My knowledge of ancient Egypt is rather rudimentary, but it seems to me that I always knew that Champollion had fallen into syncope, syncope followed by a coma of 5 days at the very moment when he had understood what the hieroglyphs meant. I did not know much more about it when a bookseller of my friends put in my hands the immense biography of Hermine Hartleben, published in 1906 and finally translated into French in 1982. 1_ And from then on the question of the nature of syncope pursued me, forcing me to look in more recent texts for some modern explanations of this pathology and to know if it had something to do with the premature end of this man. Here is the result (Dia portrait of Champollion after Madame de Rémilly and name of the hero in hieroglyphs)