Within Jean François, mind has also joined with passion. And though he too is young, he is heavy with intellectual child.
Chapter Five
Lions of the Desert
Grenoble. The residence of the prefect (that is, governor) of the Department of Isère.
ON AN AFTERNOON toward the beginning of spring in 1803, an unusual scene takes place at the prefect’s official residence. A schoolboy—Jean François—makes his appearance among the throng of petitioners and men of affairs in the prefect’s waiting room. He is received right away. While government business is forgotten, the prefect and Jean François sit talking—or, rather, Jean François listens as the prefect talks, trying to put the tense, silent boy at ease.
The prefect is new to his job. He does not look the part: His skin is dark and leathery from long treks in the Egyptian deserts, forced marches which many did not survive. He is still gaunt from the dysentery endemic among the troops. For he is none other than Jean Baptiste Fourier, physicist and secretary of the savants in Egypt, a scientist Napoleon put in a political post because he needs someone he can trust.
Though Fourier is no politician, he has been dealing ably with the throng of visitors crowding his waiting room, the clever lawyers and greedy contractors and ambitious bureaucrats who come to see him about every kind of business—every kind that is, except the one closest to the prefect’s heart: the many-volumed Description of Egypt, which it is now his privilege to help create.
It is a Herculean task. The savants have collected a vast wealth of knowledge, statistics, maps, specimens, and a thick portfolio of drawings, the bulk by the artist Dominique Denon. Nothing escapes Denon’s eye: the geometrical splendor of a temple, the claws of a bat clinging to a palm, and countless inscriptions. They appear as long strings of hieroglyphs seen not only on monuments but in Cairo’s back alleys, by the quays of Alexandria, in the fields of peasants, where huge, ancient stones have been quarried from the ruins.
Inscribed with images of kings and gods, these stones laden with knowledge now prop up a bathhouse or a privy. Covered with unreadable texts, epic poems, spells, and prayers, they are now used to grind the newly harvested grain.
The Shabaka stone records the wisdom of the famed school of Heliopolis ( “City of the Sun,” as the Greeks called it, “Iunu” for the Egyptians and “On” in the Bible: a place ancient even in the days when Joseph spoke with Pharaoh). Here is four-thousand-year-old philosophical speculation, lectures attended by Plato and Pythagoras, the cosmogony of the priests of Ra. Now dragged round and round by donkeys, its contents forgotten, the stone’s surface is pitted with holes and scratches, its metaphysics covered with coarse Nubian millet and bits of straw.
To this chaos of half-understood, half-rescued knowledge, Fourier must bring order. He comes to this task after days spent on government business, listening to officials seeking promotions, engineers planning roads through the mountains and wrangling churchmen—bishops, priests, worldly, difficult men fighting for what is due the church, the power that was theirs before the revolution. (Napoleon’s “I treat the pope as if he had two hundred thousand men!” is all that Fourier has to go by.) Not to mention the lawyers who also have a claim on Fourier’s time. He must review cases so vexed it is a wonder that he can work at all on the Description of Egypt, that the violent stories and faces of those condemned to die do not come between him and the page.
All of this—the criminals at the Place d’Armes, and military reviews, and tours of inspection—rests on Fourier’s shivering shoulders (for he is subject to bouts of malarial fever, a souvenir he has brought back with him from Egypt, from the swampy Fayum, along with his spoils, the beautiful and moving antiquities he has acquired). Worn out by his duties and his maladies, how is it that this visitor of Fourier’s—a mere child! a schoolboy!—will lift his spirits so?
They meet by chance when the prefect comes to visit the lycée. A fateful chance, the ancient Egyptians would have dialectically called it because, despite the difference in their age and situations, it is impossible that two such kindred spirits should live in the same city and not know each other.
Fate throws them together in Grenoble and keeps them together forever. When they die, they will lie near each other under Egyptian-style monuments in the Père Lachaise cemetery. And even in the twentieth century, valleys named after them when the moon is explored will not be far apart.
What then was the teacher at the lycée thinking of that day? Did he imagine that by putting Jean François in the back row to hide his shabby uniform he could prevent the “Egyptian” prefect from noticing the “Egyptian” boy?
It is not just that Jean François knows something about Egypt. All the students have followed Napoleon’s campaigns, some have even heard firsthand accounts from relatives in the army of the battle of the pyramids, the Cairo uprising, and the siege at Acre. But Egypt has been Jean François’ imaginative home. When questioned by Fourier, not only does he answer, but he eagerly asks the prefect his own questions. He talks with intimate knowledge, ranging over place and time with such ease that finally Fourier can only exclaim, “Who has been in Egypt, this boy or me?”
Fourier invites Jean François—not the indignant teacher and not the distinguished head of the lycée—to visit him at the prefecture. Talking to the boy as an equal, as Champollion will later remember, he inquires in the polite language of the day whether Jean François will do him the honor of paying him a visit.
Then the prefect is gone and Jean François is alone in the lycée again—no longer a savant but a boy who cannot spell or do the simplest math problems and who has had the impudence to hold forth before such an important visitor. Of course this “unseemly self-display” will be forgiven later on when the learned societies and the lycée will fight to claim Jean François as their own, this student in a shabby uniform who did not even have the manners to thank the prefect for his invitation—disgraceful!—who did not have the sense to take Fourier’s extended hand but stood unsmiling, staring and speechless, self-conscious and overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed or not, Jean François accepts Fourier’s invitation and so it comes to pass that the two sit closeted together in the prefect’s office. The meeting will be a turning point in Jean François’ young life.
Fourier inquires about Jean François’ studies, about his home and family in Figeac—his questions go unanswered. At first Jean François is unable to say a word. So the prefect then talks about Egypt. He describes scenes that have not changed since the time of Herodotus and before: a water boy sitting astride his ox, his gallibaya tucked up, his bare thin legs straddling the massive flanks of the patient animal. The boy’s song, Ya Amuni! Ya Amuni! has been passed down for generations, the words of the ancient language having become more and more incomprehensible and distorted until only these two syllables are left—Amun, “the Hidden God.” These syllables no longer conveying this or any other meaning, have become nothing more than plaintive and melancholy sound, something for a boy to sing as he and his ox work the shaduf.
The boy sings, the ox lows, and the buckets of the shaduf rise and dip, filling an irrigation ditch where, together with his horse, a man washes off the day’s toil . . .
It is a scene from the present, from the past, from a mural in an eighteenth dynasty tomb. The water buckets of the shaduf were rising and falling even then. Or rather: they rise and fall even now. In Egypt, the past is real and the present is not. The past overshadows the present, making it seem like a dream.
Fourier tells the boy about the tomb of Sennefer, mayor of Wast. Its walls are covered with fields and vineyards painted in brilliant colors, with harvesters and flocks of wild birds, resurrection spells and naked dancing girls: sinuous bodies so beautiful that they alone could resurrect the mayor . . . if his mummy had not been used for fuel, that is! Tossed onto the fire one cold desert night to warm his descendants.
In the fields, herds of goats trample newly sown grain into the soil, just as they did
in the days of pharaoh. And in the Egyptian churches metal rattles still echo during mass: sistra-so the Greeks called them; hatof to the Hebrews. It is the instrument Miriam played at the Red Sea when she led the women in song; sesheshet to the ancient Egyptians, a word whose sound was meant to capture a rattle’s tinkling, which in turn was meant to capture the sound of papyrus stalks rustling in the wind. Sistra, tofim, sesheshet—these instruments that joyous, bare-breasted girls once used to appease the erotic rage of the cow goddess Hathor now in the hands of bearded monks solemnly worshipping a child suckling at the Virgin’s breast, just as the hawk-headed Horus suckled at the breast of Isis.
Everywhere: past and present, life and death mingle with bittersweet pathos. The baby glove of a pharaoh is all that remains in an empty tomb. Nearby, flowers have been strewn by ancient mourners: acacia blossoms and lotus petals, persea leaves and poppy petals, garlands which, when touched by the breath of the living, crumble into dust.
In the midst of this all-pervasive past, the boisterous, immodest, irreverent French arrive. Their heads are filled with the ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau. The Marseillaise on their drunken lips, they revel in the streets of Cairo or ride out to the countryside.
Conquerors—for the hour, at least—they race camels in the desert and wrestle alligators on the banks of the Nile. Naked, covered with mud, they shout with excitement as they gouge the beasts’ eyes. Their sport watched at a distance by barefoot women veiled in black, whose thick gold ankle bracelets flash in the sun.
It is a different world the prefect describes to Jean François; a land, Napoleon will say of Egypt later, where he was able to shake off the constraints of European civilization, a place to feel joyous and free. But that is how the Emperor remembers it later, after he has lost his empire, in exile on a bleak pacific island. Then, suffering from piles and skin rashes, from scurvy and seizures and swelling of the legs, it is natural for one or another of the otherworldly Egyptian scenes the artist Denon has sketched to conjure happier memories.
Then even the ex-Emperor’s sugar bowl evokes the glorious Egyptian campaign. Sèvres porcelain, it is also designed by Denon, with a vivid depiction on its sides: stark cliffs surrounding the Nile at Elephantine. “Greatness has its beauties,” as Napoleon himself will admit, “but only in memory and only in retrospect.”
The truth is that suffering dogs the steps of the French in Egypt. A hush falls over the men as they sight shore, an empty stretch of desert some eight miles east of Alexandria. The fear and foreboding of the soldiers is more in keeping with the fate awaiting them than their general’s feelings of “freedom and joy.”
Realistically, Fourier describes the arduous campaign to Jean François. For though the prefect admires Napoleon, he has witnessed the events with the cold eye of a scientist. His point of view is closer to that of the grumbling men than to Napoleon’s.
From the first, nature is hostile. Rocky shoals make it impossible to bring the large ships close to shore. Napoleon orders them to be anchored where they are. The skies have been darkening all afternoon, and now strong winds whip up the waves as a skiff rows out to greet them. It is the French consul who has been anxiously awaiting their arrival, his lookouts posted all along the coast. Buffeted by the winds and clinging to the lines thrown down to him, the consul—a comical figure in formal clothes and drenched to the skin—is drawn aboard the Orient.
He closets himself with Napoleon to tell him the news: The English have already arrived in Egypt, a vastly superior naval force under Nelson. And though they have come and gone in hot pursuit, they will surely soon realize their mistake and return.
Indeed, even as the consul speaks, an officer interrupts with the news that a warship has been seen on the horizon—perhaps the first of many.
“Fortune, why have you abandoned me?” Napoleon cries with anguish, rushing on deck. “Five days is all I ask!”
It is not the English: only Justice, a French ship that had lagged behind and is now rejoining the fleet.
Still there is no time to lose, Napoleon realizes. The English might return any moment. To meet them at sea would mean disaster. He must get his men on land right away, despite the heavy swell, the high winds, and the darkness.
As the sun sets over the stormy sea, he is everywhere at once, giving a hundred orders, urging his men on, raging one moment, cold and precise the next. In a crisis, he is completely the military man. He forgets the savants: They are not the priority. Neighing horses are now suddenly more important than the philosophers.
“I began by landing six horses,” Anne-Jean-Marie Savary, the officer in charge of the operation, will remember, “placing the horsemen in a boat, and letting the horses down into the sea, each dragoon holding his horse by a halter.
“The first horse thus removed from the ship swam in place until the last had been let down into the sea; after which the boat made for shore, towing the six horses that were swimming, and placing them on land as near as possible to the water’s edge so the other horses could see them . . . and follow in the same manner.
“Horses of each vessel were hoisted out on both sides at once and let down into the sea while a boat was in readiness to lead them gently to overtake the others . . . a long file of horses swimming toward shore.”
Horses fare better than the men. “. . . The violent wind churned up the sea,” General Louis-Alexandre Berthier remembers, “making it impossible to navigate our boats, creating a gale that heaved one boat on top of another, smashing some, overturning others and hurling men into the foaming surf far from shore . . .”
It is a scene from a nightmare: the commands of officers shouted over howling winds, surfboats and sloops packed with soldiers tossing on the high waves, foundering on the reefs; the struggle in the darkness amid the cries of the drowning; the black beach where horses rear with terror. Hundreds die.
The scene may resemble a nightmare but it is Napoleon’s nightmare they are living. At three in the morning, Napoleon appears on the beach to review those troops who have managed to reach land.
He brushes aside obstacles that would give another commander pause. Have there been heavy casualties? In war, death is a matter of course. As Antoine Lasalle, his favorite cavalry leader, puts it: “A hussar not dead at thirty is a bungler.”
Is it impossible to hoist down the heavy artillery? Have most provisions—the dry biscuit and water—been left on the ships? Well, they can worry about that later on.
The main thing is to get started. War brings into play all Napoleon’s enormous energy, all his will and imagination. He is in high spirits as he sets off for Alexandria, shouting bawdy jokes over the still raging wind. He sings snatches of Italian songs in the dark desert, holding forth on women, art, wine, law, and religion, issuing orders as they occur to him (“There is to be no looting, no pillaging . . . Respect the mosques as you would a church . . . Approach all wells with care: They may be poisoned . . .”)
The band, safely ashore, strikes up the Marseillaise to lend fresh courage to the exhausted and storm-tossed men. They are surrounded by shadows, by Bedouin waiting to capture stragglers whom they rape and mutilate before putting to death.
Thus with the groans of the dying, with the revolutionary anthem in the background, with bawdy jokes, bravery and fear, the conquest of Egypt begins.
JEAN FRANÇOIS COMES to life, his imagination most deeply stirred when Fourier finally shows him his “treasures”—his ostraca first of all: potsherds, shattered bowls, water jugs, and wine jars broken millennia ago by a careless slave or naughty child, its pieces kept for scrap paper. Bits of clay and flakes of limestone covered with ancient writing: Greek and Aramaic and, oldest of all, hieroglyphs. The fragments speak to Jean François in a way that the prefect’s tales of glory and hardship do not.
The French schoolboy holds the work of another schoolboy in his hands. The hieroglyphs are awkwardly drawn on the clay and an outline in red has been traced around them—a teacher’s corrections of a clumsy attemp
t.
The writing on the other antiquities, however, is anything but clumsy. For not only the ostraca but the statues and papyrus scrolls and jewelry are covered with images meant for the eye as well as the mind. The hieroglyphs are painted in brilliant colors or engraved with exquisite care. The quivering antennae of a bee, the body of a woman squatting in childbirth, a thousand sensuous details occur and reoccur according to the logic of a forgotten language that, once deciphered, will be seen to have recorded everything.
There are magical formulas and mathematical problems and medical advice: lists of remedies and detailed, accurate descriptions of all parts of the anatomy. “They laid open men while alive—criminals received out of prison from the king—and while they still breathed they study them.” The brain, nt nt, meninges: is drawn out through the nose during embalming in a delicate operation requiring a small perforation—less than two centimeters—through the ethmoid bone. The embalmer’s knowledge is shared with the doctors, as can be seen in mummies with evidence of trepanning performed on them during their lifetime, operations—dua, knife treatments: to relieve besy, swelling: . Judging from the healed bone tissue in the mummified skulls these procedures must have been successful.
This is what is written on the ostraca and papyrus rolls and is waiting to be deciphered. A whole world now silent is encoded in the magical-seeming hieroglyphs: lyrical poems and prayers as well as prosaic records, property demarcations, and criminal cases, transcripts moldering in temple archives as they do in courthouses today.
But perhaps the most absorbing document of all, the one which makes one truly aware of what is at stake in the decipherment—our sense of our human past, of ourselves, of our unalterable human condition—is the story of a royal prince and high priest of Memphis in 1230 BC, Khaemwaset.
The Linguist and the Emperor Page 7
