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

ALI BONAPARTE135Menou wrote in October to General Marmont concerning a valuable administrativesuggestion he had made: “You are a man of gold, my dear general. . . . Iask God, Muhammad, all the saints of paradise and of the Qur’an, that themeasure you proposed will be adopted.” 19 Menou had been the officer in chargeof Paris security for the Republic in September 1795, at a time of royalist intrigue.Nervous politicians saw him as insufficiently forceful. They had removedhim and replaced him with Barras and Bonaparte. Three years later he was governorof Rosetta and a Muslim convert. The adoption of an almost Catholic discourseof piety in an Islamic guise by a French officer in Egypt could scarcelyhave been foreseen by the Jacobins on the Directory and in the legislature whourged the invasion.Menou was initially rare in being willing to convert in order to make a formalmarriage alliance in Egypt. Most officers simply took Egyptian women asmistresses. Still, even some of those wrestled with the same issues as hadMenou. Captain Moiret wrote, some months later, that he conducted a clandestineaffair with Zulayma, the widow of a lesser grandee, who had fled to refugewith a patron in Damietta. 20 He lived on the route to and from the mosque, anda wealthy woman often hesitated before his door as she went to or came backfrom her devotions. (Mosques sometimes had side passages where women wereallowed to pray, out of sight of the men, though this arrangement was rare.) Thetantalized Moiret could not see her face through the double veil. Once, however,he greeted her, and she put her hand to her heart. That evening, her maidservantcame and arranged for him to tutor her. He was able to communicatewith her because this slave woman had originally hailed from Marseilles but hadbeen captured off the Barbary Coast by pirates and sold in the North Africaslave markets. Zulayma had enough freedom and wealth left so that she couldhire him to tutor her in mathematics and French, with her slave woman as achaperone. He recorded her description of her life. She explained that she hadbeen sold from Georgia, but was sent to Cairo rather than to Istanbul becauseshe was not plump enough for the markets in the imperial capital. She said thateven the bey who purchased her neglected her for some time in hopes of fatteningher up. He recalled that she complained of being oppressed by the morepowerful women in the harem, of being “humiliated and enslaved” and confinedto an interior apartment with no company but elderly slaves. She explained thatthe wives and concubines had no society with men except their masters, whovisited their apartments occasionally, and for whom they would prepare withperfumes and treats. They passed their days embroidering, and occasionally hadan ‘alima, or Egyptian geisha girl, in to dance for them and tell them passionate