As a votary at the shrine of science he believed, both then and later, in the lawfulness of suicide; and he now coldly suggested murder to his surgeon-general, hinting that an overdose of opium would end the sufferings of those plague-stricken men who would have to be abandoned. It was long believed that such a dose actually had been administered to the sixty or more who were left behind. But the conclusive evidence that the report was false is in the fact that when Sir Sidney Smith occupied Jaffa the sufferers were still alive. Napoleon to the last defended the suggestion as proper, though he falsely denied having made it himself, and untruthfully declared at St. Helena that he had delayed three days to protect the dying patients. With cynical good nature, he told the fine story of how the noble French army surgeon Desgenettes had rejected the criminal suggestion, replying that a physician's profession was to save, not to destroy, human life. The rebuke was particularly scathing because the heroic doctor, in spite of his conviction that the plague was contagious, had already inoculated himself with the disease in order to allay the panic of the terror-stricken soldiers. The army was reduced to eight thousand. After a nine days' march through the burning sands, the exhausted columns of the French reached Cairo. Such was the unparalleled vigor of the survivors that a few days' rest and proper food sufficed to recuperate their strength. More wonderful still, they soon believed themselves to have returned with crowns of victory. Their crafty general explained that but for the terrible heats of Syria, the pest, and the expedition from Rhodes, which threatened their rear, they would have leveled the walls of Acre and destroyed Jezzar's palace, returning with standards and spoils to confirm France's dominion in the hearts and fears of the Egyptians. The volatile and sanguine soldiery, unwilling to admit defeat even to themselves, half believed this was true, and soon by an easy transition came to hold the mere suggestions as actual facts. Berthier was instructed that the native authorities at Cairo were to be so informed by an advance agent, General Boyer. The few important prisoners whose lives had been spared were to be conveyed, with due display of captured standards, to the citadel of Cairo, and there imprisoned with the public announcement "that a great number of such were coming." The litters of the wounded French officers Lannes, Duroc, Croizier, and Arrighi were to be quietly carried in on different days. In one emphatic paragraph are the instructions for Boyer: "He is to write, to say, to do everything which may secure a triumphal entry." So adroitly were truth and fiction intermingled and confused by Bonaparte and his agents, that in spite of various attempted risings the country as a whole remained quiet. Murad, however, who had fled to Nubia, and had there remained in concealment