble in
the matter. They were idiots of the kind that amuse themselves with
chattering instead of setting themselves to knead the dough. So our
armies were defeated, France could not keep her frontiers; The Man was
not there. I say The Man, look you, because that was how they called
him; but it was stuff and nonsense, for he had a star of his own and all
his other peculiarities, it was the rest of us that were mere men. He
hears this history of France after his famous battle of Aboukir,
where with a single division he routed the grand army of the Turks,
twenty-five thousand strong, and jostled more than half of them into the
sea, rrrah! without losing more than three hundred of his own men. That
was his last thunder-clap in Egypt. He said to himself, seeing that all
was lost down there, "I know that I am the saviour of France, and to
France I must go."

But you must clearly understand that the army did not know of his
departure; for if they had, they would have kept him there by force to
make him Emperor of the East. So there we all are without him, and in
low spirits, for he was the life of us. He leaves Kleber in command,
a great watchdog who passed in his checks at Cairo, murdered by an
Egyptian whom they put to death by spiking him with a bayonet, which
is their way of guillotining people out there; but he suffered so much,
that a soldier took pity on the scoundrel a