The Linguist and the Emperor (7 page)

David quickly produces a bold drawing, a work of genius. In its few strong lines, all that is inessential falls away. It captures Napoleon’s inhuman strength of will. One can almost hear the emperor as he holds the crown over his head and proclaims, “God and my sword!”—a soldier’s, a knight’s credo that interrupts the chanted prayers with a trace of menace.

Afterward, David repeats this sketch a second time while preparing for his epic painting,
Le Sacre.
In the end, though, David is forced to paint a softer, sentimental moment not to offend Catholic France: Napoleon crowns the kneeling Josephine, her head bowed, her hands clasped in prayer.

But before this compromise is made, David draws another sketch of the self-coronation. In this version, the sword is strapped to a naked torso, for Napoleon is nude. There is no crown, just the naked gesture of reaching upward. There are no royal robes, just the muscular soldier’s body that has endured years of hard campaigns. It is this nude sketch which sums up the truth of what Napoleon has achieved. With only his own will on which to rely, out of nothing he has raised himself above popes and kings.

BUT IF THE
world is dazzled by Napoleon, a certain unhappy, ridiculous, sublime—and vulnerable, very vulnerable—eleven-year-old schoolboy in Grenoble is not. Just the opposite: Jean François hates the military spirit sweeping France. He suffers from it. It oppresses him and makes him withdraw into himself, for it permeates every aspect of what he calls his “prison,” the
lycée
with its endless army-style parades and its Napoleon-worship.

Everyone in the
lycée
must conform—that is axiomatic in military life. Obedience and inflexible discipline dictate every detail, from how many jacket buttons must be done up and how many left undone, to the 526 books which make up Napoleon’s fiat on the curriculum:
these and no others!
It is a restraint terrible to a mind used to ranging where it likes. During Jean François’ first weeks he is discovered criminally hiding away a 527th—and a 528th—and a 529th. When the mattresses are restuffed with fresh straw, Persian and Arabic books come tumbling out, Latin poems, a list of Egyptian kings compiled by Manetho in Greek.

Word spreads like wildfire. The incident gives rise to laughter. The new boy is punished, not for hiding away the kind of books usually hidden in the straw—one of the very popular, scurrilous, and illustrated accounts of Marie Antoinette’s love life, for example; or a scandalous, lurid novel such as Diderot’s
The Nun,
the illicit writing of the day. No, Jean François is made to stand at attention all afternoon for an Arabic grammar and a Persian dictionary and a list of old kings!

For his difference, Jean François will have to endure a ridicule that he never forgets. And though he will later come up against mockery often enough, these early, childish griefs stay with him forever. Years later though occupied with his great work, he will sometimes recall them in letters. He recounts them in detail to his nephew, who leaves them out of his worshipful memoir. For though the schoolboy Jean François has amassed a great deal of precocious learning, still he is less mature than other children of his age and their laughter wounds an innocent nature formed by his solitary upbringing.

But, though his classmates laugh, the authorities take a more serious view. In the masters’ view, this hiding of respectable books reflects a rebelliousness, a dangerous independence—not merely a schoolboy’s forgivable prurience. By Napoleon’s orders, students are instructed under the most rigid constraints. For example, take the question Champollion is asked:
What is the best form of government?

A universal state like the one Napoleon is creating.
Everyone knows this answer. It is repeated often enough by every student—every student, that is, except for the brilliant yet stupid new scholarship boy. Jean François alone refuses to praise Napoleon when called upon in class. Even worse, he gives voice to his own opinions, quoting the classical authors on the tip of his tongue.

Champollion!

A long pause always follows after he is called upon, a silence that lasts forever, though he is self-assured intellectually. It is torture for him to speak in public. It is painful to fully emerge from his intense inner life. His mind, his consciousness is filled with sounds: First and foremost that is how he experiences the languages he studies. A torrent of sounds, soft or harsh, long or short, heavy or light, coming from the throat or the lips, rolled on the palate, or hissed from behind the teeth, combining and recombining like music. “If Arabic is the most beautiful of languages, then Persian is the sweetest, the Italian of the Orient.” Each language has a logic and a mystery all its own.

Champollion!

He stands awkwardly in his cracked shoes and the ill-fitting, secondhand uniform his brother bought him, facing the world: his twenty or so classmates.

What is the best form of government?

“The best form of government . . .” he begins, then pauses again. It is unbearable, excruciating. Taking his courage in his hands, he throws himself over the hurdle of his reticence, declaring as a shock goes through the room that he admires republics.

Republics?
A few years before it would have been the correct answer, there would have been no other. As Talleyrand cynically remarks: “Treason is a matter of dates.” Now with Napoleon having assumed absolute power, such a response could cost Jean François his scholarship.

Not giving this a thought, though, Champollion goes on to explain why he admires republics—especially the ancient Roman one. He recites Latin epigrams on freedom and lines from Greek poems. His answer is half absurd with its abstruse references—and half sublime. Finally the astonished teacher recollects himself and interrupts with another question: “And what about the glory Napoleon has brought France?”

Again Jean François is ridiculous and sublime. Pale, struggling for breath—on the verge of fainting as is typical of him when he becomes excited—he quotes another classical author: “I love my country, but I love the truth more . . .”

The reply silences the teacher, and earns Jean François two zeros amid shouts of laughter, one for history and one for impudent behavior.

“There are certain incidents which affect the entire course of a student’s career in an academic institution,” Jacques tells his brother in a reproachful letter. “I have used all my savings and even so, I can barely pay half the costs of keeping you in the
lycée.
Without a scholarship, where would you be? I don’t mention the fact that your opinions will be attributed to me. And I don’t remind you that by your behavior . . .” But of course he
is
reminding him of what is at stake and he
is
mentioning every fact, every argument he can think of in his effort to make Jean François succeed.

But Jean François is stubborn. He will not, perhaps cannot, give in.

So the teachers quickly come to dislike the poor, arrogant boy with his flashing eyes and his precocious learning, his awkwardness in drill, and his indifference not only to the emperor, but to the great event of the week: the special Sunday dinner, sometimes of sausages, sometimes a fat capon. Even the way Jean François eats his meals makes a bad impression.

His trouble is that he is too much like the emperor he despises. The refusal to lose himself in Napoleon-worship could not be more Napoleonic. For like the emperor, Jean François is passionate, irritable, proud, sensitive, more than a little mad; a visionary.

When he starts to learn Coptic, the language of Egypt in the first centuries after Christ, he gives himself up to his studies so completely that not only does he compile a Coptic dictionary running over two thousand pages, but he himself becomes a Copt: “I think in Coptic,” he tells his brother. “I write my notes and keep my accounts and even dream in it.”

And when he studies Arabic, he is transformed. Not only are his inflections so perfect that he is indistinguishable from a native Arabic speaker, his voice changes so that even when he speaks French it takes on a throaty and guttural quality. “I barely move my lips when I talk.”

Later, this is what sets Jean François apart from other scholars: his emotional, libidinous, voluptuous relationship to ancient language. He is obsessed, driven, stalking his quarry not just with his mind but with all his instinct and passion.

For though his linguistic insights are based on solid scholarship, they are also acts of imagination. If he is a methodical, logical scientist, he is also a magician, a medium through whom ancient Egypt will speak, an artist who lives in the world of his inspirations and who sums up existence thus: “Enthusiasm alone is the true life.” Champollion writes the word in Greek letters, conjuring its original meaning: “possessed by the god.”

But how to survive in a state
lycée
when you are possessed by a god? If his artistic temperament serves him well in his work, it is an affliction in daily life. He feels every slight or constraint more keenly. The school’s routines drive him to despair. He lives for the hours when he can study his “beloved oriental languages” with the learned Abbé Dussert, a special dispensation Jacques has managed to arrange. They are his one joy. His need for these sessions is so strong as to be almost physical. Till the small hours, he pores over his grammars by the dim light of a courtyard lamp, holding the books up on the left side of his bed. The sight in his left eye will be permanently impaired from the strain. By day, he resists anything that takes him away from his languages, cursing the lessons in mathematics and technical drawing, the drills and inspections—“these stupidities.”

Hence his endlessly imploring letters to his brother:

“They are killing me with their orders of the day . . .

“I will surely sicken or lose my mind here . . . save me, I beg of you, before that happens . . .

“Set me free,” he writes Jacques week after week, month after month, year after year, astonishing letters when one considers that they are written by a young boy lamenting hours “stolen” from the study of languages. At the same time, though, he never forgets the sacrifices Jacques is making to keep him in school. More than that, these sacrifices are a sign of his brother’s faith in him, a faith which sustains him. He is ashamed, grateful, and furious all at the same time.

“You see everything through the eyes of a wild horse, as the saying goes: magnified times five,” Jacques admonishes. “How will you achieve anything in life if you are ready to die for no reason at all? Besides, I understand that Abbé Dussert is considering permitting you to add another language, either Chaldean or Syriac.
Now
will you be content?”

But of course Jean François is not content: “How can the Abbé make it a question of one or the other? Doesn’t he know I must study both? Doesn’t he realize”—etc., etc.

He finds a place to be alone. When the others are at meals, Jean François sits under the stairwell and reads Herodotus and Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, the Greeks and Romans who are Egypt’s heirs, and from whom he absorbs everything, whatever is known about Egypt and her gods—the divine vulture Nehkbet, the jackal-god Anubis, and Ra, god of the sun.

Alone in the courtyard of his school, hidden away in an empty classroom, Champollion reads a book in Latin (
The Golden Ass
) by the Greek, Apuleis, praising the Egyptian goddess Isis. He is in the middle of a description of how Isis appeared to author-narrator Apuleis in a vision. Apuleis had been turned into a donkey and had witnessed all the falseness and lusts of the world: the fakery of the eunuch-priests of Isis who take her statue on the road and swindle the people; and then the cruelty of thieves who ride the animal almost to death as they murder and rape. Finally, the donkey manages to eat a garland of roses offered to him by a beautiful nymphomaniac and suddenly he is human again and at the great temple of Isis, worshipping the goddess who has been welcomed into Rome by a people seeking something new: salvation.

“O heart that my mother gave me!” the ex-donkey begins an ancient Egyptian hymn.

“O heart of my different ages!” Apuleis cries out in the work Champollion is reading. And then a military drumroll is heard throughout the school, followed by an even harsher, more dream-destroying bugle call:
ra-ta-ta!
Another parade, another drill and inspection: Is the angle of Champollion’s hat correct? His back straight? Arms at the sides?

Darkness. Despair. The end of the world.

To put it in the words of his beloved Apuleis—that man-turned-donkey-turned-man-again by grace of Egypt’s gods—the problem is
Et hic adhus infantilis uterus gestat nobis infantem aliem.
 .  .  . This is a prophecy addressed to Psyche, to Mind, a young girl who has coupled with Eros or Love:
Though you are still only a child, you will soon have a child of your own
 .  .  .

Within Jean François, mind has also joined with passion. And though he too is young, he is heavy with intellectual child.

Chapter Five

Lions of the Desert

Grenoble. The residence of the prefect (that is, governor) of the Department of Isère.

ON AN AFTERNOON
toward the beginning of spring in 1803, an unusual scene takes place at the prefect’s official residence. A schoolboy—Jean François—makes his appearance among the throng of petitioners and men of affairs in the prefect’s waiting room. He is received right away. While government business is forgotten, the prefect and Jean François sit talking—or, rather, Jean François listens as the prefect talks, trying to put the tense, silent boy at ease.

The prefect is new to his job. He does not look the part: His skin is dark and leathery from long treks in the Egyptian deserts, forced marches which many did not survive. He is still gaunt from the dysentery endemic among the troops. For he is none other than Jean Baptiste Fourier, physicist and secretary of the savants in Egypt, a scientist Napoleon put in a political post because he needs someone he can trust.

Though Fourier is no politician, he has been dealing ably with the throng of visitors crowding his waiting room, the clever lawyers and greedy contractors and ambitious bureaucrats who come to see him about every kind of business—every kind that is, except the one closest to the prefect’s heart: the many-volumed
Description of Egypt,
which it is now his privilege to help create.

It is a Herculean task. The savants have collected a vast wealth of knowledge, statistics, maps, specimens, and a thick portfolio of drawings, the bulk by the artist Dominique Denon. Nothing escapes Denon’s eye: the geometrical splendor of a temple, the claws of a bat clinging to a palm, and countless inscriptions. They appear as long strings of hieroglyphs seen not only on monuments but in Cairo’s back alleys, by the quays of Alexandria, in the fields of peasants, where huge, ancient stones have been quarried from the ruins.

Inscribed with images of kings and gods, these stones laden with knowledge now prop up a bathhouse or a privy. Covered with unreadable texts, epic poems, spells, and prayers, they are now used to grind the newly harvested grain.

The Shabaka stone records the wisdom of the famed school of Heliopolis (
  “City of the Sun,” as the Greeks called it,         
         “Iunu” for the Egyptians and
  “On” in the Bible: a place ancient even in the days when Joseph spoke with Pharaoh). Here is four-thousand-year-old philosophical speculation, lectures attended by Plato and Pythagoras, the cosmogony of the priests of Ra. Now dragged round and round by donkeys, its contents forgotten, the stone’s surface is pitted with holes and scratches, its metaphysics covered with coarse Nubian millet and bits of straw.

To this chaos of half-understood, half-rescued knowledge, Fourier must bring order. He comes to this task after days spent on government business, listening to officials seeking promotions, engineers planning roads through the mountains and wrangling churchmen—bishops, priests, worldly, difficult men fighting for what is due the church, the power that was theirs before the revolution. (Napoleon’s “I treat the pope as if he had two hundred thousand men!” is all that Fourier has to go by.) Not to mention the lawyers who also have a claim on Fourier’s time. He must review cases so vexed it is a wonder that he can work at all on the
Description
of
Egypt,
that the violent stories and faces of those condemned to die do not come between him and the page.

All of this—the criminals at the Place d’Armes,
and
military reviews,
and
tours of inspection—rests on Fourier’s shivering shoulders (for he is subject to bouts of malarial fever, a souvenir he has brought back with him from Egypt, from the swampy Fayum, along with his spoils, the beautiful and moving antiquities he has acquired). Worn out by his duties and his maladies, how is it that this visitor of Fourier’s—a mere child! a schoolboy!—will lift his spirits so?

They meet by chance when the prefect comes to visit the
lycée.
A fateful chance, the ancient Egyptians would have dialectically called it because, despite the difference in their age and situations, it is impossible that two such kindred spirits should live in the same city and not know each other.

Fate throws them together in Grenoble and keeps them together forever. When they die, they will lie near each other under Egyptian-style monuments in the Père Lachaise cemetery. And even in the twentieth century, valleys named after them when the moon is explored will not be far apart.

What then was the teacher at the
lycée
thinking of that day? Did he imagine that by putting Jean François in the back row to hide his shabby uniform he could prevent the “Egyptian” prefect from noticing the “Egyptian” boy?

It is not just that Jean François knows
something
about Egypt. All the students have followed Napoleon’s campaigns, some have even heard firsthand accounts from relatives in the army of the battle of the pyramids, the Cairo uprising, and the siege at Acre. But Egypt has been Jean François’ imaginative home. When questioned by Fourier, not only does he answer, but he eagerly asks the prefect his own questions. He talks with intimate knowledge, ranging over place and time with such ease that finally Fourier can only exclaim, “Who has been in Egypt, this boy or me?”

Fourier invites Jean François—not the indignant teacher and not the distinguished head of the
lycée
—to visit him at the prefecture. Talking to the boy as an equal, as Champollion will later remember, he inquires in the polite language of the day whether Jean François will
do him the honor
of paying him a visit.

Then the prefect is gone and Jean François is alone in the
lycée
again—no longer a savant but a boy who cannot spell or do the simplest math problems and who has had the impudence to hold forth before such an important visitor. Of course this “unseemly self-display” will be forgiven later on when the learned societies and the
lycée
will fight to claim Jean François as their own, this student in a shabby uniform who did not even have the manners to thank the prefect for his invitation—disgraceful!—who did not have the sense to take Fourier’s extended hand but stood unsmiling, staring and speechless, self-conscious and overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed or not, Jean François accepts Fourier’s invitation and so it comes to pass that the two sit closeted together in the prefect’s office. The meeting will be a turning point in Jean François’ young life.

Fourier inquires about Jean François’ studies, about his home and family in Figeac—his questions go unanswered. At first Jean François is unable to say a word. So the prefect then talks about Egypt. He describes scenes that have not changed since the time of Herodotus and before: a water boy sitting astride his ox, his
gallibaya
tucked up, his bare thin legs straddling the massive flanks of the patient animal. The boy’s song,
Ya Amuni!
Ya Amuni!
has been passed down for generations, the words of the ancient language having become more and more incomprehensible and distorted until only these two syllables are left—Amun, “the Hidden God.” These syllables no longer conveying this or any other meaning, have become nothing more than plaintive and melancholy sound, something for a boy to sing as he and his ox work the
shaduf.

The boy sings, the ox lows, and the buckets of the
shaduf
rise and dip, filling an irrigation ditch where, together with his horse, a man washes off the day’s toil . . .

It is a scene from the present, from the past, from a mural in an eighteenth dynasty tomb. The water buckets of the
shaduf
were rising and falling even then. Or rather: they rise and fall even now. In Egypt, the past is real and the present is not. The past overshadows the present, making it seem like a dream.

Fourier tells the boy about the tomb of Sennefer, mayor of Wast. Its walls are covered with fields and vineyards painted in brilliant colors, with harvesters and flocks of wild birds, resurrection spells and naked dancing girls: sinuous bodies so beautiful that they alone could resurrect the mayor . . . if his mummy had not been used for fuel, that is! Tossed onto the fire one cold desert night to warm his descendants.

In the fields, herds of goats trample newly sown grain into the soil, just as they did in the days of pharaoh. And in the Egyptian churches metal rattles still echo during mass:
sistra-so
the Greeks called them;
 
hatof
to the Hebrews. It is the instrument Miriam played at the Red Sea when she led the women in song;                  
                  
sesheshet
to the ancient Egyptians, a word whose sound was meant to capture a rattle’s tinkling, which in turn was meant to capture the sound of papyrus stalks rustling in the wind.
Sistra,
tofim,
sesheshet—
these instruments that joyous, bare-breasted girls once used to appease the erotic rage of the cow goddess Hathor now in the hands of bearded monks solemnly worshipping a child suckling at the Virgin’s breast, just as the hawk-headed Horus suckled at the breast of Isis.