The evening of 22 August 1799 - the eve of his departure from Egypt - was surely one of the less happy that Napoleon Bonaparte had known. Unusually mindful of the mortality of empires, he is said to have declared to the mathematician Gaspard Monge, one of a collection of savants he had brought to Egypt, that he would far rather be a Newton than an Alexander. To which Monge replied that no one could attain again to the glory of Newton for there was only one world to discover. Not so, said Napoleon: there is still the 'world of details' and the laws that govern them - a sentiment curiously apposite to his expedition. For trailing him out of Egypt came not only the Rosetta Stone, but a young professor from the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris: Etienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire, a man whose mind was torrid with details and with the desire to find the laws governing them.

LRB 19 June 1997 | PDF Download