The Instability of Human Affairs

This is an paragraph from a letter sent by Captain Sir William Sidney Smith to General Napoleon Bonaparte after the Anglo-Turkish victory at Acre. Through the leadership of Smith the French were stopped from entering India. What is more amazing is that Smith had just escaped from the Tower (the French prison that Louis XVI had been prisoner in) on Tuesday 24, April 1798 a year earlier with the help of French Royalists. It was on the May 20, 1799 that Smith's forces (combined English and Turkish) stopped Napoleon:

"I, who ought not to love you, to say nothing more: but circumstances remind me to wish that you would reflect on the instability of human affairs. In fact, could you have thought that a poor prisoner in a cell of the Temple prison-that an unfortunate for whom you refused, for a single moment, to give yourself any concern, being at the same time able to render him a signal service, since you were then all-powerful-could you have thought, I say, that this same man would have become your antagonist, and have compelled you, in the midst of the sands of Syria, to raise the siege of a miserable, almost defenceless town? Such events, you must admit, exceed all human calculations. Believe me, general, adopt sentiments more moderate, and that man will not be your enemy, who shall tell you that Asia is not a theatre made for your glory. The letter is a little revenge that I give myself."