Read The Linguist and the Emperor Online
Authors: Daniel Meyerson
The Linguist and the Emperor
The
LINGUIST
and
the
EMPEROR
NAPOLEON
and
CHAMPOLLION’S
QUEST
to
DECIPHER
the
ROSETTA STONE
Daniel Meyerson
Contents
Chapter One: Ab Ovo—From the Egg
Chapter Three: The Promised Land
Chapter Five: Lions of the Desert
Chapter Six: To the Strongest!
Chapter Seven:
Deliciae Alexandriae
—The Delights of Alexandria
Chapter Nine: On the Soldier’s Neck
Chapter Ten: Of Linguists and Emperors and Everlasting Fame
Chapter Eleven: The Weight of the World
Dedicated to:
Mollie Snitovsky, fantast, painter, and poet, who taught me that it is part of the probable that the improbable will occur.
And
Nancy Miller, Wilde’s
Critic as Artist—de vrai touche.
For entering so completely (and brilliantly) into the world of this book.
And
the forty-two Egyptian gods of the dead (among whom rages my agent, Noah Lukeman).
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to:
Rosalie Kaufman, whose friendship I value and without whose New York hospitality this book would not have been written.
Mosin Rashidi, connoisseur, for his extraordinary Egyptian hospitality and for patiently answering endless questions.
Dan Smetanka, who looked at those first sketchy pages and believed. For his encouragement and enthusiasm over months which stretched into years.
Mary Gow of Brooklyn Museum’s Wilburforce Egyptian Library: the woman who knows too much.
Sylvia Levy of Here’s a Book Store! for credit, encouragement, and much kindness.
Leah:
Maa’-hrw,
“true of voice.”
Dr. Shoshannah—for friendship.
Ahnkeroot, Connie Skedgell, and Prof. Maura Spiegal—for careful reads and strong responses.
Bubi Scholz, European Master, Middle Weight, 1964, for inspiration.
Gene Mydlowski and Beck Stvan of Ballantine Books for the knockout cover!
Vivian Heller, marvelous fellow writer.
Deirdre Lanning for her endless patience and help.
Prelude
IN HIS HOVEL,
the linguist dreams of the emperor, of the one who commands with a wave of his hand. He dreams of power and the freedom it confers.
On his throne, the emperor dreams of the linguist, of the one who understands. He dreams of knowledge and the meaning it confers.
And who are they, this improbable pair?
Does it matter? They are eternal types who have always existed and who always will.
Call the emperor “Alexander the Great” if you like. Young, handsome, in the first flush of power, he is just grown out of boyhood and already master of Greece. Surrounded by his followers, he seeks out Diogenes. He rides to the hills above Athens, sees the bald old philosopher lying naked on the ground and greets him:
“I am Alexander.”
“I am Diogenes, the dog.”
“The dog?”
“I bark at the greedy and bite stupid louts.”
A murmur goes through the crowd of soldiers and hangers-on, but Alexander continues, unfazed: “Ask what you will of me! Whatever you request is yours.”
“This is what you can do for me,” the old man shouts: ”Get out of my light!”
And Alexander, thus rebuked, turns away and says with awe: “If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes!”
His soldiers are scandalized. His admiration for such figures is something they will never understand. Rough, brave men, they deride the scholars Alexander takes with him everywhere. What great deeds have these parasites performed, what battles have they fought to be so honored? When Alexander conquers Egypt, he sets them the futile task of unraveling its mysteries, inscriptions written in signs half-forgotten even then. And they are with him again in Babylon, these puny-armed men with their bald pates, and in the east when the young hero weeps because there are no more worlds to conquer. It is a grief his scholars will never know, for their realm is limitless, as infinite as thought.
Grudgingly, the warriors protect these “camp followers,” these hangers-on who serve no discernible purpose. But the emperor commands it and it is not for them to complain.
Not then, and not some two thousand years later when another emperor called Napoleon sets out for Egypt with 167 scholars, the finest minds of France, stowed away on his warships. Poets, mathematicians, and architects, they sling their hammocks among crates of dry biscuit and rows of mounted guns.
Though they will accomplish much in Egypt, meticulously sketching and measuring and recording, the scholar who will make the greatest use of all this knowledge is not among them.
He is still a child.
It is early in the story—Year VII by the calendar of the revolutionaries which dates not from the birth of a Savior but from the triumph of freedom and the guillotine. It is the month of “Floreal,” Flowers, the name these stern men have given to May not for sentimental reasons—what are spring and love to them?—but rather to invoke Nature, the goddess of their pitiless cause.
Floreal Year 7: May 1798. Not yet a linguist, Champollion is only a boy who is punished for being moody and disobedient. And the emperor is not yet emperor, but only a certain General Bonaparte on his way to conquer Egypt for the glory of France.
They are both still young but what they will achieve is as palpable to them as a chill running down their spines or the scent of the flowers of that revolutionary spring.
“I felt the earth spin away from me as if I were flying in the sky!” Bonaparte declares at his first taste of battle. In ecstasy, he stands amid the dying and the dead, transfixed by a premonition of what the future holds.
And like Napoleon, Champollion anticipates, intuits his fate. “I will decipher the hieroglyphs!” the eleven-year-old cries at his first sight of the mysterious writing, running his hand over the coffin of a young girl who had died thousands of years before.
For both linguist and emperor, it is the beginning. They can feel the future rushing to them; the glory that will be theirs. But with this glory will be great suffering, great disillusion, and great despair. It is early but they will never again be as happy as they are now, standing at the threshold of the future and peering through the mysterious door.
PART
I
Chapter One
Ab Ovo—
From the Egg
FIGEAC.
1792
.
At the height of that violent phenomenon known as the Great Fear, violent bands roam the French countryside. Taking advantage of the disorder, they steal what they can, destroying whatever comes in their path like a force of nature. They set fire to humble farms as well as to great Chateaux, murdering, raping, choosing their victims from poor and rich alike. In a once-idyllic town in the south of France, the vineyards and fields are set ablaze and its Benedictine monastery is ransacked by a mob that has battered down its great bronze doors. Monks are tortured to make them reveal the hiding place of rumored treasure—while the pillagers ignore the finest prize: the books of the monastery’s great library.
The Abbé, a renowned scholar, has thrown some of the rarest volumes into a sack. One of them is a huge gilded work published during the Renaissance but written much earlier, in the fourth century
AD
: Horapollo’s
Hieroglyphs,
the only ancient work devoted to the mystery of Egyptian writing. The Abbé, a vigorous monk in his sixties, is determined to escape not only with his life, but with some of the treasures from this silent place of study. As the mob breaks into the fortresslike building, the holy man, together with a novice, makes his way through secret tunnels beneath the monastery. He emerges into the night with a plan. It is to the house of Champollion, the bookseller, that the monk flees. Champollion will prize his learning, the Abbé fervently hopes. And yes, Champollion takes the refugee in at the risk of his life and so acquires a tutor for his older son.
There are two boys, twelve years apart. The monk will teach the older son. The other, Jean François, is too young for lessons. But despite this fact—perhaps because of the fact that he is a child—he will be the one most affected by the Abbé. For during the years Jean François grows up, the monk is a powerful presence in the household. Every day, the boy listens to him secretly celebrating mass in a low voice. The shutters are closed and the servants are sent away on a pretext. It is a time when everything associated with the old regime, including its religion, is risky. The mystery of the Catholic ritual, intensified by danger, greatly moves the sensitive boy. These secret masses are some of his most profound memories.
It is from the Abbé that Jean François hears the story that will obsess him, something the old man tells him by chance one day. The two are walking through the damp stone corridors of the house, which are lined with piles and piles of books. The boy, who is five, notices one of the books opened to an engraving. He questions the old man about it.
The Abbé explains that the bearded man with his arms flung out is the king Belshazzar, a wicked ruler whose father had destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. The picture portrays Belshazzar in the middle of a great feast. Blaspheming the God of Israel, he is eating and drinking from the sacred Temple vessels when suddenly a disembodied hand writes mysterious words on the wall. These words fill the king with fear:
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
No one among the king’s sages can decipher the words, the Abbé continues, until finally Daniel, a Hebrew youth carried into exile, is brought before the assembly. With a glance Daniel succeeds in interpreting the words.
“ ‘
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin—
You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting,’ ” the Abbé repeats Daniel’s explanation. But in the nightmares that plague the boy for years afterward, it is not Daniel but he, Jean François, who is called upon to interpret the strange words. He is threatened by the king’s soldiers with suffering and death, but the writing remains a mystery and the boy awakens in a sweat.
This is the striking picture of Jean François which the Abbé records: a child crying out in the dark, jumping from bed and running through the book-crammed corridors of a gloomy house looking for someone, anyone, to console him because he cannot decipher inscrutable words.
AS A CHILD,
he does not play.
In the center of the square in Figeac there is a guillotine. And on the roof of a house near Champollion’s—high up, amid the drying clothes and stacks of firewood—there is another fashioned from planks of wood and a chair: “Vile aristocrats!” the children shout as they push their “victims” forward. “Damned and guilty race! In the name of liberty, die!”
“One more moment, Monsieur the Executioner!” a young girl cries as she struggles to break free, crossing herself and falling to her knees. “
Encore
un
moment!
” she pleads, pretending to be Madame Du Barry on the scaffold. For the mistress of Louis XV has just been executed and her last words have become a cruel joke in a death-obsessed land.
Young Champollion is not recruited for such games. He is too dreamy or else—his other side—he is too wild and hot-tempered to go along with any game made up by others. The children reject the swarthy boy with his large dark eyes and shock of black hair and intense expression. And he turns from them as well, going his own way.
His father is never home. In times such as these, it is not easy for a bookseller to thrive. People prefer a pair of shoes or a scrawny chicken to books. A side of meat is more to the point than the wisdom of the Greeks or heavy volumes from the church fathers.
Learning is suspect. The great chemist Lavoisier is sent to death with the jeer,
The Revolution has no need of you!
Naturalist, historian, philosopher—all die to the same refrain. The mathematician Condorcet, despite his revolutionary fervor, is hunted like a wild animal. Found hiding in the countryside, shunned by his friends, bearded and in rags, he still pathetically clutches his manuscript,
Sketch of a Historic Table of the Progress of the Human Spirit,
a work he will take with him to the scaffold. It is a time not for philosophy, but for action. And so, Champollion père, impoverished bookseller, takes to the roads.
Jean François’ mother, crippled by rheumatism, spends her days at a window overlooking the narrow stone courtyard. Even before the revolution, she had withdrawn from the world. Unable to read or write, as superstitious as a witch, she puts her faith in the Gypsies and wandering sorcerers who have brought about the miracle. For how else but with their help could it have come to pass that she—a sickly, enervated woman of forty-six, she, who had spent her days preparing for death—had given birth to a strapping, healthy son? And it is because of this mystery that, to her, the life of Jean François seems precarious. It hangs by the thread of her amulets and charms. Fearfully, she watches her son grow. When he visits her sick-room, she clutches Jean François to her, weeping and praying over him with an anguish which oppresses the boy.
Set against his mother’s dark fears and passions, his father’s books seem to offer light. But it is a light denied Jean François—for though he is now eight years old, he still cannot read. His education has been completely neglected. The Abbé who had taught his brother has long since fled the country. His brother Jacques, the only one to whom Jean François can turn during this torturous time, has been sent away to help support the family. He has left Figeac for Grenoble, a city five hours distant, to work there as a clerk, sending his meager earnings home.
Jean François is on his own with two examples always before him. To be a man is to read, to live by reason, by the books which fill every corner and passageway. Not to read is to be a woman, to dwell in a feverish world of fears and dreams. His mother, shut in by the four walls of her sick-room, lives a life that is not fully human.
Still, she is not a figure who can be simply dismissed. If she were, there would be no
danger,
Jean François would not have to flee so frantically from her example.
This becomes the riddle of his youth: His mother’s illiteracy is both the source of her degradation and the source of her power. With her spells and her prayers, she is in touch with the mysteries of the universe, or so it seems to the boy. The forces of life and death join in mumbled incantations.
It is as if fate thrusts Jean François toward his mother’s illiteracy, tormenting him and goading him to fight back. And he does fight back: fiercely. He struggles to teach himself to read. He draws the letters of the alphabet as if he were sketching pictures, covering page after page with words which have no meaning for him. And then one day, frustrated by the impenetrability of the writing, he shatters the glass cover of one of his father’s bookcases. And then he shatters another, wreaking destruction until a horrified servant comes running and beats him into stopping.
SOON AFTER THIS,
he catches his first glimpse of Egypt.
A wandering troupe of Cathedral mimes and puppeteers visits Figeac. A tent is pitched at the edge of town and a crier announces in the square: “
The story of Thaïs of Egypt! And of the blessed St. Mark! And of Flowers of the desert! St. Moses the Black! St. Anthony! Children of the wilderness! Martyrs of Egypt! Stories of the Thebaid where our first monks sought God!
”
From time immemorial, such troupes have performed in the great cathedrals of France: passion plays, sacred dramas, scenes from the lives of the saints. But since the revolution, Christianity is out of fashion. There is a Festival of the Supreme Being and pageants honoring the Goddess of Reason, but these medieval legends are politically dangerous. And so the troupe is reduced to traveling about the countryside, finally arriving in the small provincial city of Figeac where the crier fills the air with the names of Egyptian saints and monks long dead and miracle-working hermits; a long list to which the manager makes sure the crier adds, as a “draw”:
And the holy martyr Napoleon!
It is a clever ploy since General Napoleon’s name is on everyone’s lips just now. He has just become the “Savior of Revolution.” Against all odds, he has defeated the armies of the pro-monarchist Austrians in Italy before they had a chance to attack the new republic on French soil. What does it matter that the Napoleon of the play is not a general but a martyr who died in Egypt fifteen hundred years before? It is impossible to mistake the contemporary allusion and there actually is a connection between the two Napoleons: The young Corsican general was named after the saint (or after an uncle who was named after him which the clever manager of the troupe decides is the same thing).
The manager’s instincts are good: The tent is quickly packed with a crowd of the curious, among them Jean François and his brother Jacques, who has returned home for a visit. Garishly painted backdrops are arranged on the torch-lit stage and, with a clash of cymbals, Jean François is transported to a desert valley, all sand and sky.
A voice from behind the flimsy scenery calls out: “Be-hold Paphnutius, a monk famed for his holy life! Behold an angel who dwells on earth . . .”
There is a rustling of chains as a tall, gaunt figure—naked but for hair shirt and irons—crawls onto the stage. In the shadows thrown by the torches, his every gesture is magnified tenfold.
“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.