In 1840 a French Egyptian official, Clot Bey, engaged as private secretary a young French doctor of medicine, Alfred Peney. For something like fifteen years Dr. Peney carried on official medical work in Egypt. He was gradually led, however, towards Nile exploration through his official visits to Khartum, the Blue Nile, and Kordofan. He was intensely interested in ethnology and in the study of the Nile Negroes. French influence in Egypt during the fifties was in the ascendency. De Lesseps and the various officials who served France as agents and consuls-general at Cairo had known how to secure the concession for the Suez Canal. They became jealous that France should also secure for her citizens the glory of having discovered and traced the course and the sources of the Upper Nile. This blue ribbon of geographical discovery was already being sought for by Germans and Englishmen. Dr. Peney especially was continually urging his superiors in Cairo to organise, or induce the Viceroy Said to organise, a Nile research expedition under French auspices. But the choice by the French agent of a leader for this enterprise fell most unfortunately. Hanging about Cairo was a Frenchman of a type not infrequently met with at Levantine courts during the first eight decades of the nineteenth century. This was the Count d’Escayrac de Lauture. Men of this description were either Royalist refugees, or the sons of such, or they were Napoleonic noblemen who had got into financial or social difficulties. D’Escayrac, however, appears to have been an amiable dilettante, who had some pretensions to be an Egyptologist. But he was utterly unsuited to lead an expedition into Central Africa. He was elderly, vain, pompous, and extravagant. The viceroy, wishing that the expedition should not be too exclusively French, ordered d’Escayrac to recruit part of his personnel in England, Germany, and Switzerland. This was done, but the expedition never left Cairo for the Upper Nile. D’Escayrac made himself perfectly ridiculous by strutting about in a fantastic uniform, trailing a long sabre. His expensive scientific instruments were badly packed, and arrived at Cairo injured. The whole expedition was dissolved, owing to the bitter dislike which d’Escayrac inspired among his staff. The only incident in the whole of Count d’Escayrac’s preparations which shows him to have been in any way enterprising or intelligent, was his desire to secure good photographic views of the Upper Nile and its natives. He had provided the expedition with the best apparatus which could be obtained at that period (1856). It is curious to note that in the criticisms of his plans published at the time, the critics animadvert more bitterly on the extravagance of spending one hundred pounds on photography than on any other supposed mistake in d’Escayrac’s preparations.