The Linguist and the Emperor (16 page)

If this struggle is what constitutes true happiness—if victory is merely a somnolent, posthumous, half-and-half state—then perhaps for Jean François this might be called a time of true joy.

Proud; solitary among the crowds of Paris; his clothes in tatters so that, he writes his brother in Grenoble, he is ashamed to go out in decent society. He resents being sent on endless errands for his brother, who chastises him as if he were a young boy. Defiant, knowing his own worth, he is nevertheless humbled by having to take charity from a brother with little enough for himself and his family. He translates, not the Rosetta stone, but some sensational Italian novel for a small fee so that he can get by.

Once the restoration of the Bourbons takes place, he is no longer even the occasional “assistant to an assistant,” the underpaid professor, or librarian’s secretary.

For a time, he works with poor children, trying to introduce the Lancaster system, a new method of education which advocates not only teaching children how to read but teaching them how to teach other children to read as well—the older teaching the younger. Behind the idea is the hope that learning will thus spread throughout the countryside like ripples in a pool: a goal strongly opposed by the church and the political conservatives who see universal literacy as a threat to the returning stability of the old order. Thus this activity makes Jean François even more suspect.

And as if the burden of supporting himself is not enough, he has taken on the responsibility of a wife along the way. A girl of sixteen whom he had met in Grenoble, defies her bourgeois father for his sake. It is not only her father who opposes the marriage, but Jean François’ brother is against the match as well. Appalled by the girl’s ignorance, Jacques refuses to attend the wedding, predicting misery for both.

The two lovers are engaged for years. By the time they finally marry, Jean François’ interest in her has waned and he marries her out of a sense of duty and gratitude. As he later writes in a letter, it would have been dishonorable to break off the engagement after Rosine’s long faithfulness to him, her defiance of her family, her steadfast rejection of more eligible suitors, etc.

It is hard to say how true this picture of their marriage is, and how much of it is a retrospective view colored by the fact that at the time he writes the letter not only he is looking back over the distance of some years, but he is alone. He has left Rosine behind to continue his researches in Italy. And what’s more, the letter is addressed to a brilliant young woman he meets here, Angelica Palli.

She is everything his wife is not. For while the interests of Champollion’s wife do not extend beyond family and home, Angelica is accomplished, intellectual, and fascinated by his work.

She is also unattainable. Married to an Italian nobleman with whom she will live in aristocratic ease, she bequeaths to posterity thirty passionate letters, the feeling in them all the more palpable for what is left unsaid.

These letters are not written in Coptic or Arabic or Latin or Greek, but in the language—where can he have learned it, poring over old, musty papyri night and day as he does?—the language of love.

“
THE RING
”
. . . painted on countless papyri, engraved on statues, chiseled on the walls of tombs and the sides of obelisks, an oval ring winds around a cluster of hieroglyphs, thus—

Setting off certain hieroglyphs from the rest, the ring is the first clue in the decipherment. It is guessed that these rings enclose the names of the foreign as well as the native pharoahs, and that therefore these foreign names must somehow have been written phonetically. That is, the sounds of these names would need to come into play as there would be no way to represent foreign names with symbols alone. The guess uses Chinese as an analogy, Chinese being another language that is written with symbols derived from pictures; another language in which
sound
and
writing
part ways, and another language which encloses foreign names in a ring.

The savants who accompany Bonaparte’s army to Egypt call the rings “cartouches”—cartridges—after the oval shaped ammunition of the soldiers’ guns.

This first clue, this French “cartridge” enclosing Egyptian writing, is a fitting metaphor for linguist and emperor, for thought entangled in the world, for the power which encircles knowledge and the violence which claims it for its own.

“
THE BOOK
”—Horapollo’s
Hieroglyphica—
another early clue, is discovered in the 1400s on Andros, a Greek island in the Mediterranean, by a shepherd wandering in the mountains.

Noticing the entrance to a cave, an opening so narrow that it might be nothing more than a crevice in the steep face of the cliff, he had climbed up to explore, crawling into the darkness where at first he finds nothing.

Nothing worth risking his neck for, that is: amphorae, ancient wine jars of the kind once used in libations, and only fragments of them at that, broken shards heaped in a pile. But under the jars, miraculously preserved, is an ancient book—more than a thousand years old, it will be ascertained—which the shepherd takes away as a prize.

Written in Egyptian in the fourth century
AD
by Horapollo and translated into Greek by a certain “Philip”—so the book states—it is the only surviving ancient work which has as its subject the meaning of the hieroglyphs. Of the book’s author, Horapollo (Horus + Apollo), nothing is known except that, given his name, he must have been a hellenized Egyptian. It can also be conjectured that he had decided to record whatever he knew about the hieroglyphs before they were supplanted by the Greek alphabet and forgotten.

“A baboon can stand for either the moon or the world,” the author declares, “or writing or anger. A donkey’s head is used for a man who has never traveled and knows nothing of the world. And a hand is used for a builder, since the hand performs the work,” etc., etc. The book provides a word list or a sign list, a dictionary of key symbols, king, priest, the Nile. More important, its translations reveal the principle, the method by which the hieroglyphics are to be read. It is a system in which the pictures become symbols sometimes taking on one, sometimes many meanings.

And so the rare book is an important find, acquiring great authority during the Renaissance. It passes hands many times—from shepherd to merchant to prince—finally arriving in Rome, where the pope, Sixtus IV, is in the midst of gathering countless rare manuscripts. Buying them up on a grand scale, he adds them to his predecessor’s modest collection and houses them in style, creating one of the great libraries of the world.

Throughout the 1470s, book dealers of every description are sure to find a welcome in the Vatican, as are spies and desperados. For Sixtus is in the midst of a life-and-death struggle with the Medicis of Florence.

Sixtus wants the Medici brothers out of the way. And he wants Horapollo’s
Hieroglyphica
 .  .  . and Plutarch’s
Isis and Osiris
and whatever fragments of Manetho’s
Chronology of the Pharaohs
can be found scattered among the ancient manuscripts—and Polybius’
Histories
with their long parentheses on the Ptolemies of Egypt . . . and an extensive list of Coptic works, works which centuries later Jean François will study in Paris.

But the principles Horapollo explains, and even most of the meanings he gives for the hieroglyphs, are not correct. Though the book contains grains of truth, these grains are mixed with mountains of imagination at such an unequal proportion as to make them useless to a linguist. And these false clues lead generations of scholars astray, from the fifteenth century of Sixtus’ Rome right until the nineteenth century when Champollion studies Horapollo’s writing and absorbs his many errors.

SIXTUS’ GREAT LIBRARY
comes to be built in the midst of bloodshed and intrigue. The Medicis are attacked in church on Easter Sunday: Taken unawares, one brother is killed while the other manages to escape, leading to war between Florence and Rome. And if it is a wonder that Sixtus, though so embattled, occupies himself with his books and his library, it is a wonder that Napoleon repeats four centuries later, also while in the midst of the sharpest crisis of his life. Escaping from Elba in the spring of 1815, Napoleon arrives in the south of France and makes a desperate bid to regain his lost empire.

The fugitive emperor is met by a crowd of fervent worshippers, loyal old soldiers and young boys thirsting for glory. Their number swells to a thousand as Napoleon heads north toward Grenoble where the Fifth Regiment is stationed: more than seven thousand men and heavy cannon. The regimental commander, sworn to protect the restored Bourbons, dispatches a detachment of well-armed soldiers to capture Bonaparte, sending a message to Paris that he has the situation well in hand. He assumes it will be a simple matter to subdue the rebels. Indeed, his men have no trouble finding Napoleon: Just south of the city, they come upon the ragtag crowd following the ex-Emperor.

Before any fighting can take place, though, Napoleon strides out to face his pursuers. Throwing open his military coat, he declares: “You seek your emperor. I am here! Kill me if you wish!”

In silence, the amazed soldiers face the living embodiment of French glory. Suddenly, the defeats and hardships of the past are forgotten. The Bourbons mean nothing. The soldiers cannot repudiate Napoleon. Amid cheers and shouts of “Long live the Emperor!” the men are suddenly Napoleon’s once again. They accompany him to the city, which receives him with a joyous celebration that continues throughout the night.

Establishing temporary headquarters in the mayor’s office, Napoleon sends countless orders and proclamations and letters to every part of France, commanding, imploring old comrades-in-arms to stand by him now. In the midst of all his feverish activity, a delegation of professors from the university arrives.

Champollion is among them. The occasion calls for a few formal phrases, the scholars have only come to pay their respects. But as the delegation withdraws, Napoleon is struck by Champollion’s appearance and manner and he questions him about his work. The young linguist’s opinions interest him. Does Jean François think the decipherment of the Rosetta stone a real possibility? Does he think ancient Egyptian has a complicated grammar, declensions, a subjunctive? The subjunctive! With the future of not only France but all Europe at stake, the two men talk of Egyptian grammar which Champollion conjectures would resemble that of Coptic.

Coptic, the pharaohs, the savants’ engravings of the monuments, Denon’s sketches: The two men sit talking late into the night.

Napoleon knows much about Egypt, not only as a general but as a student, having attended many sessions of the institute he founded in Cairo. When the ferocious heat of the day relented at twilight, it was Napoleon’s habit to appear in the garden of the exquisite palace reserved for the scholars’ use. Toasts were proposed, a good excuse for the wine to flow, as discoveries were announced: the exact measurements of the sphinx, a new species of bird found in the marshes, a temple half sunk in the sand, a successful treatment for the eye disease so prevalent in Egypt.

If Champollion contradicts the emperor on some points, Napoleon allows it. There is no question of lèse-majesté. Both see the world from an eagle’s vantage point, ranging over continents and millennia to draw their conclusions.

Napoleon promises to rush Champollion’s huge work on Coptic through the imperial press, a promise undone one hundred days later by Waterloo. The combined British, Prussian, Austrian, and Russian forces defeat Napoleon, and the British government sends him to his final exile on St. Helena. Jean Francois’ definitive Coptic dictionary will never see the light of day.

But even on St. Helena—on this small, remote island in the South Atlantic, a scrap of black volcanic rock surrounded by endless ocean—Napoleon clings to the “ideal.”

Jagged cliffs rise from the ocean on all sides. Perched high on one of the cliffs is a country house in which the prisoner-emperor lies dying. His body puffy with disease, his features sunk in fat, and his eyes surrounded by dark shadows, he talks of a hundred possible projects as if he were still the new Prometheus. He rants about land reclamation—like Goethe’s Faust in the second part of the epic poem, another hero in a sequel who spends his days using science to reclaim land, handful by handful, from the sea.