Rousseau wrote in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: "Long before humans began to think, they already possessed compassion. It was the most universal and useful of all human qualities... Some animals gave their dead kind a form of burial; when livestock entered a slaughterhouse, they let out mournful cries, showing that the dreadful sight before them had left an inescapable shadow upon them."
A new day in Paris often began with the clatter of wooden clogs. Georgiana had worn clogs before, but the sound of them in the early morning was not because the streets were filthy and muddy.
On one "date," Bonaparte had taken Georgiana to a tavern near the Tuileries Palace, where he had once hidden during the French Revolution.
That time, they happened to encounter several farmers driving cattle and sheep into the city. Since the slaughterhouse was in the city center, he had already considered moving it to the outskirts.
The Pont des Arts had an entirely steel-frame structure, with the steel framework resting upon brick-and-stone piers. The metal used to build it had been made by melting down cannons seized since the Revolution began. The framework contained both bronze and cast iron. Bonaparte thought it hideously ugly and utterly discordant with the scenery on either bank, but it was impossible to tear it down and rebuild it.
The newly built slaughterhouse was on Montmartre Heights. Once it was completed, cattle would no longer roam through the streets everywhere.
What made it chilling, however, was that the slaughterhouse had been designed in the style of a temple—an Ancient Egyptian temple of Apis.
Long, long ago, perhaps during the First Dynasty, Apis had been a god representing fertility. By the Ptolemaic era, it had become the god of the underworld in the Memphis region. Its symbol