EXPEDITION TO EGYPT. 393 
dential 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 encoun- 
tered 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 ves- 
sel in which Kléber 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 depar- 
ture 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 Pha- 
raohs. The valiant army which he commanded had barely 
17 * 
