Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

Introduction.
xxiii
Champollion died on March 4th, 1832, and when his brother Disapearance
wished to take steps to publish the Dictionary he found that as of portions of
a result of " funestes conseils des plus funestes passions," one MSS.
half of each copy of the Dictionnaire had been carried off, but
by whom Champollion-Figeac does not say in his edition of the
Dictionnaire. All that he says on the subject there is that in
spite of all opposition he succeeded in 1840 in regaining pos- Their
session of 329 folios of the copy of the Dictionnaire, which was recovery by
written out fairly on sheets of paper, and a large number of the Figeaf ^
slips belonging to the copy, which was kept purposely in slip 1840.
form. And that having these in his hands he felt justified in
thinking that he was in possession of both manuscript copies
of the Dictionnaire in a nearly complete state. In a footnote
he refers to a pamphlet in which he tell us how he regained
of the
possession of the parts of the two manuscript copies
Dictionnaire which had disappeared, and as the pamphlet is
now very rare, and his story is not generally known, I summarise
it here.
Champollion-Figeac's pamphlet is entitled, Notice sur les
Manuscrits Autographes de Champollion le Jeune perdus en I'Annee
1832, et retrouvcs en 1840. Paris, March, 1842. He says that
when in April, 1832, he set to work to arrange his brother's literary-
effects with the view of offering the MSS. to the Government, porti ns of
he found at once that several of the most important of them were Champollion 's
missing. He devoted himself to the task of making enquiries m issing.
for them among his brother's friends, but they could give him
no information about them, and the only result of his labour
was to make widely known the fact that they were lost. The
savants of the day, remembering how freely Champollion lent his
writings to his intimate friends, hoped that they were not lost
but only mislaid by some friend who had forgotten all about them.
A year passed, and nothing was heard of the lost manuscripts.
Meanwhile Champollion-Figeac began to suspect that one of his
champollion-
brother's friends, a man who was peculiarly indebted to him, had Figeac's
- on.- t j T4. r 11 A sea-rch for the
them in his possession. This friend was a young Italian called same
Salvolini, a native of Faenza, who came to Paris to study Egyptology
in 1831, and who became a close friend of Champollion and
his family. Champollion-Figeac's suspicions were aroused by the suspicion falls
fact that a few months after the death of his brother, Salvolini on Salvolini.
sent him a prospectus of a work on the inscriptions on the Rosetta
Stone, the Book of the Dead, etc., which he intended to publish
in three volumes quarto. That a young man, 22 years of age,
b 4