The intense young man with the beautiful eyelashes sat bent over the copies of the ancient Egyptian writing, playing with different combinations of signs along with the few that could already be recognized because of their appearance in royal names on the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone did not explain much, however, and he still had to work to understand the mass of signs and what was being said in every new inscription that reached him in his rural retreat.

He was in retreat because he was a person of whom the new government was suspicious, for he had supported the Revolution, and worse, Napoleon, hoping, he had told friends, for a new day without the horrible constraints of the old Catholic faith with its myriad rules. He had been one of those modern young men who thought people could be reinvented, made better, by casting off tradition and sharing the achievements of the modern age. Especially he hoped for the demise of the priesthood and its hold on education in France. The nation had been held back for so long by the mindless dictates of the priests that only radical Republicanism and then the Empire had seemed to offer a way out.