Sic Transit Gloria . . .

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28162, 28 December 1956, Page 6

Sic Transit Gloria . . .

The fall of de Lesseps’ statue at Port Said is like a scene from Greek tragedy. It is a kind of epilogue to a life of indomitable hope, supreme triumph, and catastrophic ignominy. The fates that drew de Lesseps from failure to success, and from glory to madness and death, yet pursue his memory. Born at Versailles in 1805, Ferdinand de Lesseps was educated in Paris, and entered the diplomatic service. He served with distinction in Spain, Algiers, and Egypt, but resigned after a secret mission, which he made to Rome in 1849, had been repudiated by the French Government. He turned his extraordinary energies to executing a scheme he had seized upon during his diplomatic service in Egypt: the formation of a waterway linking the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. With almost superhuman pertinacity, he overcame, one by one, the colossal impediments put in the way of the project both by nature and by man. After 15 years of

unremitting labour, de Lesseps saw the canal opened in 1869. Throughout the world, his genius was acclaimed, and honours were showered upon him. In 1879 de Lesseps launched a grandiose scheme for a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Against his engineers’ advice, he insisted on a sea-level canal without locks. The enterprise was too formidable for faith alone. Desperately in need of fresh capital but scared to acknowledge it publicly, de Lesseps had recourse to bribery. When financial collapse and disgrace came in 1888, de Lesseps* mind was already giving way. His sentence of five years’ imprisonment was quashed on a point of law; but his ruin was complete. He died in 1894. And now, in the land where de Lesseps’ genius achieved its zenith, and in the port he named after one of his strongest supporters, his effigy is cast ignominiously into the waters that are his true and enduring memorial. Philosophers will find a moral in his history.