The Linguist and the Emperor

by Daniel Meyerson

  Scratched on the stone along with the many names of Greek mercenaries and Roman legionnaires on one expedition or another, the writing tells of soldiers on their way to quell a rebellion or to collect taxes, or to take prisoners to the mines and the quarries in the south.

  Like the French these ancient soldiers are footsore and hungry and curse the heat and the sand and the scorpions and vipers hidden under every rock. Longing for home, they precede the grumbling of Napoleon’s men with their emphatic “Shit!” or “To hell with this land!”—their unhappiness echoing across the long perspective of time.

  Far beneath the cliffs, deep under the sand, rolled up in pottery jars or hidden in the coffins of the mummified ibises and baboons (animals sacred to Thoth), are papyri which record the miseries of other soldiers, Egyptians who preceded the Greeks—who preceded the Romans—who preceded the French. In their time, these warriors had also hungered and thirsted and waded, as the French do now, through the “river of blood”:

  He is awakened after only an hour and they prod him like a donkey.

  He is hungry, his belly aching.

  He is dead while alive.

  He is ordered far away, to Syria or Cush.

  He gets neither food nor sandals when they give out the supplies.

  He marches while the sun is hot and burning overhead.

  Only on the third day can he drink foul water that tastes like salt.

  Diarrhea tears his stomach.

  The enemies come and he is surrounded in combat.

  Arrows take his life from him

  As his leader shouts:

  “Attack brave warrior! Get a name for yourself!”

  But he does not know what has happened to his body.

  His aching legs give way.

  If victory comes, the plunder and slaves must be carried back to Pharaoh in Egypt.

  The foreign slave woman can walk no further.

  She is put on the soldier’s neck.

  His own wife and children wait for him in their town.

  But he has fallen

  He is dead.

  He never reaches home.

  They leave behind their record as the French soldiers will leave behind theirs: memoirs and histories and even their names, Jacques or Jean or Lieutenant so-and-so of the 5th Chasseurs, scratched on rocks and temple walls.

  Ancient words come down through the centuries in Egyptian and Greek, in Latin and French—half lament, half boast uttered with a melancholy smile.

  Words with no other moral than to say: Look at us! Like you, we are human beings——tears of the gods. Comrades in arms: of the Regiment of Seth: Senbi. Senwosret of the Regiment of Ra. Meryptah, who carries the king’s placenta when we go forth into battle.

  These are our names and the honors we hold. Do not forget us till hhehh, —the end of time.

  AT A PLACE called Rahmaniya, the Merciful, the beleaguered Frenchmen finally arrive at the Nile. There is water and shade here. There are the promised palm trees heavy with clusters of ripe dates, and lemon and orange and fig trees as well, and black currants, and watermelons, fields and fields of them.

  Some men begin by gorging themselves on the fruit. Others strip off their uniforms or leap into the river fully clothed, shouting for joy.

  On this day of rejoicing, the feast of St. Watermelon, the men laughingly call it, Murad bey and his Mamelukes suddenly appear. Armed with helmets, spears, sabers, lances, axes, daggers, and pistols, mounted on beautiful Arabian horses, they look down from the hills east of the Nile.

  The naked men in the water, stunned, fall silent.

  Chapter Ten

  Of Linguists and Emperors and Everlasting Fame

  1823. Italy.

  ON A HOT day in the middle of August, a swarthy man with dark eyes pores over an ancient scroll. The room is small and airless, a stone chamber in an Italian palazzo where many miscellaneous finds have been carelessly stored. Although the man is just in his thirties, his hands tremble perpetually and he is stooped as he reads. At that moment he, Jean François Champollion, is the only per-son in the world who can understand the ancient writing on the coffins and statues surrounding him, or so he thinks. Could it be? Does he know the truth or not? Are his enemies right to mock him?

  Champollion has claimed that this is a system of writing and he understands the seemingly endless number of beautiful and bizarre and sometimes grotesque pictures. There are thousands of them. Has he deluded himself? Is he mad? He insists that he has deciphered Egyptian writing. He has staked his reputation on his claim—but is it true that the disembodied hands and legs, the stars and scepters and staring eyes form words, that they speak to him and to him alone after a silence of fifteen hundred years?

  Ignoring his exhaustion, Champollion persists in his patient, obscure work. Throughout his life, the rhythm of his existence is twofold: periods of almost monastic withdrawal from the world and intense lonely toil, alternate with periods of great excitement and public debate. But always the burden of the past weighs heavily. There is the crushing, painstaking labor which proceeds picture by picture, sign by sign, word by word.

  Time falls away as Champollion slowly reads this ancient document, teasing out its meaning. It is a tale of passion and betrayal, a story of two thousand years before . . . in Egypt . . . as the Nile rises for its yearly flooding, bringing its rich, dark silt to the parched land.

  People rejoice, breaking off from their labors, and in the midst of the celebrations, a beautiful woman leaves her husband to run away with her lover.

  The woman’s name is not recorded. Or perhaps it is written on part of the scroll which has crumbled to dust in this small, stifling chamber of the palazzo. So, while she is nameless, the record states that she is tall and beautiful and dark, from the southern reaches of the divided kingdom, perhaps a Nubian. Running away with one of the foreign soldiers who have occupied northern Egypt, she abandons her two young daughters. About their Egyptian father, the story is silent. These forlorn girls are taken in by a relative to live in the city dedicated to the crocodile-headed god, Sobek.

  Raised in the temple of Sobek, the two girls serve the living incarnation of the god: a huge crocodile who lazes in the sun, a glittering beast with jewels and gold sewn into its hide. One of the girls, no older than fourteen, becomes a temple prostitute, selling her body in honor of the monstrous deity. She splits her earnings with the bald-headed priests who in turn divide their share: a part for themselves, a part for the reptile-god whom they anoint with oils and perfumed unguents after offering him choice meat and game.

  A year goes by and again, during the Inundation, the mother reappears. She talks her prostitute-daughter into giving up her savings: her mother promises to find her a husband. The money will be used both for the dowry and for the cliterectomy, the female castration that will make her child a better match. But the wayward mother is false in her promises and, instead of finding a husband for her daughter, she runs away with her daughter’s savings.

  A temple hermit recounts the details in brilliantly colored hieroglyphs. About him we know only that he has retired to the precincts of the sacred pool where the god lives. Night after night he gazes on the bejeweled beast, praying to be granted prophetic dreams, visions which would catapult him to fame and honor at the pharaoh’s court. At the young girl’s request, he writes her tale of woe as a legal complaint.

  Whether the authorities act on it, what happens to the girl, her mother, her sister, the temple recluse, we do not know. The scroll on which the story was written is kept with other such documents which remained in the great archives of the temple for hundreds of years. And then, finally, during the fourth century AD, the hieroglyphic script in which these documents are written goes out of use. The meaning of the strange symbols is forgotten. And for fifteen hundred years they remain a mystery, along with all the other inscriptions and carvings and paintings from this ancient world.

  A CARETAKER KNOCKS on the door but is sent away. Since coming to Turi
n, Champollion has been so forgetful of his appearance and surroundings that the servants have begun to whisper that he is not quite right. The scroll before him has not yielded its meaning easily: The complex writing presents endless difficulties, endless exceptions to principles he himself had discovered earlier, when he had made his great breakthrough.

  He had been going along in the path which had been trod by scholars struggling with the hieroglyphs since the Renaissance, when suddenly he understood: first one word, then two, then the principle, the key which unlocked the mystery.

  Half-mad then with excitement he had run through the streets of Paris to the library where his brother worked. Holding his tattered notebook out to the astonished Jacques, he shouted, “Je tiens l’affair! (I’ve done it!)” Then he fainted, falling into a coma and lying unconscious for eight days, more dead than alive.

  From the first announcement of his discovery, it is fiercely disputed; the British especially cover him with scorn and fiercely contest his findings. Champollion’s theories are contrary to the ideas held about hieroglyphics from the earliest time, ideas which he himself had espoused until, in a moment of inspiration, all his years of study, all the concentrated effort of a lifetime, bore fruit.

  The challenge now is proving what he knows. The first basis for Champollion’s conclusions had been the Rosetta stone, but this monument was not enough to refute his critics. True, the stone was inscribed both in hieroglyphic and Greek and by comparing the scripts, one could arrive at certain possibilities. But the inferences drawn from the stone are still only educated guesses, mere clues and theories.

  First, the Greek and Egyptian writing on the stone are paraphrases of each other. They give the general meaning of the decree, and are not word-for-word translations. Also, the writing on the stone is dismissed by the experts as providing too small a sample to conclusively prove any theory. It contains only fourteen lines of formal hieroglyphs: a slender basis for Champollion’s claim that he can read the hieroglyphs.

  The brilliant Englishman Thomas Young, physicist, physician, amateur classicist, had briefly studied the stone. He made a limited but important contribution to its decipherment before giving up. A wealthy and sophisticated scholar with a broad range of interests, Young makes Champollion, with his lifelong devotion to this one mystery, seem like a crank. Champollion, holed up in a cheap rooming house in Paris, lives for one reason and for one reason alone: the hieroglyphs.

  From this obscurity, Champollion announces to the world that he can read them. Young, writing at ease from a fashionable seaside resort, gives his verdict: “Champollion is wrong.”

  The burden of proof falls on Champollion. But in the time which has passed since his great discovery, physical ailments ravage the obsessed scholar. Intense intellectual effort and the struggle with poverty have taken their toll on the slender, handsome young man, prematurely aging him.

  The race to confirm his discoveries is also a race with death, whose presence Champollion is not allowed to forget as he studies funerary papyri, coffin texts, and ancient dirges.

  The question is, will Champollion’s discoveries be his “calling card on Immortality,” as he has put it in a letter to his brother, or will his work be dismissed as the egotistical ravings of a madman?

  London. A darkened room where a single, narrow beam of light falls on a human eye.

  The light illuminates this and nothing more. It is a patient’s eye, its pupil dilating and contracting as the doctor, Thomas Young, observes intently. This is how his waking hours are largely spent, observing and analyzing and collecting data as he sees patients and conducts experiments. You can see in his pale, thoughtful, otherworldly, abstracted face that he is a man who has had more nights than days in his life.

  The light itself becomes the object of his study: candlelight shining through (or made “coherent” by) funnel-like shades and colored filters of blue and green and violet and red. In his most famous experiment, Dr. Young demonstrates the undulatory or wave theory of light which overturns Newton’s particle theory. But still, despite his considerable achievement, Young is dissatisfied and restless, plagued by what Milton calls “that last failing of a noble mind”: the thirst for fame.

  He pursues other investigations—the nature of color; and astigmatism; and the manner in which the eye accommodates itself to distance. But in the wake of Napoleon’s campaign, as volume after volume of The Description of Egypt is published and thousands of scrolls and antiquities find their way to Europe, it is not talk of the nature of astigmatism or of color or light which is on everyone’s lips, but the meaning of the hieroglyphs. Though no linguist, Young now takes up the problem. He brings to his study a thorough classical education and finely honed analytic skills, as well as the pride of a (so far) undefeated intellect.

  While Young pursues his intellectual quarry at his ease, a letter arrives from the village of Figeac. A schoolmaster there working with illiterate peasant children requests that the secretary of the Royal Society (Young) furnish him with clarification of some details about the stone which are obscure on his copy. Young, none too pleased to be hearing from a rival, replies that the obscurities on the copy are also unclear on the original.

  The provincial schoolmaster is none other than Jean François, who is languishing in “internal exile,” a richly deserved punishment. For Jean François had taken up Napoleon’s cause just as Napoleon was going down to defeat.

  Jean François had been opposed to the emperor during the years of the glorious French victories. The linguist had all along opposed the tyranny of the high-handed Bonaparte. But now, in Napoleon’s final days, the empire doomed and dying, the Bourbons waiting in the wings about to return, Jean François—idealist, romantic, fool—publicly plants the tricolor on the walls of Grenoble’s fort during the allied siege.

  For if Napoleon is a tyrant, if the emperor is high-handed and authoritarian, at least his tyranny is more bearable than that of the reactionary Bourbons. At least it is in the name of an ideal. The Bourbons represent the mindless return to the stultifying past. Of the Bourbons, the dreary Louis XVIII and, even worse, his arrogant brother Charles X, it is truly said that they had forgotten nothing (of their privileges) and had learned nothing (during their long exile).

  Thus Champollion becomes a “Bonapartist” just in time to be branded as persona non grata by the returning Bourbons, ensuring that both he and, by association, his brother will suffer.

  Jean François has not that much to lose, for up until now his professional life has consisted of meager appointments: assistant professor (at half salary, given his youth) or sub-librarian or unpaid assistant to his brother in Paris or Grenoble. They are appointments which are given and then taken away as the political situation fluctuates. During difficult periods, his brother supports him for months at a time.

  He undergoes the desperation of being down and out and knowing—trying not to lose sight of the knowledge—that if only he can continue on his path, his name will echo throughout eternity. It is the kind of struggle to which Dostoyevsky refers when he speculates that Columbus was happiest ten minutes before he discovered America—though perhaps without knowing it himself . . . when his sailors cursed him and mutinied; when he was straining against overwhelming obstacles; when success or failure still hung in the balance; when he was filled with self-doubt and misgivings.

  If this struggle is what constitutes true happiness—if victory is merely a somnolent, posthumous, half-and-half state—then perhaps for Jean François this might be called a time of true joy.

  Proud; solitary among the crowds of Paris; his clothes in tatters so that, he writes his brother in Grenoble, he is ashamed to go out in decent society. He resents being sent on endless errands for his brother, who chastises him as if he were a young boy. Defiant, knowing his own worth, he is nevertheless humbled by having to take charity from a brother with little enough for himself and his family. He translates, not the Rosetta stone, but some sensational Italian novel for a smal
l fee so that he can get by.

  Once the restoration of the Bourbons takes place, he is no longer even the occasional “assistant to an assistant,” the underpaid professor, or librarian’s secretary.

  For a time, he works with poor children, trying to introduce the Lancaster system, a new method of education which advocates not only teaching children how to read but teaching them how to teach other children to read as well—the older teaching the younger. Behind the idea is the hope that learning will thus spread throughout the countryside like ripples in a pool: a goal strongly opposed by the church and the political conservatives who see universal literacy as a threat to the returning stability of the old order. Thus this activity makes Jean François even more suspect.

  And as if the burden of supporting himself is not enough, he has taken on the responsibility of a wife along the way. A girl of sixteen whom he had met in Grenoble, defies her bourgeois father for his sake. It is not only her father who opposes the marriage, but Jean François’ brother is against the match as well. Appalled by the girl’s ignorance, Jacques refuses to attend the wedding, predicting misery for both.

  The two lovers are engaged for years. By the time they finally marry, Jean François’ interest in her has waned and he marries her out of a sense of duty and gratitude. As he later writes in a letter, it would have been dishonorable to break off the engagement after Rosine’s long faithfulness to him, her defiance of her family, her steadfast rejection of more eligible suitors, etc.