Fortunately, I was given a beak and claws.
(Jean-François Champollion’s oft-repeated
comment about his childhood)
Of the many hundreds, if not thousands, of replicas of the Rosetta Stone that have been made since 1800, ranging from the lithographic copy taken directly from the newly excavated artefact by French scholars in Cairo to today’s Rosetta Stone mouse mat sold at the British Museum, the grandest example is an inscribed slab of black granite from Zimbabwe. It measures 11 metres (36 feet) long and 8.5 metres (28 feet) wide – about 100 times the area of the original. Forming a pavement that fills most of a small Romanesque courtyard in France, appropriately known as the Place des Écritures, it is sculpted with three steps – one per script – so that a pedestrian can step up and walk over the Greek alphabetic section, step up again onto the demotic section, and finally reach the hieroglyphic section, with its badly broken corner. Created by the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth to commemorate the bicentenary of Champollion’s birth, the replica is located next to the Musée Champollion in Figeac, the town where Champollion was born in 1790.
Figeac lies in a river valley among rolling green foothills at the very edge of the Massif Central, in south-western France. It now falls in the département of Lot, but in the 18th century it formed part of the old province of Quercy and in Roman times belonged to Aquitania Prima. The town may be built on a Roman site; not far away is the disputed site of Uxellodunum, the hill fort where Julius Caesar’s legions finally defeated the Gauls in 59 BC – a site that Champollion tried to locate and excavate with his brother in 1816. During the 9th century AD the province was part of the Frankish kingdom of Aquitaine. Figeac was also a stopping point on one of the pilgrimage routes to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. By the 12th century it had become an important trading town, as can be seen from its former merchants’ houses with sandstone façades, medieval arcades of boutiques (small shops), and soleilhos – columned attics open to the sun where, for example, fruits were dried. In the 13th century Figeac’s Benedictine monastery traded woollen cloth, wine and honey as far afield as England, Cyprus and the Middle East.
When one of King Louis XVI’s inspectors of taxes and finances arrived in Figeac in 1781, he noted in his travel journal that the population was a little more than 6,000 inhabitants, out of a total of about 100,000 people in the province of Quercy. Significant local products were wine, wheat, rye, hemp, hay, walnuts and chestnuts. Oils were imported from Lower Languedoc, and cheeses from the Auvergne, while other items came from Bordeaux, away to the west, by riverboat, vehicle or on mule-back. Intellectually, though, not a lot seemed to be happening in the area. What is the genius of the Quercynois? the royal inspector enquired, presumably of some notables in Figeac. ‘No genius,’ came the reply. ‘Generally, the spread of ideas is very slow and the mental faculties are difficult to rouse for the grasping of any new method. In general, [there is] much activity especially in the countryside but little in the culture.’
Jacques Champollion, the father of Jean-François, arrived in Figeac in 1770 and set up a bookselling business that prospered for many years. He was not a Quercynois, and had travelled a long way from his native place, an Alpine valley in the province then known as Dauphiné, quite close to Grenoble, some 300 kilometres (185 miles) to the east of Figeac. Despite attempts by various biographers and Champollion family members to find a noble line in the Champollions, Jacques’s ancestry was relatively humble, either peasant or petit bourgeois. It may have included Italian blood, and the family name may perhaps have descended from the name Campoleone – a connection with a neighbouring land that would appeal strongly to Jean-François when he visited Italy as a scholar in the 1820s. Born in 1744, Jacques was the youngest of five sons, three of whom lived out their lives in the area of their birth, while the fourth, André, became a military officer and in 1798 went to Egypt with Napoleon’s army.
As with most aspects of the life of Champollion père, his motives in moving from Dauphiné to Figeac are murky, since there is little or no direct evidence. Until 1770 he is known to have made his income as an itinerant pedlar of books. The border region near Grenoble between France, the Savoy, Switzerland and Italy was surely a more promising territory for such a bookseller than the purely French-speaking, commercially oriented Figeac, whatever the town’s trading connections with other parts of France might have been. However, itinerant merchants in Dauphiné were forced to travel far from their home regions to make ends meet during the long Alpine winter months. Certainly Jacques Champollion made a point of spending time at the annual Beaucaire Fair, near Avignon, which was famous throughout the south of France for centuries until the arrival of the railways and attracted as many as 300,000 visitors at its height. Conceivably, he may have visited Figeac on business, liked it, and decided to abandon his wandering life and settle down in favour of a softer, more sedentary existence. But it is also possible that he was exiled from his home for his opinions (as his sons would later be exiled from Grenoble), perhaps because he was found to be selling forbidden books. In the 16th century, the religious authorities had burned travelling booksellers for offering heretical publications, and in the 17th and 18th centuries, the government had imprisoned them for selling pamphlets hostile to royal power. Jacques Champollion’s future role during the French Revolution might lend support to such a ‘republican’ interpretation of his move to Figeac in 1770 – as might the fact that he never once returned to his place of birth.
After two years in Figeac Jacques bought a house with the customary open soleilho, in a dark and narrow lane in the town centre, the Rue de la Boudousquerie (today renamed as the Impasse Champollion). Seven years later he purchased a boutique: a small shop with a window overlooking the town’s main marketplace. In the meantime he had married a local woman, Jeanne-Françoise Gualieu – a bond that undoubtedly provided him with an entrée into commerce and society. She was the daughter of an established local manufacturer; her father and grandfather had been weavers, and her mother belonged to a well-known local family that included a former mayor. Jeanne-Françoise’s two younger sisters were married to a dyer and a tanner. The name Gualieu is frequently cited in the archives of Figeac, with reference either to simple artisans or to town worthies. Surprisingly, though, Jeanne-Françoise appears to have been illiterate, since the marriage register of Figeac’s church, Notre-Dame-du-Puy, notes that she was unable to sign her name during her wedding in 1773.
The couple’s first child, a son, died within hours of his birth in 1773. A daughter was born a year later, and a second daughter two years after the first; she was followed by a son in 1778; a third son, who died prematurely; and another daughter in 1782, when Jeanne-Françoise was probably 40 years old. At this point there was a long gap before the arrival of the youngest child, Jean-François, in 1790.
Although he would be close to two of his sisters, who tended to spoil him, it was Jean-François’s brother Jacques-Joseph, twelve years his elder, who would have by far the greatest influence on Jean-François’s life, both as a child and as a man – his parents not excluded. Indeed, without the worldly Jacques-Joseph’s lifelong support and savoir faire, it is highly unlikely that the world would ever have heard of Jean-François Champollion. In later life, the elder brother called himself Champollion-Figeac, partly to distinguish himself from his more famous sibling, who was known as Champollion le jeune. Sufficiently well known to merit an entry in today’s Encyclopaedia Britannica, Champollion-Figeac became a palaeographer and librarian, first as curator of manuscripts at the National Library in Paris, then at the palace of Fontainebleau. He also edited his brother’s posthumous works. The Champollion biographer Jean Lacouture even compares Jean-François and his mentor Jacques-Joseph with Vincent van Gogh and his devoted art-dealer brother Theo, with considerable validity (although Theo was, of course, younger than Vincent). To help us understand the younger Champollion, it is therefore worth considering, briefly, the early years of the older Jacques-Joseph.
Jean-François Champollion’s place of birth (at top right) in the Rue de la Boudousquerie, now called the Impasse Champollion, Figeac. He lived here from 1790 to 1801.
(Photo Sally Nicholls.)
Portrait of Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac, elder brother of Jean-François Champollion, in his twenties.
(Drawing of Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac, anonymous, undated. Musée Champollion, Figeac. Photo D. Vinçon, Conseil général de l’Isére.)
Ironically, Jacques-Joseph was a sickly child who would live into his late eighties, whereas his younger brother was a healthy boy who would die of a stroke in his early forties. There was some doubt whether Jacques-Joseph would survive his infancy, but as soon as he was able to say a few words his parents – perhaps unable to cope with his fragility – handed him over to the charge of an old and saintly woman, ‘la Catinou’, who kept him in her house until he was 7 and gave him some elementary education.
Once back in his family’s home Jacques-Joseph received some schooling of undistinguished quality, but in 1791, when he turned 13, his school closed its doors as a result of the Revolution, putting an end to his formal education altogether. Several years of turbulence followed, culminating in the Terror of 1793–94, during which the town’s Tree of Liberty and its guillotine were located in a small square within earshot of the Champollion house. During this period, it is claimed by Champollion’s first biographer, Hermine Hartleben, that the head of the family, Jacques Champollion, became chief of the police in Figeac along with two fellow citizens; and that he used his official position, surprisingly, to give asylum in his house to two threatened Benedictine priests, Canon Seycy and Dom Calmels. If the claim is true, which seems doubtful, this was dangerously risky behaviour. In the early years of the Revolution, ‘Those who had most grounds for fear were the ones who sheltered priests who refused to cooperate with the Revolution,’ writes the historian Richard Ballard in The Unseen Terror, his study of provincial France in the 1790s. There are no town records or written evidence to support Hartleben’s claim, which relied on Champollion family testimony; but, according to Jacques-Joseph himself, during this time Calmels agreed to take charge of Jacques-Joseph’s education on a friendly basis. That his father, Jacques, certainly had local influence is proved by the fact that during the Terror the 15-year-old Jacques-Joseph was given a paid position in the secretariat of the municipality, where he quickly became a trusted archivist and assistant to the chief secretary. It was his first step into officialdom in what would become a convoluted career exposed to the vagaries of post-revolutionary French politics over half a century.
This information derives from an unpublished autobiography written by Jacques-Joseph in 1799, at the age of 21, a year after he had moved from Figeac to take a job in Grenoble. In his detailed manuscript he makes no reference at all to the birth of his brother Jean-François on 23 December 1790, even though he was godfather to the infant, according to the baptismal register. This astounding omission, along with other evidence we shall come to, suggests that the truth of the birth may have been rather different from the legend handed down by the Champollion family and reported by Hartleben without comment in her biography.
First, the legend. The source is a report on Champollion made after his death, written in 1833 by a Dr Janin, a physician who had known and examined him personally. According to this document, Champollion’s mother was so badly affected by rheumatism in her forties that she became almost paralysed. Doctors could do nothing for her, and so a local healer, a peasant known as Jacquou the Magician, was called. He made her lie on a bed of herbs and massaged her with hot wine containing specially prepared decoctions, which he also required her to drink. Not only did Jacquou promise her a complete and rapid recovery, he also made a prediction: that she would give birth to a son ‘who would be a light of centuries to come’. And on the third day she arose from her bed, and was able to climb and descend the stairs in the family house. Less than a year later, she gave birth to Jean-François.
Although Champollion himself apparently did not disavow the miraculous story, which he said his mother had told him frequently in his early years, it is definitely hard to credit. First and foremost, Champollion’s mother was 48 years old in 1790, according to Janin – a very advanced age for childbearing in the late 18th century. Moreover, she had not given birth for eight years. Almost as telling is the fact that Jean-François himself, both as a boy and as an adult, would never refer to his mother in his prolific correspondence. By contrast, he did make a number of allusions, right up to his death – twenty-five years after the death of Jeanne-Françoise Champollion – to the existence of an unnamed woman in Figeac who was very dear to him and whom he continued to visit. Finally, there is the fact, referred to by himself and many others (and mentioned in his passport), that unlike his brother he was unusually dark-skinned – so much so that he could easily pass for an Arab in Egypt.
Some Champollion biographers, such as Hartleben and, today, Michel Dewachter, prefer to read no significance into the facts mentioned above. Others, such as Alain Faure and Lacouture, speculate, reasonably enough, that Jeanne-Françoise was not the real mother of Jean-François. Births outside of marriage were by no means unheard of in the parish registers of Figeac in this period, as Faure points out. Lacouture goes further. His view is that it is quite likely Jacques Champollion had a liaison with a woman, perhaps a gypsy – or even an ‘Egyptian’ – whom he may have met at the annual Beaucaire Fair, and that this liaison produced a son. There are strong hints from his contemporaries that Jacques enjoyed the bohemian life, and he unquestionably took to the bottle in his later years, which destroyed his bookselling business and poisoned relations with his children. To prove such a liaison is by its very nature impossible, but if the theory were true, it might help to explain not only Jean-François’s puzzlingly distant relationship with his father (and mother), but also the exceptional difference in temperament between Jean-François and his siblings, including Jacques-Joseph.
Champollion le jeune, unlike his generally cautious and calculating elder brother, was a hot-blooded southerner, subject to mercurial mood swings. From an early age, the lion was his favourite animal, which he liked to associate with the ‘lion’ in his surname. ‘Outbursts, renunciations, enthusiasm, dejection – such was and would always be the way with Jean-François,’ observes Lacouture. He had a ‘volcanic temperament’ and ‘a furious impatience – his principal fault,’ admits Hartleben. These emotions would give him the passion and dedication to succeed in Egyptology, yet at the same time they would undermine both his health and many of his relationships with other scholars.
The revolutionary temper of the times probably exacerbated his natural tendencies. His political sympathies would always lie with republicanism, yet he would often find that his work was supported by royalists and autocrats, in France, Italy and Egypt. So all through his life he would oscillate between the republican and royalist worlds, torn between his love of liberty and his respect for stability, not to mention his ardent admiration for the ancient Egyptian civilization created and maintained by century after century of divine kingship.
A story told about him when he was a little less than 5 years old, in the period following the Terror, and reported by Hartleben, has the ring of truth. He was out walking in the street with his mother when they came across a blind beggar sitting on the threshold of a house, holding out his torn hat to passers-by. Jean-François was in the process of putting a coin in the hat while carefully avoiding the outstretched legs of the old man when a leader of the revolutionary party, puffed up with his own importance, struck the beggar with his walking-stick in order to make him rise and get out of the way. Jean-François, furious at the injustice, tried to grab the stick, crying out: ‘Wicked stick, you obey this bad man that you should rather thrash!’ ‘Citizenness,’ said the Jacobin to his mother, apparently amused that she did not know how to react, ‘you would do well to trim right away the beak and claws of your fledgling so that others are not obliged to do it.’ Champollion recalled the encounter for the rest of his days. When, as an adult, he was attacked by one or other of his numerous adversaries, he liked to remark: ‘Fortunately, I was given a beak and claws.’
At around the same age, Jean-François taught himself to read and write – a result of his rather shadowy mother’s help, combined with his own fierce love of independence (according, once again, to the family tradition reported by his first biographer). Throughout her life Jeanne-Françoise apparently remained illiterate, despite her husband’s profession, but as a pious Catholic she committed to memory long extracts of her missal by hearing them sung and intoned during the Mass. She taught these extracts by ear to her young son, who repeated them uncomplainingly. Soon he took a copy of the prayer book from the stock in his father’s bookshop and settled himself alone among piles of old books and prints in a corner of the shop (which was probably often closed in this troubled period) along with paper and pencils. There, by copying out letters and words from the missal – which would also have encouraged his drawing skills – he succeeded, through a process of trial and error, in matching the words of the prayers memorized in his mind with the same words printed on the page, and also grasped the different sounds of the letters in the alphabet (‘his first work of decipherment’, in Hartleben’s phrase). Perhaps he was aided by the missal’s illuminated letters, somewhat comparable to the pictures and cartouches of the hieroglyphic script; undoubtedly he would have been helped by the frequency of proper names and religious terms in the text. As a result, he was able to read passages of the book that he had not committed to memory, which came as a great surprise to his parents. One must assume that his father had been too busy, or maybe disinclined, to teach him to read while they spent time together in the bookshop. But his brother Jacques-Joseph, impressed by this literary achievement, began to give the 6-year-old more methodical instruction in the spring of 1797, during his rare moments of leisure.
Once he had cracked the alphabetic code, Jean-François’s reading must have developed with exceptional rapidity. By the age of 10, before he left Figeac in 1801, he was said to have been able to recite long passages from Homer and Virgil by heart in the original Greek and Latin. His relations recalled enjoying the family’s youngest son act out dramatic scenes from these classics in his own French translation during winter evenings spent around the fireplace at home. Sometimes their friends would slip into the room and gaze with curiosity at the unheard-of spectacle of the boy, seated on a stool next to the hearth (Champollion always relished physical warmth as a child and as an adult) with his eyes sparkling, bringing alive for his family the ancient stories he had learned how to read.
Jean-François’s precocity in languages had little to do with any formal schooling. The primary schools in France had closed down during the Revolution. Festivals every ten days – the length of the official ‘week’ in the new calendar – were the stuff of revolutionary education in the years before Napoleon’s coup d’état of November 1799. Attendance was poor, and the festivals were a failure. Reading reports of them now, comments Richard Ballard, ‘We can feel the yawns two centuries later … Liberty was celebrated to extinction.’
In 1796 the primary schools began to reopen as restrictions on priests gradually started to ease, though more by default than through any official policy. Jacques-Joseph, who had been teaching his brother for nearly a year and a half, left home in the summer of 1798, after cousins had offered him a job with an export firm in Grenoble. (His father had arranged matters with the relatives at the Beaucaire Fair, with Jacques-Joseph in tow.) Now bereft of his tutor, Jean-François was made to attend school in Figeac in November that year, just before his eighth birthday. He proved to be a bad pupil, unable to stomach the monotony of rote learning and too wilful to accept the discipline of the teachers; mental arithmetic was a particular torture for him. The school was abandoned, and early in the following year, at the insistence of Jacques-Joseph, the boy was instead committed to the personal care of Dom Calmels, Jacques-Joseph’s own former teacher. It was Calmels who was responsible for starting Jean-François on Latin and Greek. He also took him for walks in Figeac and its surrounding countryside. The town’s historical buildings, including an old chateau and a gateway decorated with numerous grotesques, helped to stimulate the boy’s interest in history. But it was nature, not architecture, that really appealed to him. The fields, forests and hillsides opened the boy’s eyes to a new world and a more scientific way of thinking. But his questions soon exhausted his teacher’s knowledge, as Jean-François delightedly collected insects, plants and stones, to be classified later at home in the Rue de la Boudousquerie, perhaps in the well-lit soleilho at the top of the dark house. Here was the beginning of a fascination with the natural world that would suffuse all his research on Egypt, ancient and modern.
In Figeac, Egypt was not on the boy’s educational menu. Indeed, there is no record of any interest in that country from Champollion le jeune until he moved to Grenoble. This was not the case with his elder brother, however, who had made enquiries about joining the French army’s expedition to Egypt during the first half of 1798. ‘If I have any regret,’ Jacques-Joseph wrote in his unpublished autobiography the following year, ‘it is that of not being part of the army of Egypt. I would also say that if I were forced to choose between all the estates, I would probably favour a military career.’ Family tradition had it that in September 1799 the Champollion bookshop received from Cairo a copy of the Courier de l’Égypte, announcing the discovery and potential significance of the Rosetta Stone, intended for Jacques-Joseph. It is quite plausible that it was sent by Captain André Champollion, Jacques’s brother and an army officer, who would have known of his nephew’s interest in Egypt. Conceivably, Jacques Champollion showed the copy to his youngest son before forwarding it to Jacques-Joseph in Grenoble, but if he did, it made no impression on the 8-year-old Jean-François.
At any rate, Calmels was an inspired choice of teacher. Nevertheless, despite being fond of his pupil, he was eventually compelled to admit that he could not develop the ‘particular genius’ of Jean-François in the intellectually unstimulating atmosphere of Figeac, partly for lack of suitable books and qualified teachers. It was clear that the boy’s studies were languishing and that he was suffering from a form of depression, not least because of a lack of attention from his parents, as one strongly suspects. At the end of December 1800, the worried tutor wrote to Jacques-Joseph in Grenoble about the situation. After mentioning the boy’s considerable progress in Latin, he added more generally: ‘He has plenty of taste, plenty of desire to learn but this taste and this desire are swamped by an apathy, a negligence that is difficult to reverse. There are days when he appears to want to learn everything, others when he would do nothing.’
A few days later, in early January 1801, Jean-François himself took up the pen to write to his brother, probably at the dictation of his tutor. Apart from showing great respect for his ‘very dear brother’, mentioning ‘our dear sisters’ and making the minimum possible reference to ‘Papa’ and ‘Maman’, he asked to be excused for his somewhat ‘fickle’ mind, which he hoped that ‘your lessons will correct’. A sample of his Latin prose, decorated with many flourishes, was attached to the letter.
At the end of February, Jacques-Joseph replied to his brother. By now he had clearly decided to take charge of Jean-François in the long term, including meeting the future cost of his education. But first he gave him a warning:
Since you have confessed to me that your mind is fickle you must try to acquire some perseverance. Never forget that time lost is irreparable, apply yourself well to your studies. Consider that nothing is more shameful for a pupil than laziness and negligence … If you desire to come here with me, it is necessary that you learn something quickly – ignoramuses are good for nothing. If it is your wish that I should obtain permission from our dear father to have you here, from your side you must give him all possible satisfaction.
Note that Jacques-Joseph referred only to their father, as if their mother’s opinion about so momentous a decision were irrelevant. As for Champollion père, he seems to have given his permission readily. Solid evidence for his motives is lacking, as usual, but his decision was of a piece with his unexplained lack of involvement with his youngest son’s education thus far. (Oddly enough, a similar situation pertained with Thomas Young, an eldest son who was parted from his parents even earlier than Champollion, and who avoided reference to his father or mother as an adult.) From this point on, the father in Figeac and the youngest son in distant Grenoble would have remarkably little to do with each other, until Jean-François was compelled to return to Figeac during his exile from Grenoble in his mid-twenties. One possible explanation for the father’s ready agreement might be that he had already started to drink too much.
At the end of March 1801, Jacques’s 10-year-old son set out on the first major journey of his life. At Figeac he boarded the diligence (public stagecoach) to Lyons, where he changed to a second diligence heading for Grenoble. There is no evidence that his father accompanied him, or that his brother or anyone else came to meet him in Lyons. In modern-day terms, this was something like sending an unaccompanied child on a long-distance flight to an unfamiliar city. Evidently, Jean-François, for all his fickleness of mind, possessed an unusual amount of self-confidence. His sisters in Figeac, who had cheerfully indulged the whims of the little tyrant, said of his departure: ‘Our house is no longer what it was.’ After Jean-François’s death decades later his brother, his new guardian in Grenoble, would say memorably: ‘I was, by turns, his father, his master and his pupil.’