Did Jesus speak French?
Why a leading French mathematician spent a fortune on letters from Plato, Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, Alexander the Great, and other famous historical figures. Even though all the letters were written in perfect French.
Professor Michel Chasles has spent this day in 1861 in the library at his home in Paris, sitting at his desk. He hasn’t spoken to anyone all day. He is working on a new mathematical problem — the number of conics tangent to five given conics — which is going very well and he is feeling rather pleased with himself, and pleased on behalf of France. He is pleased for France because Chasles is an ardent patriot and his new proof corrects errors in an earlier solution to the problem by the Swiss mathematician Jakob Steiner. Chasles mentally chalks up another victory for France.
The professor devotes nearly all of his time to mathematics. He teaches at the Sorbonne, where he was appointed in 1846, and spends a lot of time at the Académie des Sciences, to which he was elected in 1851 as a reward for his outstanding work in mathematics. He serves tirelessly on various committees for the Académie. He has written histories of mathematics. He is unmarried and lives alone.
At exactly the same time, Denis Vrain-Lucas is also sitting in a library in Paris. Not his library; his work as a law clerk does not offer enough remuneration for him to own such a thing. Vrain-Lucas is in the Imperial Library, studiously examining books. His nose is so close to the dusty pages he is almost inhaling the knowledge they contain. He has been there all day, apart from a brief, impecunious lunch at the nearby Café Riche, and he will stay in the library until it closes. He hasn’t spoken to anyone all day either.
But after both men have dined that evening, they will talk to each other, when they meet. Vrain-Lucas calls on Michel Chasles at his home. As he opens his front door to his guest the mathematician’s intense gaze, harsh face, and mean little mouth give no clue to the kind and generous host he is widely regarded as being. His eyes settle upon the small, olive skinned man in shabby clothes, who looks for all the world like the poorly paid servant he once was. The two men are acquaintances, and have a shared interest in antique documents. Chasles has bought documents from Vrain-Lucas before and this evening he is anticipating seeing some very interesting and rather rare papers. Chasles greets Vrain-Lucas and invites him to enter.
Sat in Chasles’ drawing room, Vrain-Lucas calmly outlines the story of how he has come to own this valuable package of hand written letters.
He tells Chasles that they come from the collection of the late Comte de Boisjardin, who tragically perished in a shipwreck on his way to the New World in 1791. Seeing the professor’s anxiety about the possible damage the sea might have caused to the documents, Vrain-Lucas assures him that they survived intact and are completely undamaged, as he will shortly demonstrate.
Carefully untying the package containing the various papers, Vrain-Lucas quietly tells Chasles of the efforts he put into tracking down the documents and the difficulty he had persuading the owner to sell them to him. Chasles’ interest is keen and he leans forward eagerly to examine the documents as they are revealed.
Vrain-Lucas’ description of the papers as truly rare and remarkable turns out to be quite the understatement. In front of the astonished mathematician he produces a letter from the brave, holy, French heroine, Joan of Arc, and a poem by the theologian Pierre Abelard. There is a passport signed by the King of the Gauls, Vercingetorix, who was so cruelly murdered after his defeat by Julius Caesar at the Battle of Alesia. Brave Vercingetorix had surrendered to save his men, but Caesar had the king publicly strangled. How the patriotic heart of Chasles must race as he holds this passport in his hand!
But there is more. Speaking of Caesar, there is a letter to him from Cleopatra, giving him news about their son. There are letters from Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun; letters from Laura de Noves to her lover, Petrarch; and a letter from Galileo. But surely the most precious, the most amazing letter is that from Mary Magdalene to the newly risen Lazarus, written, it says, from Marseilles.
Chasles is overwhelmed and immediately offers to buy the letters from Vrain-Lucas. He must have these letters, no matter what the price (which is considerable); they are truly remarkable.
Indeed they are. But what is most remarkable about the letters is that (apart from Galileo’s letter, which is written in Italian) they are all written in perfectly flawless French.
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France at this time was ruled by the Emperor Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon III can perhaps best be described as a benevolent despot. The writer Victor Hugo, who was vehemently opposed to Napoleon III, referred to him as ‘Napoleon the Small’. Karl Marx, adding to something his fellow philosopher Hegel had written, was referring to Napoleon III when he said that all great historical figures appear twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
The Emperor’s rule was a mixed blessing for France. When not sleeping with his countless mistresses, he somehow found time to give the vote to the workers, introduced schooling for girls and oversaw vast infrastructure developments. The revisioning of Paris by Baron Haussmann was carried out at the Emperor’s request. The French rail network was built, assisting the growth of the coal and steel industries. The French economy boomed, but the costs soared even faster and the legislature, horrified at the mounting debt, opposed the Emperor where it could. His foreign policy was a disaster that left France without allies and ultimately contributed to the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870.
Even before this final collapse, the Emperor’s rule had divided France. But there was no doubt that he was doing everything he thought right to put the country on the map, to make it the leader in Europe once again. It was a time of transformation for France. Change was in the air — as was dust, the streets of Paris were being dug up everywhere you looked — and the nation strove to hold its collective heads high once again.
The scientific world in France was still smarting over the trouncing of Descartes’ theories about the forces that kept the planets in their orbits around the Sun by the theories of that annoying Englishman Isaac Newton. Descartes posited that some sort of mechanical link existed that kept the planets connected to the Sun and he suggested there might be a system of vortices that helped in this. Naturally, French scientists supported this theory.
Newton proposed the existence of something he called universal gravitation, which caused the planets to be attracted to each other in space without any need for a mechanical connector. Naturally, English scientists supported Newton.
As we know, in the eighteenth century Newton’s theories were eventually accepted as the most correct explanation and Descartes’ theories were cast aside. But in the nineteenth century, French scientists were still feeling that their national pride had been hurt. We can assume there were conversations in places such as the Académie des Sciences, and in the private homes of French scientists, about the arrogant English lording it over the noble French. I am sure the patriotic Chasles took part in such conversations, re-asserting the supremacy of French scientists.
In 1867 Professor Chasles had an opportunity to put such a case to his colleagues at the Académie des Sciences. Addressing his sixty-five fellow members of the Académie, he presented his belief that it was the great French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal who had first developed the theory of universal gravitation. Not only had he done this prior to Newton, he actually wrote to Newton about it. Chasles’ audience gasped. They asked for proof of such a claim, and Chasles calmly produced the very letter Pascal had written to Newton. The room erupted in furor.
Where, his colleagues, wanted to know, had Chasles got such a letter?
Where indeed?
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No doubt during his early conversations with Vrain-Lucas in Chasles’ fine home (he had been a stockbroker before turning to mathematics) in the course of the purchase of one or two minor historical documents, Chasles had expounded his feelings about the wretched English scientists boasting of having bested their French counterparts. No doubt Vrain-Lucas nodded sympathetically and silently wondered how he might help his new benefactor even the score.
And no doubt Chasles was overjoyed when Vrain-Lucas brought to him, for his consideration, letters between Pascal, Newton, and the Irish scientist Robert Boyle. In these letters Pascal addresses Newton as “my young friend”, and offers him some problems to solve. In passing, Pascal mentions his theory of universal gravitation. Chasles is astounded, asks to purchase the letters and Vrain-Lucas happily sells them for a substantial amount. Chasles begs his new friend to bring him any other valuable documents. And thus, with the matching of supply to demand, begins their real acquaintance.
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It is on the basis of these letters that conveniently restore the preeminence of French science over that of its neighbouring country, that Chasles is so willing to buy anything that Vrain-Lucas brings him, including letters from Mary Magdalene. The proud Frenchman will eventually hand over hundreds of thousands of Francs (almost half a million Euros in today’s money) to the law clerk for some twenty seven thousand documents. Why Chasles doesn’t present the Pascal letters to his colleagues at the Académie des Sciences immediately is not clear (some versions of the relationship between Vrain-Lucas and Chasles disagree on the timing and order in which the documents are bought). But when he does present them, they cause a sensation.
There are those in the Académie who believe the letters are genuine, and those who are equally adamant that they are fakes. One member, examining the date of the letter from Pascal to Newton, calculates that Newton can only have been a child when it was written. Another says the handwriting on the letter does not, in his opinion, match the handwriting of Pascal documents in the Académie’s archive. But Chasles, and his supporters, are indefatigable. These letters prove that a Frenchman, not an Englishman, unlocked the secret that governs the movement of planets in the universe. The planets march to a French beat.
Such is the ferocity of the debate that it lasts for two whole years. How can such a thing be possible? Do scientists not know their own fields, the history of their subject? Regardless of their patriotism, surely they must be cognisant of the reality of history? Writing from Paris to the English ‘Athenaeum’ magazine in December 1867, a Monsieur W. de Fonvielle attempts to offer an explanation of his fellow scientists’ behaviour. Addressing his readers in “your free nation” he says of those learned men who believe the whole affair is a disgrace to French science, “If they do not raise their voices it is because in the present state of political and mental oppression [in France] it requires more than ordinary courage to oppose men of note and wealth.” He adds that the partisan, government controlled press and “the systematic despotism” in the country make people think twice before speaking out.
But for every criticism leveled at Chasles and his Pascal letters, Chasles is able to provide a counter claim, always in the form of yet another letter, so handily supplied by Vrain-Lucas. After a member of the Académie des Sciences challenges a supporting letter supposedly from Galileo on the basis that the Italian astronomer was blind at the time it was alleged to have been written, Chasles produces another letter from Galileo saying he was only pretending to be blind. Chasles’ peers demand to know the source of all of his letters. Where have these documents been all of this time?
Well of course they hadn’t been anywhere, since they didn’t exist until Vrain-Lucas created them. This is what he was doing all of the time he was in the Imperial Library; researching and making notes. Then he would return to his rooms and create the forgeries. His work as a law clerk involved him copying documents and he slipped easily from this to forgery. (He is also described in the records as working for a genealogist who may not have been totally dependable in the coats of arms he supplied to needy clients.) Initially Vrain-Lucas tried hard to make these documents look authentic, using old paper and making his own ink, aging the paper, etc. As time went on, his work became less carefully achieved (his letters from Cleopatra and Alexander the Great were both written on nineteenth century paper that contained identical fleur de lis watermarks). Like many forgers, it is almost as if he wanted to be caught.
And caught he was. But not as a result of the Pascal fiasco. It was Vrain-Lucas’ failure to provide three thousand documents that Chasles had paid for up front that caused the mathematician to call for his arrest, in fear that he might sell the documents to someone else (perhaps, heaven forbid, someone who wasn’t a patriotic Frenchman). At Vrain-Lucas’ trial in 1869 the whole story came pouring out. Chasles eventually had to admit that the letters supporting Pascal’s role in the creation of the theory of gravitational force must be fake. And umm, also, that he had bought letters from Vrain-Lucas that were by Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, and others…
Highly educated, clear thinking, intelligent scientists shouldn’t fall for such obvious forgeries, but they do. Like everyone else in the world they are fallible. They want to believe what they want to believe, regardless of the evidence. We love the clichéd notion of the smart/stupid, absent-minded professor; the genius in his own field who cannot boil an egg, or find the spectacles resting on his forehead. Every commentator on the Vrain-Lucas/Chasles case is stunned by how a smart scientist is fooled by fakes that are often of poor quality and ludicrous in content. But isn’t it always the case that forgery works in this way? What Chasles actually bought was not so much a cache of letters, but more a statement of French superiority. While the normal scientific method is to try to test hypotheses by refuting them, many people, including noted scientists, seek out data or information that supports the theory they already hold. It is possible that this is what was going on in Chasles’ mind as he held the Vrain-Lucas forgeries in his hand.
I have seen some of Vrain-Lucas’ forgeries (those that were not destroyed after his trial). Many are on the same sort of paper, with more or less the same colour ink. One or two are in script that looks like it seriously intends to be what it claims. But scores are slapdash, written at speed, with words compressed as the lines run too close to the edge of the paper. Many of the letters fit tightly onto a single page, with barely a margin to be seen. At his worst (and he is often at his worst) Vrain-Lucas produces ridiculous stylisations in his forgeries. His letters supposedly from Charlemagne, written on the same paper as other letters, are in a narrow and elongated spidery script that he presumably thought would look eighth or ninth century. But the letterforms of that time are rounded and squat. Vrain-Lucas can’t even be bothered to make much of an effort getting Charlemagne’s distinctive monogram correct.
Clearly if Chasles was upholding the honour of France in his purchases, Vrain-Lucas was only finding easy ways of making money (though at his trial he too claimed to be exalting France). But what happened to all that money is a mystery. In court Vrain-Lucas stated he had very little of it left. But he also had little to show for the wealth Chasles had handed over to him through the years of their relationship. Where had it gone? There are some who think Chasles was not a dupe, but a partner in the fraud. Others create a mistress who somehow links the men and who pocketed the cash. They see a gap in the story, and they want to fill it in with an explanation that is satisfactory to them. They want what they believe to be true, to actually be true. Just like Chasles.
But that belief will trip us up every time. It is reported that at the time of his arrest Vrain-Lucas was preparing for Michel Chasles the handwritten text that Jesus used when he gave the Sermon on the Mount. What more collectable autograph could there be than that of the Son of God? Apart, of course, from His Father’s.
