Eventually, the project was bought out by the United States, which solved the medical problems and changed the design to a non-sea level canal with locks.

This intimacy and his longing for pasta caused Muhammad Said to hurry to the French consulate whenever the frugal diet of the viceregal table left a void in his stomach".

The marshal wrote to Mathieu de Lesseps on 18 December 1830: "I have had the pleasure of meeting your son, who gives promise of sustaining with great credit the name he bears.

While the vessel, in which Lesseps sailed to Egypt, was in quarantine at the Alexandrian lazaretto, M. Mimaut, consul-general of France at Alexandria, sent him several books, among which was the memoir written upon the previously filled and abandoned Ancient Suez Canal, according to Napoleon Bonaparte's instructions, by the civil engineer Jacques-Marie Le Père, one of the scientific members of the French expedition.

While in Egypt he encountered and was influenced by Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, who was working on a dam north of Cairo for Ali while preaching for a union of the Mediterranean and Red Seas.

Towards the close of the year 1837 he returned to France, and on 21 December married Agathe Delamalle (1819–1853), daughter of the government prosecuting attorney at the court of Angers.

In the course of a bloody insurrection in Catalonia, which ended in the bombardment of Barcelona, de Lesseps offered protection to a number of men threatened by the fighting regardless of their factional sympathies or nationalities.

After being slightly modified, the plan was adopted in 1856 by the civil engineers constituting the International Commission for the piercing of the isthmus of Suez.

Lesseps was similarly not deterred by the opinions entertained, in France as well as in Britain, that the sea in front of Port Said was full of mud which would obstruct the entrance to the canal, and that the sands from the desert would fill the trenches.

[10] During the following ten years, Lesseps had to overcome the continuing resistance of the British government, which kept the Sultan from approving the construction of the canal; at one stage even seeking the support of his cousin, Empress Eugenie, to persuade the Emperor Napoleon III to act as arbitrator in the disputes.

[5] While in the interests of his canal, Lesseps resisted British government opposition to an enterprise which threatened to give France control of the shortest route to India, he acted favourably towards Britain's interests after Benjamin Disraeli acquired the Suez shares belonging to the Khedive, by admitting to the board of directors of the company three representatives from the government of Britain.

The consolidation of interests which resulted, and which was strengthened by the addition in 1884 of seven more British directors, chosen from among shipping merchants and business men, increased, for the benefit of all concerned, the commercial character of the enterprise.

If, in 1869, he appeared to deviate from this principle by being a candidate at Marseille for the Corps Législatif, it was because he yielded to the entreaties of the Imperial government in order to strengthen its goodwill for the Suez Canal.

[11] He subsequently encouraged Major Roudaire, who wished to transform a stretch of the Sahara into an inland sea to increase rainfall in Algeria.

[14] From 17 November 1899 to 23 December 1956, a monumental statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps by Emmanuel Frémiet stood at the entrance of the Suez Canal.

[13] However, the decision to dig a Panama Canal at sea level to avoid the use of locks, and the inability of contemporaneous medical science to deal with epidemics of malaria and yellow fever, doomed the project.

Particularly disastrous were recurrent landslides into the excavations from the bordering water-saturated hills, and the death toll from malaria and yellow fever.

The failure of the project is sometimes referred to as the Panama Canal Scandal, after rumors circulated that French politicians and journalists had received bribes.

By 1892 it emerged that 150 French deputies had been bribed into voting for the allocation of financial aid to the Panama Canal Company, and in February 1893 Lesseps, his son Charles (born 1849), and a number of others faced trial and were found guilty.

Lesseps was ordered to pay a fine and serve a prison sentence, but the latter was overturned by the Court of Cassation on the grounds that it had been more than three years since the crime was committed.

Eleven of her twelve children (six boys and six girls) with Lesseps survived their father: On 11 June 1884, Levi P. Morton, the Minister of the United States to France, gave a banquet in honor of the Franco-American Union and in celebration of the completion of the Statue of Liberty.

Ferdinand de Lesseps, as head of the Franco-American Union, formally presented the statue to the United States, saying: This is the result of the devoted enthusiasm, the intelligence and the noblest sentiments which can inspire man.

Nasser used the codeword repeatedly in a public address in Alexandria that was broadcast to the nation via radio, and minutes later announced that he had issued a presidential decree nationalising the Suez Canal Company.

The statue of Lesseps at the entrance of the Suez Canal was removed from its pedestal, to symbolize the end of European control of the waterway.

On television, Guy Marchand played Lesseps in the 1983 French/German mini-series L'homme de Suez, and John Walters portrayed him in "The Panama Canal", an episode of the 2003 BBC docu-drama series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World.