Champollion

 And so Jacques throws himself into teaching his brother. He sets him riddles—

Why is the Chorus made up of old men in the first part of the Oresteia, why of slave women in the second, why of the Furies in the third? What is the secret?
He explains the subtle nature of language to him, how the dry rules of grammar can create a deep puzzle, choosing lines from the tragedies that turn in on themselves—

The living are killing the dead.
The dead are killing the living.

—in Greek a single phrase which expresses both meanings at once, the words themselves intertwining, as inseparable as the crimes of the past and present to which they refer.
More gifted than his hard-working brother, Jean François is able to remember long phrases and grasp difficult grammatical concepts after hearing them just once, astonishing Jacques with his facility. What his older brother has taken endless pains to learn, Jean François picks up with ease. He is a prodigy, Jacques quickly sees. When the older brother returns to Grenoble, he makes further sacrifices and finds the money for Jean François to be enrolled in school.
But if Jean François is an enfant prodigue, he is a temperamental one. He hates the discipline of his new school. He gets into fights with the other boys there every day. He becomes lazy and refuses to study anything. His head is filled with scenes from antiquity. Called upon to divide ten by two, to know the population of Figeac, to jump over a low hurdle, to spell his own name, he cannot.
Letters go back and forth between Grenoble and Figeac, between Jacques and Jean François, who appeals to his brother to let him live with him in Grenoble.
His brother answers, “If you want to come and live with me, you must study. An ignorant person can achieve nothing.”
The boy says he cannot study what does not interest him: It has no meaning for him. What he does care about, he devours, obsessed. He begins to see that the world was old even in the first centuries, with exhausted oracles and gods who have ceased to speak.
He becomes preoccupied with time, with first beginnings, an endlessly receding horizon. And before that? And before that? he asks his brother like a child—relentlessly—but also like a philosopher. And with these insistent questions, he begins to stumble upon his fate, the life’s work that will one day be his.
And before Christ?
The gods of Olympus, serene in beauty and power.
And before them?
Brutal monsters, the Titans—giants who howl with fear and rage as they devour their young.
And before that?
The earth and sky which for the Greeks always existed—but which the Hebrew God created from nothingness, from a single word, Yehee!, Let there be!, uttered in the darkness of endless night.
But still there is something before that, before the Greeks and Hebrews, something prior, preceding and half-forgotten like a dream or an hallucination: There is Egypt. Working his way back through the many moments in Egyptian time, first Arab, then Christian, Roman, Greek, Persian Egypt, Jean François arrives at the Egypt of the Pharaohs, dynasty after dynasty of rulers whose glory and splendor dazzled the world for millennia (the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms) before beginning to wane one thousand years before Christ. For when Athens was just a patch of rock-strewn ground and Jerusalem a crude Jebusite fortress; when Rome was a forest haunted by wolves, great pyramids and temples had already risen on the banks of the Nile.
The monuments, perfect in form and massive in size, are a measure of Egypt’s power. And the inscriptions with which they are covered are a measure of her wisdom: the writing which the Greeks call hieroglyphs, holy carvings, and which the Egyptians call “the words of the gods.” Fantastic pictures of walking jars and beasts with human bodies, a jumble of drawings: humpbacked vultures, squatting children, flowers and fruits, stars and palm trees and bald-headed priests, women giving birth, and male members spilling seed or urinating.
But what can they mean, these “words of the gods”? Their significance has been forgotten in the long course of time. “Speeches from the grave,” the hieroglyphs will be called even in Roman times when there are still a few old priests who understand them. “The language of the dead,” the Emperor Hadrian shrugs in the first century AD. But between “dying” and “dead” two centuries still remain and it is not until AD 394 that hieroglyphic writing, in use for more than three thousand years, is inscribed on a temple wall for the last time. And then silence descends: For fifteen hundred years the strange symbols stand as a puzzle and a challenge to all who see them. The cumulative experience and wisdom of a great civilization, they are a legacy—but only for the scholar wise enough to read them.
The young Jean François takes in the challenge, not yet seeing its connection to himself. This is the first moment of a great passion: The lover sees his beloved for the first time, but he does not yet understand his agitation. He sees the beloved and stands still in awe. There is no movement toward her, no declaration, no vow—no, the determined cry I will decipher the hieroglyphs! will come later. Jean François will not wait long, a few years, not more. When he is eleven he will take that step, too. For everything in his life takes place early, quickly, as if he knows that he has much to do in a short time. A bow that is tightly strung must be unstrung by midday will be one of his favorite quotations—from a pharaoh who also knew that he would not have many years to complete his desired tasks.
For the time being, though, it is enough that Jean François sees Egypt—and that he hears Egypt’s mysterious silence of fifteen hundred years. Aware of the challenge, he turns to other projects, work for which his immature skills are more suitable. His brother’s letters encourage him, exhort him not to be idle. He compiles a list of ancient peoples and then, still dwelling on origins, he compiles another list of famous dogs going back to the beginning of time. There is the dog of Odysseus and the dogs who devour the body of Jezebel and the “cynotherapists,” the dogs of the healing temples, the Asklepieions, who gently walk or lay among the afflicted . . .
Thusor of Hermione, a blind boy, had his eyes licked by one of the Temple dogs and departed cured  .  .  .
Thus, for Jean François the next years will be spent in study. In due course, his brother—finally!—will let him come to live with him in Grenoble although he never fulfills his brother’s requirements of “. . . first learning the simple, the necessary facts and practical skills—not the least of which is to write legibly!”
From the narrow winding streets of Figeac, Jean Fran-çois will be transported to a city two hundred miles away in which the snow-capped mountains can be seen on all sides. He will never see his mother again. She will die while he is learning Hebrew and Arabic and Chaldean, as well as Latin and Greek. For two years his brother will tutor him and then the next stage in his education will begin: the lycée.
Two contrary elements will be present from this time on. Two sign posts as contrary as east and west mark his way: the inevitable and the improbable.
For what could be more improbable than the fate awaiting him? What could be more far-fetched—who would have guessed it?—that a young boy living in a small French town would conceive a passion such as the one which consumes Jean François? Who could have known that the strange carvings covering the tombs and temples of Egypt—mere chicken scratchings to a philistine mind!—would make everything else pale in the life of Jean François?
But if it is a strange, a fantastic passion, it is also, like all great passions, an inevitable one. To understand this inevitability, though, to see how it came about, one must ignore external circumstances. The logic of Jean François’ development is an inner one. To understand, to be in sympathy with him, one must ask along with this young French boy—and with the same naïve wonder—And before that? And before that? And even before that? until one is standing in blinding light before a silent Egyptian tomb.

***
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 François 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 meals, 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  .  .  .
Within Jean François, mind has also joined with passion. And though he too is young, he is heavy with intellectual child.

***
(...)
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. (...)

IN FOURIER’S STUDY, Jean François wanders among the ancient objects covered with writing. He sees a fragment from a young man’s coffin, late, from the Roman period. His portrait has been painted, in encaustic: the pigments burned into the wood, on a gilded mask meant to cover his mummy. The youth’s black hair is a thick tangle of rough curls falling over his forehead, the barbarian style fashionable in the first century AD. His eyes are large and staring. Sparse beginnings of a beard cover his downy cheeks.
Next to him is another Roman-period coffin, a complete one of lime wood with a young girl portrayed on the mask.
Her cheekbones are high, her skin a warm pinkish apricot. Her white mantle and her jewelry—three gold snake bracelets—have been carelessly painted. From the left, light falls on her young face with its melancholy expression. Thick, red lips, a half frown. Large dark eyes look sadly to a point beyond the viewer. A garland of rosebuds encircle dark hair pulled back with a severity more in keeping with an older face.
Around the sides of the coffin and on the sides of the headrest under the girl’s neck, spells have been painted in brilliant colors, hieroglyphs invoking the gods of Egypt. Soon, in two centuries, they too will undergo the oblivion of death, their altars covered with sand or usurped by monks living in the desert.
Running his hand over the writing, Jean François asks the prefect if anyone knows what it means. Fourier shakes his head. A stone has been found in the course of reinforcing an old fort at el-Rashid (Rosetta)—an ancient decree written in both hieroglyphs and Greek. But the meaning of the hieroglyphs is still as obscure as the spells painted on the young girl’s coffin.
“Then I will be the one!” Jean François declares with a fervor Fourier will never forget. “I will decipher the hieroglyphs . . .”
***
Between that strangled, gluttonous cry and Alexander the Great’s pronouncement, To the strongest! lie two thousand years and a babble of languages echoing all the way back to the Greek carved on the Rosetta stone. This is the real prize of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, this paean of praise for Ptolemy V Ephiphanes “Who pardoned those who had been arrested and who were in prison, and every person who had committed whatever crime long ago; Who gave grain to the god-houses yearly; Who took care to send infantry and cavalry and ships to drive back those who came to fight against Egypt from the sea coast as well as from the Great Green . . .” This near-miraculous find will help open the way to the decipherment. When the British triumph over the pathetic, dwindling troops Napoleon has left to languish in Egypt, they demand the stone as part of the French surrender.
General Menou will not agree to this. Negotiating the surrender, he gives in to almost all their terms except the “theft” of the stone. Day after day, week after week, he uses all kinds of ruses and stratagems to retain it: hiding it, denying its existence, even insisting that it is his “personal property.” When he finally fails, he weeps openly as he hands it over. The French soldiers bitterly curse and swear at the victors carting it away. At every moment, a British officer reports, he fears that they will be attacked.
This is not the end of the matter: The inscriptions on the stone have been copied. Its gray surface has been covered with boot black (for lack of printer’s ink) and pressed onto sheets of paper: the emperor’s gift to the linguist.
The British may have the stone. On the side of it they arrogantly chisel the date and the fact of their victory. Theirs, however, is a victory that will be snatched away. This is the linguist’s gift to the emperor: for when twenty-three years later, after twenty-three years of unremitting toil, Champollion finally succeeds in its decipherment, he will reclaim its glory for France.
True, by then it is a gift to a dead man, to an emperor who had perished on a small, barren island; to an ex-general whose body is laid naked on a billiard table and eviscerated as a hurried autopsy is performed.
Like the copies made of the stone, a death mask is made of the Emperor’s face: a plaster impression of his features. That famous silhouette—through the memories and ideals it conjures—will continue to command.
***
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.
***
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. ... 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.
***
A CARETAKER KNOCKS on the door but is sent away. Since coming to Turin, 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?
***
THE DECIPHERMENT BEGINS with a handful of “letters” thrown down on a page of Jean Francois’ notebook—Ptolemaios, the Greek form of Ptolemy, next to the eight hieroglyphs encircled in the cartouche on the Rosetta stone: if the cartouche is encircling a foreign name, it stands to reason that these eight letters must spell Ptolemy:
Not only Champollion but Young had been working on the problem of the foreign names—or rather, the foreign “name” on the Rosetta stone, for there was only one of them, “Ptolemy.”
Of the eight letters, Young got five of them right, but more important than conjecturing the value of a letter more or a letter less was Champollion’s overall approach.
At this point, both men assume that only the names of foreign kings would have to be written with an alphabet in Egyptian. How else but phonetically could Ptolemy or Berenike or Xerxes or Darius, etc., be recorded?
The principle for indicating such sounds might be like that of a “rebus,” Jean François conjectured. It would be as if when writing the English word “seer” one used a picture of the sea plus an “ear.” Or as if “seersucker” was jotted down—as in a seersucker suit—by joining a bearded sage to a fool scratching his head—a sucker—and so on, using fertile, inventive combinations for every contingency.
Or, Champollion also opined, these special cases where phonetic writing was required might use the “acrophonic” principle—a “rabbit” for the letter “r,” a door for the letter “d,” etc.; the initial sounds of a word being indicated by its picture.
Apart from these foreign names, though, the pure hieroglyphs “depict the ideas and not the sounds of the language . . .” as Champollion puts it.
This far, there is general agreement. But Egyptian script is another matter. The script had been thought to be a different form of writing from the “pure” hieroglyphs, and what’s more an alphabetic or phonetic one.
On the Rosetta stone, the Egyptian section made use of both hieroglyphs and “demotic” script, the latest and simplest form of cursive Egyptian. And there are also two other Egyptian scripts (not used on the Stone): the so-called “hieratic” or priestly script; and linear hieroglyphs, both simplifications of the detailed carvings and paintings on tombs and monuments. For example, oldman in its four forms:
Now while Young never learned to distinguish between “demotic” and “hieratic” and probably never even realized that linear hieroglyphs existed, Champollion immersed himself in the scripts obsessively. Going back and forth between them, he finally came to realize that all four forms of writing operated on the same principle. Therefore, the scripts—like the pure hieroglyphs—could not be phonetic since the pure hieroglyphs were not. They were not an alphabet.
Champollion became so expert in recognizing the correspondences between the scripts, that he would transcribe words, whose meaning he still did not know, back and forth from cursive to hieroglyph and from hieroglyph to cursive, until, like Coptic, it became second nature to him.
This fluency in the scripts—along with his deep knowledge of Coptic—gets him over his next and perhaps most formidable hurdle. But before he can take that leap, first there is a vital piece of the puzzle which Fate or Chance must supply.
For up until this point, the eight letter/hieroglyphs which have been deciphered from the name of Ptolemy are only guesses or conjectures. In order to proceed according to sound linguistic principles, Champollion needs to cross-check them against a second ancient source. And like the Rosetta stone, this second source—whatever it might be—must contain a known, foreign royal name other than Ptolemy—yet containing some of the same letters.
Even as Jean François wrestles with this problem, this second ancient source—a gift of the gods—has finally, after endless difficulties and delays lasting more than a decade, reached England.
***
LATER, CHAMPOLLION WILL write of the hieroglyphs: “It is a complex system, a writing that is pictorial, symbolic and phonetic at one and the same time, in a single text, a single phrase and even in a single word. Each of these types of character aids in the notation of ideas by different means: It is a code.”
As he refines his understanding, he identifies many different aspects of the writing. “Determinatives”—for example, non-phonetic indicators as to what order of being a word belonged. So that a hieroglyph to which a small bird was added (a determinative) took on a negative or evil or sickly connation; whereas that same hieroglyph with a small flag would indicate divinity. A wavy line was the determinative for liquid; a phallus emitting liquid, procreation; a forearm with a stick, force—and so on.
Champollion will work with hapax legomena (words connected to a specific time or subject, such as our “Watergate”). He toils over foreign words, Aramaic or Hebrew, embedded in Egyptian. He suffers the agonies of the damned deciphering ancient classics which only existed in the careless practice copies of schoolboys.
In defense of his decipherment, he will travel to Egypt and find hundreds upon hundreds of examples of writing to prove his discovery—which, like every great discovery, must go against tenaciously held ideas. Like Columbus, who was forced to controvert known fact, Champollion rejects the givens of the linguistic world, and presents a far-fetched theory of an ancient language endlessly complicated and rich and subtle: “visual poetry,” he will call it, an interweaving of thought and image, of writing and sound.
But first—before he does any of this—he must run through the streets of Paris to tell his brother. And then he lies in a faint, in a coma. For eight days, he remains in a drugged dream.
After all, how can he bear it? It’s a wonder it doesn’t kill him! How can anyone bear such joy?
***
HONORS ARE BESTOWED upon Champollion from all sides. The pope, the French king, learned societies, universities, all extol his achievement. But Champollion views such praise only as a means to an end. Having the ear of the world, he can plead for more care in the excavation of the ancient sites of Egypt. Funds are made available for an Egyptian wing in the Louvre. A chair of Egyptology is established in the University of Paris.
There is still much work to be done, many mysteries of the ancient language to be unraveled. Yet with Champollion’s decipherment, knowledge of our shared past is extended to include the long-silent millennia before Christ.

CHAMPOLLION RETURNS TO France from his researches in Egypt in the dead of winter. Perhaps with Drovetti’s connivance, his boat is made to remain in quarantine outside of Marseille an extraordinary forty-two days. Not longer after, Champollion, at the height of his powers, dies at forty years of age.
His brother spends the next three decades editing and posthumously publishing his work.

The LINGUIST and the EMPEROR
NAPOLEON and CHAMPOLLION’S

QUEST to DECIPHER the ROSETTA STONE
Daniel Meyerson