The Linguist and the Emperor (8 page)

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 attempt.

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.

When the boy Champollion, tentatively touching the papyrus fragments with his clumsy, trembling fingers, grows into the linguist he will be, Prince Khaemwaset will emerge from his long sleep with a long, dark scream. Call it magic, call it existential despair, this shriek from 1230
BC
might have been painted in the twentieth century by the Norwegian artist Munch.

One of the 111 sons of Ramesses II, Khaemwaset was restlessly, reflectively drawn to the past. A brooding, royal scholar versed in the wisdom of his day, he haunted his ancestors’ ruined palaces and tombs. In a still extant inscription high on a pyramid’s side, he declares that it was he, Khaemwaset, who restored the crumbling pyramid of Unas, a pharaoh who reigned in 2375
BC,
a thousand years before.

And what does Khaemwaset discover in his researches? A chant carved on the walls of Unas’ forgotten tomb that celebrates a brutality long erased from Egyptian civilization: cannibalism.

Unas is the bull of heaven who rages in his heart!
Who lives on the being of every god,
Who eats their entrails.
Unas is he who eats men, feeds on gods
 .  .  .

—so goes the savage chant from the tomb of the fifth dynasty pharaoh Prince Khaemwaset restores.

Thus Khaemwaset, having delved into the past, becomes a figure of awe in the papyri which tell his story. He is said to have a knowledge that is more than human, to be a magician, a kind of demigod. While epic poems celebrate the conquests of his father, Ramesses II, his son Khaemwaset is known neither for subduing the Hittite legions nor slaying the fierce Meshwesh of the desert. No, his life finds its ideal in the search for a book.