The Linguist and the Emperor (18 page)

The great question is whether the squares will hold in the face of the violent Mameluke charges.

“So furious was the Mameluke onslaught,” the military historian, Harold, observes, “that the mortally wounded horses were carried by their sheer momentum inside the French ranks where they were finished off with bayonets and rifle butts . . . The least break in discipline [by the French] hundreds of miles south in this foreign country would have meant certain annihilation.”

Again and again, the Mamelukes charge, daring and courageous in their desperation.

With the cries of the dying in their ears, with the booming of the guns and the exploding shells drowning out the commands of their officers and even the signals of the trumpets and drums, the Frenchmen stand fast.

If the strain on the French soldiers is terrible, the slaughter of the Mamelukes is equally merciless. Thousands fall in the first hour of the engagement alone, their bejeweled turbans and splendid swords glittering in the sun.

The French restraint is so complete that not even the rich booty tempts them from their squares.

Charge after charge fails until the Mameluke horsemen must leap over mounds of the dead. The “rabble” rounded up from Cairo and the hapless farmers, the
fellahin
with their clubs—also pressed into service—try to clear a path for the mounted warriors, but it is impossible.

As the day wears on, a mere remnant remains of the thirty thousand who at dawn had swaggered forth to war. It becomes obvious to the Mamelukes that the shabby-looking foreigners in their unglorious squares have cold-bloodedly won.

Dazed and broken, the survivors, Murad bey among them, begin to flee. They try to cross the Nile and return to Cairo from behind whose walls they hope to mount a defense.

Napoleon orders his men to pursue and the retreat becomes a massacre during which the death of the Mameluke leader Murad goes almost unnoticed. Desperate men crowd onto river boats that sink under their weight. Those who try to ford the river on horseback are easily picked off by the Frenchmen on shore.

One Frenchman holds back from the fray, sitting astride a camel and watching. He makes remarks to his young aide-de-campe, Josephine’s son, speaking to him rapidly and harshly and with an Italian accent (for General Bonaparte is, after all is said and done, a Frenchman
by courtesy
).

Already, he is making plans for the occupation of Cairo, dictating notes about sanitary measures to prevent the plague; ways to light the dark city at night; and—almost as imperturbable as the Sphinx in whose presence the historic battle has been fought—he even has the sangfroid to consider, as the last of the Mamelukes either flee or drown, whether it will be feasible to build windmills along the banks of the Nile.

As an ironic postscript to the Battle of the Pyramids, it must be recorded that a solitary windmill
is
built. It will end up serving a far different purpose from the one Napoleon envisions. For in one of those strange genealogies of history, it will stand useless and futile at the outskirts of Cairo until the 1950s when the Coptic patriarch, forced out of his monastery by the socialist Nasser, takes up residence here.

From an upper chamber, the holy man blesses the faithful who flock to the windmill from all over Egypt. Beneath its unmoving arms, he chants prayers to the dog-headed saints who have replaced the dog-headed gods of Egypt. He takes in an army of beggars and lepers and tends to their needs, teaching, by example, a lesson Napoleon would have scorned: that the meek will inherit the earth. Or if not the earth, at least a ruin in a land that does not lack for ruins. For by the 1950s that is all that remains: the ruins of a windmill built by a general who is practical, ruthless, brilliant, and as mad as Don Quixote. A general who, for all his mistakes—and Egypt will be one of them—will be hailed as emperor.

But even as Napoleon proceeds toward Cairo, even as he sketches plans for windmills and street lamps, Admiral Nelson is circling back to destroy the entire French fleet moored off Alexandria. Cutting off all means of supply to France’s army, Nelson thus ensures that the French surrender in Egypt will only be a matter of time.

“
ASK ME FOR
an image of civilization,” wrote the philosopher Seneca, “and I will give you the sack of a great city.” This is what all Cairo fears as news of the disaster spreads: There is no one left to defend it.

Murad bey is dead and Ibrahim bey has headed south with his followers. Even the foreign soldiers of fortune—Greeks and Italians mostly—are gone, taking with them the sultan’s emissary along with his pleasure boat. They disappear downriver where the foreign soldiers and the pasha and his troupe of singers and musicians and dancing girls are never heard from again.

Whoever is able to, flees. Many are cut down or enslaved by the Bedouins who await them in the desert. The rich and the poor, the young and the old, the healthy and the infirm all panic. Young boys lead blind Koran-reciters. Black eunuchs lead veiled harem-women along the way. Donkey carts filled with European treasures are dragged behind them: porcelain and mirrors and harps; and four-poster beds on which have been painted naked nymphs and obscene, lustful satyrs; and trompe-l’oeil cupids riding lions who roar with delight.

Whirling dervishes dance in the streets while storehouses are looted and prisons are emptied and mosques call the faithful to prayer.

THE FALL OF
Cairo makes the French masters of Egypt. Now Bonaparte’s main conquest will be himself. He will try to forget Josephine and console himself with others, to recover from his loss and heal his wounded pride.

Of course he has responsibilities and decisions and duties. He is just as pressed as before. But though events continue to unfold with as much drama and intensity as before, the pattern remains the same.

A full-scale rebellion in Cairo, for example, is put down with military severity: a cruelty surpassing even that of the Mamelukes which he had so deplored. There is a side campaign into Palestine, torturous and difficult from its beginning to its plague-ridden end.

But what does Napoleon think of as he enters the Tivoli: the theater and dance hall the French have created in Cairo for their pleasure?

Is it the demonically cunning Djezzar who had defeated him at Acre with the trick of a second wall? The first gave way and when the French poured through the breach, they were slaughtered in the enclosure.

Or does he recall the unaccountable rebellion of the Egyptians (whom he has treated so well, he exclaims)?

It is more likely that Napoleon muses over the woman at his side, the beautiful blond Pauline Fourès, the young wife of an artillery lieutenant. A stowaway who came to Egypt to be with her husband, she is nevertheless in her element with the general. He only turns to her after his disappointment in a series of dusky beauties, first local Egyptian girls (whose “imperfections” offend him); and then Abyssinian slaves with whom he tries to forget.

Still and all, women light or dark do not console him. He is bitter.

When General Bonaparte returns from Egypt, he locks himself in his room, giving strict instructions that Josephine not be allowed in the house.

Surprised by his sudden appearance in France, she is still on her way back to Paris. However, when she arrives, she brushes aside the servants, who are all on her side, and weeps all night before her husband’s locked door. By morning, he has capitulated and forgiven her betrayal.

It is a well-known story. Josephine confides it to her close friends. Servants listen to everything behind their doors. Napoleon himself later recounts it to a courtier after everything is over—war and passion and glory—and he is living on the island of his exile. He adds with a rueful smile that he had inscribed
To Destiny
on the wedding brooch he gave her, not
To Love
 .  .  .

For all his ruefulness, it is Josephine’s name that is on his lips during his death agonies. It is “Josephine, divine Josephine” he calls for and not “the brood mare,” as he refers to the Austrian archduchess he later marries, obsessed with founding a dynasty.

But to call for your beloved on a remote volcanic island during convulsions is one thing. To pay her bills when you are in a state of perfect health is another. For during her husband’s absence in Egypt, the “divine” Josephine has been busy with more than romantic infidelities. She has spent some 1.5 million francs for dresses, jewels, and furnishings. She decides to keep this matter from Napoleon, having one of her friends in the government pay it with funds put aside for medical supplies for the army.

This comes to light, however—as financial subterfuges have a way of doing sooner or later (in this case, it is sooner)—during Bonaparte’s second conquest of Italy. The “fools” at the Directory had lost Italy while he was away in Egypt, and now he must conquer it again. There are shortages of bandages and medicine and no hospital tents to ease the agonies of the dying. Napoleon is furious when he discovers why.

Denon, who continues to follow Napoleon after Egypt, helps calm him and shrug off the matter. The artist is grateful to Josephine, she has been a patroness of sorts, convincing the reluctant Napoleon to take Denon along on the Egyptian campaign and in general trying to help further the artist’s career.

But it is not only a question of Denon’s gratitude. His natural sympathy is in any case with Josephine, since his perspective is ancien régime. His milieu is the
bal des prostitués
where nobility mingle with the deliciously low, where all the whores of Paris, male and female, are guests of honor. What does a lover matter? What do two? And as for Josephine’s extravagance, he argues, what could be more natural? Compared to that of others he has known, Madame Pompadour and Mme. du Barry and Marie Antoinette, it is nothing.

The artist proves a good advocate for her with the angry, wounded Napoleon, the older man relating a thousand and one tales of the courts where in his heyday he had been an intimate—those of Louis XV and Louis XVI, and of Catherine the Great and of Napoleon’s fellow military genius and hero, Frederick the Great.

Denon holds up Frederick, completely indifferent to bourgeois morality, as a model. Told during a tour of inspection why a soldier was in chains—bestiality with a horse—Frederick’s famous reply was: Fools! Put him in the cavalry! Denon also points to a Bourbon prince as an example of rational sangfroid. Finding his wife in bed with her lover, the royal merely turned away and murmured,
What, monsieur! Without being obliged?
Napoleon, however, is still too much the romantic—and the Italian—to take such matters lightly.

His ideal is a different sort completely. Earlier, when the aggressive, intellectual, and large-bosomed Madame de Staël had stalked him at one of Tallyrand’s salons, gazing at him intently and asking:
Who do you consider the perfect woman, general?
Napoleon had replied without a pause:
My wife
 .  .  .

The intellectual and politically astute de Staël does not attract him. He loves the faithless Josephine with a tempestuous, disappointed, angry love, though his ideal is something else again! It is the malleable and insipid Austrian archduchess he later marries, dutiful and docile and little more than a child. It is his innocent, wide-eyed Polish mistress, also little more than a girl.

It is an eternal “moment” he is smitten with: the moment when the frightened bride weeps in the (Aldobrandini)
Wedding:
an ancient fresco he becomes obsessed with bringing back to France, though Pius VII somehow manages to keep it in Rome.

In the painting, a curly-headed youth—the bridegroom’s messenger?—leans against a wall, waiting as a sensual Venus, half-nude, sits next to the bride, comforting her, perhaps informing her of what is soon to be.

Josephine is not the bride of the ancient wedding. Still, she is able to hurt Napoleon as no one else can, to draw on deeply buried feelings in him.

After Egypt, he learns to love her again and to forgive her, reclaiming a part of himself which he, emperor and “Man of Destiny,” is otherwise unable to acknowledge—his weakness, his humanity.

Chapter Twelve

The Divine Crossword Puzzle

DURING THE REIGN
of the “inglorious” Louis XVIII, nothing is possible anymore, everything is over . . . such is the feeling, the spiritual malaise, which settles over France, over Europe.

While on a hot summer’s afternoon in Egypt:

The French consul in Egypt, Bernadino Drovetti, an Italian by birth, sits in his wooden-frame house in Alexandria conducting a hearing, a kind of preliminary investigation. The surroundings are informal: the consul’s small menagerie runs wild in the garden—ostriches and baboons and a giraffe (brought up from the Sudan by the naturalist St. Hilaire and soon to become a celebrity in France as Europe’s first giraffe). Those who cannot crowd into the house listen to the proceedings from the porch that surrounds the unimposing building, for this is a much-talked-about case.

The atmosphere is somber since, for all the informality of the surroundings, Drovetti’s decision is binding and the case is one of life and death.

Strictly speaking, the consul is an unlikely man to serve as judge. Though he has studied law in his youth and therefore by default is better qualified to preside than the other foreign consuls, still he himself is, if rumors are to be believed, as criminal as the accused. This would be a certain Dr. Duzcap, an Italian who had run away from Istanbul with the wife of a wealthy Armenian banker and then possibly murdered her for her jewels.

While Drovetti, with his large mustache and terrible flashing eyes, judges Duzcap, trying to disentangle rumor from fact, the European community also judges the judge—in whispers, naturally, and with innuendos. Too powerful to confront openly, he is said to be involved in every kind of immoral scheme.

A dealer in antiquities, he is a man who manages to acquire great collections and then to sell them for a fortune—statues, papyri, jewelry. The collection in Turin which Champollion studies for months had been sold to the prince of Savoy by Drovetti, an immensely valuable collection like others the consul has offered for sale.

He will stop at nothing to get the pieces he wants, so it is said. His methods are deplorable. If twenty ancient alabaster vases are found in a tomb, he will see to it that half are smashed to bring up their price. If an obelisk catches his eye, he will have it hurled down and its pyramidion (top portion) broken off to make it easier to dispose of, etc.

Countless such stories circulate about him, along with rumors of his slave dealings: girls he brings from Ethiopia and eunuchs from the Sudan—young men captured from desert tribes and castrated by Coptic priests. More than half die while the survivors are sent to tend harems in Cairo.

But if Drovetti has many sins on his head, he remains a hero of sorts. Statues of him are raised in his native Italy, acknowledging the service he has performed in gathering together the magnificent works of Egyptian art and astonishingly beautiful papyri for Europe.

If he is despoiling Egypt, well, his admirers would say, consider the destruction visited on the antiquities by the Egyptians themselves. Indeed, Mohammed Ali, who rules Egypt after the French are forced out, desires to pull down the pyramids themselves in order to use their huge stones for the dams and canals he is building. He is only dissuaded by the difficulty he encounters in the attempt.

Drovetti has Mohammed Ali’s ear: Will the statues and papyri bring a high price? Will they win the good will of European nations? The pasha is only too ready to dispose of them, just as a century earlier tons of pulverized mummies were shipped to Europe either as fertilizer or as a medicine for every ailment from gout to impotence.

From Turin, Champollion will write to Drovetti, asking about the provenance of various antiquities, not knowing that the place of origin has been purposely obscured to conceal the brigandage by which they were obtained.

While polite in his response to the awkward questions, Drovetti’s civility masks a deep malice. Working behind the scenes, through a network of political friends, the consul will try to prevent Champollion’s visit to Egypt.

When Champollion, circumventing him, finally does arrive in Egypt, Drovetti will try to prevent him from traveling down the Nile, creating all kinds of obstacles to keep him under his eye in Alexandria. Wherever Champollion goes, he is in the way. Champollion is forever stumbling into one or another of the “turfs” into which Egypt has been divided by the principal collectors: Drovetti; Henry Salt, the British consul; the German consul—harsh, greedy men and their Egyptian accomplices who conduct “business” with duplicity and violence.

“. . . you will be pleased to hear of the discovery I made of a bilingual stone among Drovetti’s things,” Champollion’s rival, Young, writes during a visit to Italy, “which promises to be invaluable.”

Young engages an artist to copy the inscriptions on the object, but Drovetti denies him permission: “Drovetti’s cupidity seems to have been roused . . . and he has given me to understand, that nothing should induce him to separate it from the remainder of his . . . collection, of which he thinks it so well calculated to enhance the price. He refuses to allow any kind of copy of it to be taken.”

Thus the possibility of a great advance in the knowledge of the human past is turned into a familiar object of sordid barter: filthy lucre. As are moving and intimate images from the far distant past: a delicate carving of a queen playing on her game board with the god of Eternity . . . An inscription recalling an expedition to the eastern desert to quarry stone in which a gazelle giving birth is chanced upon and immediately sacrificed, together with her young, to the gods . . . The tale of Snefru, a pyramid-building pharaoh suffering from ennui five thousand years ago, asking his harem to become “sailors” and dressed in nothing but fish nets to row him about the sacred lake:

. . . a pleasure though I found none. And Zazamonkh said: “If Your Majesty would take the beauties of the palace to the lake of the Great House . . . Then will the heart of your majesty be made joyous as they row to and fro . . . Then will happiness enter your heart . . .”

The rapacious foreign consuls—Drovetti foremost among them!—with their corrupt agents, feverish with greed, scavenge among the ruins—oblivious to death by plague or massacre in the lawless countryside, obsessed with gain as they gather their great collections: sphinxes and gods and demons, the sculptures which have lain under the sand for an eternity, the powerful, brooding faces of kings which the modern world will gaze upon with awe.

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,
old
man
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.

Granada, Spain. 1809.

WILLIAM BANKES
was a member of parliament and lord of Kingston Lacy, one of the great landed estates in nineteenth-century England. A nobleman who usually took his place among statesmen and generals and royalty, on this hot July day in 1809, he could be seen lolling in the shady hills above Granada with a band of Gypsies.

He had not accompanied Wellington to fight the French in Portugal and Spain. Rather, he had come along to watch his countrymen fight the French, led by Napoleon’s brother Joseph whom the Emperor has put in charge here. As the campaign drags on, Bankes, aesthete and misfit, becomes bored and wanders off to consort with thieves and Gypsies in the south. For a while he gives himself up to all-night revelries and feasts of miscellaneous scraps including a “sublime ragout of cat,” as he writes his friend, Lord Byron, “receipt [recipe] as follows . . .”