The Linguist and the Emperor

by Daniel Meyerson

  Love, friendship, rebellion; then “a certificate of study and conduct” from the lycée. At sixteen, Jean François is ready to face the world, which he does suddenly, by surprise, five days after his graduation.

  With more brotherly pride than wisdom, Jacques has decided to risk his own reputation and Jean François’ self-esteem, arranging for him to deliver a paper before the Académie delphinale. But why he should have chosen this particular setting for Jean François’ debut is a mystery. Jacques knows the conservative, skeptical nature of the academy’s membership, distinguished scholars and diplomats, scientists and mathematicians who are rigorous and critical and severe. Called away from their own work, they expect to be rewarded with discourse that is extraordinary. This is the raison d’etre of the Académie.

  Jacques knows the idea of a young student presenting a paper here will astonish everyone. Regardless of what Jean François has to say, there is something to provoke ridicule simply in the fact of a sixteen-year-old lecturing established scholars, authorities in their respective fields. Jacques knows that a failure elsewhere could be shrugged off by his brother, but that here it will publicly humiliate Jean François. Yet Jacques goes ahead with the scheme.

  There is a practical consideration, perhaps. Young men are being drafted daily, their ages younger and younger as Napoleon’s soldiers die on battlefields and must be replaced. But if a success would help Jean François receive a military exemption, why here, precisely where success is hardest to achieve?

  Later Jacques will say that he had followed the progress of his brother’s ideas and decided that he was ready. Ready for what, though? Intense scrutiny of ideas which are just beginning to germinate? Examination of a judgment which is not yet mature? An ordeal?

  It is true that by the time Jean François finishes at the lycée, he has already sketched out his plans for a work on Egypt, but this is an early attempt. Modestly giving it the title Essay on the Geographical Description of Egypt Before the Conquest of Cambyses (the Persian conquest), Jean François brings all his research to bear on a single question: the place names of ancient Egypt, its cities, rivers, oases, provinces . . .

  Jacques feels the work is defensible. Actually, not only is the essay defensible, it reflects masterful scholarship, the control of an enormous amount of material woven into a coherent, thought-provoking whole.

  Rather, it is an essay that would be defensible, if the young Jean François remembers to stay within its limits, if he is careful not to improvise or get carried away—dangers against which Jacques has cautioned his brother. But try to preach discretion to an enthusiast. Tell a moth to avoid the flame or Icarus to be wary of the sun . . . Jacques is pissing against the wind.

  And so, five days after his graduation, the young scholar appears at the Académie delphinale. He is introduced briefly—what is there to say about him, after all? Striding up to the podium, he begins to speak.

  He is brilliant. In a tour de force, he analyzes scores of Arabic, Latin, Greek, and Coptic Egyptian place names; sometimes they are translations or paraphrases of older, pharaonic names; sometimes, more rarely, they contain elements of the original language (the Coptic names especially). These are sounds that have survived thousands of years since last spoken as part of the ancient, forgotten language. Distorted, changed, combined with other languages, missing letters, endings (phonetic decay)—they nevertheless provide hints and suggestions, which Jean François explores in speculative asides.

  Taking a first step out of the charmed circle of the defensible, he continues on his dangerous path by predicting that whatever ancient Egyptian has survived in Coptic will provide an important clue in the decipherment of the hieroglyphs.

  Of course it must be remembered, he continues—proceeding in the self-contradictory, dialectical way characteristic of all real thought—that from antiquity on, the hieroglyphs have been described as a silent, symbolic language: each image representing an idea, a word, an allegory. There are far too many hieroglyphs to represent an alphabet, far too many to represent sounds . . . hundreds (in Ptolemaic times, thousands). Yet Coptic words, Coptic sounds are and will be crucial. Just why and how this is, he does not yet know and cannot yet explain.

  Jean François, though deep in his studies, is still far from tackling any of the new inscriptions brought back to Europe by Napoleon’s savants, a wealth of writing, both papyri and statues and prolific copies made from vast temple walls and many-chambered tombs—Denon’s the most important among them.

  It is an embarrassment of riches, in addition to which—most tantalizing of all—there are the inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, the three scripts which have been studied unsuccessfully by linguists across Europe. In fact, the experienced authority Silvestre de Sacy, the decipherer of the Sassanid Persian inscriptions at Naqsh-i-Rustam, a man who will soon be one of Jacques’ mentors in Paris, has opined that in the present state of knowledge, decipherment of the hieroglyphs is impossible.

  Perhaps one day, perhaps by chance, de Sacy believes, success will be achieved. But only by chance, only because of some lucky find, some fortuitous discovery that brings to light material not yet known. Until that time, declares this eminent professor of Persian and Arabic, this scholar well-versed in Coptic, the quest is futile.

  This pronouncement Jean François completely rejects though he cannot yet say why. Seeing Jacques bury his face in his hands, he tries to circle back to the problem of Shunet es Zebib—the name for a fortress at Abydos meaning Storehouse of Raisins in Arabic. The same sounds appear in classical authors (predating the Arab conquest) and which must therefore . . . Mid-sentence Jean François stops. He has finished.

  “I listened in the silence to my beating heart,” he later remembers. The young linguist stands alone and exposed. He has no idea that, after the first shock of surprise is over, this silence will give way to loud acclaim. Or that in the next moment, surrounded by admirers, he will become the youngest member of the Académie delphinale.

  TO PARIS! A truly wondrous city, since Napoleon has graced her with great art looted from all over Europe. From Germany and Italy and Austria, with Denon to advise him at his side, the Emperor brings back wagonloads of canvasses and antique sculpture to adorn his capital, which, nevertheless, is crowded, filthy, and foul-smelling! Napoleon has been too busy with world-conquest to concern himself with sewers. The Seine will do.

  Nor has he repaired the destruction visited upon the city during the revolution: the royal monuments toppled by frenzied crowds and the great houses stripped bare. Though more than a decade has passed, rubble and charred buildings are still to be seen everywhere.

  A few paces from Napoleon’s imperial institutes, narrow, squalid streets turn in upon themselves in a dark labyrinth left over from medieval days. And it is precisely here that Jean François takes up residence. In a small, bare room facing a wall, he is now far from the mountains of Grenoble with their thin, white waterfalls, their wildflowers and pines.

  His health is affected immediately perhaps because of the bad air, the stench, and the crowding, or perhaps because of his poverty. The little that Jacques can spare does not go far in Paris. Jean François develops a chronic cough and splitting headaches. He is given to shortness of breath and exhaustion. But despite the shock to his physical constitution, there is intellectual joy for Jean François here. At the College de France, the Special School of Oriental Languages, there are long hours of Chaldean and of Hebrew; of Arabic, Ethiopian, Coptic, and Persian.

  His capacity for work is staggering, though work is not the word for it. He is insatiable, intoxicated, pursuing a course of study, a range of languages that would be difficult for several students, let alone one. And he arranges for private instruction. An Egyptian priest at the church of St. Roch tutors him in Coptic. A Turkish diplomat from the Porte converses with him in Arabic. And there is a collector of antiquities, an alluring French lady with a mellifluous voice who has traveled to the ends of the earth—and who is fortunately fluent
in Persian.

  The city opens a new world to him. Not only are there other linguists of great stature, such as Silvestre de Sacy and Louis-Mathieu Langlès and Prosper Audran, who has such respect for his student that he sometimes has him teach the Aramaic or Hebrew class himself, but there are the manuscripts as well: texts which would not have been available to Jean François.

  There is a magnificent collection of incunabula in Paris: rare books brought back from Italy as spoils of war, crates and crates that Napoleon pillaged from the Vatican, along with countless works of art.

  They arrive in a grand triumphal procession. The emperor boasts that he has made Paris the new Rome. To the rolling of drums and the booming of cannon, the priceless treasures enter the sewerless, victorious city, proudly displayed in ceremonial coaches which pause every few paces before the admiring crowds.

  First come the paintings, canvasses covered with Madonnas and saints and popes (Caravaggio and Titian, Velázquez and Raphael)—a magnificent procession which, as Napoleon’s police chief Fouché notes, is a godsend to the pickpockets working the crowd.

  Next come the statues from antiquity, carried on litters by proud soldiers in resplendent uniforms. There are Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, the Apollo Belvedere and the nude Diana preparing for her bath; and human figures, like the Spinaria, the young boy taking a thorn from his foot, a first-century marble. And the Laocoön depicting the priest struck down as he warns his countrymen not to let the wooden horse enter Troy: Wrapped in the coils of a great serpent, he dies together with his two sons. Their sculpted agony is so dynamic, so filled with noble, anguished passion that spectators cry out in wonder at the sight of it, just as Michelangelo and Pope Julius had when it was unearthed three centuries before.

  And, finally, the books appear, the most splendid displayed as dramatically as the works of art: fragile papyrus rolls preserved in cases of silver and gold; thick, parchment volumes covered with jewels.

  Brought to the understaffed National Library, many works will remain uncatalogued and in their original crates for years, though on the recommendation of his teachers Jean François is given access to them. To his delight, he discovers many Coptic works, obscure texts abounding with strange words that deepen his knowledge of the language.

  Written in the first and second and third centuries AD when Egypt’s old beliefs were being transformed into the new, they are part Christian, part pagan; ecstatic prayers and crude spells and mystical speculation.

  In language resonant with echoes of ancient Egyptian—for an ear straining to hear them—they tell how a demonic spirit, the Archon Sabaoth, challenges the great mystery of Light. Or they recount a simple story: A desert monk, returning to his cave, begs a snake he has disturbed not to slither away, vowing to abandon his home if the creature leaves him.

  Or—on a small scrap of papyrus cut into the shape of a dagger—the ancients utter enchantments. Tartari! Saro! Pthah! a man calls on the gods (degraded gods, by the second Christian century: mere demiurges and demons) Astabias! I am that which raised Judas against Ei, Jesus until he was crucified upon the wood. I am that which went up to heaven calling out, Eloi Ei Elemas. I myself am god. As for me, then, I beg . . . put hatred and separation between Sipa son of Siheau and Ouartheihla, daughter of Cauhare (Louvre E.14.250). Make his [member] like a rag on a dung heap, like an ant frozen in winter! Let her hunger for me like a bitch for a dog, like a sow for a boar . . .

  God is absolutely alone, begins another text of heretical, Christian Egypt. Not even St. Mark, whose blackened, mummified body will be smuggled out of Egypt in a barrel of pickled pork when Islam arrives centuries later—not even St. Mark can woo daring, imaginative, speculative, superstitious, stubborn Egypt from its many heresies, its Monophysitism, its Gnosticism, its unnameable beliefs tracing back, in one way or another, to the repressed memory of its dead yet living gods. God is unknowable and separate from every created being. The son of god . . . a created being and so not god in the full sense . . . But may He not be worshipped as a lesser deity?—May He not be—The work goes on for many chapters, its Coptic words and sounds studied, recorded, hoarded by Jean François.

  Obscure and difficult—Akhnoui Akham Abra Aabaoth, Akg’hag’ha is my name, Sabagha is my true name, Glot the might is my name—these studies will bear fruit though their usefulness in deciphering the hieroglyphs is not immediately apparent, either to Jean François or to his mentors. But, as Terence Duquesne, another brilliant Coptic scholar, will observe in the twentieth century, the inscrutable names and esoteric words in such texts are like the chalk marks left by Gypsies: marks that point the way to fellow wanderers, but which are meaningless to others.

  Jean François is just such a “wanderer”; he approaches his goal—the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone—indirectly, ranging far and wide, by instinct, waiting to attack them until he has learned all that he can.

  Years later, when Napoleon’s stolen books find their way back to the Vatican library, the scholar Sir William Gell will relate, “I think there are few Coptic books in Europe he [Champollion] has not examined. A friend of mine told me there is no book in the Vatican in that language, that has not remarks of Champollion in almost every page, which he made when the manuscripts were at Paris.”

  Jean François devotes himself especially to his Coptic although, after all, what is it? A patois, a jargon written in Greek letters, a jumble of words spoken by a people who, conquered again and again, had forgotten not only the classical form of their language but even their own script. Moreover, a patois that has itself gone out of use a thousand years before Jean François takes up its study!

  Replaced by Arabic after the Arab conquest, Coptic becomes an echo of an echo, a memory of a memory: a vernacular, a slang, a debased language gradually dying into silence. Its tones, inflections, its expressions are all reduced to a fixed liturgy of “corrupted” words and a few crates of books in the National Library—books looted by a visionary general and pored over night after night by a feverish boy!

  His theory that Coptic still bears some affinity to ancient Egyptian is still an unproven theory, little more than a guess, as Jean François knows. And even supposing that it is a remote descendant of the ancient language, how changed it must be—another problem. How many centuries separate Coptic from ancient Egyptian—and how many foreign conquests, how many foreign words and sounds and scripts have been interposed between the two.

  Still Jean François persists in his study, going through crate after unopened crate, cutting through twine and breaking the military seals affixed in Rome. Reading through the night, his voice echoes in the empty library, for he reads out loud, a habit picked up from the ancients for whom the written word was not silent but filled with sound.

  He reads: They will awake. . . the strange Coptic words wrapped in their ill-fitting Greek shroud whose alphabet can only express just so much (but not all) of the ancient language, so that seven letters must be added to the Greek ones. Seven letters modeled on the hieroglyphs in a simplified form, almost unrecognizable as such, it is true, but letters through which ancient Egyptian struggles—like the arms of the mummified god Osiris—to break through its cerements and winding bands . . . the shei , the fei , the khei , the tjima , the djiandjia , the tei , the ch-hei .

  He reads: —Coltsfoot, a sweet, edible plant, growing in clayey soil.

  He reads: —it is a word for which no meaning can be found.

  He reads, taking notes, sounding out phrases, compiling growing lists:

  —Streaming eye, a disease—which he is happy to connect with closing of the eye, positing them both as synonyms for blindness

  —A victor’s (martyr’s?) crown

  —A soul passing through closed doors

  THE WATCHMEN GET to know him. They see him, hour after hour, as they make their rounds. Even their dogs, Jean François writes his brother, no longer growl.

  This, then, is how the young man spends his nights in Paris.

  Chapt
er Nine

  On the Soldier’s Neck

  August, 1798. Cairo.

  “I AM YOUR SLAVE,” the governor of Alexandria said, surrendering the city to Napoleon. Afterward, he secretly sent a messenger to his Mameluke master in Cairo, describing his desperate bravery in attempting to hold the city and informing him of the approaching danger.

  Traveling for days through rough desert terrain, this messenger finally arrives in Cairo at dawn, breathless and exhausted. But just before he enters the city, he is fatally seduced by whirling dervishes dancing by the Nile. Despite having been told to “turn neither to the left nor the right, to salute no man nor to return any man’s greetings but to go directly to the Qasr Aini (the Palace of the Fountain),” the messenger dismounts here at the city’s edge for the briefest moment—or so he believes—to receive the blessing of the holy men as they spin with flaring robes to beating drums and trilling flutes. Arms outstretched in prayer, their faces are distorted with ecstasy.

  Throwing themselves on the ground, they drag him down with them as the Master of the Order gallops over their prostrate bodies on a black stallion, leaving the messenger together with the writhing holy men, who are beyond all care for the vicissitudes of this world.

  Thus it is not the messenger who brings the news of the French invasion, but a humble gatherer of sebak, of fertilizer, who happens to be passing by. His cart is filled with the crumbled brick of ancient monuments and the effluvia of disintegrating mummies, human heads and torsos, mummified ibises and bulls and apes to be crushed into powder and spread over the depleted fields. This illiterate peasant takes the messenger’s dispatches to the Qasr al-Aini. The Mameluke leader, Murad bey, reading the letters with astonishment and rage, rewards the sebak gatherer for his trouble with death.

  And so it comes about that early in the morning on the twentieth of Muharram, as the Arab historian el-Jabarti records, all of Cairo is thrown into an uproar as word spreads: foreigners have invaded. Alexandria, Damietta, and Rosetta have already fallen and the army of infidels, like a swarm of locusts, is now heading for the capital.