Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (35 page)

But no child was forthcoming. Fourès now returned to the scene. There is some confusion about whether he made it to France or not. In one story his ship is intercepted by the English who, discovering the transparent flimsiness of his mission, unearth the fact that they have Napoleon’s lover’s husband on board. To confuse the great conqueror further, they sent Fourès back to Egypt. Whatever the truth, on his return Fourès was put in a rage when he discovered just how far his wife had gone, from a shy and retiring hat maker to the talk of the town. He demanded to see her and told all who would listen that he would take a
sabot
(a clog from her native Pyrenees region) to her comely backside. Pauline was not intimidated: she demanded a divorce ‘to protect myself against his brutality’. In eight days, thanks to Sartelon, Napoleon’s commissionaire in Egypt, the marriage was dissolved.

Pauline blossomed as a mistress of the salon. Her picnics at the Pyramids, site of Napoleon’s great victory the previous year over the Mamluk army, were the gayest and most eagerly attended gatherings. She took tuition in that native lute-like instrument the
oud
and, by all accounts, was most proficient. She also learnt the harp, its calming tones so welcome to Napoleon, whose victory in Egypt was gradually looking like stagnation. Blockaded by the British, unable to defeat the Ottomans in Syria, he received word that France was itself in a dangerously vulnerable state. Telling Pauline that he was simply going ‘up the delta’ for a few days, he did a midnight flit back to Paris. The man
who would conquer Europe and burn Moscow was too afraid of his girlfriend to tell her he was leaving her. He did write a letter explaining things, and Pauline, with her instinct for survival, installed herself as the mistress of Napoleon’s successor in Egypt, General Kléber. She is said to have grown skilled at telling false diamonds from the real. When offered a diamond she would, and this must have been hard to carry off with style, let a drop of water fall on to its surface and move it around with a hat pin. If the gem was glass or paste the water spread, if a real diamond it remained as a globule.

Pauline returned to France in 1800, shortly before the French gave up their occupation of Egypt. In 1801 she married a well-placed retired officer, Henry de Ranchoup, a marriage secured through Napoleon’s advice to Ranchoup. She never again met Bonaparte, except once, at a ball, in 1811, a year after he finally divorced Josephine and married Marie Louise of Austria. Probably he and Pauline did not dance on that occasion.

As a wedding present Ranchoup was given the consulship in Santander and in 1810 he was sent to Sweden. Pauline stayed in Paris, becoming one of the great salon hostesses of the time. She painted, played the harp and wrote three novels:
Lord Wenworth
(1813),
Aloïze de Mespres
(1814) and then, after a long gap – coincident with Napo leon’s defeat and exile and death –
Une Châtelaine du XIIème Siècle
(1834). Of the 112 works in Napoleon’s library on St Helena there were no novels by his former mistress.

Ranchoup died in 1826. To restore her fortunes Pauline went to Brazil to start a venture buying tropical hardwoods in partnership with a retired Imperial Guards officer. She succeeded, and in 1837 returned to France to live a rich and eccentric later life. She took up smoking, was notorious for bringing her lapdog into church and kept, in her orangerie, a troop of small monkeys. She died aged ninety-one, in 1869, the year the Suez Canal, the work of another Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, was finally opened.

I went searching for the palace of Alfi Bey and the apartment occupied by Pauline Fourès. It was in the Ezbekiya neighbourhood, a place now known for its enormous outdoor second-hand book market. Of the palace nothing remains – though the name lives on in the traditional restaurant Alfi Bey’s, which is to be found in Alfy Street just opposite the raunchy bellydancing club the New Arizona. A little bit further along is one of my favourite hostelries, the Windsor Hotel bar;
I popped in to drink to the extraordinary career of Napoleon’s Cairo mistress Pauline Fourès.

14
•
Muhammad Ali – from taxman to king of the Nile

Don’t ask news of an old person, ask it of a traveller
. Egyptian proverb

It’s 1805. Napoleon’s navy is getting its final drubbing at Trafalgar where Nelson will be shot once too often and die. Meanwhile, Egypt is up for grabs. The Mamluks are still running things but their credibility has been destroyed by Napoleon’s invasion. Into the vacuum steps a determined Albanian tax collector – Muhammad Ali, a man who will leave an indelible mark on the Nile from Cairo as far as the great Sudd swamp.

Muhammad Ali was, like Alexander the Great, born in Macedonia, though of Albanian parents. It is strange to think of Alexander, Napoleon and Muhammad Ali all linked not just by their overweening ambition and similarity in personality but also by the fact of Egypt being the focus of their ambitions. Without Napoleon’s example and the opportunity afforded by his invasion of Egypt, Muhammad Ali would have remained a
bolukbashi
, or tax collector, in Macedonia. Though his father was a tobacco trader, Muhammad Ali was taken under the wing of his uncle, through whose connections he became first an efficient tax collector and later leader of the Kavala volunteer regiment, one of many that went to Egypt in 1801 to reoccupy the country for the Ottoman Turkish regime. In the power vacuum left by the departure of Napoleon the Ottomans did battle with the much weakened Mamluks, the military power in Egypt since the ninth century. By carefully playing for both sides but always with an eye on both the people and the sheikhs of Al-Azhar mosque, Muhammad Ali presented himself as an able ruler. So much so that by 1805 the
ulema
(Muslim scholars) asked Ahmed Khushid Pasha to stand down as
wali
, or governor, of Egypt and allow Muhammad Ali to take over.

His personality and character were suited to the great tasks ahead of him. James Augustus St John, who visited Egypt later on in Muhammad Ali’s rule, spent some time with the
wali
, observing him:

St John reports that Muhammad Ali Pasha slept little and that Europeans who shared his tent while on a journey complained of being asked questions at all times of the night, and of his conversation going on long after they wished to sleep. He rose before daybreak and quickly rode to his divan or office where all petitions, letters and despatches awaited his opinion. These were read out to him as he paced the floor and dictated his replies. Muhammad Ali’s habit of having most letters read to him gave rise to the persistent rumour, held now by many Egyptians, that a mere illiterate had gained power over them. Apart from its being a requirement for a tax collector, there is ample evidence that Muhammad Ali could read in Turkish if not in Arabic. St John states that one of his pastimes was to retire to the banks of the canal, have a carpet thrown down for him to sit on, and there while coffee was being prepared read and seal his despatches. He would then enjoy his coffee and a
shisha
, before returning to the palace. In his harem, the private part of the palace frequented by eunuchs and women alone, he read or had books read to him, or ‘amused himself by conversing with the abler part of his eunuchs’. At other times of leisure he dictated his autobiography or played chess, to which he was addicted. ‘In fact, his active restless temper will never suffer him to be unoccupied; and when not engaged with graver and more important affairs, he descends even to meddling.’ His interest extended to the seemingly minute. An educated Egyptian teacher of mathematics, engaged in instructing a group of young officers in Alexandria, was made to give an exact account of how each one was advancing in his studies. When his fleet was being prepared he was rowed out each day to observe the shipwrights at work, urging them on by his presence. Though he would often go to bed late he would rest, or at least withdraw, from about 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in his harem. Then he would be back at his divan dealing with business until 11 at night or even later.

The accidents of the weather never interfered with his business. Rainfall, which most Cairenes deplore, never deterred him, and, indeed, making a journey in a torrential downpour had once caused him a very serious illness. Everywhere you see evidence of his will to initiate, pursue, complete. His movements were known to be sudden and unexpected. He could be in Cairo and a few days later in Alexandria, arriving unannounced; it maintained the agents of government in their vigilance better than admonitions from the centre. Others said it was an affectation or a caprice; nevertheless it worked.

To regain his composure there was a small alcove in the Shubra Palace where the Pasha would sit at about eleven or twelve o’clock at night, sometimes for an hour, sometimes less. As St John relates, ‘From this alcove two long vistas, between cypress, orange and citron trees, diverge, and extend the whole length of the grounds; and in the calm bright nights of the East, by moon or star light, when the air is perfumed by the faint odours of the most delicate flowers, a more delicious or romantic station could hardly be found.’

Muhammad Ali had one wife, whom he treated, it is said, with profound respect. She was known as an energetic woman who had a great deal of influence over him. When she died he never remarried, though he did keep a number of female slaves in his harem.

John Barker, the British Consul-General in Egypt, related that at his first meeting with Muhammad Ali to present his credentials he handed over the Imperial firman, or decree, from Turkey, the nominal ruler of Egypt. The Pasha did not deign to look at the document. Instead he spoke of the fine new frigates he was building. The Pasha praised the new Consul’s predecessor for never opposing his will or disrespecting his opinions. Muhammad Ali concluded, though, that this was easy as his words and actions were founded in reason and justice. ‘I will tell you a story,’ the ruler added.

He glanced again at the Imperial decree: ‘You see, I have never had a master.’

Above all, the Pasha was a simple man. (You hear the same said about Franco and Stalin.) When St John interviewed him about his life he was treated to a long exposition on his victorious expeditions to Sennar, Nubia, Kordofan, the Hejaz and Syria. St John writes, ‘I observed however, that, in the enumeration of his achievements, no mention was made of the destruction of the Mamluks. Doubtless, as he ran back over the track of memory, the recollection of that bloody day [when Muhammad Ali had 499 Mamluks killed] presented itself among his brighter reminiscences, like Satan among the sons of God; and conscience may, moreover, have whispered that his hearers also remembered the event.’

Muhammad Ali could never, however, be drawn to comment on the fate of the Mamluks. He had excised them from memory, and from history.

15
•
Napoleon and Muhammad Ali

Embers, the child of fire, can also burn a person
. Nubian proverb

Every Nile ruler from Cleopatra to Sadat has been fearful of poisoning. Napoleon, exiled after his defeat at Waterloo and writing feverishly in St Helena, was no exception. He believed himself the victim of poisoning, slow poisoning (there is controversial evidence from his hair that he was poisoned with arsenic). However, even while worrying about his health, he did not cease thinking of Egypt. He wrote in his prison diary, ‘The day will come when work will be put in hand to dam the two branches of the Nile at the head of the delta, so that all the waters of the one branch can flow through one and then the other alternately, and the flood can be doubled.’

Muhammad Ali, sitting in Cairo, had everything written by
Napoleon translated and read to him. The Frenchman was Muhammad Ali’s role model – Napoleon, after all, had not only given him Egypt, he had inspired him in his campaigns to conquer the entire region. It made sense to listen to his hydrological advice too, albeit in a simplified form. At first Muhammad Ali wanted to stop up the Rosetta branch and let it all be diverted to the other branch at Damietta. Louis Linant, his French water engineer, who would later lay the groundwork for the Suez Canal, objected on the grounds that it would deprive Alexandria of fresh water. The Pasha’s next plan was to dismantle the Pyramids, which he considered a heathen distraction, and use the stone to dam both the branches of the Nile. This plan was half adopted: the dam or barrage was built, but the seventh wonder of the world was not the source of masonry for the expedient reason that it was too costly (that is, heavy and cumbersome) to transport. It gives us some idea of the feat of the ancient Egyptians that they managed to construct a monument so massive that it resisted destruction through sheer weight and bulk.

Despite plague and a war in Sudan, Muhammad Ali conscripted a corvée to build the barrage, the first of the Nile dams. In point of fact a barrage is a subspecies of dam proper in the sense that a barrage never blocks the river – its purpose is simply to raise the level of the water behind itself. There is no sense of a reservoir lake being built, something in which there is no current. A barrage simply backs the river up, slowing it down but not stopping it. By raising its level it can be drawn off for longer into the canals upstream of the barrier. The barrage, once its teething troubles had been fixed, which it has to be said took many years, was hugely successful in increasing cotton production.