Napoleon returns alone, a fact unremarked upon at the time. He had slipped out of Egypt secretly, at night, leaving the pitiable remnant of his army to await the final defeat by themselves.
Even General Kléber, the next in command, is informed of his departure after the fact. A letter from Napoleon is given to him beginning (in true princely style) “By the time you receive this, I will have left Egypt” and going on to instruct Kléber to “hold out for as long as possible.”
And Kléber, scatologically cursing the day he ever set eyes on Napoleon, does hold out. For almost a year, he attempts to salvage what he can. Finally, he dies on a Cairo street, cut down by a religious fanatic who leaps out from amid a crowd of beggars and raises the cry which has echoed in Egypt from the moment the French arrive: “Death to the infidel dogs!” Josephine will name a pale, hundred-petaled rose in poor Kléber’s honor.
Command is left to a lovestruck, struggling general called Menou. While the demoralized army Napoleon had abandoned, decimated by disease, disintegrates before Menou’s eyes, and while Napoleon, in Paris, is fêted and applauded, the middle-aged Menou, swathed in white robes, publicly converts to Islam in the vast courtyard of the Ibn Tulun Mosque, where the French conquerors had stabled their horses when they first arrived.
“There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet!” the general declares in the presence of his broken, sorrowful officers, and before those of the savants who choose to attend. Perhaps this is a genuine profession of faith. Or perhaps it is a desperate political gesture, a last, futile attempt to gain popular support. Or perhaps it is neither of these but a case of violent, romantic passion overtaking a middle-aged man. Menou had fallen head-over-heels in love with a virtuous sixteen-year-old beauty who would not marry a Christian. In any case, this conversion does not save the situation: The French are forced to surrender.
The surrender is a long, drawn-out task, entailing much emotional back-and-forth and much senseless delay. By the time the surviving soldiers straggle back to France, by the time the appalling stories of what happened in Egypt become public knowledge, it no longer matters. Napoleon has, by then, seized power and, at the head of a new army, has gone on to achieve one victory after another.
With dazzling speed, Napoleon regains his Italian conquests, lost by the incompetent Directors while he was in Egypt, and achieves a decisive victory at Marengo that will lead the Austrians, the Prussians, and the Russians to sue for peace. The first coalition against France is vanquished.
Peace. Finally, there is a brief interval, a breathing space that lasts long enough for Napoleon to declare himself emperor before returning to his art. For he is an artist by nature, a temperamental, moody, passionate artist whose medium is war.
He is intractable. He is stubborn and provocative. Soon a second coalition against France must be defeated. But now it is as emperor that Napoleon leads the French armies to triumph—through Italy, Belgium, the German Kingdoms, the Austrian Empire, and finally the battle of Austerlitz, his masterpiece.
It is fought under a clear winter sky which becomes a catchphrase: the cold sun of Austerlitz. Indeed it can be taken as a metaphor for the stage in his career at which Napoleon has arrived. For unlike the Egyptian campaign—all furious heat, all willfulness and passion—by the time Napoleon fights at Austerlitz, he has achieved a balance between instinct and reason, boldness and prudence, passion and dispassion. He tempts the tsar to pursue the supposedly “retreating” French troops, drawing him into an untena-ble position. Then he surrounds the combined Russian-Prussian-Austrian force and cuts it to bits.
It is a brilliant piece of strategy conceived the night before when, sleepless and brooding, Napoleon makes the rounds of his troops, stalking back and forth on next-day’s battlefield, giving his imagination, his intellect, his instincts free play.
Half-abstracted, distant, he stops every so often to scrutinize some insignificant detail: the slope of a small hillock, the buttons on a soldier’s jacket. He mutters to himself or stares into the distance. Then he jokes with his soldiers—coarse jokes, talking obscenely of the “impatiently waiting” women of the enemy. He becomes eloquent about glory, practicing the genius he had for “getting others to die for him.” Finally, he falls silent. Looking over the dark field, he comes up with the inspired plan which brings Russia to its knees a second time, along with Prussia and the haughty Austrian Empire. The second coalition against France is vanquished.
Thus Napoleon dazzles the world. On a raft in the middle of the Nieman River, at a point equidistant from both army camps, Tsar Alexander publicly embraces the “usurper, the Corsican upstart,” calling him “brother.” The young and beautiful queen of Prussia—décolleté and shameless—outrageously flirts with him, trying to win favors for her defeated land. Princes and kings hang anxiously on his every word.
He has fulfilled his boast: the challenge he threw to the world at his coronation. At the height of the ceremony, Napoleon seizes the crown from the pope’s hands and, in an act of self-creation, places it on his own head.
The moment is captured by the great artist of the revolution, Jacques-Louis David—a man who had been so devoted to Robespierre that he had vowed to “drink hemlock with him” rather than let him die alone. Still alive and sketching furiously, David stands in a recess of Notre Dame. Now it is with Napoleon that he vows to “drink hemlock” if the need should arise.
David quickly produces a bold drawing, a work of genius. In its few strong lines, all that is inessential falls away. It captures Napoleon’s inhuman strength of will. One can almost hear the emperor as he holds the crown over his head and proclaims, “God and my sword!”—a soldier’s, a knight’s credo that interrupts the chanted prayers with a trace of menace.
Afterward, David repeats this sketch a second time while preparing for his epic painting, Le Sacre. In the end, though, David is forced to paint a softer, sentimental moment not to offend Catholic France: Napoleon crowns the kneeling Josephine, her head bowed, her hands clasped in prayer.
But before this compromise is made, David draws another sketch of the self-coronation. In this version, the sword is strapped to a naked torso, for Napoleon is nude. There is no crown, just the naked gesture of reaching upward. There are no royal robes, just the muscular soldier’s body that has endured years of hard campaigns. It is this nude sketch which sums up the truth of what Napoleon has achieved. With only his own will on which to rely, out of nothing he has raised himself above popes and kings.
BUT IF THE world is dazzled by Napoleon, a certain unhappy, ridiculous, sublime—and vulnerable, very vulnerable—eleven-year-old schoolboy in Grenoble is not. Just the opposite: Jean François hates the military spirit sweeping France. He suffers from it. It oppresses him and makes him withdraw into himself, for it permeates every aspect of what he calls his “prison,” the lycée with its endless army-style parades and its Napoleon-worship.
Everyone in the lycée must conform—that is axiomatic in military life. Obedience and inflexible discipline dictate every detail, from how many jacket buttons must be done up and how many left undone, to the 526 books which make up Napoleon’s fiat on the curriculum: these and no others! It is a restraint terrible to a mind used to ranging where it likes. During Jean François’ first weeks he is discovered criminally hiding away a 527th—and a 528th—and a 529th. When the mattresses are restuffed with fresh straw, Persian and Arabic books come tumbling out, Latin poems, a list of Egyptian kings compiled by Manetho in Greek.
Word spreads like wildfire. The incident gives rise to laughter. The new boy is punished, not for hiding away the kind of books usually hidden in the straw—one of the very popular, scurrilous, and illustrated accounts of Marie Antoinette’s love life, for example; or a scandalous, lurid novel such as Diderot’s The Nun, the illicit writing of the day. No, Jean François is made to stand at attention all afternoon for an Arabic grammar and a Persian dictionary and a list of old kings!
For his difference, Jean Fran
çois will have to endure a ridicule that he never forgets. And though he will later come up against mockery often enough, these early, childish griefs stay with him forever. Years later though occupied with his great work, he will sometimes recall them in letters. He recounts them in detail to his nephew, who leaves them out of his worshipful memoir. For though the schoolboy Jean François has amassed a great deal of precocious learning, still he is less mature than other children of his age and their laughter wounds an innocent nature formed by his solitary upbringing.
But, though his classmates laugh, the authorities take a more serious view. In the masters’ view, this hiding of respectable books reflects a rebelliousness, a dangerous independence—not merely a schoolboy’s forgivable prurience. By Napoleon’s orders, students are instructed under the most rigid constraints. For example, take the question Champollion is asked: What is the best form of government?
A universal state like the one Napoleon is creating. Everyone knows this answer. It is repeated often enough by every student—every student, that is, except for the brilliant yet stupid new scholarship boy. Jean François alone refuses to praise Napoleon when called upon in class. Even worse, he gives voice to his own opinions, quoting the classical authors on the tip of his tongue.
Champollion!
A long pause always follows after he is called upon, a silence that lasts forever, though he is self-assured intellectually. It is torture for him to speak in public. It is painful to fully emerge from his intense inner life. His mind, his consciousness is filled with sounds: First and foremost that is how he experiences the languages he studies. A torrent of sounds, soft or harsh, long or short, heavy or light, coming from the throat or the lips, rolled on the palate, or hissed from behind the teeth, combining and recombining like music. “If Arabic is the most beautiful of languages, then Persian is the sweetest, the Italian of the Orient.” Each language has a logic and a mystery all its own.
Champollion!
He stands awkwardly in his cracked shoes and the ill-fitting, secondhand uniform his brother bought him, facing the world: his twenty or so classmates.
What is the best form of government?
“The best form of government . . .” he begins, then pauses again. It is unbearable, excruciating. Taking his courage in his hands, he throws himself over the hurdle of his reticence, declaring as a shock goes through the room that he admires republics.
Republics? A few years before it would have been the correct answer, there would have been no other. As Talleyrand cynically remarks: “Treason is a matter of dates.” Now with Napoleon having assumed absolute power, such a response could cost Jean François his scholarship.
Not giving this a thought, though, Champollion goes on to explain why he admires republics—especially the ancient Roman one. He recites Latin epigrams on freedom and lines from Greek poems. His answer is half absurd with its abstruse references—and half sublime. Finally the astonished teacher recollects himself and interrupts with another question: “And what about the glory Napoleon has brought France?”
Again Jean François is ridiculous and sublime. Pale, struggling for breath—on the verge of fainting as is typical of him when he becomes excited—he quotes another classical author: “I love my country, but I love the truth more . . .”
The reply silences the teacher, and earns Jean François two zeros amid shouts of laughter, one for history and one for impudent behavior.
“There are certain incidents which affect the entire course of a student’s career in an academic institution,” Jacques tells his brother in a reproachful letter. “I have used all my savings and even so, I can barely pay half the costs of keeping you in the lycée. Without a scholarship, where would you be? I don’t mention the fact that your opinions will be attributed to me. And I don’t remind you that by your behavior . . .” But of course he is reminding him of what is at stake and he is mentioning every fact, every argument he can think of in his effort to make Jean François succeed.
But Jean François is stubborn. He will not, perhaps cannot, give in.
So the teachers quickly come to dislike the poor, arrogant boy with his flashing eyes and his precocious learning, his awkwardness in drill, and his indifference not only to the emperor, but to the great event of the week: the special Sunday dinner, sometimes of sausages, sometimes a fat capon. Even the way Jean François eats his meals makes a bad impression.
His trouble is that he is too much like the emperor he despises. The refusal to lose himself in Napoleon-worship could not be more Napoleonic. For like the emperor, Jean François is passionate, irritable, proud, sensitive, more than a little mad; a visionary.
When he starts to learn Coptic, the language of Egypt in the first centuries after Christ, he gives himself up to his studies so completely that not only does he compile a Coptic dictionary running over two thousand pages, but he himself becomes a Copt: “I think in Coptic,” he tells his brother. “I write my notes and keep my accounts and even dream in it.”
And when he studies Arabic, he is transformed. Not only are his inflections so perfect that he is indistinguishable from a native Arabic speaker, his voice changes so that even when he speaks French it takes on a throaty and guttural quality. “I barely move my lips when I talk.”
Later, this is what sets Jean François apart from other scholars: his emotional, libidinous, voluptuous relationship to ancient language. He is obsessed, driven, stalking his quarry not just with his mind but with all his instinct and passion.
For though his linguistic insights are based on solid scholarship, they are also acts of imagination. If he is a methodical, logical scientist, he is also a magician, a medium through whom ancient Egypt will speak, an artist who lives in the world of his inspirations and who sums up existence thus: “Enthusiasm alone is the true life.” Champollion writes the word in Greek letters, conjuring its original meaning: “possessed by the god.”
But how to survive in a state lycée when you are possessed by a god? If his artistic temperament serves him well in his work, it is an affliction in daily life. He feels every slight or constraint more keenly. The school’s routines drive him to despair. He lives for the hours when he can study his “beloved oriental languages” with the learned Abbé Dussert, a special dispensation Jacques has managed to arrange. They are his one joy. His need for these sessions is so strong as to be almost physical. Till the small hours, he pores over his grammars by the dim light of a courtyard lamp, holding the books up on the left side of his bed. The sight in his left eye will be permanently impaired from the strain. By day, he resists anything that takes him away from his languages, cursing the lessons in mathematics and technical drawing, the drills and inspections—“these stupidities.”
Hence his endlessly imploring letters to his brother:
“They are killing me with their orders of the day . . .
“I will surely sicken or lose my mind here . . . save me, I beg of you, before that happens . . .
“Set me free,” he writes Jacques week after week, month after month, year after year, astonishing letters when one considers that they are written by a young boy lamenting hours “stolen” from the study of languages. At the same time, though, he never forgets the sacrifices Jacques is making to keep him in school. More than that, these sacrifices are a sign of his brother’s faith in him, a faith which sustains him. He is ashamed, grateful, and furious all at the same time.
“You see everything through the eyes of a wild horse, as the saying goes: magnified times five,” Jacques admonishes. “How will you achieve anything in life if you are ready to die for no reason at all? Besides, I understand that Abbé Dussert is considering permitting you to add another language, either Chaldean or Syriac. Now will you be content?”
But of course Jean François is not content: “How can the Abbé make it a question of one or the other? Doesn’t he know I must study both? Doesn’t he realize”—etc., etc.
He finds a place to be alone. When the others are at meal
s, Jean François sits under the stairwell and reads Herodotus and Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, the Greeks and Romans who are Egypt’s heirs, and from whom he absorbs everything, whatever is known about Egypt and her gods—the divine vulture Nehkbet, the jackal-god Anubis, and Ra, god of the sun.
Alone in the courtyard of his school, hidden away in an empty classroom, Champollion reads a book in Latin (The Golden Ass) by the Greek, Apuleis, praising the Egyptian goddess Isis. He is in the middle of a description of how Isis appeared to author-narrator Apuleis in a vision. Apuleis had been turned into a donkey and had witnessed all the falseness and lusts of the world: the fakery of the eunuch-priests of Isis who take her statue on the road and swindle the people; and then the cruelty of thieves who ride the animal almost to death as they murder and rape. Finally, the donkey manages to eat a garland of roses offered to him by a beautiful nymphomaniac and suddenly he is human again and at the great temple of Isis, worshipping the goddess who has been welcomed into Rome by a people seeking something new: salvation.
“O heart that my mother gave me!” the ex-donkey begins an ancient Egyptian hymn.
“O heart of my different ages!” Apuleis cries out in the work Champollion is reading. And then a military drumroll is heard throughout the school, followed by an even harsher, more dream-destroying bugle call: ra-ta-ta! Another parade, another drill and inspection: Is the angle of Champollion’s hat correct? His back straight? Arms at the sides?
Darkness. Despair. The end of the world.
To put it in the words of his beloved Apuleis—that man-turned-donkey-turned-man-again by grace of Egypt’s gods—the problem is Et hic adhus infantilis uterus gestat nobis infantem aliem. . . . This is a prophecy addressed to Psyche, to Mind, a young girl who has coupled with Eros or Love: Though you are still only a child, you will soon have a child of your own . . .
The Linguist and the Emperor Page 6
