The Linguist and the Emperor

by Daniel Meyerson

  The two brothers make a strange picture: sitting on the banks of the fetid canal that runs by the local tannery, walking through the winding streets of Figeac or in the meadows beyond the town, both lost in a dream.

  On the road to sacred Olympia, there is a rocky mountain with high cliffs. It is a law that any woman discovered at the Olympic games will be thrown from this mountain. Kallipateira, though, the daughter of a famous boxer whose father and husband were both dead, disguised herself as a trainer and brought her son Pisirodos to Olympia to compete in the games. He won, and forgetting herself, his mother joyously leapt over the barrier, revealing herself to be a woman. But the authorities forgave her, passing a law that trainers, like athletes, must be naked.

  Jean François becomes alive to language, discovering how a single word can throw a veil over reality—

  Alcibiades, as a desperate measure to avoid being thrown in the games, bit his opponent’s hand.

  He released his grip, shouting: “You bite like a dog, Alcibiades!”

  “No!” Alcibiades answered, “like a lion.”

  Other texts follow the Olympic ones—not only in Greek, but in Hebrew and Latin as well: funeral dirges and raucous jokes, curses, love songs, and beautiful prayers. Sometimes the passages are too hard for Jean François. Other ideas he understands despite his youth.

  These are the great events in his life. Each passage is as much of a turning point for Jean François as Napoleon’s early battles were revelations for him. Young Champollion’s events are inward, not part of the great clamor and noise of the world. They take the boy away from the world.

  He starts to write, copying many sayings in his notebooks. The pages are covered with laborious print, the round letters of a boy whose immature hand contrasts strangely with the meaning of the wide-ranging passages . . .

  Watching a storm destroy his fleet, the Persian king Xerxes ordered that his soldiers whip the ocean.

  It is an astonishing scene: the raging king at the edge of the dark water, the terrified soldiers whipping the high waves, the drowned sailors and shattered ships washing ashore. Jean François marvels at the strangeness of the world, its madness-in-meaning and meaning-in-madness! How far away is Xerxes and his rage from the narrow streets of Figeac; distant not only in time and place and feeling but in sound. Jean François first hears the story in Greek, beautiful inflections written in mysterious letters which only his brother can understand, or so it seems to him.

  But other passages capture Jean François’ imagination as well, moments as ephemeral as a spider’s web—

  The sound of Roman laughter—

  Who wants to make some ready money?

  I’d be happy to.

  Good, all you have to do is be crucified in my place!

  A sudden realization, uttered in the midst of suffering—

  We who see only one part of things, for us evil is evil. But to God who understands all, evil is good.

  An insult hurled at a man who has long since returned to dust—

  Your dirty legs are like a slave’s.

  Ancient epitaphs and wills and funeral orations, which, unlike their solemn modern counterparts, laugh at human frailty and greed—

  All beneficiaries of my will inherit under this proviso: that they cut my body in pieces and eat it with the townspeople watching.

  And all kinds of stories, portraits of lives that become more real for Jean François than the one he is living.

  The desperate courage of a slave boy who dares to plead before the ruler of the world:

  The Emperor Augustus was dining with Vedius Pollio. One of the slave boys broke a crystal dish and Vedius ordered him to be thrown to the great lampreys in his fish pond. The boy tore himself away and fell at the Emperor’s feet to ask him this only—that he should die some other way and not be fed to the fish. The indignant Emperor ordered the slave to be freed, that all Vedius’ crystal dishes be smashed, and that the fish pond be filled up . . .

  And miraculous stories—Zeus descending in a shower of gold and Venus rising from the sea. Hebrew miracles as well, stories told in a language as different from Greek, and reflecting a consciousness as far from the Olympian spirit as it is possible to be; tales of lepers raised from their dung heap to silken tents and goblets of gold—

  Four lepers sat outside the besieged city and said to one another: “Why should we wait here until we die? If we say: Let us enter the city, the famine is in the city, and we will die there. If we remain here, we will also die. Come and let us go over to the Aramean camp. If they spare our lives, we will live. And if they kill us, we will simply die.” But when they came to the Aramean camp, behold not a man was there . . . in great confusion and fear which the Lord had put in their breasts, the Arameans had fled at the sound of a driven leaf. They entered a tent, ate and drank, and took from there silver, gold, and clothing, and went and hid them. Then they returned and entered another tent, took from there also and went and hid them . . . Then they said: “We are not doing right. This day is a day of good tidings. Come, let us go and tell the king’s household . . .”

  And along with such stories as these, Jacques, who teaches his brother with opposing texts, also gives Jean François Roman “miracles” that mock all virtue, all belief:

  . . . the governor of Ephesus sentenced a thief to be crucified . . . Night came and a soldier remained to prevent his relatives from taking down the body. Now as the soldier stood guard, he noticed a light shining in the caves nearby. Curious, he made his way there, stopping short at the sight of a beautiful woman so faithful, so pure that she had followed her husband’s corpse to its tomb, determined to die by his side.

  The soldier began to talk and the woman listened . . . and soon the doors of the tomb were closed upon them while he enjoyed her beauty . . . But the next morning when he emerged, he beheld a terrible sight: The cross was empty—someone had taken down the thief’s body in the night and buried it. Now he himself had the death penalty before him and, trembling, he ran to tell the woman. “The gods forbid,” she cried out. “I would rather hang my dead husband on the cross than lose you . . .” Thus that day the townspeople were left to wonder at a miracle: how a dead man had climbed up onto the cross . . .

  And the boy takes in everything, assimilates everything, making it his own; the gossip of the ancient world—

  To the eunuch Bagoas, begging him to give him access to the fair one committed to his charge: “Thou, Bagoas, who art entrusted with the task of guarding thy mistress—I have but a couple of words to say to you, but they are weighty ones. Yesterday I saw a lady walking in the portico beneath the temple of Apollo . . .

  Its precepts—

  Learn the pleasure of despising pleasure.

  A man keeps and feeds a lion. The lion owns a man.

  If, as they say, I am only an ignorant man trying to be a philosopher, then that may be what a philosopher is.

  Its virtue and its vice—its grandeur forms him.

  Walk with swift feet, mortal, as you fulfill your uncertain destiny.

  Intellectually, Jean François has begun to fall in love.

  Bring water, bring wine, slave! Bring us crowns of flowers; bring them so I may box with Eros.

  The simplest question by Jean François is answered with an outpouring of ardor from Jacques for whom the lessons are a relief and a distraction. For a long time now Jacques has been leading a severe existence. Every sou he has earned has gone to support his parents in Figeac; and every moment he can snatch from his drudgery has been used for his studies.

  With an iron discipline, he has taught himself Hebrew and Latin and Greek, studying an enormous range of ancient works; poring over them until finally his knowledge surpasses those with years of formal training.

  Perhaps it is because his struggle has been so solitary, his achievement so hidden, that Jacques takes his rejection so much to heart. For without telling any one, he had applied to join the scholars General Bonaparte is recruiting for an extraor
dinary expedition. Going where? Far from France. Lasting how long? Six months or six years. Everything about it is shrouded in mystery, except the fact that Napoleon has gathered the best minds in his service.

  There have been months of preparation, months of hope for Jacques, but now word has spread throughout the land: Bonaparte has suddenly slipped away in the middle of the night with his chosen scholars and his soldiers. Without a word of warning, he leaves Jacques Champollion, self-taught classicist and shipping clerk, at home.

  And so Jacques throws himself into teaching his brother. He sets him riddles—

  Why is the Chorus made up of old men in the first part of the Oresteia, why of slave women in the second, why of the Furies in the third? What is the secret?

  He explains the subtle nature of language to him, how the dry rules of grammar can create a deep puzzle, choosing lines from the tragedies that turn in on themselves—

  The living are killing the dead.

  The dead are killing the living.

  —in Greek a single phrase which expresses both meanings at once, the words themselves intertwining, as inseparable as the crimes of the past and present to which they refer.

  More gifted than his hard-working brother, Jean François is able to remember long phrases and grasp difficult grammatical concepts after hearing them just once, astonishing Jacques with his facility. What his older brother has taken endless pains to learn, Jean François picks up with ease. He is a prodigy, Jacques quickly sees. When the older brother returns to Grenoble, he makes further sacrifices and finds the money for Jean François to be enrolled in school.

  But if Jean François is an enfant prodigue, he is a temperamental one. He hates the discipline of his new school. He gets into fights with the other boys there every day. He becomes lazy and refuses to study anything. His head is filled with scenes from antiquity. Called upon to divide ten by two, to know the population of Figeac, to jump over a low hurdle, to spell his own name, he cannot.

  Letters go back and forth between Grenoble and Figeac, between Jacques and Jean François, who appeals to his brother to let him live with him in Grenoble.

  His brother answers, “If you want to come and live with me, you must study. An ignorant person can achieve nothing.”

  The boy says he cannot study what does not interest him: It has no meaning for him. What he does care about, he devours, obsessed. He begins to see that the world was old even in the first centuries, with exhausted oracles and gods who have ceased to speak.

  He becomes preoccupied with time, with first beginnings, an endlessly receding horizon. And before that? And before that? he asks his brother like a child—relentlessly—but also like a philosopher. And with these insistent questions, he begins to stumble upon his fate, the life’s work that will one day be his.

  And before Christ?

  The gods of Olympus, serene in beauty and power.

  And before them?

  Brutal monsters, the Titans—giants who howl with fear and rage as they devour their young.

  And before that?

  The earth and sky which for the Greeks always existed—but which the Hebrew God created from nothingness, from a single word, Yehee!, Let there be!, uttered in the darkness of endless night.

  But still there is something before that, before the Greeks and Hebrews, something prior, preceding and half-forgotten like a dream or an hallucination: There is Egypt. Working his way back through the many moments in Egyptian time, first Arab, then Christian, Roman, Greek, Persian Egypt, Jean François arrives at the Egypt of the Pharaohs, dynasty after dynasty of rulers whose glory and splendor dazzled the world for millennia (the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms) before beginning to wane one thousand years before Christ. For when Athens was just a patch of rock-strewn ground and Jerusalem a crude Jebusite fortress; when Rome was a forest haunted by wolves, great pyramids and temples had already risen on the banks of the Nile.

  The monuments, perfect in form and massive in size, are a measure of Egypt’s power. And the inscriptions with which they are covered are a measure of her wisdom: the writing which the Greeks call hieroglyphs, holy carvings, and which the Egyptians call “the words of the gods.” Fantastic pictures of walking jars and beasts with human bodies, a jumble of drawings: humpbacked vultures, squatting children, flowers and fruits, stars and palm trees and bald-headed priests, women giving birth, and male members spilling seed or urinating.

  But what can they mean, these “words of the gods”? Their significance has been forgotten in the long course of time. “Speeches from the grave,” the hieroglyphs will be called even in Roman times when there are still a few old priests who understand them. “The language of the dead,” the Emperor Hadrian shrugs in the first century AD. But between “dying” and “dead” two centuries still remain and it is not until AD 394 that hieroglyphic writing, in use for more than three thousand years, is inscribed on a temple wall for the last time. And then silence descends: For fifteen hundred years the strange symbols stand as a puzzle and a challenge to all who see them. The cumulative experience and wisdom of a great civilization, they are a legacy—but only for the scholar wise enough to read them.

  The young Jean François takes in the challenge, not yet seeing its connection to himself. This is the first moment of a great passion: The lover sees his beloved for the first time, but he does not yet understand his agitation. He sees the beloved and stands still in awe. There is no movement toward her, no declaration, no vow—no, the determined cry I will decipher the hieroglyphs! will come later. Jean François will not wait long, a few years, not more. When he is eleven he will take that step, too. For everything in his life takes place early, quickly, as if he knows that he has much to do in a short time. A bow that is tightly strung must be unstrung by midday will be one of his favorite quotations—from a pharaoh who also knew that he would not have many years to complete his desired tasks.

  For the time being, though, it is enough that Jean François sees Egypt—and that he hears Egypt’s mysterious silence of fifteen hundred years. Aware of the challenge, he turns to other projects, work for which his immature skills are more suitable. His brother’s letters encourage him, exhort him not to be idle. He compiles a list of ancient peoples and then, still dwelling on origins, he compiles another list of famous dogs going back to the beginning of time. There is the dog of Odysseus and the dogs who devour the body of Jezebel and the “cynotherapists,” the dogs of the healing temples, the Asklepieions, who gently walk or lay among the afflicted . . .

  Thusor of Hermione, a blind boy, had his eyes licked by one of the Temple dogs and departed cured . . .

  Thus, for Jean François the next years will be spent in study. In due course, his brother—finally!—will let him come to live with him in Grenoble although he never fulfills his brother’s requirements of “. . . first learning the simple, the necessary facts and practical skills—not the least of which is to write legibly!”

  From the narrow winding streets of Figeac, Jean Fran-çois will be transported to a city two hundred miles away in which the snow-capped mountains can be seen on all sides. He will never see his mother again. She will die while he is learning Hebrew and Arabic and Chaldean, as well as Latin and Greek. For two years his brother will tutor him and then the next stage in his education will begin: the lycée.

  Two contrary elements will be present from this time on. Two sign posts as contrary as east and west mark his way: the inevitable and the improbable.

  For what could be more improbable than the fate awaiting him? What could be more far-fetched—who would have guessed it?—that a young boy living in a small French town would conceive a passion such as the one which consumes Jean François? Who could have known that the strange carvings covering the tombs and temples of Egypt—mere chicken scratchings to a philistine mind!—would make everything else pale in the life of Jean François?

  But if it is a strange, a fantastic passion, it is also, like all great passions, an inevitable one. To understan
d this inevitability, though, to see how it came about, one must ignore external circumstances. The logic of Jean François’ development is an inner one. To understand, to be in sympathy with him, one must ask along with this young French boy—and with the same naïve wonder—And before that? And before that? And even before that? until one is standing in blinding light before a silent Egyptian tomb.

  Chapter Three

  The Promised Land

  WHILE CHAMPOLLION SITS at his lessons, another boy, a British “boy,” appears on a London stage—eighteen-year-old Mademoiselle Legrini, the sensation of the day. Hair cropped short, she wears a schoolboy’s cap and tight breeches, and she saunters across the stage with a sexy swagger, singing a bawdy song while showing off her famous legs. Her fans go wild. Among them is Napoleon’s chief opponent in Europe, the pleasure-loving, corpulent Prince Regent. He rules England during the times when his father is mad. And though no warrior, he is one of the best dancers in the land.

  On her way back to her dressing room, Legrini passes an Italian compatriot. She and the strongman Belzoni are both main attractions of the day. Their acts, her singing and his feats of strength, are part of a gala performance occasioned by the war with France which any day might be fought on English soil. Or, as a patriotic poster in front of the theater proclaims:

  This day was published,

  An

  Address to the People