Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

124 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTDetroye complained, “chanted baroque airs accompanied by music that waseven more baroque. Such is the procession that traversed the city at night,shouting, crying out, and making an infernal racket.” Moiret wrote that “theprincipal residents circulated in the streets with the marks of their rank orfunction, accompanied by slaves, some of them armed and the others carryingtorches.” At Azbakiya they suspended in the air an illumined representation ofthe Prophet’s tomb in Medina.The next day, Detroye said, the festival started up again, more tumultuousthan the day before. The following day saw more processions, more singing, moreshouting. One can only speculate that the Egyptians took advantage of the Frenchpermission to celebrate their religious holiday to reaffirm their faith and steadfastness,at a time when both had surely been shaken by the French infidel conquest ofEgypt, which had been continuously in Muslim hands since the seventh century.The actual day of the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth, Detroyeremembered, was celebrated with even more fervor than the precedingdays. “The public places were crowded with small sideshows: bear or monkeytrainers, singers, songstresses who performed scenes with dialogue, women whochanted poetry, magicians working with goblets who made live snakes disappear,children who performed the most indecent dances, gladiators who engaged insingle combat, etc.”Despite the sacredness of the event, the street people commonly engaged inlewd dancing to celebrate it. Denon at Rosetta witnessed a similar scene, but ofmen, not children: “The dance that followed was of the same genre as the chant.It was not a painting of joy or of gaiety, but of a voluptuousness that turnedquite rapidly toward a lasciviousness more and more disgusting, in which the actors,always masculine, expressed in the most indecent manner the scenes thateven love does not permit to the two sexes save in the shadow of mystery.” 4Denon, author of the 1777 libertine short story “No Tomorrow” (“Point deLendemain”), was no prude. He was complaining not about eroticism but aboutan explicit style of public performance that was common in Egypt. He may alsohave been especially shocked, since he mentioned the dancers’ masculinity, atthe homosocial character of the pornographic performance. The scout Milletobserved, “They know nothing of prudishness in Egypt. A true Muslim willshow the most lewd and licentious dances and recreations to his family.” 5 Theworldly libertines from secular Paris were continually blushing at scenes, usuallyinvolving hip action, put on by the supposedly hidebound Egyptian Muslims. Atthe same time, the Egyptian historian al-Jabarti took a dim view of the sexualmorality of French men and women.