On entering this room in the museum, I was seized with a mortal chill at the sight of a table 10 feet in length, covered from end to end with a layer of papyrus debris, to a depth of at least half a foot … How to shield oneself from emotion when stirring this ancient dust of centuries? I philosophized extravagantly – no chapter of Aristotle or Plato was as eloquent as these scraps of papyrus. My table spoke even more than the tablet of Cebes, Socrates’ disciple: I have seen roll through my hand the names of ages whose history is totally beyond recall, the names of gods who have lacked altars for fifteen centuries, and I have picked up, hardly daring to breathe, fearing to reduce it to powder, one little scrap of papyrus – the last, unique memorial of a king who in his lifetime perhaps found himself cramped in the immense Palace of Karnak!
(letter from Jean-François Champollion to his brother describing the Egyptian Museum in Turin, November 1824)
Developments in Champollion’s career had scarcely ever been free from opposition. His visit to Italy in 1824 would prove to be no exception. Without the persistence and resources of the duke of Blacas, it would have stood no chance at all of success. Hartleben recounts how, as he anxiously awaited a decision, Champollion controlled his fever of impatience to apply his decipherment to new Egyptian monuments and papyri by repeatedly telling himself: ‘For me, the road to Memphis and to Thebes passes via Turin.’
Near the end of March, Blacas’s introduction to Louis XVIII at last materialized. The king graciously received from Champollion the first copy of the Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens, with its personal dedication; soon after the royal audience, copies of the book were sent to interested scholars and went on sale to the Paris public. But although the king engaged its author in a long conversation, he did not bring up the subject of Champollion’s Italian visit. The rumour mill in Paris had raised objections to the official funding of such a notorious republican from provincial Grenoble, and the king had ordered an enquiry into Champollion’s suitability. Louis XVIII rapidly took advice from the former prefect of Isère, the count of Montlivault, and from the baron of Haussez, who was still in post as prefect at Grenoble and was of course Champollion’s implacable enemy. We may easily imagine what these two gentlemen told the king. Nevertheless, the influential Blacas prevailed over Louis, as he so often had in the past. He advised Champollion-Figeac and Champollion how to write a letter giving details of the proposed Italian research, which was formally submitted to the king on 5 April. In the event, part of the funding came from the civil list and the rest from the pocket of Blacas himself, acting in the interest of the burgeoning science of Egyptology. He agreed with Champollion that the latter would depart Paris in mid-May for Isère, then go to Turin to examine its recently acquired Egyptian collection, and after that would visit Egyptian collections in other Italian cities such as Naples, where Blacas expected to welcome him in his capacity as French ambassador.
Before Champollion left Paris, it is said (by Hartleben) that he and Champollion-Figeac undertook a lightning visit to London – Champollion’s sole journey to England. Their purpose was to see the British Museum’s Egyptian collection, which of course included the Rosetta Stone.
A personal sighting of this long-pursued quarry would undoubtedly have been an emotionally stirring occasion for Champollion. Yet he did not once refer in his correspondence to having seen the Rosetta Stone, nor did his brother in his many writings; and there is no record of a visit to England by Champollion in the correspondence or memoirs of his contemporaries, such as Young, Sir William Gell and some known English admirers of Champollion. The sole evidence that such a visit may have occurred is a letter written two years later by the Chevalier San Quintino, director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, to Young. San Quintino referred to ‘M. Champollion, who, in speaking to me one day of his journey to England, and the British Museum, told me that the English are barbarians’. Since San Quintino had by this time (1826) fallen out badly with Champollion, as we shall see, and wished to cultivate his English correspondent Young by stirring up trouble for the French scholar, his comment must be regarded with caution. Most likely, Champollion never in fact went to England or set eyes on the Rosetta Stone he had for so long laboured to decipher. By April 1824, its inscriptions were no longer of importance to the progress of his decipherment; indeed, he would never bother to publish a translation of the stone, unlike Young.
Champollion travelled to Italy via Grenoble, where he had not been for nearly three years. Here he spent eight days in the idyllic park-like surroundings of his brother’s family house at Vif, where his wife, Rosine, had preceded him. Their only child, Zoraïde, had been born in Vif on 1 March, while Champollion had been awaiting the royal signal back in Paris. Now he had a chance to hold the baby in his arms and was happy to find that she responded to her name. (A local Catholic priest, possibly less happy than her father at the Oriental name, baptized the child ‘Zéroïde’.) The three-month-old already promised to be ‘the daughter of her father’, Champollion claimed, because she shared his dusky complexion and the same particular cast of eyebrows.
In early June, word reached Champollion that the pass of Mont-Cenis through the Alps – a route to Italy constructed in the time of Napoleon – had become free enough of snow to negotiate in a diligence. On the morning of 4 June, Jean-François said goodbye to his wife – who had no idea when she and the baby would see him again – climbed aboard a diligence and headed for Chambéry. Two days later, as the sun rose, the most dangerous part of the journey began. Although the route was magnificent, it was ‘marked out on the hillsides above terrifying precipices and there was never enough daylight to guide a large diligence,’ as Champollion wrote soon after. But he arrived in one piece at Turin, on 7 June.
This was Champollion’s first visit to the capital of Piedmont-Sardinia, but it was not his first connection with the city. In 1818, the liberal prefect of Isère, Choppin d’Arnouville, had asked for Champollion’s help in sorting out some documents relating to the territories ceded by France to Piedmont-Sardinia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. As a result, Champollion had become friendly with Count Costa, the secretary of state of the Sardinian kingdom, who had then offered him the post of professor of history and ancient languages at the University of Turin. Notwithstanding the salary – which Champollion very much needed in 1818 – and the prestige of an institution founded in the 15th century, he had turned down the count’s offer, since he did not want to desert Grenoble. Now, in June 1824, he was welcomed to Turin by Costa, in whose residence he stayed.
The notably reactionary royal family of Sardinia had little to do with the French visitor, despite his enjoying the official support of Louis XVIII. Yet Champollion proved to be a hit with the nobility of Turin – in stark contrast to his clashes with the royalist authorities in Grenoble. His letters to his brother in Paris are dotted with the names of aristocratic contacts: Count Apremont, the Count and Countess Sclopis and the Count Vidua, who had travelled in Egypt, as well as the duke of Clermont-Tonnerre, the marquis of Cavour and the inspired poet Countess Diodata of Saluzzo (the ‘Sappho of Piedmont’, then one of the most admired celebrities in Italy). Champollion’s aristocratic conquests would be repeated elsewhere in Italy, among kings, queens, dukes, cardinals, and even the pope in Rome. Like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in imperial Austria four decades earlier, Champollion was fêted by Italian high society, despite his liberal political views, and he came to regard Italy, especially Florence, as his second home. His unique personality and undoubted charm, not to speak of his hauteur, must have played their part in this warm aristocratic reception. In addition, some of the lustre of the Egyptian pharaohs had rubbed off on ancient Egypt’s decipherer. Like many a committed egalitarian, in practice Champollion often got on rather well with the social elite.
But it was the scholars, not the nobility, who naturally interested him the most. Intellectually, Champollion was fortunate in Turin and made a number of lasting friendships. The two most important were with the Abbé Amadeo Peyron, a Hellenist and professor of the faculty of letters at the university, and the Abbé Constanzo Gazzera, an Orientalist and the university’s librarian, who had been in touch with Champollion in Paris during the period of his breakthrough. Other scholars included another Hellenist, a Latinist, the director of the astronomical observatory, and a mathematician. Champollion would have their support when the director of the Egyptian Museum, San Quintino, began to intrigue against him in what Peyron would describe as ‘the struggle of a Pygmy against a giant’.
Today, the Egyptian Museum in Turin is the second most significant collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities in the world after the national museum in Cairo, and the only national museum outside of Egypt devoted solely to Egyptian art and culture. The first Egyptian object to reach Turin arrived in the late 1620s; it was a puzzling altar table probably created in ancient Rome for the temple of Isis. Housed in the University of Turin, it became the nucleus of a small collection of Egyptian objects during the 18th century. But not until 1824, after the king of Piedmont-Sardinia, Carlo Felice, purchased the Egyptian collection of the French consul-general Drovetti (who was of Piedmontese origin), did the Egyptian Museum acquire its own building: a 17th-century palace built as a Jesuit school that had later passed to the Academy of Sciences. Drovetti’s superb trove – which was still being unpacked when Champollion arrived, and even when he left nine months later – consisted of 5,268 objects: 100 statues, 170 papyri, stelae, sarcophagi, mummies, bronzes, amulets and items from daily life. Perhaps its single most famous piece is a granite statue of Ramesses II, excavated by Drovetti at Thebes.
The Egyptian Museum, Turin, showing the Drovetti collection on display. Champollion studied here for many months during the period 1824–25, proving the truth of his decipherment.
(Early 19th-century engraving of the interior of the Egyptian Museum, Turin. Egyptian Museum, Turin.)
Champollion’s first letter to his brother after entering the museum on 9 June showed his growing feeling of astonishment and reverence for Egyptian art:
You are, without doubt, very impatient to get my news. I shall give it to you in a phrase of this country: Questo e cosa stupenda [sic] [This is a marvellous thing]. I did not anticipate such riches; I find the courtyard filled with colossi in pink granite and in green basalt. One 8-foot group, representing a seated Amon-Ra with King Horus, son of Amenophis II of the 18th dynasty, at his side, is an admirable piece of work; I have yet to see anything of such beauty. Inside are still more colossi: a superb giant statue of Misphra-Thuthmosis, preserved as if it had just emerged from the sculptor’s workshop; a monolith 6 feet in height, representing Ramesses the Great seated on a throne, between Amon-Ra and Neith, an exquisite piece. A colossus of Moeris, in green basalt, of astonishing execution; a standing statue of Amenophis II; a statue of Ptah from the time of the same prince. A group in sandstone, King Amenophis and his wife, Queen Atari; a statue of Ramesses the Great, larger than life size, worked like a cameo, in magnificent green basalt. On the uprights of his throne are sculpted, in full relief, his son and his wife. A crowd of funerary statues in basalt, red sandstone, white sandstone, white limestone, grey granite, among which is a squatting man, bearing on his tunic four lines of demotic characters. In the middle of all this, more than 100 stelae of 4, 5 and 6 feet in height, an altar loaded with inscriptions and a mass of other objects.
Not all of these identifications were correct. Nonetheless, Champollion was the first person since the late Roman Empire to have a realistic hope of accurately identifying the Turin statues from their inscriptions. He set to work deciphering frenziedly in this virgin field, describing his discoveries in two lengthy letters to his patron, the duke of Blacas. The first letter was dated July and the second December 1824; both were published as a book in Paris in 1825, with additional material by Champollion-Figeac. But it was a further encounter at the museum later in 1824 that would make the single strongest impression on both him and the nascent discipline of Egyptology. Rather than monuments, this amazing discovery involved manuscripts.
Seated statue of Ramesses II in the Egyptian Museum, Turin. Discovered by Bernardino Drovetti at Thebes, it is probably the finest existing portrait of the pharaoh.
(Egyptian Museum, Turin.)
After completing the task of unrolling various historical papyri, in November Champollion heard mention of a room in the attic of the museum containing papyrus debris. He was told that the material was not worth visiting, but he insisted. When he entered the attic, the sight of the debris was chilling, as he described in the extract at the beginning of this chapter. The Drovetti collection’s gruelling journey from Thebes by boat and ship, and the cold and damp of northern Italy – where the objects had waited for a long time in the port of Livorno until their demanding owner had agreed a purchase price – as compared to the dry conditions in the necropolis of Thebes where the papyri had originally been stored, had wreaked havoc on the manuscripts. A dismayed Champollion nonetheless began to piece together what he could, as he explained to his brother:
In these remains, so fragile and mutilated, of a world that is no more, I have noticed that like today there is only a small step from the sublime to the ridiculous – that time reduces to the same level and sweeps up without distinction the great and the small, the serious and the frivolous, the sad and the cheerful: next to some fragment of a regnal act of Ramesses the Great, or a ritual consisting of praises to Ramesses-Meïamun or to some other great Shepherd of his people, I have found a bit of an Egyptian cartoon, showing a cat guarding ducks with a shepherd’s crook in its paw, or a cynocephalus playing a double flute; – next to the name and forename of the bellicose Moeris, there is a rat armed for battle letting fly arrows against a ferocious combatant, or perhaps a cat mounted on a war chariot. – Here lies a scrap of funerary ritual on the back of which some interested party has written a contract of sale, and there lie the remains of paintings of a monstrous obscenity that give me a singular idea of the Egyptians’ gravity and wisdom.
Champollion had been looking at pieces of what became known later in the century as the ‘Book of the Dead’ – which he was the first modern scholar to begin reading – and at what is now known as the ‘Turin Erotic Papyrus’ (first published in the 1970s). But the papyrus that concerned him most, on account of its terrible state, was the one now known as the ‘Turin King List’ or the ‘Turin Royal Canon’ – a vitally important manuscript from the period of Ramesses II. In Champollion’s own words, once more:
Satirical scene from a Book of the Dead, 19th–20th dynasties, c. 1295–1069 BC. A cat and a hyena herd ducks and goats; and a lion and a gazelle play a board game known as senet.
(Papyrus with satirical vignettes found at Deir, c. 1295–1069 BC. British Museum, London.)
The most important papyrus, the one whose complete mutilation I shall always regret, and which is a real historical treasure, is a chronological table, a true Royal Canon in hieratic script, containing more than four times the number of dynasties as are shown in the Table of Abydos, in its unmutilated form. I have gathered from the dust about twenty fragments of this precious manuscript, but these scraps an inch or two in length at the most still contain the forenames, more or less damaged, of seventy-seven pharaohs. What is even more remarkable about all this is that not one of these seventy-seven forenames resembles any of those in the Table of Abydos, and I am convinced that they all belong to earlier dynasties. It seems to me equally certain that this historical canon dates from the same period as all the manuscripts from which I have gathered debris, that is to say from no later than the 19th dynasty … I confess that the greatest disappointment of my literary life is to have discovered this manuscript in such a desperate condition. I shall never get over it – it is a wound that will bleed for a long time.
Such early dates for Egyptian civilization, however provisional, were a potential challenge to the biblical story of the Creation – perhaps more so in France than in Italy at this time, given the accession to the French throne of the reactionary count of Artois – the leader of the Ultras – as Charles X after the death his elder brother Louis XVIII in September 1824. Charles X introduced notorious legislation against sacrilege in 1825, which encouraged an atmosphere of Catholic intolerance that would directly affect Champollion’s work on Egyptian chronology. In Champollion’s second letter to Blacas, following the discovery of the Turin Royal Canon, he and his brother (who supplied the letter’s appendix on ‘Chronology’) were careful to make no reference to any potentially embarrassing pre-biblical dates.
Following Champollion’s discovery, the Egyptologist Gustavus Seyffarth managed to piece together the Turin Royal Canon in the correct order, though many gaps remained. Modern scholarship has shown that the canon must originally have included about three hundred rulers, all of them named and with the precise duration of their reigns given. Moreover, the canon makes an attempt to go back before the time of known pharaohs to the reigns of unnamed spirits and gods. It must have been a document such as this that provided the ancient Greek historian Manetho with his sequence of thirty dynasties, which proved so valuable to both Young and Champollion.
Champollion, seldom tactful, made known his displeasure at the poor state of conservation of these papyri. He also publicly ridiculed, under the cloak of anonymity, the museum’s careless display of its giant statue of Ramesses II (called Ozymandias by Greek travellers), by distributing a delightful but recklessly insolent pamphlet on the streets of Turin under the title ‘Petition of Pharaoh Ozymandias to His Majesty the King of Sardinia’. In the pamphlet, Ozymandias complains to King Carlo Felice that he has been relegated not so much to a courtyard as to a farmyard, where he is covered in pieces of straw rather than being allowed to enjoy the ‘beautiful yellow costume bordered in green’ granted to some other works of art. This was a sly dig at museum director San Quintino’s penchant for dressing up certain statues, including even those of cats and other animals, to the unintended merriment of the Turinese. An outraged Ozymandias cries out across three millennia to his fellow monarch:
What! The Pharaoh who conquered Bactria at the head of seven hundred thousand men, who erected the most marvellous building in Thebes, shall from now on be known only as a Straw King, or, to be blunt, a Stuffed King? No, Sire, Your Majesty cannot stand for this. You now know the long line of my tribulations; I appeal to your fairness – It is as a King that I should be treated.
That word spells out all that I expect. I demand also, as an essential reparation, that the inventor of the ridiculous straw garb with which I am got up should himself be stuffed, for immediate despatch to the Museum of Natural History. This would be justice.
There were frequent spats between Champollion and San Quintino during 1824. Although friction was inevitable, given their respective positions – Champollion as the celebrity outsider, San Quintino as the ignorant insider – not all of it redounded to the credit of Champollion, who might have chosen to be less provocative in trying to bring order to the Drovetti collection. However, San Quintino’s bad faith cannot be doubted. In February 1825, at a meeting of the Academy of Turin where the recently elected Champollion was absent, San Quintino put forward as his own research all that he (and others) had heard from Champollion in the preceding few months about the numerical system of the ancient Egyptians. Only energetic protestations against this blatant plagiarism from Peyron and Gazzera, Champollion’s colleagues at the university, prevented the communication from being printed under San Quintino’s name. For some time afterwards, the embarrassed museum director avoided attending sessions of the academy.
Since January, Champollion had been preparing to leave Turin and continue his odyssey in search of ancient Egyptian objects. Suddenly, at the end of February, he received an unexpected offer to become the consul of Sardinia in Egypt, a result of his longstanding friendship with the secretary of state, Count Costa. The proposal had tremendous immediate appeal, but on the other hand the position would require him to abandon his Italian tour, to change his French citizenship and to dwell far from his brother in Paris. Champollion-Figeac advised firmly against acceptance. To begin with, he wrote by return, ‘It is better to be the first among one’s own people than among others.’ Second, a foreign posting would gratify Champollion’s enemies in Paris, such as Jomard: ‘Let us guard against satisfying them,’ he wrote. Champollion declined the job.
Although his health was poor after his relentless research in Turin, in early March 1825 Champollion set off for Rome. He journeyed via Milan and Bologna, where he conducted brief examinations of Egyptian collections, all the while suffering from endless hours of jolting travel in pouring rain and sleepless nights in uncomfortable inns, which aggravated the gout in his feet and hands that would trouble him for the rest of his life. Having left Bologna on 7 March, he arrived in Rome five days later at six o’clock in the morning without once lying in a bed.
The sight of the Flaminian obelisk at the northern gate of eternal city revived Champollion’s enthusiasm. Without even resting at his hotel, he spent the entire day guiding himself on swollen feet around the churches and ancient monuments of Rome, and meeting influential people. His first stop was St Peter’s, which provoked the following comment to his brother: ‘We are wretches, in France: our monuments are pitiable beside this Roman magnificence.’ After St Peter’s, he raced to the Piazza Navona, where he saluted the Pamphilian obelisk. At the museum on the Capitoline Hill, he was thrilled to see two Egyptian colossi representing Ptolemy Philadelphus and his wife Arsinoe, and two magnificent Egyptian lions at the base of the staircase leading down from the hill. At seven o’clock that evening he called on the French ambassador, the duke of Laval, whom he had known at Turin; he received a warm welcome, and an invitation to dinner the following night with a party of his fellow countrymen. Returning to his hotel at last, he found a note from the duke of Noailles, who had just arrived from Naples. They passed the evening together at the duke’s hotel. ‘He gave me news of M. de Blacas, who has requested me to make haste for Naples as soon as possible, given that he must come to Rome for Holy Week; it is likely that I shall depart to join him in five or six days at the latest. So that was my first day in Rome, which I shall never forget,’ Champollion told his brother, adding: ‘My tender affections to M. Dacier’.
Naples, for Champollion, was ‘the first lively city that I have encountered since the Alps’. Blacas introduced him to the king and queen of Naples, who were interested in Egypt. The king asked for a report on some Egyptian vases in the palace, and the queen requested Champollion to give her a private tutorial in the basic principles of the hieroglyphic system. Although Mount Vesuvius was quiet – to Champollion’s disappointment – he was excited by the ruins of Pompeii (rediscovered only in the mid-18th century) and even more excited by the Greco-Roman city of Paestum, down the coast from Naples, which he visited alone and on foot, despite the area’s reputation for brigands. The perfectly preserved temples, located on a desolate plain, had a profound effect on him: ‘From a certain distance, and above all because of the way they stand out golden yellow against the beautiful azure of the sky and the sea, I felt I was looking at Egyptian temples: most of all with the temple of Neptune, the grandest of them all, in which the Egyptian origin of the Greek architecture penetrates every part of the building.’ Here was a theme – the neglected ancient Egyptian influence on Greek civilization – that would become more and more prominent in Champollion’s writing, and that remains controversial to this day.
Back in Rome towards the end of April 1825 and staying with Blacas – his initial host in the capital – Champollion immediately set to work recording the city’s many obelisk inscriptions. Conditions were difficult: hot sun, abrupt showers of rain, and dangerous ruins surrounding the ancient monoliths, from which emanated foul smells. But Champollion, ever ardent for Egyptian knowledge, was indefatigable. The more he carefully noted down the hieroglyphs, the more he discovered the inaccuracy of existing copies, especially those made by the fancy-prone Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher. (This issue would become a great theme of Champollion’s expedition to Egypt, especially in regard to the inaccuracy of the Description de l’Égypte.) He even suggested the design of a modern obelisk, complete with inscriptions, for the French ambassador’s party in Rome to celebrate the coronation of Charles X; the obelisk was made and much admired, but persistent rain unfortunately ruined the grand party.
Egyptian obelisk in Rome commissioned by the Emperor Hadrian in AD 130, as copied by Athanasius Kircher in 1652–54 and published in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus.
(Barberini obelisk drawn by Athanasius Kircher, from his Oedipus Aegypticus, vol. 3, 1652–54. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.)
Champollion also worked in the Vatican on its collection of Egyptian papyri and reacquainted himself with Coptic and other manuscripts that he had studied (and annotated) as a student in Paris nearly two decades earlier. (The Vatican published a catalogue of these papyri the same year.) Moreover, Champollion was presented to Pope Leo XII at a long private audience in June. Aware of Champollion’s dating of the Dendera Zodiac to the Roman period (but of course unaware of the dates contained in the Turin Royal Canon), the pope told him three times, in excellent French, that he had rendered ‘a beautiful, great and good service to the Church’. He then offered to make him a cardinal. A surprised Champollion sidestepped the unwelcome and impossible proposal with a deft pirouette, by saying that ‘two ladies would not agree’. Later, at the suggestion of Leo XII to the French government, Champollion was created a knight of the Legion of Honour.
Although he and his hieroglyphic decipherment were now the toast of the diplomatic community in Rome, Champollion wanted to escape, so as to continue his Egyptian studies. Two days after his papal audience, he reached Florence, where he stayed for only about two weeks. Nonetheless, he was invited by the Grand Duke Leopold II to catalogue his Egyptian collection, initiating a relationship that would soon prove vital for Champollion’s future Egyptian expedition. In a letter to his brother, he called Florence ‘the only city in Italy where one may enjoy a true and just liberty; it is really the only land here that has a government, and that is certainly something.’ Soon after, he went back to Turin and worked with the Drovetti collection at the Egyptian Museum for a further long period. Then, in early November 1825, just before the Mont-Cenis route through the Alps became impassable, he returned to his family in Grenoble.
Before that, however, an important development occurred that would lead to the next major stage in Champollion’s career. He received word that a large and probably excellent new Egyptian collection had arrived in Livorno. It had been put together by Drovetti’s competitor, the English consul in Egypt, Henry Salt. Sensing a great opportunity, Champollion had called in at Livorno in July 1825 on his way from Florence to Turin. After inspecting the objects, he was determined that, having failed to buy Drovetti’s magnificent collection, the French government – rather than the British Museum – must buy the Salt collection and make it the foundation of a new Egyptian gallery at the Louvre Museum. He and his brother hoped that he would be appointed the first curator of such a collection.
Portrait of Henry Salt, Egyptologist and English consul in Egypt, whose collection was purchased for the Louvre Museum. It was painted c. 1815 by John James Halls.
(Portrait of Henry Salt, engraving by C. Heath after a portrait by J. J. Halls, c. 1815.)
Inevitably, the two Champollions, supported by Blacas, had a battle royal on their hands. A rival Egyptian collection, belonging to the Italian excavator Giuseppe Passalacqua, had arrived in Paris around the same time and was up for sale. Jomard was determined that the French government should buy Passalacqua’s collection and appoint him as the new curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre, given his long affiliation with Egypt going back to Napoleon’s expedition. Champollion’s enemies lined up in support of Jomard. But eventually, in late February 1826, as a result of Blacas’s recommendation, Champollion received a royal grant to return to Livorno, study the Salt collection and estimate its value to the government. He departed from Grenoble as soon as he could on his second visit to Italy.
While he was in Livorno, Champollion met two very different people who would influence the rest of his life. Ippolito Rosellini was a 25-year-old professor of Oriental languages at Pisa who had been sent by Grand Duke Leopold II to meet Champollion. Rosellini had been studying the hieroglyphs for a year and now asked if Champollion would accept him as a pupil. Their lessons began there and then, and the two scholars immediately became collaborators and friends. ‘I was no sooner taken into his friendship and generously informed about his secrets and discoveries’, Rosellini later recalled of this seminal first meeting, ‘than I felt a love for Egypt grow more sharply and deeply in my heart; and I immediately determined to follow him wherever he should go.’ Champollion, for his part, enthused to his brother about the young Italian professor’s ‘excellent heart and well-furnished head’. Soon the two of them were travelling together in Italy – to Florence, Rome and Naples – and conceived the idea of a joint French–Italian expedition to Egypt, which they hoped would be supported by Leopold II and the French king. Leopold was interested, and at the end of 1826 Rosellini would join Champollion in Paris for further discussions.
The second important figure was a poet, Angelica Palli, the daughter of a local businessman. Champollion fell in love with her after hearing her improvise a poem in his honour at a meeting of the Academy of Livorno. Although his love was unrequited and the two of them in fact met only a few times during mid-1826, he opened his heart to her in thirty letters written in 1826–29, even after she had ceased to respond. (They were published in 1978 as Lettres à Zelmire.) Her replies, such as they were, have not been preserved, so it is difficult to form a clear impression of the relationship, except to say that it had little to do with his passion for Egypt. Champollion’s biographers have been divided about Palli: some, including Hartleben, have seen her as talented and sincere in her professed admiration for Champollion; others, including Lacouture, have viewed her as the type of calculating schemer familiar from Italian comic opera. In the end, Palli is probably significant in Champollion’s story less for herself than for what his letters to her reveal of his unsatisfying marriage to Rosine Blanc.
Bust of Ippolito Rosellini, Egyptologist, student of Champollion and joint leader of the Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt.
(Museo Archaeologico, Florence.)
Champollion’s recommendations regarding the Salt collection, supported by Blacas, carried the day in Paris, against the bitter public opposition of Jomard. In April 1826, the king approved purchase of the collection, and in May Champollion received word from his brother that their wish had been granted: Champollion was to be appointed as the first curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre. He was nevertheless obliged to remain in Italy until mid-October to supervise the despatch of the Salt collection from Livorno to Le Havre, which gave him a chance to visit Venice for the first time. But, by the very end of October, he, his wife and their young daughter, Zoraïde, were on their way from Grenoble to Paris. Champollion had been absent from the centre of French power and influence for two-and-a-half years.
Portrait of Angelica Palli, the poet from Livorno for whom Champollion felt an unrequited love.
(Portrait of Angelica Palli, engraving, anonymous, 19th century.)