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Authors: Anthony Burgess
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the church, but I’ve forgotten. I have one or two nice little things. I’m disappointed,” he joked, “that I have nothing opulent from Constantinople. You failed me there.”
“Did he honestly expect me to go?”
“He honestly did. On assback and camelback and quin-quereme or however one gets to the Sublime Porte, if that’s the right name. A good thing for you you didn’t go. They’d be presenting your ballocks, nicely mounted, to Sir Smith there.”
“So that’s the end of Egypt. A pity in a way. A Gallicized Cairo would have been pleasant for a winter holiday. Aperitifs in the sun.”
“And the smell of camel-dung. No, Egypt won’t do. No ecclesiastical saltcellars there. It’s mad. All that comes out of Egypt is letters screaming about divorce. Has there ever been anything like it before in the whole history of the world? The British press prints evidence that our friend’s a cuckold, and the intended recipient gets his letter by courtesy of London, Frankfurt and the Paris press. Well, this is perhaps the end of a promising career. It’s hard to survive that kind of laughter.” He took a draught of burgundy from a delicately wrought chalice. Talleyrand seemed to murmur words of consecration over his before drinking:
“ Gloria mundi, gloria mundi ” And then: “How long will it be, do you think, before the Directory sees what has to be done? And the Elders and the Five Hundred and all the rest of the nonsense.”
“When they’re thoroughly frightened they’ll listen. And nod. And say yes yes yes.”
“I suppose history will say it was an interesting experiment. Useful too. Confirmatory. The bottoms of the monarchs will feel their thrones securer than ever.”
“That isn’t what happened in England. No more absolutism after Cromwell. Nothing in history is a mere parenthesis.”
“Did you make that up?”
“It’s not too soon to start getting a speech ready. I have a number of little maxims of that kind. Purged and cleansed, we return to the ways of light. Would interregnum be better than parenthesis’ ? That partridge you have seems over-crisp.”
“I like crisp things.”
“Armies,” Barras said, when they got to the roast beef stage, “are very expensive.”
“They brought you some pleasant things from Italy. Don’t you think that Tiepolo is hung a little too high?”
B onaparte thrust from his head the biblical associations of Gaza, but the image of gouged-out eyes kept recurring. The Turks would do anything with a captured screaming infidel body—make it chew its own penis, thrust the testicles up the anus, saw the noseless earless head off with slow delicacy. There were so many of the skeletal or bloated who had survived the Sinai march, now torpid under the limes and lemons and olives, who might welcome the ultimate atrocity—at least on others—as the fitting artistic completion—a nod of satisfaction as the concluding horror prepared. Some were sick in their sleep as they remembered, in some dream fantastication that could hardly outdo hard fact, the tearing at raw donkey-flesh, the fetidity of sliced dromedary hump, the salt acid abomination of camel-piss. Some had fallen dead in the burning snow with the taste of crushed limes almost in their leather mouths. Of the living, furred teeth could hardly engage the golden skins, eyes swooned up in pain at the released zest. With the orchards stripped in a blue locust-swoop, the goats butchered and eaten to the very caecum, what was there to feed the two thousand prisoners on? Quartermasters snarled, with right jealousy, over the dwindling store of army biscuit. The Turks expected head-lopping but they were given freedom, what was called parole: your war is over. They did not understand: this was holy war, holy war was never over. Bonaparte dragged his men to Jaffa and whipped them to another victory, what time the fifes cried:
Let extortion and tyranny tremble:
Now the blood-red flag is on high.
This time they
“Did he honestly expect me to go?”
“He honestly did. On assback and camelback and quin-quereme or however one gets to the Sublime Porte, if that’s the right name. A good thing for you you didn’t go. They’d be presenting your ballocks, nicely mounted, to Sir Smith there.”
“So that’s the end of Egypt. A pity in a way. A Gallicized Cairo would have been pleasant for a winter holiday. Aperitifs in the sun.”
“And the smell of camel-dung. No, Egypt won’t do. No ecclesiastical saltcellars there. It’s mad. All that comes out of Egypt is letters screaming about divorce. Has there ever been anything like it before in the whole history of the world? The British press prints evidence that our friend’s a cuckold, and the intended recipient gets his letter by courtesy of London, Frankfurt and the Paris press. Well, this is perhaps the end of a promising career. It’s hard to survive that kind of laughter.” He took a draught of burgundy from a delicately wrought chalice. Talleyrand seemed to murmur words of consecration over his before drinking:
“ Gloria mundi, gloria mundi ” And then: “How long will it be, do you think, before the Directory sees what has to be done? And the Elders and the Five Hundred and all the rest of the nonsense.”
“When they’re thoroughly frightened they’ll listen. And nod. And say yes yes yes.”
“I suppose history will say it was an interesting experiment. Useful too. Confirmatory. The bottoms of the monarchs will feel their thrones securer than ever.”
“That isn’t what happened in England. No more absolutism after Cromwell. Nothing in history is a mere parenthesis.”
“Did you make that up?”
“It’s not too soon to start getting a speech ready. I have a number of little maxims of that kind. Purged and cleansed, we return to the ways of light. Would interregnum be better than parenthesis’ ? That partridge you have seems over-crisp.”
“I like crisp things.”
“Armies,” Barras said, when they got to the roast beef stage, “are very expensive.”
“They brought you some pleasant things from Italy. Don’t you think that Tiepolo is hung a little too high?”
B onaparte thrust from his head the biblical associations of Gaza, but the image of gouged-out eyes kept recurring. The Turks would do anything with a captured screaming infidel body—make it chew its own penis, thrust the testicles up the anus, saw the noseless earless head off with slow delicacy. There were so many of the skeletal or bloated who had survived the Sinai march, now torpid under the limes and lemons and olives, who might welcome the ultimate atrocity—at least on others—as the fitting artistic completion—a nod of satisfaction as the concluding horror prepared. Some were sick in their sleep as they remembered, in some dream fantastication that could hardly outdo hard fact, the tearing at raw donkey-flesh, the fetidity of sliced dromedary hump, the salt acid abomination of camel-piss. Some had fallen dead in the burning snow with the taste of crushed limes almost in their leather mouths. Of the living, furred teeth could hardly engage the golden skins, eyes swooned up in pain at the released zest. With the orchards stripped in a blue locust-swoop, the goats butchered and eaten to the very caecum, what was there to feed the two thousand prisoners on? Quartermasters snarled, with right jealousy, over the dwindling store of army biscuit. The Turks expected head-lopping but they were given freedom, what was called parole: your war is over. They did not understand: this was holy war, holy war was never over. Bonaparte dragged his men to Jaffa and whipped them to another victory, what time the fifes cried:
Let extortion and tyranny tremble:
Now the blood-red flag is on high.
This time they
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