The Linguist and the Emperor

by Daniel Meyerson

  “Behold how he subdues his flesh!”

  People cry out as he whips himself in a frenzy. He is soon covered with blood (whether his own or that of a slaughtered animal is a professional secret). Finally he throws himself on the ground to sleep.

  A screen descends on which a beautiful woman is painted, her face hidden in her hands, her half-naked body turned toward the dreaming monk.

  “It is the unhappy courtesan Thaïs! Save her! Oh, save her, Paphnutius!”

  Getting to his feet, Paphnutius marches across the stage as the backdrops are changed for Alexandria, a worldly city famed for its philosophers and poets and whores.

  But Jean François does not see the rest of the play: how Paphnutius converts Thaïs; how he brings her to the desert where the harsh life of penance kills her; and how the monk loses his faith afterward, tormented by his lust for the beautiful saint he has created . . .

  The boy is in another world: He has fainted dead away from excitement. Slung like a sack of potatoes over his brother’s shoulder, he is carried out into the cold night air.

  And this is symbolic of what their relationship will be throughout their lives. Jean François, volatile and passionate with the excitability of a visionary, will have much trouble making his way in the world. Jacques, less inspired, will be his brother’s mainstay and support, always believing in him and overlooking his moodiness and fits of temper.

  Even physically the two present a contrast, Jacques having none of his brother’s exotic looks. He is a large, thickset young man, with regular features and eyes heavy with learning; having been forced to give up his formal studies, he pursues them on his own late into the night, immersing himself in Greek and Latin and Hebrew. What he lacks in brilliance, he makes up in devotion. His head filled with Plato and Homer and Virgil and the Bible, Jacques staggers to work in the morning, sitting all day recording how many bolts of cloth have been sold and how much money has been collected and how much is owed. He dreams of escape.

  But escape is impossible during the Terror. During the Terror, nothing is possible—except for violence.

  The Champollions: would-be scholar Jacques, sitting on his clerk’s stool in Grenoble; undisciplined, unschooled Jean François going his dreamy, solitary way; bankrupt bookseller Champollion père; and invalid Champollion mère. They are all lucky simply to be alive.

  A NEW WORLD is being born. If its birth pangs are inseparable from the death agonies of its enemies, so much the worse for them! Thus proclaims the “midwife”—Robespierre the “Incorruptible”—a skillful orator whose stirring speeches have helped him seize power (a power maintained with denunciations and spies and fanatic scoundrels). The flesh holds no interest for Robespierre. He is a celibate, tortured torturer, a compiler of execution lists, and, when the mood is upon him, a maker of exquisite lace.

  Day by day, citizens are arrested to satisfy the bloodlust and morbid suspicions of the Incorruptible. Among them is a sensual Creole named Rose who will play a large role in the events that follow. Daily, Rose expects arrest, so when it finally comes, she cries out with anguish, “I have done nothing! Nothing! I am from the Americas—an innocent woman!” She clutches her two children, a girl of ten and a boy of twelve, as she is dragged from a small house just outside Paris.

  What she says is true: She was raised on the island of Martinique and in poverty, too, on a half-abandoned sugar plantation ruined by hurricanes. Yet these circumstances do not save her. She is thrown into a Paris prison with her husband, a rich aristocrat she married when she was fifteen.

  Then Rose had been a girl filled with romantic dreams, sent to Paris to repair the family’s fortunes. But her new husband quickly disillusioned her, despising her provincial manners and her innocence. Debauched and sated with all manner of pleasures, he has only a technical, legal interest in the young Creole brought from the islands: Without a wife he cannot inherit the family estate.

  By the time of the Terror, Rose has had two children with him. She is in her early thirties. Since her arrest, her teeth have become bad, her complexion has begun to coarsen, and her clothes have gotten ragged. After her husband is guillotined, she takes what she thinks will be a last lover in prison. Something about her fascinates men; her beauty is a sum greater than its parts. And when this lover is guillotined as well, she takes another last lover. What sense is there in waiting for death alone? Besides which, a pregnancy would mean a nine-month reprieve. A lie will win her four at the least. Such is her reasoning as she desperately seeks niches and corners where she and her friend can steal a moment alone: in the chapel of the convent turned prison, beneath a winding staircase, even the women’s privy provides a brief chance. A guard finally discovers Rose and her would-be savior in flagrante delicto, and drags them off to different cells.

  Though she will not become pregnant, Rose will end up cheating the executioner. She will live to fascinate many other “last lovers,” including a younger man. The most ardent of her lovers, he and his passion will both frighten and amuse her. This serious and brooding soldier will one day rename her “Josephine” and make her empress of France.

  For the time being, though, Napoleon is unaware of Rose’s existence. “I have only one passion, only one mistress and that is France. I sleep with her,” he says grandly, taking up his first military command with a good conscience. What is the Terror to him? “The revolution?” He shrugs with a soldier’s realism. “It is an opinion with bayonets.” If he is a member of Robespierre’s party, it is only because it is useful for him.

  But even the Terror must finally come to an end. It is in the nature of things: Sooner or later, violence turns in upon itself. On the very day that Josephine is supposed to die, Robespierre, who has grown increasingly out of touch with reality, makes a fatal speech. “I fear impure influences . . . from impure men,” he tells the National Assembly, staring at face after face with an intense gaze whose significance is quickly understood. “My nearest colleagues, the Committee for Public Safety itself must be purified.” At first there is silence, but suddenly there are cries of “Murderer!” “Criminal!” “Tyrant!” A flood of rage is released.

  The next day, Robespierre himself is dragged to the guillotine. His jaw has been broken during his attempt to escape. As he is forced onto the scaffold, he snarls and strikes out. The blade descends and his severed head is held up to the crowd. A deafening shout echoes in the Place de la Revolution. The great orator has fallen silent forever.

  A time of abandoned celebration follows, a time when everything is possible. Society women walk bare-breasted across Paris on a bet. Young men, les incroyables, strut about in fantastic get-ups while young women take to wearing gauzy, transparent dresses that would have outraged Republican virtue just a year before. And macabre bals du guillotine are given, in which the revelers dance wildly, making the jerky motions of a decapitated body as the horrors of the Terror are forgotten in fountains of wine.

  In the midst of the frantic merrymaking, an awkward young man in a field uniform stands silently.

  “His face is thin and pale. He is contemptuous in his bearing. He has none of the qualities of the men of the study or of society,” a shrewd observer (Mme. de Staël) remembers him. “If he recounts his personal experiences, he discloses the lively imagination of an Italian. Character, mind, speech—all have a strange stamp. This very strangeness helps him to win over the French . . .”

  Though he has been fighting for France, Napoleon is not a Frenchman. He is from Corsica, a rugged island off the coast of Italy where blood feuds and an exaggerated code of honor formed him—and where gentry such as the Bonapartes are almost as poor as the peasants.

  Sent on a scholarship to France, to the royal military academy at Brienne, young Napoleon is taunted by his aristocratic classmates for his Italian accent and his poverty. But he is a scrapper, willful and stubborn. His sense of himself only becomes stronger during his years at the academy, first at Brienne and then in the École Militaire in Paris where he con
centrates on mathematics and artillery.

  If he is an outsider, though, what sets him apart is not so much his background, his foreign birth, and poverty: it is his consciousness. A fellow Corsican, Paoli, sums him up, “There is nothing modern about you, Napoleon. You are straight out of Plutarch.” True: It is from classical readings that Napoleon derives inspiration. Such figures as Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great stir his imagination with visions of a godlike glory and make him dissatisfied with anything less.

  Which is why he stands silent and brooding at the bal du guillotine. Ambition gnaws at him, only made sharper by his first taste of victory. For though he has shown himself brave and a bold strategist during the early days of the revolution, what has he done, after all? Relieved a French port, Toulon, from foreign occupation. On the world-historical scale of his vast imagination, it is barely worth noticing.

  What would Caesar or Alexander or . . . ? A wine glass is placed in his hand and a friend taps him on the arm. The preoccupied and abstracted soldier finds himself face-to-face with the Creole woman Rose, rescued from prison and on the arm of the Director Barras, one of the five men who now rule France.

  “You should know each other: You are both from islands,” the director laughs, “and you both know how to fight . . .”

  Rose is about to say something pleasant and move on, but something silences her in the look Napoleon gives her: a serious and imploring and strange look very out of place in that setting.

  From the beginning, everything about Rose touches him to the quick. Napoleon will remember his first impression of her with pain even after it is all over, after they have both betrayed each other and he is a defeated and exiled emperor on his prison island writing his memoirs. At this momentous meeting, her laughter is shot through with melancholy. Her abandon—her dress is very revealing—somehow has an innocence about it. Not a girlish innocence. At the time she is womanly and is more experienced, more so than he, with his one or two abrupt experiments in the physical act of love and his romantic sighing over interchangeable women. Her innocence, he decides, doesn’t depend on her experience or lack thereof, but on a kind of radical purity of soul.

  Though Rose is Barras’ mistress, the director has already begun to tire of her. She is willing to receive Napoleon’s attentions. Soon he calls on her and she quickly becomes everything to him. She finds him strange, a diversion, though somewhat oppressive—abrupt, serious, romantic, often silent, unsmiling. He is the opposite of the pleasure-loving, worldly Barras, and the opposite of herself. Rose—soon to be transformed into Josephine by the importunate soldier—thinks no more of changing her lovers than of changing her shoes.

  After their first night together, Napoleon writes to her, “I have awakened full of you. The memory of last night has given my senses no rest . . . Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an effect you have on my heart! I send you thousands of kisses—but don’t kiss me. Your kisses sear my blood.”

  And Josephine profitably sells Napoleon’s letters to the chief of police Fouché, who spies on all figures of any political importance, among whom he counts the “hero of Toulon,” a man whose victory has already earned him a measure of fame.

  Napoleon wants to marry Rose quickly, before he goes off to battle. She agrees, after consulting with Barras. He feels Napoleon shows promise. Moreover, Barras tells her that he intends to put Napoleon in charge of the revolutionary army languishing in the Alps.

  But just who it is she is marrying, she has no more idea of now than when she saw him silent and brooding at the Directory ball.

  His Italian campaigns will do more than make him a hero and a demigod in France. They will astonish the world. Given command of a ragged army that has been languishing for months in the Italian Alps, Napoleon inspires them with his own strength of will: “Soldiers, you are hungry and almost naked,” he tells the cold, half-starved men, immediately forging a mystic bond with them. “I will lead you into the most fertile plains on earth . . . There you shall find honor, glory, riches. Soldiers of Italy, can resolution fail you now?”

  And he makes good on his promises. Combining brilliant tactics with desperate courage, Napoleon turns this side-theater of the war into the main one. One after the other, he defeats the superior Austrian armies sent against him. He forces the Austrians to sue for peace. He fills the empty coffers of the Directory with tribute and he searches through the churches and palaces of Italy to send the finest works of art back to France.

  This means nothing to him. “What I have accomplished so far will earn me a footnote in history,” he tells his adjutant. He craves much more. Like Caesar, like Alexander, he wants immortality. He decides, after much agonizing, that he will look for it in the sands of Egypt.

  IT IS THE place their paths will cross imaginatively, Napoleon’s and that of Jean François. They will sit and talk about Egypt the way two men talk who have loved the same woman. But not yet. For first Napoleon must conquer it. And Jean François must learn how to read.

  Napoleon steps onto the world stage from nowhere. He appears suddenly: a gaunt, passionate young man filled with nervous energy and in love with glory. “What is happiness?” he asks in his diary during his student days. “It is the possibility of making full use of one’s powers.”

  During the monarchy, such happiness is beyond his reach. Under Louis XVI, aristocratic birth is everything, merit nothing. Because he is a commoner, Napoleon was given an insignificant command when he completed his studies, and that is all he could expect in the future as well. And so he suffered. His genius stifled, his aggression turned inward and he wanted to die: “I see no place for myself in this world,” the young officer writes to his brother. “If this continues, I shall end by not stepping aside when a carriage rushes past.”

  The revolution changes everything. France is attacked on all sides by monarchs fearful of her radical example. For their part, the leaders of the revolution welcome war. They understand that if their revolution does not spread to other countries, it will die. War is a necessity.

  But the French army is in disarray. Its aristocratic officers have fled for their lives, leaving the rabble without a leader. Thus Destiny, in which Napoleon believes with a perfect and pagan faith, has opened the way for him.

  Destiny, glory, immortality—Napoleon conceives of war in grand, heroic terms, as if he were an ancient warrior and not an artillery officer in the nineteenth century, trained in the latest, most scientific methods. This is a paradox at the heart of his character: This most realistic of realists is never disillusioned by the horrors of war. For him, it will always be what the Greek philosopher Heraclitus calls it—a say-ing Napoleon scribbles in the margins of an order for the day, on the back of a letter from his mother, across a bill from Josephine’s dressmaker—“War, the father of all good things.”

  From his first campaign to his last, all he sees is glory: in Italy, where he orders that all the boys and men in a village be shot to discourage guerrilla fighting; in Egypt, where his soldiers go mad from thirst, chasing after mirages in the desert and killing themselves; in the Holy Land, where the ravages of the plague force him, out of mercy, to poison his own men; during the long Russian retreat where it is common to see starving men throw themselves on a fallen horse and devour its flank and liver while the animal is still alive.

  And even when he is shaken, he forces himself to overcome his weakness. Looking over a battlefield where thousands lie dying and dead, he turns away and murmurs, “The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet,”—the words of a Roman emperor he is pretending to be. The next moment he will be some other Roman or Greek, another figure whose words, whose stance, he has made his own. When he becomes emperor, he will stride through the palace with a swaying gait after hearing that Louis XVI walked in this manner. Even his physical maladies are viewed by him as “world-historical”: Is it Nature that has afflicted him with epilepsy or is he unconsciously mimicking that other great epileptic, Julius Caesar?

  Is Napoleon a
man afflicted with disease or one suffering from a superabundance of life and imagination and nervous energy? A revolutionary or an autocrat? Is he a Frenchman—when his troops grumble at the hardships in Egypt, he curses the French, a nation that makes love with its mouth and fights with its feet—or an Italian?

  When alone, this revolutionary emperor, this Italian creator of French glory, does he himself know who he is?

  Chapter Two

  The Awakening

  JEAN FRANÇOIS DISCOVERS who he is by reading.

  His brother Jacques begins to teach him on visits home: first the alphabet, then everything. To begin with, he reads stories of the games on Olympus, of wrestling and discus throwing and racing. Some passages Jacques reads to the unathletic and uncoordinated boy include tales of incredible strength:

  Polydamas strangled a lion with his bare hands, a feat depicted on his statue at Olympia. He also stopped a chariot dead in its tracks, seizing hold of it as it sped past him.

  First he recites in Greek, letting Jean François hear the music of the language before Jacques translates. He translates not only their language, but the stories’ spirit—not a physical, but a metaphysical spirit.

  What are they striving for, these poised and beautiful athletes?

  Victory!

  But what is Victory?

  It is the holy mingling of god and man.

  Jacques teaches Jean François to hear the echoes of an ancient world, showing him what, at Olympus, is at stake.

  Glaukos was a farmer. One day the ploughshare came away from the plough and his father saw him hammering it back with his bare fist. Impressed, the old man decided to take him to the next Olympic games. This he did but Glaukos was inexperienced and took many blows in the early bouts. When he came to his last opponent, he was so badly wounded that everybody thought he would have to give up. But his father called: “My son! Remember the ploughshare!” Whereupon Glaukos hit his opponent so hard that the contest was ended there and then.