On this Valentine’s Day, come back to the most famous Figeacois, Jean-François Champollion. If he does not seem to have unleashed romantic passions, a few women have crossed his life.
It was around 1770 that Jacques Champollion, hawker, moved to Figeac as a bookseller. With his wife Jeanne-Françoise Gaulieu, daughter of a town merchant, they will have seven children, including the last Jean-François, will be born in 1790.
Cataloged as a poor student and very undisciplined, he is not very good at spelling and arithmetic, to the point that Jacques-Joseph, his brother and godfather, withdraws him from the Figeacoise school, and brings him to Grenoble. He takes him back to high school and takes care of his education. At 17, he joined the Collège de France and the Special School of Oriental Languages in Paris. He is passionate about them and learns them easily, especially Coptic.
But beyond the turbulent schoolboy transformed into a studious student and virtuoso, who was the young man Jean-François Champollion? It is known that with his brother and mentor, he very quickly married Bonaparte’s cause to King Louis XVIII. If Jacques-Joseph was fine, witty and highly educated, Jean-François may have seemed less sociable but certainly warmer, “which made him all the more dangerous,” according to the Isère prefect. For Marie-Hélène Pottier, former curator of the Champollion Museum – Les Écritures du Monde, we discover a quality character, with convictions, hopes, a man facing political difficulties, a scientist, and through him, his family, his feelings “…
Passionate about his studies and his research, Jean-François Champollion does not seem to have unleashed great love passions, even if he fell in love at 16 with Pauline Berriat, his brother’s sister-in-law, who did not seem to take him seriously. serious.
As a student in Paris, he met “the amiable and modest” Louise to whom he dedicated a poem entitled “The lottery of love”.
Later, during his exile in Figeac, he offered another poem to Madame Adèle for her birthday: “Happy dawn, who of your beautiful years, saw the flower bloom and adorn the fields” …
However, it was with Rosine Blanc, the daughter of a glover from Grenoble, that he married on December 30, 1818 in Figeac, after a long engagement. From this union will be born a Zoraïde girl.
Jean-François and Angelica: impossible love, or reciprocal admiration?
On April 2, 1826, Angelica Palli, an Italian woman of letters enters her life, during a session of the Academy during which she declaims a poem in homage to the Egyptologist. Reciprocal admiration will be followed by a loving friendship. Jean-François sends him a letter with these words: “When I saw you for the first time, an unknown feeling attracted me to you… I experienced the strongest emotion I have ever received in my life”…
Love impossible or without return, no one knows. Between 1826 and 1829, he sent him about thirty letters. He signs them Zeid and names her Zelmire. He has boundless adoration for her, but does not seem to receive in return the feelings he hopes for. What he complains about, emphasizing the silence or the bad temper of his girlfriend.
He died in Paris on March 4, 1832, far from Rosine and her 8-year-old daughter Zoraïde.
–
