Had old Murat, Musa, and Hagi Ali, happened at that time to have been upon some mercantile errand to Cairo, there is no doubt but they would have been preferred and become ambassadors to France. They would have gone there, perplexed the minister and the consul with a thousand lies and contrivances, which the French never would have been able to unravel; they would have promised every thing; obtained from the king some considerable sum of money, on which they would have undertaken to send the embassy in any form that was prescribed, and, after their return home, never been heard of more. But those worthies were, probably, all employed at this time; therefore the only thing Poncet could do was to bring Murat, since he was to procure at all events an ambassador. He had been a cook to a French merchant at Aleppo; was a maker of brandy at Masuah; and probably his uncle old Murat’s servant at the time. But he was not the worse ambassador for this. Old Murat, Hagi Ali, and Musa, had perhaps been also cooks and servants in their time. Prudence, sobriety, and good conduct, skill in languages, and acquaintance, with countries recommended them afterwards to higher trusts. Old Murat probably meant that his nephew should begin his apprenticeship with that embassy to France; and M. Poncet, to increase his consequence, and fulfil the commission the consul gave him, allowed him to invent all the rest. Poncet, from Jidda, went to Tor, and thence to Mount Sinai, where, after some stay, being overtaken by Murat, they both made their entry into Cairo. M. de Maillet, the consul, was an old Norman gentleman, exceedingly fond of nobility, consequently very haughty and overbearing to those he reckoned his inferiors, among which he accounted those of his own nation established at Cairo, though a very amiable and valuable set of men. He was exceedingly testy, choleric, obstinate, and covetous, though sagacious enough in every thing concerning his own interest. He lived for the most part in his closet, seldom went out of his house, and, as far as I could learn, never out of the city. There, however, he wrote a description of all Egypt, which since has had a considerable degree of reputation[72]. Maillet had received advice of the miserable state of this embassy from Jidda, that the Sherriffe of Mecca had taken from Poncet, by force, two female Abyssinian slaves, and that the elephant was dead; which particulars being written to France, he was advised in a letter from father Fleuriau by no means to promote any embassy to the court of Versailles; that a proper place for it was Rome; but that in France they looked upon it in the same light as they did upon an embassy from Algiers or Tunis, which did no honour to those who sent it, and as little to those that received it; this, however, was a new light.