THE FRENCH ACADEMY. 303 



raand of a thousand Albanians, and npon which the 

 French expedition had made a very deep impression. 

 This compatriot of Alexander could neither read nor 

 write. His fortune grew rapidly, and as he forgot 

 nothing which had been done either for or against 

 him, when you arrived in Egypt at the beginning of 

 1832 as a student-consul, the powerful Viceroy at 

 once took you into favour. Mohammed Said, one of 

 his sons, was your early friend. You took a strange 

 hold over him, and when he came to the throne you 

 reigned conjointly with him. Through you he dimly 

 perceived an ideal of light and justice for which his 

 soul thirsted, but which dark clouds, issuing from a 

 deep abyss of barbarism, still veiled for a time from 

 his eyes. 



You have described, in that easy and natural style 

 which is all your own, the details of this intimacy 

 which has been so big with consequences of the 

 gravest import to the whole world ; you have told us 

 of his strange alternations of passion and good sense, 

 of the enthusiasm for science of a nature but just 

 removed from absolute ignorance, of the torrents of 

 tears which succeeded his outbursts of mad fury, of 

 the peals of laughter and of his ungovernable vanity : 

 in short, of the struggle between a Tamerlane and a 

 Marcus Aurelius. Your account of the wonderful 

 journey which you made with him to the Soudan is a 

 document of incomparable value for the student of 

 Oriental psychology. The story of how, upon one 



