Free The Linguist and the Emperor by Daniel Meyerson Page A

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