back by way
of Constantinople, I should never have abandoned those whom France had
intrusted to me. Xenophon, on the banks of the Tigris, was in a much
more desperate situation than you on the banks of the Nile. He brought
his ten thousand back to Ionia, and they were not the children of
Athens, not his fellow citizens; they were mercenaries!"

From the instant Bernadotte uttered the word Constantinople, Bonaparte
listened no longer; the name seemed to rouse a new train of ideas in his
mind, which he followed in solitary thought. He laid his hand on the arm
of the astonished Bernadotte, and, with eyes fixed on space, like a man
who pursues through space the phantom of a vanished project, he said:
"Yes, yes! I thought of it. That is why I persisted in taking that
hovel, Saint-Jean-d'Acre. Here you only thought it obstinacy, a useless
waste of men sacrificed to the self-love of a mediocre general who
feared that he might be blamed for a defeat. What should I have cared
for the raising of the siege of Saint-Jean-d'Acre, if Saint-Jean-d'Acre
had not been the barrier in the way of the grandest project ever
conceived. Cities! Why, good God! I could take as many as ever did
Alexander or Caesar, but it was Saint-Jean-d'Acre that had to be taken!
If I had taken Saint-Jean-d'Acre, do you know what I should have done?"

And he fixed his burning eyes upon Bernadotte, who, this time, lowered
his under the flame of this genius.

"What I should have done," repeated Bonaparte, and, like Ajax, he
seemed to threaten Heaven with his clinched fist; "if I had taken
Saint-Jean-d'Acre, I should have found the treasures of the pasha in the
city and three thousand stands of arms. With that I should have raised
and armed all Syria, so maddened by the ferocity of Djezzar that each
time I attacked him the population prayed to God for his overthrow. I
should have marched upon Damascus and Aleppo; I should have swelled my
army with the malcontents. Advancing into the country, I should, step by
step, have proclaimed the abolition of slavery, and the annihilation of
the tyrannical government of the pashas. I should have overthrown the
Turkish empire, and founded a great empire at Constantinople, which
would have fixed my place in history higher than Constantine and
Mohammed II. Perhaps I should have returned to Paris by way of
Adrianople and Vienna, after annihilating the house of Austria. Well,
my dear general, that is the project which that littl