Daniel Meyerson - The Linguist and the Emperor: Napoleon and Champollion’s Quest to Decipher the Rosetta Stone

The LINGUIST and
the EMPEROR

NAPOLEON and CHAMPOLLIONS
QUEST to DECIPHER the
ROSETTA STONE

Daniel Meyerson

Contents

Dedicated to:

Mollie Snitovsky, fantast, painter, and poet, who taught me that it is part of the probable that the improbable will occur.

And

Nancy Miller, Wildes Critic as Artistde vrai touche. For entering so completely (and brilliantly) into the world of this book.

And

the forty-two Egyptian gods of the dead (among whom rages my agent, Noah Lukeman).

Acknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks to:

Rosalie Kaufman, whose friendship I value and without whose New York hospitality this book would not have been written.

Mosin Rashidi, connoisseur, for his extraordinary Egyptian hospitality and for patiently answering endless questions.

Dan Smetanka, who looked at those first sketchy pages and believed. For his encouragement and enthusiasm over months which stretched into years.

Mary Gow of Brooklyn Museums Wilburforce Egyptian Library: the woman who knows too much.

Sylvia Levy of Heres a Book Store! for credit, encouragement, and much kindness.

Leah: Maa-hrw, true of voice.

Dr. Shoshannahfor friendship.

Ahnkeroot, Connie Skedgell, and Prof. Maura Spiegalfor careful reads and strong responses.

Bubi Scholz, European Master, Middle Weight, 1964, for inspiration.

Gene Mydlowski and Beck Stvan of Ballantine Books for the knockout cover!

Vivian Heller, marvelous fellow writer.

Deirdre Lanning for her endless patience and help.

Prelude

IN HIS HOVEL, the linguist dreams of the emperor, of the one who commands with a wave of his hand. He dreams of power and the freedom it confers.

On his throne, the emperor dreams of the linguist, of the one who understands. He dreams of knowledge and the meaning it confers.

And who are they, this improbable pair?

Does it matter? They are eternal types who have always existed and who always will.

Call the emperor Alexander the Great if you like. Young, handsome, in the first flush of power, he is just grown out of boyhood and already master of Greece. Surrounded by his followers, he seeks out Diogenes. He rides to the hills above Athens, sees the bald old philosopher lying naked on the ground and greets him:

I am Alexander.

I am Diogenes, the dog.

The dog?

I bark at the greedy and bite stupid louts.

A murmur goes through the crowd of soldiers and hangers-on, but Alexander continues, unfazed: Ask what you will of me! Whatever you request is yours.

This is what you can do for me, the old man shouts: Get out of my light!

And Alexander, thus rebuked, turns away and says with awe: If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes!

His soldiers are scandalized. His admiration for such figures is something they will never understand. Rough, brave men, they deride the scholars Alexander takes with him everywhere. What great deeds have these parasites performed, what battles have they fought to be so honored? When Alexander conquers Egypt, he sets them the futile task of unraveling its mysteries, inscriptions written in signs half-forgotten even then. And they are with him again in Babylon, these puny-armed men with their bald pates, and in the east when the young hero weeps because there are no more worlds to conquer. It is a grief his scholars will never know, for their realm is limitless, as infinite as thought.

Grudgingly, the warriors protect these camp followers, these hangers-on who serve no discernible purpose. But the emperor commands it and it is not for them to complain.

Not then, and not some two thousand years later when another emperor called Napoleon sets out for Egypt with 167 scholars, the finest minds of France, stowed away on his warships. Poets, mathematicians, and architects, they sling their hammocks among crates of dry biscuit and rows of mounted guns.

Though they will accomplish much in Egypt, meticulously sketching and measuring and recording, the scholar who will make the greatest use of all this knowledge is not among them.

He is still a child.

It is early in the storyYear VII by the calendar of the revolutionaries which dates not from the birth of a Savior but from the triumph of freedom and the guillotine. It is the month of Floreal, Flowers, the name these stern men have given to May not for sentimental reasonswhat are spring and love to them?but rather to invoke Nature, the goddess of their pitiless cause.

Floreal Year 7: May 1798. Not yet a linguist, Champollion is only a boy who is punished for being moody and disobedient. And the emperor is not yet emperor, but only a certain General Bonaparte on his way to conquer Egypt for the glory of France.

They are both still young but what they will achieve is as palpable to them as a chill running down their spines or the scent of the flowers of that revolutionary spring.

I felt the earth spin away from me as if I were flying in the sky! Bonaparte declares at his first taste of battle. In ecstasy, he stands amid the dying and the dead, transfixed by a premonition of what the future holds.

And like Napoleon, Champollion anticipates, intuits his fate. I will decipher the hieroglyphs! the eleven-year-old cries at his first sight of the mysterious writing, running his hand over the coffin of a young girl who had died thousands of years before.

For both linguist and emperor, it is the beginning. They can feel the future rushing to them; the glory that will be theirs. But with this glory will be great suffering, great disillusion, and great despair. It is early but they will never again be as happy as they are now, standing at the threshold of the future and peering through the mysterious door.

PART
I

Chapter One

Ab Ovo
From the Egg

FIGEAC. 1792. At the height of that violent phenomenon known as the Great Fear, violent bands roam the French countryside. Taking advantage of the disorder, they steal what they can, destroying whatever comes in their path like a force of nature. They set fire to humble farms as well as to great Chateaux, murdering, raping, choosing their victims from poor and rich alike. In a once-idyllic town in the south of France, the vineyards and fields are set ablaze and its Benedictine monastery is ransacked by a mob that has battered down its great bronze doors. Monks are tortured to make them reveal the hiding place of rumored treasurewhile the pillagers ignore the finest prize: the books of the monasterys great library.

The Abb, a renowned scholar, has thrown some of the rarest volumes into a sack. One of them is a huge gilded work published during the Renaissance but written much earlier, in the fourth century AD: Horapollos Hieroglyphs, the only ancient work devoted to the mystery of Egyptian writing. The Abb, a vigorous monk in his sixties, is determined to escape not only with his life, but with some of the treasures from this silent place of study. As the mob breaks into the fortresslike building, the holy man, together with a novice, makes his way through secret tunnels beneath the monastery. He emerges into the night with a plan. It is to the house of Champollion, the bookseller, that the monk flees. Champollion will prize his learning, the Abb fervently hopes. And yes, Champollion takes the refugee in at the risk of his life and so acquires a tutor for his older son.