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Bonaparte sits his horse on the ridge with his back to us, 28 years old and three weeks landed in Egypt. Gérôme sometimes called the picture Oedipus, after the young man who came 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 importantly, 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 the cavalry of the Mamluks, the warrior caste that ruled Egypt, massed before Cairo. The pyramids stood on the horizon, blurred by the heat. The general produced the line he had almost certainly rehearsed: soldiers, from the top of these pyramids, 40 centuries look down upon you. The squares held, the cavalry broke against them, and Cairo opened its gates. Then the campaign went the way of any campaign cut off from home. Within a fortnight Nelson burned the French fleet at anchor, and the army was stranded inside its own conquest. Bonaparte stayed a year. He reorganized Egypt on paper, marched into Syria and back with plague in the baggage train, then slipped home on a frigate to seize power in Paris. The army he left behind surrendered later. As war, the expedition failed completely. As theater and as science it never stopped paying. A soldier at Rosetta pulled a dark slab out of a fort wall with three scripts cut into it. The scholars' survey of the country, the Description de l'Égypte, ran to 23 volumes and started Egyptology. Europe caught an Egypt fever that never fully broke. Gérôme painted the meeting the legend wanted in 1886, nearly a century later. The general sits alone on horseback. His staff and his columns are specks down in the valley, and the Sphinx is buried to the neck in sand, exactly as it stood in 1798. The French title Gérôme sometimes used was Oedipus: the young man come to answer the riddle. Gérôme put salt in the flattery. The stone face is scarred and worn down, and the rider in front of it is very small. One correction to the folklore: the Sphinx's broken nose owes nothing to Napoleon's gunners. It was already gone centuries before he arrived. The picture and its companion, Bonaparte in Cairo, hang today in a California castle built by the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.