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.
Power or knowledge, knowledge or power. When all is said and done, which is the shadow and which is the substance? Which is worth having? Which is worth striving for?
Chapter Eleven
The Weight of the World
August 1922. Cairo. The Abdin Palace.
SIGNOR GIOVANNI MARRA, a historian dressed in a formal morning suit, and suffering in the intense heat, nervously waits in the enormous reception room for the arrival of the king, Fuad.
The palace is meant to be grand, with high ceilings and marble floors and much gilt and carved wood. There is something depressing about the official rooms. An imitation of a Western notion of what is royal, they are like a stage setting where Fuad can play at being king for the benefit of the foreign diplomats and visiting dignitaries.
Small signs of shabbiness everywhere surprise and even scandalize the rather stupid Signor Marra. Like a housekeeper, he meticulously notes the defects in his memoirs: the silk wallpaper is stained here and there by swatted insects; the drapes are frayed though they hang from magnificently gilded cornices; the vitrines containing medals and ribbons and coins are dusty and even cracked, etc.
It is as if Fuad, demoralized by the presence of the British, has let things go—an inference Signor Marra does not draw. Indeed, he is the kind of historian who comes to few conclusions, being content merely to record what he can.
A servant in livery interrupts these observations to lead him to the king, who is walking in the garden. The royal greets his visitor in a high-pitched drawl, interrupted every few words with a harsh, guttural bark. A bullet is lodged in Fuad’s throat, fired by a half-mad cousin. Visitors are warned to take no notice of the noises which punctuate His Majesty’s conversation.
The interview succeeds in winning Signor Marra the permission he needs. He is the first foreigner to be given access to the lower vaults of the Citadel, Saladin’s sprawling twelfth-century fortress which dominates the city.
In the dark, airless chambers, amid snakes and rats, Marra finds the moldering records he has been seeking, accounts which go back to the short period when Napoleon ruled—or rather, tried to rule—Cairo. Calling himself “Sultan Kebir,” the Great Sultan, Napoleon issues endless edicts and dispenses “enlightened” humane justice—justice which becomes less enlightened and more harsh and even barbaric as Napoleon learns the bitter lesson that to capture a great foreign city is not the same as to hold it.
1798. SHUBRA KIT. A place near the watermelon patches of Rahmaniya and the Nile. In the annals of military history, the first encounter between Napoleon’s troops and the Mamelukes—an insignificant skirmish at a place named Shubra Kit—is passed over in silence.
Instead, when the battles of the First Empire come to be taught in the military academies of France’s Second Empire, attention is focused on the great struggle that takes place on the vast plain before Cairo, with its larger-than-life proportions and its ancient pyramids looming in the background.
Yet it is during this first skirmish that the basic approaches of the adversaries are put to the test. Napoleon puts his faith in strategy and calculation here. Whatever heavy artillery he has managed to drag over the desert he now uses with mathematical precision. The Mameluke leader, Murad, relies on the desperate personal courage of his men, and on his vastly superior cavalry.
There are the infinite number of incalculable elements involved in any battle. Napoleon’s men are exhausted, demoralized, and on the point of open rebellion. After the brutal desert crossing, when Napoleon had first reappeared among them, he had been openly taunted: “Well, General,” a man calls out during inspection, “are you going to lead us to India next?”
Napoleon further alienates the men by turning on the rebel and answering disdainfully: “No, it is not with such men as you that I would conquer India . . .”
India is beside the point, except perhaps as a metaphor for the ends of the earth, the place where Alexander the Great’s men finally mutinied and would go no further, an allusion that would not be lost on Napoleon. The real question is whether Napoleon can conquer and hold Egypt with “such men” who, for all their complaining, and despite their general’s disdain, are truly heroic.
It is a question almost immediately answered, on that day in Rahmaniya when the French get their first sight of the Mamelukes. The entire army would have been annihilated when Murad bey suddenly appeared above the watermelon patches and the Nile were it not for the merest chance.
Looking up and seeing the huge, well-armed Mamelukes on their sleek horses, the Frenchmen despair. But lo and behold, Murad bey, after surveying the scene, retires. The Mameluke army the French imagine is behind him—just on the other side of the hills—is not there. Leaving his main force some miles away, Murad has come with only a scouting party, giving the Frenchmen time to scramble from the river, toss away their watermelons, and prepare to battle.
The next day, early in the morning, Napoleon leads his no-longer-naked men toward the encounter, switching from the defensive to the offensive. He seeks to engage the enemy in this isolated place as opposed to Cairo where, in case of a disaster, they would be able to fall back behind the walls of the great city.
Murad also undergoes a change, switching from the offensive to the defensive. Shortly after the French arrive, he sizes up the situation. After some preliminary fighting—little more than skirmishing—the wily Mameluke again retires, his warriors swiftly retreating on their Arabian mounts.
Made uneasy by unfamiliar French tactics, for the first time unsure of himself, Murad has no intention of fighting a decisive battle here. Let the French torturously make their way toward Cairo. There will be more heat, more unbearable thirst. The villages will be empty and the canals will be dry and surrounded by salt marshes. From tombs and ruins snipers will harass the foreigners . . . and they will arrive in Cairo ready for the slaughter.
Dawn, July 21, 1798. A plain before Cairo.
THROUGH THE HAZE of sand that grows thicker as the sun rises, the French soldiers can see the thousand mosques of Cairo in the far distance, their graceful minarets outlined against the brightening sky.
Closer to the battlefield, but still miles away, are those most ancient monuments, the pyramids, with their guardian: that colossus with its leonine torso and human face whom the Arabs call “Abu Hol,” the Father of Terror; and whom the Greeks call Sphinx, or Strangler, for the death it exacts from those who can not guess the answer to its question; the riddle of our humanity.
Between its gigantic paws is the “plaque” of Thuthmosis IV (1400 BC). As a young prince hunting wild gazelle in the desert, he had fallen asleep here and dreamed that by clearing the creature of centuries of sand (it was more than a thousand years old even then) his reign would be blessed with a glory equal to his grandfather’s, Thuthmosis III, the greatest warrior of Egypt.
Here war is a story as old as the pyramids of which the Arabs say: All mortals are afraid of time, but Time is afraid of the pyramids. When ancient Memphis, before Cairo, was the capital, then, too, great armies clashed on this plain.
Indeed, the scene Napoleon and his thirty-eight thousand Frenchmen have come to Egypt to enact has been played out here so often, that were it not for the modern guns and the European uniforms, the date might have been one, or two, or three, or four millennia before.
The very stars that have begun to fade overhead—the Coma Berenike, the tresses of Queen Berenice—take their name from just such a violent moment. War raged among the Ptolemies, and elephants brought from the heart of Africa trampled down men and clashed with one another. While these great beasts, maddened by the fumes of drugs and prodded on by their handlers (the “heavy artillery” of the day, each one equal to a thousand soldiers), a lovesick Queen, Berenike, cut off her beautiful hair and laid it on the altar of the gods, praying for victory for her husband.
The Linguist and the Emperor Page 15