THE GREAT PLUNDER

Historical novel in four volumes

Robert Casanovas

VOLUME II — THE EGYPTIAN CAMPAIGN

1798–1801

Egypt, Malta and the Return — Science and Plunder

COMPLETE SUMMARY

Prefatory Note

This novel is a work of historical fiction grounded in authentic research. All the works mentioned were genuinely removed during the French conquests between 1794 and 1813. Most of the characters existed; the sequence of events traces verified facts. For narrative purposes, certain scenes and dialogues have been imagined.

Chapter I — The Orient in Arms (1798)

This first chapter follows the French army from Toulon to the capture of Cairo. The novel alternates between Bonaparte's military perspective and the gaze of the embarked scholars — Denon, Monge, Berthollet, Jomard, Fourier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire — each bringing a distinct reading of the expedition, somewhere between scientific fascination and a growing moral awareness.

From Toulon to Malta (19 May – 12 June 1798)

On 19 May 1798, a fleet of three hundred and forty-seven ships sets sail from Toulon. Berthollet sees in it a large-scale “acquisition operation”; Denon sees it as an opportunity to draw a world still undocumented; Jomard measures the length of the between-decks corridor. Bonaparte reads Alexander, Caesar and Volney, searching for precedents for what he already intends to do.

During the crossing, evenings of readings and debates on ancient history bring together the scholars and the educated officers around Bonaparte. The central question — why do civilisations endure — foreshadows the stakes of the entire expedition. Within less than a hundred miles of Nelson's fleet, chance and wind play a decisive role: the two squadrons cross paths without sighting each other in the Mediterranean darkness.

On 9 June, the fleet appears before Malta. The Knights of Saint John, old and divided, capitulate in three days. The inventory reveals three to four million francs in ingots, silverware and precious metals. Denon identifies in the Cathedral of Saint John canvases by Mattia Preti and, in the novices’ oratory, Caravaggio’s Beheading of Saint John the Baptist — three metres sixty by five metres twenty. He stays the hand of a soldier who has come to assess it: “It would die on a ship.” The painting stays. Berthollet notes that each campaign plunders in its own way: Flanders was methodical, Italy scholarly, Malta hasty. Egypt will be something else.

From Alexandria to the Nile (1 July – 6 July 1798)

The Egyptian coast is disappointing. Fifteen thousand inhabitants, mud-brick houses, smells of salt and fish. Pompey’s Column — the only ancient monument in sight — is measured by Jomard with the precision of a Polytechnique graduate. Denon discovers that Alexandria the Great has almost entirely vanished. Bonaparte, surveying the ruins: “Ancient Egypt exists only in its stones. That is why we are here.”

The march to Cairo across the desert is a calvary. Forty degrees, no water, soldiers dying as they walk without anyone stopping. Bonaparte marches on foot like his men, shares his water with Monge. The scholars, ill-suited to it, follow as best they can. Denon draws while walking. On the fourth day, the green line of the Nile appears on the horizon. Soldiers run. The fertile strip never exceeds a few kilometres in width — Egypt is nothing but a corridor of water in a continent of sand.

At the Saqqara market, Denon purchases his first objects: a painted-wood shabti, royal scarabs, faience amulets. The seller who parts with the shabti says, through Hassan the interpreter: “This is my ancestor’s tomb.” Hassan translates precisely. He does not translate the tone.

The Battle of the Pyramids (21 July 1798)

Ten kilometres from the pyramids, Bonaparte halts his troops and delivers the line that will endure: “Soldiers, from the height of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you.” Kléber will command the left, Desaix the right. The Mamluk cavalry of Murad Bey — six to seven thousand horsemen in embroidered silk robes, each fighting for his own glory — will charge in wave after wave against the French infantry squares. From inside one of the squares, Monge sees only backs, smoke and necks. Denon draws what he can, half-blind. At two in the afternoon, Bonaparte launches a counter-attack; the Mamluks collapse, two thousand dead. French losses: fewer than three hundred.

In the evening, Denon sits on the Great Pyramid in the moonlight. The stone is still warm with an inner heat. He draws. Around one in the morning, Jomard joins him and announces that he has understood something during his measurements: the main axis of Karnak is oriented twenty-six degrees north of east — the exact azimuth of sunrise at the summer solstice at the latitude of Thebes. This is not an accident. The next day, they descend into the Great Pyramid with Monge. The Grand Gallery stops them in their tracks. In the King’s Chamber, the empty sarcophagus. Denon writes in his notebook: “One enters a pyramid as one enters a sentence whose beginning and end one cannot understand.”

The Battle of Aboukir Bay (1 August 1798)

On 1 August, Nelson attacks the French fleet anchored in Aboukir Bay. He grasps that the French have protected their landward flank but left the starboard side exposed: he sends five vessels between the French line and the shore. The battle lasts one night. L’Orient, the flagship of one hundred and twenty guns, explodes at ten in the evening — visible from Alexandria thirty kilometres away. Eleven ships out of thirteen are sunk or captured. Three thousand French dead, not a single English ship lost. The Mediterranean reverts to British control.

The army is now a prisoner. Bonaparte, convening the council: “L’Orient is cut off from France. We are henceforth obliged to do great things.” Denon takes an inventory of the crates by lantern-light. He notes the existence of twenty-three unlabelled crates in the north-west corner of the storehouse — contents unverified, provenance unknown. These crates belong to the part of the expedition that has no name.

The Institut d’Égypte (22 August 1798)

Three weeks after Aboukir, Bonaparte founds the Institut d’Égypte. He is its vice-president, Monge the president. Every five days, the scholars gather in the great hall of the Hassan-Kashif palace. Fourier presents his equations for heat propagation, born of the desert heat. Berthollet analyses the chemistry of the natron lakes. Geoffroy observes the Polypterus bichir — a fish with fins resembling limbs, sharing with Amazonian species an identical anatomical blueprint ten thousand kilometres away. This convergence unsettles him. That evening, he writes to Cuvier a letter that will inaugurate thirty years of dispute about the fixity of species.

Venture de Paradis, the chief interpreter, reveals during a session that the classical Arabic of the Koran and the Arabic spoken by Egyptians are two distinct languages: many of the faithful recite texts they do not understand. Fourier draws a parallel with the hieroglyphs: “We too copy signs we do not understand. Our successors may perhaps grasp their meaning.”

The Cairo Uprising (21 October 1798)

On 21 October, accumulated hostility erupts. Thousands of rioters flood the streets. French soldiers are massacred, decapitated. Bonaparte orders repression without delay. Artillery bombards the insurgent quarters. The mosque of Al-Azhar is invaded — a desecration that horrifies the entire population. Three days of fighting, dozens of civilian dead. The heads of the insurgent leaders are displayed in the Ezbekiyeh square.

Denon goes out all the same, notebook in hand, under gunfire. An officer shouts at him: “This is not the moment to be drawing.” He replies: “On the contrary, this is precisely the moment.” After the repression, he draws a weavers’ shop pillaged by French soldiers — the nails on the wall where the cloth had hung, the imprint of the loom on the floor. He notes: “The army pillaged as the Institut collected. The word differed. The gesture was kindred.” Hassan, the interpreter, watches without translating. Some faces cannot be written into notebooks.

The Sphinx and the Necropolises (November 1798)

In November, Denon organises an expedition to the Sphinx before dawn, to take advantage of the raking morning light. The head emerges from the sand in its shades of polished limestone and eroded hollows. Denon notes that the face looks precisely eastward, towards the rising sun at the equinox — a giant astronomical instrument rather than a decorative statue.

At Saqqara, the team descends into the necropolises through shafts thirty metres deep beneath the desert. The smell is distinctive: saltpetre, mineral dust, something animal. The walls of the mastabas preserve their millennial polychromy. Berthollet obtains four human mummies to chemically analyse the embalming resins — natron, terebinth resin, animal fat, bitumen of Judaea. At three in the morning, he thinks of those embalmers who had solved a problem of organic chemistry two thousand five hundred years before the theory was formulated.

Scientific Debates (December 1798)

The session of 15 December sees Monge and Fourier in opposition. Monge wants volumes and angles; Fourier wants contexts and meanings. Bonaparte decides: both. In the corridor, Fourier confronts Denon about his market purchases: “We are here to understand Egypt, not to empty it of its remains.” Denon replies: “Certain things must be seen to be understood. And to be seen, they must travel.” The following morning, the shabti has been placed in plain view on his work table. Fourier had entered during the night. Before the table, a single grain of sand on the polished tile.

Berthollet says to Bonaparte on his way out: “What we are doing here is not harmless. It is not true. And Monge knows it as well as I do.” Then, later, regarding the collections: “When we leave, it will be in haste. What is in the crates at the moment of departure is what will leave. One should not tell oneself otherwise.”

Chapter II — Up the Nile (1799)

This chapter follows Desaix’s expedition into Upper Egypt, accompanied by Denon, Jomard, Jollois and Devilliers. The military campaign against Murad Bey serves as the setting for the exploration of the most important monuments of ancient Egypt. This is the chapter of major discoveries: Dendera, Thebes, the Valley of the Kings, Philae, and the Rosetta Stone.

Dendera (24 January – early February 1799)

On 25 December 1798, Desaix’s expedition leaves Cairo. Ten thousand soldiers, Denon and his notebooks. Bonaparte hands him a four-page list: the categories of objects to be brought back to Paris — portable obelisks, exceptional bas-relief fragments, documented papyri, royal scarabs. “Three levels, three different legitimacies: what the Commission documents, what the officers select, what the soldiers take. If the first level is beyond reproach, the rest becomes tolerable by comparison.”

On 24 January, the Temple of Hathor at Dendera rises up in the dry air of Upper Egypt. Eighteen columns with capitals bearing the face of the goddess. Jomard spends five days measuring. Denon draws without stopping. A man from the neighbouring village comes each morning to watch Jomard at work, then offers him a pot of fresh water. He knows the Arabic names of the columns, passed down from generation to generation: “the column that bleeds in spring,” “the column of the voice.” These names will not appear in the Description — they have no measurable value. But they tell us that this temple is a neighbour, not a ruin.

Denon lies on his back in the Chapel of Osiris to draw the Dendera Zodiac — a circular disc two metres fifty across, carved in the ceiling, depicting the map of the ancient Egyptian sky. He drafts a memorandum: it would be possible to extract the block, but it would require “diamond-toothed saws, jacks, six weeks of work, a specially fitted vessel.” Perhaps in thirty years. This memorandum is the first official document to mention the possibility of transporting the zodiac to Paris.

Jomard calculates an estimate: twenty objects per company per day of halting, four companies, five days, two battalions. Result: a minimum of a thousand objects for this temple alone. He confronts Berthollet. Berthollet: “That is not a justification. But it is a context.” Jomard: “A chemist does not say a reaction is defensible. He says whether it produces what was expected.”

Thebes and Karnak (27 January – 7 February 1799)

Karnak exceeds everything they had imagined. The hypostyle hall: one hundred and thirty-four columns, the sixteen central ones twenty-one metres high, an area of five thousand two hundred square metres. Denon: “No description can do justice to this. One must be here to understand.” On the night of the first day, Jomard verifies the azimuth with a theodolite and grasps that the main axis is oriented twenty-six degrees north of east — the azimuth of sunrise at the summer solstice. Fourier will confirm by letter: “Your calculation is correct.”

At the Temple of Luxor, Denon identifies the two obelisks of Ramesses II, twenty-five metres of granite each, two hundred and thirty-two tonnes. Desaix looks at them and asks whether they could be taken. Denon: “It would require a specially built ship. Nothing we have in the Mediterranean can do it.” Desaix: “Someone will find a way. But not right now.” — In 1836, one of these obelisks will be erected in the Place de la Concorde. Hassan translates the words of an old guardian seated at the entrance to the temple: “The Ottomans came. The Mamluks came. Now the French are here. Each time, they take stones.”

In a side chamber, Denon finds a gilded bronze face of Osiris, fifteen centimetres high, almond-shaped eyes inlaid with gold. He places it in his satchel without reporting it to the Commission. “The boundary between what he was collecting for the Commission and what he was collecting for himself had gradually dissolved since Dendera.”

The Valley of the Kings (8 – 10 February 1799)

Jomard sets off before dawn for the west bank. From a ledge, he invents his “field triangulation” to map the necropolis. The fellahs of Gournah have known every entrance for generations — their village is built on the tombs themselves. The arrival of the French upsets the balance: by guiding the scholars, they reveal secret entrances, accelerating tenfold the plundering they had been quietly practising for centuries.

Denon descends into seven tombs in two days. The tomb of Seti I: one hundred and thirty-seven metres of corridors at forty-four metres of depth. “These paintings equal or surpass the finest frescoes we have seen in Europe.” In the fourth tomb, Denon and a soldier simultaneously spot a papyrus on the floor. The soldier has it in his hand first. Denon takes it from the soldier’s hands: “Commission des arts.” The soldier lets go. Denon will leave the chamber without looking back, and will record in his journal in one line: “Took the papyrus before the soldier.”

The soldier returns to the chamber and picks up what Denon has left: three broken faience amulets, a fragment of gilded cartonnage. “Both had made a selection. Only the criteria differed.”

Aswan and Philae (March 1799)

On 5 March, Denon and Jollois embark on a felucca for Philae, an island occupied almost entirely by Ptolemaic temples. The Kiosk of Trajan — fourteen slender columns with floral capitals — stops him. He could have blocks dismantled. He decides not to. “Not out of scruple. Out of a refusal to destroy what moves me.” This is the first time since their departure that he makes this choice consciously, naming the reasons.

The rocks around Philae bear names carved by ancient pilgrims. Jollois: “These graffiti move me more than the temples. They are ordinary pilgrims. They came to pray to Isis and carved their names. Not for posterity. Just to leave a trace.” Denon: “Our notebooks are our graffiti.”

The Rosetta Stone (15 July 1799)

On 15 July 1799, Lieutenant Bouchard is overseeing earthworks near Rosetta. His pickaxe strikes something. A black granodiorite stele, one hundred and twelve centimetres, bearing three parallel inscriptions: hieroglyphs at the top, Demotic in the middle, Greek at the bottom — the same decree in three languages. If this is true, three millennia of history become legible again.

Marcel and Raige arrive on 24 July. Marcel makes rubbings by pressing wet paper against the inscribed surface. Raige reads the Greek aloud: a decree of the Council of Priests of Memphis in the ninth year of Ptolemy V, 196 BC. Jomard observes that the word “Ptolemy” appears eleven times in the Greek text and that a group of hieroglyphic signs is also repeated eleven times — a first step towards decipherment.

Marcel takes a decision without informing anyone: he makes thirty additional rubbings beyond the official ones, and sends five to European correspondents — London, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen — so that if the English take the stone, decipherment can proceed in Paris from the copies. Denon: “You distributed the key before opening the lock.”

Negotiations, Victory and the Death of Kléber

Bonaparte leaves Egypt secretly on the night of 22 August 1799, with Monge and Berthollet. He leaves a letter to Kléber transferring command to him. Denon’s first thought: the ninety-six crates in the palace outbuildings, including the twenty-three without labels. With Bonaparte gone, the distinctions between organised plundering and scientific collection no longer hold even politically.

Kléber negotiates an evacuation with the Ottomans and the English: the Convention of El-Arish, January 1800. Hope lasts five weeks. In March 1800, British admiral Keith declares the convention null — Sidney Smith had exceeded his authority. Kléber takes up arms again. The victory at Heliopolis (20 March 1800), ten thousand against eighty thousand, is a tactical marvel. The French lose eight hundred men; the Ottomans leave nine thousand behind.

On 14 June 1800, Kléber is assassinated in his garden by a twenty-four-year-old Syrian student named Soleyman el-Halabi. Four stab wounds. The same day, hundreds of kilometres away, Desaix dies at Marengo while charging at the head of his division. Two men who had looked at the same temples with attention, on the same day, thousands of kilometres apart. Denon remains for a long time in the dark. He finds in his notebooks the annotations of Desaix — logistical questions about the monuments: how long to excavate, how many men to move them. He re-reads them differently.

Chapter III — The Scholars’ Season (1800–1801)

Under the command of General Menou, a convert to Islam and husband of an Egyptian woman, the scholars continue their explorations in the Delta and the eastern desert. This is the most scientifically productive period, and the darkest politically. The army is a garrison waiting for its defeat.

The Last Campaigns

Menou is more benevolent than his predecessors but more intrusive. Fourier devises a survival strategy: attaching his name to minor discoveries, handing him reports too technical to be understood, and continuing the substantive work without informing him. “This is survival,” not diplomacy.

At Tanis, Bubastis, Sais — the Delta sites — the monuments are less spectacular than those of Upper Egypt. But they yield an ordinary Egypt: irrigation techniques thousands of years old, necropolises of sacred cats, granite blocks reused in the walls of fellah houses for generations. These fellahs are the true involuntary custodians of Sais. Jomard: “Without their houses, these blocks would have disappeared long ago.”

During an excavation at Bubastis, Denon finds a small bronze sarcophagus in the shape of a seated cat, twenty centimetres tall, eyes inlaid with glass. The base bears a line of hieroglyphs: the name of the dedicant. Three hundred grams in the satchel. He cannot help thinking of what Fourier would have said.

The Eastern Desert and the Coptic Monasteries

In the spring of 1801, Denon explores the Coptic monasteries hidden in the cliffs between the Nile and the Red Sea. At the monastery of Saint Anthony, inhabited since the fourth century, the father superior agrees to show the manuscripts but not to let them leave. Denon spends three days copying a bilingual Greek-Coptic psalter, letter by letter, in a language of which he understands only half. He departs with his copy.

Jomard discovers in the cliffs hermits’ caves covered with graffiti. He thinks of the inscriptions at Philae: “These hermits were making the same wager on eternity that we make on science. The means differ, not the intensity.”

Agriculture and Unwritten Knowledge

Conté, the expedition’s inventor, presents to the Institut a study on Egyptian irrigation systems. The shaduf and the sakia — a counterweighted lever and an ox-driven wheel — are machines that any fellah can build from local wood and rope. The Description will document them. The plans will be published. But the hand gestures — the exact pressure, the angle, the drying time judged by eye — will travel nowhere.

Denon discovers in the Coptic quarter of Cairo a workshop still making papyrus by pharaonic techniques. The old craftsman says, through the interpreter: “It does not matter to know the history. What matters is that the hands know.” Denon buys three sheets and draws the craftsman’s hands — which he will frame in his apartment on the Rue Saint-Dominique on his return.

The Fall of Cairo (27 June 1801)

On 27 June 1801, General Belliard opens capitulation negotiations with the Grand Vizier. The convention contains Article Sixteen: all natural and artificial curiosities collected by members of the Institut are to be handed over to the British commissioners. When Fourier reads the clause aloud, a silence follows that Denon compares to the announcement of a death. Then everyone speaks at once.

Geoffroy is ready to burn his collections rather than surrender them. Marcel relies on his rubbings. Fourier searches for legal loopholes. Denon sums up: “They will take the originals. We will keep the copies. The copies are the real spoils.”

The March to Alexandria (2 – 14 July 1801)

Thirteen thousand soldiers, two hundred civilians, all the scholars. En route, an Ottoman patrol attempts to stop the wagons: “These objects belong to Egypt. You took them from our temples.” General Damas holds firm. The patrol disappears on the morning of 5 July. They arrive in Alexandria on 14 July — the thirteenth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille — and wait seven weeks in the port warehouses.

On the road, a twenty-three-year-old deserter who had learnt Arabic and wished to stay in Egypt rather than return to the factory receives thirty lashes. He will march all the same to Alexandria. Geoffroy gives him a salve for his wounds. The soldier says he did not want to see what was going to happen in Alexandria: \u201cWe are going to hand our discoveries to the English. I was carrying Monsieur Jomard\u2019s crates at Thebes. And now we give everything away.\u201d

Chapter IV — The Collapse and the Return (1801–1802)

This final chapter covers the confrontation with the British commissioners in Alexandria, the loss of the Rosetta Stone and the major antiquities, the safeguarding of the scientific collections and drawings, the return to France, and the early years of publication of the Description de l’Égypte.

The Major Antiquities (3 – 22 September 1801)

On 3 September 1801, British commissioner William Richard Hamilton arrives with Edward Daniel Clarke to examine the collections. Clarke, twenty-four years old, trained in classical antiquities at Oxford, states at once: all natural and artificial curiosities. Jomard has prepared overnight a legal memorandum in three categories: seizable antiquities, non-seizable intellectual productions, the grey area of instruments.

The Rosetta Stone is entered first in Clarke’s register. Marcel watches the quill scratch the paper. Each letter is a nail in a coffin. He has said nothing. He had his thirty rubbings. Clarke could take the stone. Marcel was quite determined to keep the text. Next come the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II in green basalt — a tomb prepared for the last native Egyptian pharaoh, which was never used —, the statue of the high priest of Amun in grey granite, the stelae. Hamilton promises that the British Museum will acknowledge the French discovery on the labels.

Denon rises: “I will accept no seizure without prior discussion of each category of objects.” The strategy is adopted: defend everything, yield only when resistance is no longer possible, make each concession cost something. “This is not a strategy of victory. It is a strategy of dignity.”

The Saved Collections

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire places himself between the soldiers and his crates, shouting: “You will not touch these collections.” He lights a tinderbox ten centimetres from the dry straw. “You will bring back ashes to London.” Clarke retreats. The jars of Nile fauna remain with the French. Geoffroy’s victory has a knock-on effect: the scholars understand that firm resistance can achieve results.

Hamilton grants Denon the right to publish his notebooks in France without restriction — on a single condition: a copy of each plate for the British Museum. This agreement makes possible the Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte, published as early as 1802. The rubbings remain with Marcel — they are not antiquities, Hamilton says, they are working notes. Jomard’s measurement notebooks remain because Jomard defends them as an engineer, conceding nothing that cannot be proved. Clarke says to Denon: “Your young colleague neither overvalues anything nor concedes anything. That is rare in a negotiation. — He is a mathematician.”

An Egyptian merchant named Mahmoud al-Tawil presents himself with a list of eight objects stolen by French soldiers in 1798. Hamilton notes his name and hands him a receipt. The objects are not returned \u2014 the procedure for individual restitution in this context is \u201clegally inextricable.\u201d Mahmoud al-Tawil folds the paper and leaves. He says one sentence. His son translates: \u201cHe says to note his name all the same.\u201d

The Ethics of Spoliation

On 18 September, Hamilton dines with the scholars, without a secretary. He comes to say directly that the sarcophagus of Nectanebo leaves tomorrow for the port. Denon: “It is not your taking it that troubles me. It is that in a hundred years, an Egyptian will have to come to London to see the sarcophagus of one of his pharaohs.” Hamilton: “If in a hundred years there is an Egyptian who wants to see this sarcophagus, it will be because someone will have taught him what it is. And that person will probably have worked from your drawings and your surveys. Not from the stone.” Denon: “That is not an answer. It is a justification.” Hamilton: “Yes. As are all the answers we give ourselves about what we are doing here.”

Marcel: “This sarcophagus was already stolen once before the Arabs. The Romans removed it from Nectanebo’s tomb and took it to Alexandria. Alexandria made it a bathtub. The Arabs turned it into a fountain. We measured it. You are going to display it. Each era has its own way of appropriating Egypt.” Geoffroy: “And Egypt itself has no say.”

On 22 September, the final record of proceedings is signed. Hamilton signs first — protocol requires that the party which has imposed its terms signs first. Denon holds the quill for a moment without writing. This is not hesitation. It is the time the hand takes to accept what the mind has already accepted. He signs. Before leaving, Hamilton says: “What we have done here will be judged differently by future generations. But we have at least tried to do it with a certain equity.” Denon records the phrase in his notebook.

The Return to France (18 November – 25 November 1801)

The ship docks at Toulon on 18 November 1801, three years and six months after their departure. Denon walks down the gangplank and sets foot on the wet, cold stone. The smell of salt and tar. He says nothing, does not kiss the ground. He takes the cold air into his lungs and waits for his body to remember.

In Avignon, a woman of about fifty holds a miniature portrait in her hand. She asks for nothing. She only looks at the faces of the soldiers coming down. Fourier looks away. Some would always be waiting. In Lyon, Denon meets an engraver who will be able to produce the plates for the Description, and buys in a bookshop a copy of his own correspondence published during his absence. He recognises the words but not quite the voice. “My writing has changed. It has become more direct, less preoccupied with effects. That may be good news.”

The entry into Paris through the Faubourg Saint-Antoine takes place at dusk. No parade, no speeches — the Army of the Orient has returned defeated. A coachman asks: “You are coming from far away, Monsieur?” Denon: “From Egypt.” The coachman: “They say it is beautiful.” Denon: “It is more than beautiful. But one must return to know what it is worth.”

The Work Begins (December 1801 – December 1802)

Bonaparte receives Fourier at the Tuileries in December 1801, standing as always: \u201cPublish this. I am making it a project of State.\u201d Offices are provided, budgets allocated. Denon is appointed Director General of the National Museums \u2014 the man who documented the expedition\u2019s plunderings will become the great organiser of the French imperial collections. He accepts, believing he will be able to influence how the collections are assembled and presented.

Jomard, in the Rue de la Croix-Faubin, transcribes his two hundred sheets of surveys. He calculates the height of the Great Pyramid: one hundred and forty-six and a half metres, or two hundred and eighty royal cubits. He publishes the cubit: 0.5236 metres. Egyptologists will use it for a hundred and fifty years. He also detects Lepère’s error on the Suez Canal — nine metres of purported difference in level between the two seas — but too late to correct the official report. It will take sixty years and Ferdinand de Lesseps for the canal to be dug.

Fourier drafts the historical preface to the Description over two years — one hundred and sixty dense pages, a synthesis of all that is known about Egypt since the Greeks. Every sentence weighed. He wants it to be an intellectual monument comparable to the Encyclopédie. The Description will be published in twenty-three folio volumes between 1809 and 1822, in print runs of a thousand copies on laid paper watermarked “Égypte ancienne et moderne.”

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire writes to Cuvier a letter about what he has seen in Egypt: the conviction that species are not fixed. Cuvier will fight him on it. They will dispute for thirty years before the Académie. This quarrel is one of the most important in European natural history. It began here, in a room in Paris, in December 1802, with a letter to a man he loves and combats at the same time.

On the evening of 31 December 1802, Denon sets down his pencil, picks up tube number one and draws out the first notebook. It opens to a quick sketch: the bridge of L’Orient, with the sails and the fleet in the background. Drawn during the crossing of May 1798. Four years earlier. Another man, almost. He closed the notebook, screwed the cap back on, and went out into the street.

What France truly kept from Egypt was one hundred and sixty-seven minds and the eight hundred and thirty-six images they had produced. What it had taken — and the word was exact, whatever the justification — was in London. The statues were in London. The knowledge was in Paris. That was the only comfort available. It was real.

Gallery of Principal Characters

Vivant Denon

Diplomat, draughtsman, man of taste, he is the central witness and narrative thread of the volume. He draws everywhere, while walking, under gunfire, by torchlight in the tombs. His notebooks are at once a scientific archive and a moral journal: he documents the removals in which he participates, the soldiers pillaging before him, his own inability to stop. Appointed Director General of the National Museums on his return, he will oversee for thirteen years the artistic acquisitions of the Empire.

Édouard Jomard

Twenty-two years old, freshly graduated from the École Polytechnique. He measures everything — the pyramids, the temples, the burial shafts, the irrigation systems. His discovery of the astronomical orientation of Karnak is one of the key moments of the novel. He will produce the most accurate map of Egypt ever made, and his surveys will serve as a reference a century later to the British engineers who build the first Aswan Dam.

Jean-Baptiste Fourier

A mathematician of twenty-nine at the outset, he becomes in Egypt the intellectual organiser of the expedition. His work on heat propagation in the desert — the “heat equations” that never leave him — will be one of his great scientific contributions. He drafts the preface to the Description de l’Égypte and presides over the Institut d’Égypte with quiet authority. He will die in 1830 without seeing the final volumes published.

Claude-Louis Berthollet

The expedition’s chemist, he analyses the embalming resins, the chemistry of the natron lakes, and discovers — while contemplating the natural reactions of the lakes — the seed of what will become his Essay on Chemical Statics (1803). Pragmatic and clear-sighted, he is the one who tells Bonaparte that the Commission’s work “is not harmless,” and the one who recalls that “when we leave, it will be in haste.”

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

A passionate young naturalist, he accumulates in Egypt evidence for what he has been sensing since Paris: that species are not fixed. The fauna of the Nile — two hundred and forty species new to European science — and the animal mummies of Saqqara will fuel his quarrel with Cuvier on the fixity of species. His threat to burn his collections rather than surrender them to the English is one of the most intense moments of the capitulation negotiations.

Jean-Joseph Marcel

Orientalist and director of the Cairo National Press, he is the one who immediately grasps the significance of the Rosetta Stone. His nocturnal rubbings, his thirty copies sent to the four corners of Europe before the capitulation, and his legal resistance to Clarke are one of the expedition’s most effective contributions. His formula sums it all up: “They will take the stone. We will keep the text.”

Hassan

Official interpreter of the Commission, a Copt from Cairo, educated in Arabic and French. He is the most clear-sighted character about what the expedition is actually doing — neither on the side of the soldiers nor on the side of the insurgents, but on the side of language. His role as intermediary in the antiquities markets, the fifteen per cent commission he takes on each sale, and his silent entry into the great hall of Karnak at dawn make him the most ambiguous and perhaps the most honest figure in the novel.

William Richard Hamilton

British commissioner, twenty-four years old, trained at Oxford. He arrives in Alexandria to seize the French collections and goes about it with firm rigour and genuine equity. The nocturnal conversation with Denon about the sarcophagus of Nectanebo — in which he acknowledges the validity of all the French arguments and takes the sarcophagus away all the same — is one of the most unsettling scenes in the novel.

Kléber

Alsatian general, two metres tall, frankness as a professional failing. He takes command at Bonaparte’s secret resignation, negotiates the Convention of El-Arish, wins the battle of Heliopolis, and is assassinated on 14 June 1800 in his garden in Cairo. His death on the same day as Desaix at Marengo is one of the tragic coincidences the novel leaves without comment.

Themes and Issues of Volume II

Science as a Justification for Plunder.

The novel asks the same question relentlessly: what distinguishes the scholar who documents from the soldier who takes? Denon and the soldier see the papyrus on the floor of a tomb at the same moment. The Commission and the informal markets operate according to the same logic of acquisition. Berthollet’s official form legalises what Denon’s satchel does not document. The difference lies in the name given to the gesture, not in the gesture itself.

Transmission and Embodied Knowledge.

The Egypt that the scholars document is twofold: the stone monuments, measurable and reproducible in the Description, and the living knowledge — the gestures of the Coptic weaver, the Arabic names of the columns of Dendera, the irrigation techniques of the fellahs — which will travel in no crate and will die with their holders. The novel returns constantly to this asymmetry between what can be engraved and what hands know.

The Question of the Absent Owner.

Who owns the Egyptian antiquities? The fellahs who find them in their fields, the merchants who resell them, the scholars who document them, the states that carry them off, or the modern Egyptians who did not exist as a nation in 1798? Mahmoud al-Tawil, whose objects were stolen twice in succession — first by French soldiers, then as British war booty — leaves with a signed receipt and the request: “Note my name all the same.”

The Paradox of Copies.

The Rosetta Stone leaves for London. But Marcel’s rubbings remain in Paris, and it is they that will enable the decipherment of hieroglyphs. Denon’s notebooks remain in Paris and it is they that document what the English are taking away. Fourier formulates the asymmetry at the council before the capitulation: “They will take the originals. We will keep the copies. The copies are the real spoils.” That is the only comfort available. It is real.

Duration against Conquest.

Egypt has traversed three millennia of plunder — Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, Mamluks, French, English — and the monuments are still there. The guardian of the Temple of Luxor watches the French soldiers file past with the resignation of one who has seen it all before. The cloth merchant of Cairo calculates after Aboukir that pepper prices have not changed. This quiet permanence of popular Egypt in the face of successive conquerors is the background sound of the novel.

Chronology of Volume II

19 May 1798 — Departure from Toulon: 347 ships, 40,200 men embarked.

9–12 June 1798 — Capture of Malta in three days. Inventory of the Order’s treasury.

1 July 1798 — Landing at Alexandria. March to Cairo.

21 July 1798 — Battle of the Pyramids. Victory over Murad Bey.

22 July 1798 — Capture of Cairo.

1 August 1798 — Naval Battle of Aboukir Bay. Destruction of the French fleet by Nelson.

22 August 1798 — Foundation of the Institut d’Égypte by Bonaparte.

21 October 1798 — Cairo Uprising. Brutal repression, bombardment of the insurgent quarters.

November 1798 — Expedition to the Sphinx and the Saqqara necropolises.

15 December 1798 — Major scientific session of the Institut. Monge/Fourier debate.

25 December 1798 — Departure of Desaix’s expedition towards Upper Egypt, with Denon.

24 January 1799 — Discovery of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera.

27 January 1799 — First sighting of Karnak by the Commission. Night of Jomard’s astronomical discovery.

7 – 10 February 1799 — Exploration of the Valley of the Kings. Tomb of Seti I.

5 March 1799 — Visit to Philae. Denon’s decision to take nothing.

April 1799 — Denon returns to Cairo. Bonaparte leaves for Syria.

15 July 1799 — Discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Bouchard.

August 1799 — Convention of El-Arish prepared. Fourier defends the collections.

22 August 1799 — Bonaparte secretly leaves Egypt for France with Monge and Berthollet.

14 June 1800 — Kléber assassinated in Cairo. Desaix killed at Marengo the same day.

27 June 1801 — Capitulation of Cairo. Article Sixteen demands all collections.

2 July 1801 — Evacuation of Cairo. March to Alexandria.

14 July 1801 — Entry into Alexandria. Seven-week wait.

3 – 22 September 1801 — Negotiations with Hamilton and Clarke. Division of the collections.

22 September 1801 — Signing of the final record of proceedings. The Rosetta Stone leaves for London.

18 November 1801 — Return to Toulon.

December 1801 — First reports to the Consular Government. Bonaparte decrees the Description de l’Égypte a project of State.

1802 — Publication of Denon’s Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte.

1809 — First volume of the Description de l’Égypte.

1822 — Final volume. Twenty-three folio volumes, 836 plates.