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

THE OBJECT OF HIS DESIRES189their gardens or their women are not pretty, for our ideas and our ways of seeingare different.” Egyptians, he said, preferred their women plump, whereasParisians wanted thin waists and small feet. “If we decry their supposed poortaste, will they not say the same of us? To love, in a foreign country, it is necessaryto see with the eyes of the inhabitants.” He observed that if the travel writerClaude Étienne Savary had fooled the officers with his rosy images of Egypt, “itis because he saw it as they did, or because he wrote it as a novel.”The officers could afford expensive harem women, either as slaves or mistresses.The presence of thousands of ordinary French soldiers in Cairo, mostoften left with little to do and baking in the capital’s languid heat, fanned a rapidgrowth in red-light districts and prostitution. Niello Sargy wrote that he wassurprised at how few brawls or duels broke out, “despite the whoring that wenton. There were at that time public women in our quarters.” 17 Eugène deBeauharnais recalled a disturbance not far from Bonaparte’s headquarters thatFrench soldiers provoked by entering a harem. “Already a great number of inhabitantshad assembled before that mansion, expressing loudly their indignationat this desecration that they regarded as execrable. I was sent with someother officers to put a stop to it. We found in that harem soldiers of differentregiments giving themselves over to all the excess and brutality that a long privationcould, while not excusing it, at least allow us to understand.” They brokeup the debauchery, he said, by striking the soldiers with the flat of their sabersand chasing them from the harem. 18 This gang rape of the odalisques provokeda public demonstration.Galland remarked that prostitution was widespread in Egypt, but wasarranged differently from that in Paris. A pimp made the arrangements andbrought the women, mounted on donkeys, to the customer, with whom theystayed as long as he desired. He alleged, “One saw girls of twelve puttingthemselves, completely nude, in the middle of a square for a few coins.” 19 It isunlikely that the beys or the clergy would have tolerated such behavior in anurban center. Some of what shocked the French was a result of the breakdownin the Ottoman-Egyptian order that their own occupation triggered.Bernoyer regaled his cousin with the priapic story of how, that fall, before hisfaux marriage to Fatima, he decided to end his sexual abstinence with a publicwoman. 20 He was living in a confiscated Ottoman-Egyptian mansion onthe Nile island of Roda. Bernoyer used go-betweens to make contact with apimp, one Sultan Ganash, who doubled as a boatman on the Nile. Afterabout six hours Sultan Ganash brought his boat to Bernoyer’s residence withsix women. All of them wore long blue tunics that descended to their heels,