Free The Linguist and the Emperor by Daniel Meyerson Page B

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.

Chapter Five
    Lions of the Desert
    Grenoble. The residence of the prefect (that is, governor) of the Department of Isère.

    ON AN AFTERNOON toward the beginning of spring in 1803, an unusual scene takes place at the prefect’s official residence. A schoolboy—Jean François—makes his appearance among the throng of petitioners and men of affairs in the prefect’s waiting room. He is received right away. While government business is forgotten, the prefect and Jean François sit talking—or, rather, Jean François listens as the prefect talks, trying to put the tense, silent boy at ease.
    The prefect is new to his job. He does not look the part: His skin is dark and leathery from long treks in the Egyptian deserts, forced marches which many did not survive. He is still gaunt from the dysentery endemic among the troops. For he is none other than Jean Baptiste Fourier, physicist and secretary of the savants in Egypt, a scientist Napoleon put in a political post because he needs someone he can trust.
    Though Fourier is no politician, he has been dealing ably with the throng of visitors crowding his waiting room, the clever lawyers and greedy contractors and ambitious bureaucrats who come to see him about every kind of business—every kind that is, except the one closest to the prefect’s heart: the many-volumed
Description of Egypt,
which it is now his privilege to help create.
    It is a Herculean task. The savants have collected a vast wealth of knowledge, statistics, maps, specimens, and a thick portfolio of drawings, the bulk by the artist Dominique Denon. Nothing escapes Denon’s eye: the geometrical splendor of a temple, the claws of a bat clinging to a palm, and countless