he fine arts; it was necessary to ask the cooeperation of several
men of judgment and of experience. Monge and Berthollet, both members of
the Institute and Professors in the Polytechnic School, became, with a
view to this object, the principal recruiting aids to the chief of the
expedition. Were our colleagues really acquainted with the object of
this expedition? I dare not reply in the affirmative; but I know at all
events that they were not permitted to divulge it. We are going to a
distant country; we shall embark at Toulon; we shall be constantly with
you; General Bonaparte will command the army, such was in form and
substance the limited amount of confidential information which had been
imperiously traced out to them. Upon the faith of words so vague, with
the chances of a naval battle, with the English hulks in perspective, go
in the present day and endeavour to enroll a father of a family, a
savant already known by useful labours and placed in some honourable
position, an artist in possession of the esteem and confidence of the
public, and I am much mistaken if you obtain any thing else than
refusals; but in 1798, France had hardly emerged from a terrible crisis,
during which her very existence was frequently at stake. Who, besides,
had not encountered imminent personal danger? Who had not seen with his
own eyes enterprises of a truly desperate nature brought to a fortunate
issue? Is any thing more wanted to explain that adventurous character,
that absence of all care for the morrow, which appears to have been one
of the most distinguishing features of the epoch of the Directory.
Fourier accepted then without hesitation the proposals which his
colleagues brought to him in the name of the Commander-in-Chief; he
quitted the agreeable duties of a professor of the Polytechnic School,
to go--he knew not where, to do--he knew not what.

Chance placed Fourier during the voyage in the vessel in which Kleber
sailed. The friendship which the philosopher and the warrior vowed to
each other from that moment was not without some influence upon the
events of which Egypt was the theatre after the departure of Napoleon.

He who signed his orders of the day, the _Member of the Institute,
Commander-in-Chief of the Army in the East_, could not fail to place an
Academy among the means of regenerating the ancient kingdom of the
Pharaohs. The valiant army which he commanded had barely conquered at
Cairo, on the occasion of the memora