The Linguist and the Emperor (3 page)

From his first campaign to his last, all he sees is glory: in Italy, where he orders that all the boys and men in a village be shot to discourage guerrilla fighting; in Egypt, where his soldiers go mad from thirst, chasing after mirages in the desert and killing themselves; in the Holy Land, where the ravages of the plague force him, out of mercy, to poison his own men; during the long Russian retreat where it is common to see starving men throw themselves on a fallen horse and devour its flank and liver while the animal is still alive.

And even when he
is
shaken, he forces himself to overcome his weakness. Looking over a battlefield where thousands lie dying and dead, he turns away and murmurs, “The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet,”—the words of a Roman emperor he is pretending to be. The next moment he will be some other Roman or Greek, another figure whose words, whose stance, he has made his own. When he becomes emperor, he will stride through the palace with a swaying gait after hearing that Louis XVI walked in this manner. Even his physical maladies are viewed by him as “world-historical”: Is it Nature that has afflicted him with epilepsy or is he unconsciously mimicking that other great epileptic, Julius Caesar?

Is Napoleon a man afflicted with disease or one suffering from a superabundance of life and imagination and nervous energy? A revolutionary or an autocrat? Is he a Frenchman—when his troops grumble at the hardships in Egypt, he curses the French,
a nation that makes love with its mouth and fights with its feet—
or an Italian?

When alone, this revolutionary emperor, this Italian creator of French glory, does he himself know who he is?

Chapter Two

The Awakening

JEAN FRANÇOIS DISCOVERS
who he is by reading.

His brother Jacques begins to teach him on visits home: first the alphabet, then everything. To begin with, he reads stories of the games on Olympus, of wrestling and discus throwing and racing. Some passages Jacques reads to the unathletic and uncoordinated boy include tales of incredible strength:

Polydamas strangled a lion with his bare hands, a feat depicted on his statue at Olympia. He also stopped a chariot dead in its tracks, seizing hold of it as it sped past him.

First he recites in Greek, letting Jean François hear the music of the language before Jacques translates. He translates not only their language, but the stories’ spirit—not a physical, but a metaphysical spirit.

What are they striving for, these poised and beautiful athletes?

Victory!

But what is Victory?

It is the holy mingling of god and man.

Jacques teaches Jean François to hear the echoes of an ancient world, showing him what, at Olympus, is at stake.

Glaukos was a farmer. One day the ploughshare came away from the plough and his father saw him hammering it back with his bare fist. Impressed, the old man decided to take him to the next Olympic games. This he did but Glaukos was inexperienced and took many blows in the early bouts. When he came to his last opponent, he was so badly wounded that everybody thought he would have to give up. But his father called: “My son! Remember the ploughshare!” Whereupon Glaukos hit his opponent so hard that the contest was ended there and then.

The two brothers make a strange picture: sitting on the banks of the fetid canal that runs by the local tannery, walking through the winding streets of Figeac or in the meadows beyond the town, both lost in a dream.

On the road to sacred Olympia, there is a rocky mountain with high cliffs. It is a law that any woman discovered at the Olympic games will be thrown from this mountain. Kallipateira, though, the daughter of a famous boxer whose father and husband were both dead, disguised herself as a trainer and brought her son Pisirodos to Olympia to compete in the games. He won, and forgetting herself, his mother joyously leapt over the barrier, revealing herself to be a woman. But the authorities forgave her, passing a law that trainers, like athletes, must be naked.

Jean François becomes alive to language, discovering how a single word can throw a veil over reality—

Alcibiades, as a desperate measure to avoid being thrown in the games, bit his opponent’s hand.

He released his grip, shouting: “You bite like a dog, Alcibiades!”

“No!” Alcibiades answered, “like a lion.”

Other texts follow the Olympic ones—not only in Greek, but in Hebrew and Latin as well: funeral dirges and raucous jokes, curses, love songs, and beautiful prayers. Sometimes the passages are too hard for Jean François. Other ideas he understands despite his youth.

These are the great events in his life. Each passage is as much of a turning point for Jean François as Napoleon’s early battles were revelations for him. Young Champollion’s events are inward, not part of the great clamor and noise of the world. They take the boy away from the world.

He starts to write, copying many sayings in his notebooks. The pages are covered with laborious print, the round letters of a boy whose immature hand contrasts strangely with the meaning of the wide-ranging passages . . .

Watching a storm destroy his fleet, the Persian king Xerxes ordered that his soldiers whip the ocean.

It is an astonishing scene: the raging king at the edge of the dark water, the terrified soldiers whipping the high waves, the drowned sailors and shattered ships washing ashore. Jean François marvels at the strangeness of the world, its madness-in-meaning and meaning-in-madness! How far away is Xerxes and his rage from the narrow streets of Figeac; distant not only in time and place and feeling but in sound. Jean François first hears the story in Greek, beautiful inflections written in mysterious letters which only his brother can understand, or so it seems to him.

But other passages capture Jean François’ imagination as well, moments as ephemeral as a spider’s web—

The sound of Roman laughter—

Who wants to make some ready money?

I’d be happy to.

Good, all you have to do is be crucified in my place!

A sudden realization, uttered in the midst of suffering—

We who see only one part of things, for us evil is evil. But to God who understands all, evil is good.

An insult hurled at a man who has long since returned to dust—

Your dirty legs are like a slave’s.

Ancient epitaphs and wills and funeral orations, which, unlike their solemn modern counterparts, laugh at human frailty and greed—

All beneficiaries of my will inherit under this proviso: that they cut my body in pieces and eat it with the townspeople watching.

And all kinds of stories, portraits of lives that become more real for Jean François than the one he is living.

The desperate courage of a slave boy who dares to plead before the ruler of the world:

The Emperor Augustus was dining with Vedius Pollio. One of the slave boys broke a crystal dish and Vedius ordered him to be thrown to the great lampreys in his fish pond. The boy tore himself away and fell at the Emperor’s feet to ask him this only—that he should die some other way and not be fed to the fish. The indignant Emperor ordered the slave to be freed, that all Vedius’ crystal dishes be smashed, and that the fish pond be filled up . . .

And miraculous stories—Zeus descending in a shower of gold and Venus rising from the sea. Hebrew miracles as well, stories told in a language as different from Greek, and reflecting a consciousness as far from the Olympian spirit as it is possible to be; tales of lepers raised from their dung heap to silken tents and goblets of gold—

Four lepers sat outside the besieged city and said to one another: “Why should we wait here until we die? If we say: Let us enter the city, the famine is in the city, and we will die there. If we remain here, we will also die. Come and let us go over to the Aramean camp. If they spare our lives, we will live. And if they kill us, we will simply die.” But when they came to the Aramean camp, behold not a man was there . . . in great confusion and fear which the Lord had put in their breasts, the Arameans had fled at the sound of a driven leaf. They entered a tent, ate and drank, and took from there silver, gold, and clothing, and went and hid them. Then they returned and entered another tent, took from there also and went and hid them . . . Then they said: “We are not doing right. This day is a day of good tidings. Come, let us go and tell the king’s household . . .”

And along with such stories as these, Jacques, who teaches his brother with opposing texts, also gives Jean François Roman “miracles” that mock all virtue, all belief:

. . . the governor of Ephesus sentenced a thief to be crucified . . . Night came and a soldier remained to prevent his relatives from taking down the body. Now as the soldier stood guard, he noticed a light shining in the caves nearby. Curious, he made his way there, stopping short at the sight of a beautiful woman so faithful, so pure that she had followed her husband’s corpse to its tomb, determined to die by his side.

The soldier began to talk and the woman listened . . . and soon the doors of the tomb were closed upon them while he enjoyed her beauty . . . But the next morning when he emerged, he beheld a terrible sight: The cross was empty—someone had taken down the thief’s body in the night and buried it. Now he himself had the death penalty before him and, trembling, he ran to tell the woman. “The gods forbid,” she cried out. “I would rather hang my dead husband on the cross than lose you . . .” Thus that day the townspeople were left to wonder at a miracle: how a dead man had climbed up onto the cross . . .

And the boy takes in everything, assimilates everything, making it his own; the gossip of the ancient world—

To the eunuch Bagoas, begging him to give him access to the fair one committed to his charge: “Thou, Bagoas, who art entrusted with the task of guarding thy mistress—I have but a couple of words to say to you, but they are weighty ones. Yesterday I saw a lady walking in the portico beneath the temple of Apollo . . .

Its precepts—

Learn the pleasure of despising pleasure.

A man keeps and feeds a lion. The lion owns a man.

If, as they say, I am only an ignorant man trying to be a philosopher, then that may be what a philosopher is.

Its virtue and its vice—its grandeur forms him.

Walk with swift feet, mortal, as you fulfill your uncertain destiny.

Intellectually, Jean François has begun to fall in love.

Bring water, bring wine, slave! Bring us crowns of flowers; bring them so I may box with Eros.

The simplest question by Jean François is answered with an outpouring of ardor from Jacques for whom the lessons are a relief and a distraction. For a long time now Jacques has been leading a severe existence. Every sou he has earned has gone to support his parents in Figeac; and every moment he can snatch from his drudgery has been used for his studies.

With an iron discipline, he has taught himself Hebrew and Latin and Greek, studying an enormous range of ancient works; poring over them until finally his knowledge surpasses those with years of formal training.

Perhaps it is because his struggle has been so solitary, his achievement so hidden, that Jacques takes his rejection so much to heart. For without telling any one, he had applied to join the scholars General Bonaparte is recruiting for an extraordinary expedition. Going where?
Far from France.
Lasting how long?
Six months or six years.
Everything about it is shrouded in mystery, except the fact that Napoleon has gathered the best minds in his service.

There have been months of preparation, months of hope for Jacques, but now word has spread throughout the land: Bonaparte has suddenly slipped away in the middle of the night with his chosen scholars and his soldiers. Without a word of warning, he leaves Jacques Champollion, self-taught classicist and shipping clerk, at home.

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.