"When the house is finished, death enters," say the Orientals. This sad and true saying has just been realized in Cairo for the famous Bulaq Museum. Scarcely had it emerged from its transformations when its founder, Auguste Mariette, died there, surrounded by the respect and regrets of the scholarly world, but deprived of the supreme consolation of seeing again those collections, those charming rooms that were the homeland of his soul and whose completion was accomplished according to long-meditated plans.
Returning to Egypt from France on his deathbed, it was with great difficulty that Mariette reached his home, which he was never to leave again. There, from the top of that veranda so beloved by his guests, in the midst of his desolate children and friends, this man, so firm, so master of himself, could not hold back his tears as he cast his eyes one last time over the Nile, that path of glory he could no longer travel; over the rejuvenated facade of the Museum which, shortly after, was to be transformed into a funeral chapel; and finally, over those gardens that had just been planted for him and were about to become his burial place.
This sacred place, where Mariette first landed thirty-one years ago, where he lived, and where he now rests, has kept the still-visible imprint of a life entirely dedicated to a vocation, to a work of predilection. Thus, its appearance is full of contrasts and lessons. While at one end of the enclosure stands the elegant and new Egyptian facade of the Museum, at the other, the founder's poor and old house, now uninhabitable, is barely noticeable. In summer, the floodwaters invade the lower floor; the dark staircase threatens to collapse; one hardly dares to venture onto the balconies, and from the open-work ceilings in the dilapidated rooms falls the dust of ruins.
The life of the founder of Bulaq presents similar contrasts. Vested for twenty-three years with the confidence and personal friendship of the viceroys, enjoying a prestigious reputation in Europe, another man in Mariette's position might have thought of himself or his children. But he, modest sometimes to a fault, liberal and unconscious of his resources, indifferent to well-being and careless of the future, kept nothing. He gave everything—life, health, strength—to the work he was creating for the world and for Egypt. At a time when everything in that country was difficult and unstable, he endowed it with an institution little understood by those who should have been interested, and he knew how to make it durable.
Under a government and among a people exclusively preoccupied with material interests, he opened the way to the intellectual speculations of the most advanced civilizations. He forced Egypt to preserve, to collect within its borders and for itself, the monuments of the most ancient civilization on the globe—the last ones left to it by the invaders and fanatics of antiquity, as well as by the utilitarian builders, excavators, and travelers of the modern world.
First Mission to Egypt
To undertake and sustain such a task required the instincts of both a scholar and a man of action, and Auguste Mariette is an example, which posterity will not forget, of the power of a true calling. Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer on February 11, 1821, at the age of twenty-eight he was still a modest seventh-grade teacher at the municipal college of his hometown. Scarcely ten years had passed, and he had enriched science and honored his country by rediscovering, under the sands of the Nile valley, one of the most venerable sanctuaries of Egypt: the Serapeum of Memphis, which had been sought for half a century.
