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The general small and temporary on the ridge. Gérôme sometimes titled the picture Oedipus: the young man arrives to answer the riddle.

The Egyptian expedition of 1798 was sold to the Directory as a blow at British India, and to the 28-year-old general commanding it as a stage. Bonaparte sailed with 35,000 troops and, more consequentially, 167 civilians: mathematicians, chemists, engineers, naturalists, artists, the largest scientific staff ever attached to an army. The soldiers called them the donkeys and gave them the center of the square when the fighting started. On 21 July, with the Mamluk cavalry massing before Cairo and the pyramids on the heat-blurred horizon, the general produced the sentence he had almost certainly rehearsed: soldiers, from the height of those pyramids, 40 centuries look down upon you. The squares held, the cavalry broke against them, and Cairo opened its gates. The campaign itself then went the way of campaigns cut off from home: Nelson burned the fleet at anchor within the fortnight, this museum hangs that night two rooms over, and the army was marooned in its conquest. Bonaparte stayed a year, reorganized Egypt on paper, marched into Syria and back with plague in the baggage train, and finally slipped home on a frigate to collect a coup d'état, leaving the army to capitulate at leisure. As war, the expedition failed completely. As theater and as science it never stopped paying: a soldier at Rosetta dug a black slab out of a fort wall with three scripts on it; the savants' Description de l'Égypte ran to 23 volumes and invented Egyptology; and Europe caught an Egypt fever that never fully broke. Gérôme painted the meeting the legend required in 1886, nearly a century on: the general alone on horseback, the staff and columns shrunk to specks in the valley, and the Sphinx, buried to the neck in sand exactly as it then stood, meeting his examination with four and a half millennia of practice. The French title Gérôme sometimes used was Oedipus: the young man come to answer the riddle. He salted the flattery: the great face is scarred and patient, the rider small and temporary, and the desert takes no side. One correction the painting makes to folklore: the Sphinx's broken nose owes nothing to Napoleon's artillery, being centuries older than his visit. The two canvases Gérôme made of the subject hang today in a California castle built by a newspaper baron, which the emperor of publicity would have understood perfectly.