The Linguist and the Emperor

by Daniel Meyerson

  of the United Kingdom of

  Great Britain and Ireland,

  on the threatened

  INVASION.

  Among the inexpressibly dreadful consequences which are sure to attend the conquest of your Island by the French, there is one of so horrible a nature as to deserve distinct notice. This barbarous, but most artful people, when first they invade a country in the conquest of which they apprehend any difficulty, in order to obtain the confidence of the people, compel their troops to observe the strictest discipline, and often put a soldier to death for stealing the most trifling article. Like spiders they artfully weave a web round their victim, before they begin to prey upon it. But when their success is complete then let loose their troops, with resistless fury, to commit the most horrible excesses, and to pillage, burn, and desolate without mercy and without distinction. But the practice to which I particularly allude will make your blood freeze in your veins . . .

  And so on. The details, a mixture of truth and propaganda, are calculated to arouse fear and indignation. Crowds gather to read the poster, jostling one another beside a man hawking plaster casts of Mademoiselle Legrini’s famous legs (the proceeds also going for the cause!)—“La jambe de Legrini,” the leg of Legrini, described by reviewers as being “. . . so beautiful, of such a symmetry, a moelleux and a play of muscle that the sight of it will enchant any lover of art!”

  The audience agrees, for long after Mademoiselle Legrini has finished, the cries for her to return do not die down . . . until the giant Belzoni steps out onto the stage. He is handsome, with a long auburn beard flowing over his broad chest. And he is enormous. Six foot six with rippling muscles, his huge figure dwarfs the ten large men already in place. They stand center stage on a metal frame to which a harness is attached. The strongman crouches down, slips the harness over his shoulders and then slowly lifts the staggering weight. The audience, after a stunned silence, breaks into an ecstatic roar.

  The applause lasts so long, in fact, that most performers would find the act a difficult one to follow. But the young girl waiting backstage has no qualms—having been dead for more than two thousand years, according to the doctor who has brought her mummy from Egypt and who claims that he can understand the inscriptions on her coffin, those bare-breasted goddesses and the jackal-headed gods.

  The curtain is lowered and the learned doctor steps in front. He begins his introductory patter while the mummy is wheeled into place: “An ancient princess will be unwrapped tonight for the benefit of Science and for your personal edification! A girl who died tragically young, as inscriptions on her coffin indicate.”

  Backstage Belzoni pauses at the sight of the mummified princess. The handsome, laughing strongman crouches down, kneeling by her side. He has no idea that one day he will be surrounded by thousands of mummies, both human and animal—cats and crocodiles and bulls that were, for the Egyptians, divine. Nor does Belzoni dream that he will almost become a mummy himself as he crawls through the underground labyrinths of the City of the Dead, bats in flight extinguishing his torch, leaving him lost in dark winding tunnels, choking on the dust of the disintegrating and once sacred flesh. He will travel throughout the ancient land, be overwhelmed by Ramesses’ fantastic colossi, witness the lonely splendor of Abu Simbel. This colossus showman will explore the burial chambers of the Shining and Beautiful Pyramid, the Pyramid which is Pure of Places, the Pyramid where the Ba-spirit Rises. And his name will be forever linked with Egypt when he discovers her most famous temples and long-forgotten tombs.

  But at this juncture, the corpse of the young-yet-ancient princess is just a rival act. He is a sensation—a Seven Days’ Wonder—and so is she. As the curtain rises, to peals of laughter he gives her a kiss before being shooed from the stage.

  It is a theatrical gesture, obscene and unforgettable, Grand Guignol and nothing more. For Belzoni is a showman through and through who has used his strength to escape the poverty into which he was born. As a boy of twelve he was left to make his way in the world, but now he has begun to use his mind as well. It is a creative mind; the strongman is studious and imaginative. He gives himself no rest after his performances are over: working, inventing, experimenting into the small hours of the night, struggling to discover the necessary something, the undreamed of whatever that will complete his transformation from a boy sleeping in alleys and fighting for scraps thrown in the street to a man of the world who has achieved fortune and fame.

  And when he finally does create an invention that seems promising—a hydraulic irrigation wheel more powerful than anything tried before—it will be this practical feat of engineering that will bring him to Egypt, a land that depends on the waters of the Nile.

  But Belzoni’s hydraulic wheel will ultimately fail and be forgotten. Yet in those desert wastes, among colossal statues and ancient tombs, the strongman, a colossus himself, will put his enormous energy and stamina to good use. He will return to Europe with his undreamed-of wonders: sixty-three-foot-tall statues of pharaohs and soaring obelisks and alabaster sarcophagi. Covered with inscriptions, these monuments will ultimately be essential to Champollion’s work.

  For the time being, though, Belzoni is as indifferent to Egypt as the princess he has just kissed is to him: “She did not shudder at my embrace!” he jokes to a writer for the broadsheets, a gossip from the Gentleman’s Review who dawdles backstage, knowing the strongman is always good for a quote. The two men stand together, talking and laughing in the wings, watching as the princess’ body is exposed layer by layer. Exotic flutes trill in the background, accompanying oohs and aahs as scraps of parchment, ancient spells, and strange amulets are found hidden in the bandages. And the phony doctor is also stripped naked onstage: stripped of his learned pretensions. For the coffin inscriptions, hieroglyphs he claims to have read, he cannot have understood. The mummy has—or once had—a male member.

  This fact is not immediately known. By an ancient saving grace (saving for the doctor), this masculine member was removed and embalmed separately in imitation of Osiris, god of the dead, who is murdered and castrated by his brother—and revived and made whole by the magic of his sister-wife Isis. For in the primal world of the Egyptian gods nothing is obscene, the facts of the body are interwoven with the soul in tales childlike both in their violence and their innocence.

  A real doctor, a serious young man named Thomas Young who has been granted his degree not by theatrical courtesy but by Emmanuel College, Cambridge, comes backstage to examine the mummy. An aristocrat and an intellectual with wide-ranging interests, Young will be drawn to the riddle of the hieroglyphs not, like Champollion, for metaphysical reasons but because of the logical puzzle it presents. Although a good classical scholar, he will never match the vast linguistic resources Champollion acquires. He will never know Coptic or Persian or Chaldean or immerse himself in Egyptian history and geography so that thousands of ancient place-names are on the tip of his tongue. This limitation will determine Young’s mathematical approach when he takes up the problem in the course of time.

  At the present, however, Young determines the “princess’” sex right away. And more besides: He finds among the linen wrappings fragments of a poem written in Greek on gazelle skin, a scrap of leather used like old newspaper to wrap fish. Perhaps this had been thrust between the toes to keep them apart or perhaps it had been tucked in as padding for this long-dead man’s heels.

  The Greek on the scrap dates the mummy as being late in Egyptian history, sometime after Alexander conquers Egypt in 330 BC when both the Greek and Egyptian languages are in use. And thus the serious young scholar, unable to read the hieroglyphs on the coffin, can read the ancient dialogue written on the hide of a gazelle.

  The poem describes a scene between a girl and her would-be lover. With many lines crumbled into dust, it is like a conversation overheard from the past, words and half phrases carried on the winds of time—

  . . . simply restrain yourself . . .

  or if you can’t, there,
in our house, is a girl

  . . .

  why then grieve her?

  This was her plea. So I formally answered:

  “There are many sweet gifts for young men from the goddess,

  Pleasures that stop at the brink

  One will suffice.

  If the god wills,

  . . . pour my libation

  Out at your grassy gateway . . .

  Do not deny me the threshold, beloved . . .

  I’ll not break in . . .

  As for Neoboule, she is for others.

  Let who will have her

  She is full blown and her grace is gone.

  . . .

  . . .

  I prefer you.”

  This said, I laid the girl down among the flowers in my

  soft cloak.

  I embraced her gently.

  I touched her flesh with my hands.

  She remained still but she trembled like a fawn as I

  released the white force of my passion.

  A fitting poem for Young to find curled beneath the “princess’” leg: a warning at the beginning of his career. For like the demivierge, the half-virgin who both accepts and refuses her importunate lover, Egypt will never give herself completely to Champollion or to Young, to Bonaparte and his scholars, or to those who come after. She will forever remain a mystery, half-revealed and half-hidden beneath her eternally shifting sand.

  THE MOON SHINES down on a fleet sailing across the Mediterranean. The deck of the flagship is brightly lit with torches burning around a raised platform. A play is in progress, not a bawdy comedy like the ones which have pleased the soldiers and sailors on other nights, but a dramatic adaptation of Goethe’s novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

  It is a strange choice for the night’s entertainment, but the men are now used to their general’s unpredictable ways. At the same time he is both the perfect soldier and completely unsoldierly. Napoleon has filled valuable space, they whisper, storage room another general would use for ammunition and provisions, with box after box of scientific instruments; with printing presses, presses set up with Arabic and Greek as well as Roman type; and with a huge library of books that he has had taken on board besides. Reference and technical and historical works are stacked in crates beside the pawing and nervous horses, of which there are not enough—a fact that will force most of the light cavalry, when they reach Egypt, to march on foot.

  But then if there are not enough horses, there are plenty of scholars: 167 of them, the general’s “favorite mistress” as the men call them. Night after night, Bonaparte sits on deck debating, arguing, theorizing with them as the ships make their way through dangerous waters. The fleet is in a race with the stronger British Navy, England’s most powerful weapon in its life-and-death struggle against revolutionary France.

  And so, though all eyes are on the actors, everyone is aware that at any moment the British might suddenly materialize. In the unequal battle that would follow, General Bonaparte, his scholars, his books, printing presses, and scientific instruments would all be sent to the bottom of the sea: thirty-eight thousand men, including the soldier playing the tragic Werther, a burly dragoon (totally miscast!) who throws out his arms as he declaims: “Treat my heart as a sick child! Grant it whatever it requests!”

  But the British do not interrupt the performance. Luck has been with Napoleon since the night the expedition left France when a terrific storm dispersed the British warships threatening Toulon. “An act of God!” the atheistic revolutionaries joke. As the British struggle to regroup, Napoleon’s ships slip past them and out to the open sea. A fleet is sent from England to find the French fleet—but just where to look in the Mediterranean is the question: Sicily? Egypt? the Greek Isles?

  Napoleon’s saving grace is the secrecy in which he has cloaked the expedition. The secretary of the navy himself did not know its destination until hours before the departure. In fact, at first a completely different scheme had been planned: All along France’s coast preparations had been made for an invasion of Britain, a direct assault across the Channel which was to have been launched that spring. Though this plan is abandoned, the preparations are kept up as a smokescreen.

  Such an invasion would have been in line with Napoleon’s boldness. There is nothing the young general shrinks from: He will cross the Alps with an army on sleds and pack donkeys, he will attack when he is outnumbered and outflanked, he will gamble and win time and again when the odds are against him. However, at least at this stage in his career, his boldness is tempered by a keen appreciation of military realities.

  An invasion across the Channel would fail. “The way to strike at England is through Egypt,” he lectures the Directors of France (lawyers and an ex-Abbé with little military experience), unfolding a global strategy in which British trade routes are cut off, the British hold on India is destroyed, Britain is isolated, then defeated.

  “And the nation that defeats Britain could rule the world!” he continues with a wildness that makes the Directors wonder if he is mad: “After Egypt, I shall march upon Damascus and Aleppo, increasing my army as I go . . . for I shall announce to the people the overthrow of the tyrannous pashas. Then with overwhelming forces, I shall take Constantinople [Istanbul], making an end of Turkey, and found a new and great empire. This will bring me immortal fame. Perhaps I shall then make my way home through Adrianople or Vienna, after annihilating the House of Hapsburg.”

  The five sober Directors are right to wonder. There is, of course, more than a little madness, grandiosity, and megalomania in Napoleon’s plan: “I am the instrument of Providence. She will use me as long as I accomplish her designs, then she will break me!” He rants on, talking of cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Suez in the place where the ancient one of the pharaohs had been, describing a hundred fantastic projects from curing Egypt’s plague-ridden people to improving its beer!—all the while he urges the hesitating lawyers not to delay: “You do what you have to do and do it quickly. Be ruthless about it!”

  They know that this inspired soldier means what he says, for hadn’t he saved the Directory in its early days by turning cannon on the demonstrating crowds, leaving a broad swathe of men and women lying dead in the streets? “A whiff of grapeshot,” he muses afterward, “would have saved the King . . .”

  But if Napoleon is mad and in his madness capable of anything, there is an eminently sane man listening to him along with the Directors. Foreign Minister Talleyrand agrees with the general, at least as far as Egypt is concerned. As for the rest—the world—“There is time,” Talleyrand shrugs in his discreet and diplomatic way.

  Talleyrand is an uncompromising realist and will never really understand Napoleon’s worldview. He is a wily aristocrat who flees the revolution at just the right time and returns at the correct moment as well. A handsome, cultured man of forty, with catlike agility and elegant manners, he always lands on his feet.

  For him, glory is a word for schoolboys. The conquest of Egypt is a practical step, an expedient démarche and nothing more. But Napoleon, like Alexander the Great, goes to Egypt to find out if he is a god. The general wants to be an immortal, to have immortal fame. And the painters, sculptors, poets, playwrights he commissions at every turn, the boatsful of scholars he takes with him are all part of this quest.

  “The true conquests, those that will never be forgot-ten are those that are wrested from ignorance!” Napo-leon declares, a statement crucial to understanding the philosopher-soldier that he is. With scholars in tow, he claims Egypt in the name of knowledge. It is his plan to study everything about this forgotten land, its flora and fauna, its birds, its fish, and even its insects, to understand its diseases, to chart its deserts and to sketch its crumbling antiquities in order to enlarge mankind’s knowledge of itself.

  “In Egypt, at the crossroads of Asia, Europe, and Africa, knowledge flourished at the dawn of time,” one of the savants writes later on, describing the feeling of his colleagues for the coun
try. “Here Homer, Lycurgus, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato came to learn the sciences, religion, and the laws.”

  As much as the present, it is this past of Egypt that Napoleon wants for his own. From the moment he reaches her shores, he will struggle like a man possessed to obtain it. If a languor descends on his soldiers who suffer from the unbearable heat, he urges them on, sets them a thousand tasks to perform when they are not fighting, hitches them to the guns during forced marches when their animals drop in exhaustion. Napoleon himself holds men in his arms in the pesthouse who are dying of plague; the moment becomes a famous painting. Napoleon is looking up, he is always looking up in the paintings as if communing with the gods, indifferent to danger, in love with fate.

  “The sciences are the glory of the human mind, the arts bequeath noble deeds to our offspring,” proclaims this creator of academies on warships, this greatest lawgiver since Justinian, and this god who will practice any bloodshed or brutality he pleases. Are not gods above the law? Thousands of prisoners will be slaughtered during the eastern campaign since he does not have enough food to feed them. At the suggestion of freeing them, he goes into a rage. “Free them?” He shakes his fist at an appalled officer who opposes him. “If that’s the way you feel, go, hide away in a monastery and never come out!”

  Bloodstained, godlike, cruel, artistic, philosophic, and immoral, he proclaims, “The French people would rather win a great mathematician, painter, or other man of note than win the wealthiest of provinces.” He makes this boast not knowing that Fate is listening and will take him at his word. For if he will have an intellectual triumph in Egypt—page after page of the twenty-three volume Description of Egypt is edited in his own hand—it will come with a crushing military defeat: the first in his career.

  This is still in the future. The present finds him haranguing the stolid lawyers (and one ex-Abbé!) of the Directory, hurling phrases at them in his passionate and irresistible way—though they try to resist. They listen and they doubt.