“But,” asked Bonaparte satirically, “if you have, as you say, two hundred thousand soldiers under arms, why do you want me to bring back the fifteen or twenty thousand men I have in Egypt, who are useful there as colonizers?” “If I ask you for them, general, it is not for any need we may have of them, but in the fear of some disaster over taking them.” “What disaster do you expect to befall them, commanded by Kléber?” “Kléber may be killed, general; and who is there behind Kléber? Menou. Kléber and your twenty thousand men are doomed, general!” “How doomed?” “Yes, the Sultan will send troops; he controls by land. The English will send their fleet; they control by sea. We, who have neither land nor sea, will be compelled to take part from here in the evacuation of Egypt and the capitulation of our army. “You take a gloomy view of things, general!” “The future will show which of us two have seen things as they are.” “What would you have done in my place?” “I don’t know. But, even had I been forced to bring them back by way of Constantinople, I should never have abandoned those whom France had intrusted to me. Xenophon, on the banks of the Tigris, was in a much more desperate situation than you on the banks of the Nile. He brought his ten thousand back to Ionia, and they were not the children of Athens, not his fellow citizens; they were mercenaries!” From the instant Bernadotte uttered the word Constantinople, Bonaparte listened no longer; the name seemed to rouse a new train of ideas in his mind, which he followed in solitary thought. He laid his hand on the arm of the astonished Bernadotte, and, with eyes fixed on space, like a man who pursues through space the phantom of a vanished project, he said: “Yes, yes! I thought of it. That is why I persisted in taking that hovel, Saint-Jean-d’Acre. Here you only thought it obstinacy, a useless waste of men sacrificed to the self-love of a mediocre general who feared that he might be blamed for a defeat. What should I have cared for the raising of the siege of Saint-Jean-d’Acre, if Saint-Jean-d’Acre had not been the barrier in the way of the grandest project ever conceived. Cities! Why, good God! I could take as many as ever did Alexander or Cæsar, but it was Saint-Jean-d’Acre that had to be taken! If I had taken Saint-Jean-d’Acre, do you know what I should have done?” And he fixed his burning eyes upon Bernadotte, who, this time, lowered his under the flame of this genius.