The Scope of Orientalism 89 connected with [the modern] works are on the most gigantic scale, and a perusal of a little pamphlet, descriptive of the undertaking, from the pen of the Chevalier de St. Stoess, impresses us most forcibly with the genius of the great Master-mind—M. Ferdinand de Lesseps—to whose perseverance, calm daring and foresight, the dream of ages has at last become a real and tangible fact .. . the project for bringing more closely together the countries of the West and the East, and thus uniting the civilizations of different epochs." The combination of old ideas with new methods, the bringing together of cultures whose relations to the nineteenth century were different, the genuine imposition of the power of modern technology and intellectual will upon formerly stable and divided geographical entities like East and West: this is what Cook perceives and what, in his journals, speeches, prospectuses, and letters, de Lesseps advertises. Genealogically, Ferdinand’s start was auspicious. Mathieu de Lesseps, his father, had come to Egypt with Napoleon and remained there {as “unofficial French representative,” Marlowe says*?) for four years after the French evacuated it in 1801. Many of Ferdinand’s later writings refer back to Napoleon’s own interest in digging a canal, which, because he had been misinformed by experts, he never thought was a realizable goal. Infected by the erratic history of canal projects that included French schemes entertained by Richelieu and the Saint-Simonians, de Lesseps returned to Egypt in 1854, there to embark on the undertaking that was eventually completed fifteen years later. He had no real engineering background. Only a tremendous faith in bis near-divine skills as builder, mover, and creator kept him going; as his diplomatic and financial talents gained him Egyptian and European support, he seems to have acquired the necessary knowledge to carry matters to completion. More useful, perhaps, he learned how to plant his potential contributors in the world-historical theater and make them see what his “pensée morale,” as he called his project, really meant. “Vous envisagez,” he told them in 1860, “les immenses services que le rapprochement de l’occident et de Yorient doit rendre a la civilization et au développement de Ia richesse générale. Le monde attend de vous un grand progrés et vous voulez répondre 4 l’attente du monde.”** In accordance with such notions the name of the investment company forined by de Lesseps in 1858 was a charged one and reflected the grandiose plans he cherished: the Compagnie

90 ORIENTALISM universelle. In 1862 the Académie frangaise offered a prize for an epic on the canal. Bornier, the winner, delivered himself of such hyperbole as the following, none of it fundamentally contradicting de Lesseps’s picture of what he was up to: Au travail! Ouvriers que notre France envoie, Tracez, pour !’univers, cette nouvelle voie! Vos peres, les héros, sont venus jusqu’ici; Soyez ferme comme aux intrepides, Comme eux vous combattez aux pieds des pyramides, Et leurs quatre mille ans vous contemplent aussi! Oui, c’est pour l’univers! Pour l’Asie et !’Europe, Pour ces climats lointain que la nuit enveloppe, Pour le Chinois perfide et l’Indien demi-nu; Pour les peuples heureux, libres, humains et braves, Pour les peupics méchants, pour ‘es peuples esclaves, Pour ceux a qui le Christ est encore inconnu.** De Lesseps was nowhere more eloquent and resourceful than when he was called upon to justify the enormous expense in money and men the canal would require. He could pour out statistics to enchant any ear; he would quote Herodotus and maritime statistics with equal fluency. In his journal entries for 1864 he cited with approbation Casimir Leconte’s observation that an eccentric life would develop significant originality in men, and from originality would come great and unusual exploits.** Such exploits were their own justification. Despite its immemorial pedigree of failures, its outrageous cost, its astounding ambitions for altering the way Europe would handle the Orient, the canal was worth the effort. It was a project uniquely able to override the objections of those who were consulted and, in improving the Orient as a whole, to do what scheming Egyptians, perfidious Chinese, and half-naked Indians could never have done for themselves. The opening ceremonies in November 1869 were an occasion which, no less than the whole history of de Lesseps’s machinations, perfectly embodied his ideas. For years his speeches, letters, and pamphlets were laden with a vividly energetic and theatrical vocabulary. In the pursuit of success, he could be found saying of himself (always in the first person plural), we created, fought, disposed, achieved, acted, recognized, persevered, advanced; nothing, he repeated on many occasions, could stop us, nothing was impossible, nothing mattered finally except the realization of “fe résultat final, le grand but,” which he had conceived, defined,