The Art of Travel

III

On the Exotic

1.

On disembarking at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport, I am struck, only a few steps inside the terminal, by the appearance of a sign hanging from the ceiling, which announces the way to the arrivals hall, the exit and the transfer desks. It is a bright-yellow sign, one metre high and two metres across, simple in design, a plastic fascia in an illuminated aluminium box suspended on steel struts from a ceiling webbed with cables and air-conditioning ducts. Despite its simplicity, even its mundanity the sign delights me, a delight for which the adjective exotic, though unusual, seems apt. The exoticism is located in particular areas: in the double a of Aankomst, in the neighbourliness of the u and the i in Uitgang, in the use of English subtitles, in the word for ‘desk', balies, and in the choice of practical, modernist fonts, Frutiger or Univers.

If the sign provokes in me genuine pleasure, it is in part because it offers the first conclusive evidence of my having arrived elsewhere. It is a symbol of being abroad. Although it may not seem distinctive to the casual eye, such a sign would never exist in precisely this form in my own country. There it would be less yellow, the typeface would be softer and more nostalgic, there would—out of greater indifference to the confusion of foreigners—be no subtitles, and the language would contain no double as, a repetition in which I sense, confusedly, the presence of another history and mind-set.

A plug socket, a bathroom tap, a jam jar or an airport sign may tell us more than its designer intended; it may speak of the nation that made it. And the nation that made the sign at Schipol Airport seems very far from my own. A bold archaeologist of national character might trace the influence of the lettering back to the de Stijl movement of the early twentieth century, the prominence of the English

subtitles to the Dutch openness towards foreign influences and the foundation of the East India Company in 1602, and the overall simplicity of the sign to the Calvinist aesthetic that became a part of Holland's identity during the war between the United Provinces and Spain in the sixteenth century.

That a sign could evolve so differently in two places is evidence of a simple but pleasing idea: countries are diverse, and practices variable across borders. Yet difference alone would not be enough to elicit pleasure, or not for long. The difference has to seem like an improvement on what my own country is capable of. If I call the Schipol sign exotic, it is because it succeeds in suggesting, vaguely but intensely, that the country that made it and that lies beyond the uitgang may in critical ways prove more congenial than my own to my temperament and concerns. The sign is a promise of happiness.

2.

The word exotic has traditionally been attached to more colourful things than Dutch signs, among them snake charmers, harems, minarets, camels, souks and mint tea poured from a great height into a tray of small glasses by a moustachioed servant.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the term became synonymous with the Middle East. When Victor Hugo published his cycle of poems Les Orientales in 1829, he could declare in the preface, ‘We are all much more concerned with the Orient than ever before. The Orient has become a subject of general preoccupation, to which the author of this book has deferred.'

Hugo's poems featured the staples of European Orientalist literature: pirates, pashas, sultans, spices, moustaches and dervishes. Characters drank mint tea from small glasses. His work found an eager audience, as did the Arabian Nights, the Oriental novels of Walter Scott and Byron's The Giaour. In January 1832, Eugene Delacroix set off for North Africa to capture the exoticism of the Orient in painting. Within three months of arriving in Tangier, he was wearing local dress and signing himself off in letters to his brother as ‘your African'.

Even European public places were becoming more Oriental in appearance. On the fourteenth of September 1833, a crowd lined the banks of the Seine near Rouen and cheered as a French Navy boat christened the Louxor sailed upstream to Paris on its way from Alexandria, bearing, in a specially constructed hold, the giant obelisk lifted from the temple complex at Thebes, destined for a traffic island on the Place de la Concorde.

One of the spectators was a moody twelve-year-old boy named Gustave Flaubert, whose greatest wish was to leave Rouen, become a camel driver in Egypt and lose his virginity in a harem, to an olive-skinned woman with a trace of down on her upper lip.

The youngster held Rouen—indeed, the whole of France—in profound contempt. As he put it to his school friend Ernest Chevalier, he felt nothing but disdain for this ‘good civilisation' that prided itself on having produced ‘railways, poisons, cream tarts, royalty and the guillotine'. His life was ‘sterile, banal and laborious'. ‘Often I feel like blowing the heads off passersby' he told his diary. ‘I am bored, I am bored, I am bored.' He returned repeatedly to the theme of how boring it was to live in France, and especially in Rouen. ‘Today my boredom was terrible,' he reported at the end of one bad Sunday. ‘How beautiful are the provinces and how chic are the comfortably off who live there! Their talk is… of taxes and road improvements. The neighbour is a wonderful institution. To be given

Eugene Delacroix, Doors and Bay- Windows in an Arab House, 1832

its full social due, his position should always be written in capital letters: NEIGHBOUR.'

It was as a source of relief from the prosperous pettiness and civic-mindedness of his surroundings that Flaubert contemplated the Orient. References to the Middle East pervaded his early writings and correspondence. In ‘Rage et Impuissance', a story written in 1836, when Flaubert was fifteen (he was at school and fantasised about killing the mayor of Rouen), the author projected his Eastern fantasies onto his central character, M. Ohmlin, who longed for ‘the Orient with her burning sun, her blue skies, her golden minarets… her caravans through the sands—the Orient!… The tanned, olive skin of Asiatic women!'

In 1839 (Flaubert was reading Rabelais and wanted to fart loudly enough for all Rouen to hear), he wrote another story, ‘Les Memoires d'un fou', whose autobiographical hero looked back on a youth spent yearning for the Middle East: ‘I dreamt of faraway journeys through the lands of the South; I saw the Orient, her vast sands and her palaces teeming with camels wearing brass bells I saw blue seas, a pure sky, silvery sand and women with tanned skin and fiery eyes who could whisper to me in the language of the Houris.'

Two years later (by which time Flaubert had left Rouen and was studying law in Paris, in deference to his father's wishes), he wrote another story, ‘Novembre', whose hero had no time for railways, bourgeois civilisation or lawyers but instead identified with the traders of the East: ‘Oh! To be riding now on the back of a camel! Ahead a red sky and brown sands, on the burning horizon the undulating landscape stretching out into infinity. … In the evening one puts up one's tent, waters the dromedaries and lights a fire to scare off the jackals that can be heard wailing far off in the desert; in the morning one fills the gourds at the oasis.'

In Flaubert's mind, the word happiness became interchangeable with the word Orient. In a moment of despair over his studies, his lack of romantic success, the expectations of his parents, the weather and the accompanying complaints of farmers (it had been raining for two weeks, and several cows had drowned in flooded fields near Rouen), Flaubert wrote to Chevalier, ‘My life, which in my dreams is so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love, will turn out to be like everyone else's: monotonous, sensible, stupid. I'll attend law school, be admitted to the bar and end up as a respectable assistant district attorney in a small provincial town such as Yvetot or Dieppe. … Poor madman, who dreamt of glory, love, laurels, journeys, the Orient.'

The people who lived along the coasts of North Africa, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine and Syria might have been surprised to learn that their lands had been grouped by a young Frenchman into a vague synonym for all that was good. ‘Long live the sun, long live orange trees, palm trees, lotus flowers and cool pavilions paved in marble with wood-panelled chambers that talk of love!' he exclaimed. ‘Will I never see necropolises where, towards evening, when the camels have come to rest by their wells, hyenas howl from beneath the mummies of kings?'

As it happened, he would, for when Gustave was twenty-four, his father died unexpectedly, leaving him a fortune that allowed him to sidestep the bourgeois career he had seemed destined for, with its attendant small talk about drowned cattle. He began at once to plan an Egyptian trip, assisted in the task by his friend Maxime Du Camp, a fellow student who shared his passion for the East and combined it with the practical turn of mind that was a necessary requirement for anyone wishing to undertake a journey there.

The two Oriental enthusiasts left Paris at the end of October 1849 and after a stormy sea crossing from Marseilles arrived in Alexandria in the middle of November. ‘When we were two hours out from the coast of Egypt, I went up to the bow with the chief quartermaster and saw the seraglio of Abbas Pasha like a black dome on the blue of the Mediterranean,' Flaubert reported to his mother. ‘The sun was beating down on it. I had my first sight of the Orient through, or rather in, a glowing light that was like melted silver on the sea. Soon the shore became distinguishable; the first thing we saw on land was a pair of camels led by their driver, and then, on the dock, some Arabs peacefully fishing. We landed amidst the most deafening uproar imaginable: Negroes, Negresses, camels, turbans, cudgellings to right and left, and earsplitting guttural cries. I gulped down a whole bellyful of colours, like a donkey filling himself with hay'

3.

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel in the Jordaan district and after lunch in a café [roggebrood met baring en uitjes) went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert's Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern-day Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar (far more regular than English or North American brickwork, and exposed to view, unlike the bricks on French or German buildings); long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows; bicycles parked outside every house (recalling university towns); street furniture displaying a certain democratic scruffiness; an absence of ostentatious buildings; straight streets interspersed with small parks, suggesting the hand of planners with dreams of a socialist garden city. In one street lined with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. I wanted to stand by the curtainless window at dusk, looking out at the identical apartment opposite, and then snack my way through an erwentsoep metroggebrooden spek before retiring to read in bed in a white room with white sheets.

Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be.

My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to a financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness and light.

In the more fugitive, trivial association of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and

Street in Amsterdam

change—from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.

And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

4.

To understand why Flaubert found Egypt exotic, it may hence be useful first to examine his feelings towards France. What would strike him as exotic—that is, both new and valuable—about Egypt was in many ways the obverse of what drove him to rage at home. And that was, baldly stated, the beliefs and behaviour of the French bourgeoisie, which since the fall of Napoleon had become the dominant force in society, determining the tenor of the press, politics, manners and public life. For Flaubert, the French bourgeoisie was a repository of the most extreme prudery, snobbery, smugness, racism and pomposity. ‘It's strange how the most banal utterances [of the bourgeoisie] sometimes make me marvel,' he complained in stifled rage. ‘There are gestures, sounds of people's voices, that I cannot get over, silly remarks that almost give me vertigo. … The bourgeois … is for me something unfathomable.' He nevertheless spent thirty years trying to fathom it, most comprehensively in his Dictionary of Received Ideas, a satirical catalogue of the French bourgeoisie's more striking sheeplike prejudices.

The organisation of only a few of these dictionary entries by theme indicates the direction of his complaints against his homeland, the foundation upon which his admiration for Egypt would be built:

A SUSPICION OF ARTISTIC ENDEAVOUR

ABSINTHE—Exceptionally violent poison: one glass and you're a dead man. Journalists drink it while writing their articles. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouins.

ARCHITECTS—All idiots; always forget to put staircases in houses.

INTOLERANCE FOR AND IGNORANCE OF OTHER COUNTRIES (AND THEIR ANIMALS):

ENGLISHWOMEN—Express surprise that they can have pretty children.

CAMEL—Has two humps, and the dromedary one; or else the camel has one and the dromedary two—nobody can ever remember which.

ELEPHANTS—Noted for their memory and worship of the sun.

FRENCH—The greatest people in the world.

HOTELS—Are first-rate only in Switzerland.

ITALIANS—All musical. All treacherous.

JOHN BULL—When you don't know an Englishman's name, call him John Bull.

KORAN—Book by Mohammed, which is all about women.

BLACKS—Express surprise that their saliva is white and that they can speak French.

BLACK WOMEN—Hotter than white women (see also BRUNETTES and BLONDES).

BLACK—Always followed by ‘as ebony'.

OASIS—An inn in the desert.

HAREM WOMEN—All Oriental women are harem women.

PALM TREE—Lends local colour.

MACHISMO/EARNESTNESS:

FIST—To govern France, an iron fist is needed.

GUN—Always keep one in the countryside.

BEARD—Sign of strength. Too much beard causes baldness. Helps to protect ties. (Flaubert to Louise Colet, August 1846: ‘What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I'm essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous—not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slapstick comedy, but rather in the sense of a ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and most ordinary gestures. For example, I can never shave without starting to laugh; it seems so idiotic. But all of this is very difficult to explain.')

SENTIMENTALITY:

ANIMALS—'If only animals could speak! There are some that are more intelligent than humans.'

COMMUNION—One's First Communion: the greatest day of one's life.

INSPIRATION (POETIC)—Aroused by: the sight of the sea, love, women, etc.

ILLUSIONS—Pretend to have had a great many, and complain that you have lost them all.

FAITH IN PROGRESS/PRIDE IN TECHNOLOGY:

RAILWAYS—Enthuse about them, saying, ‘I, my dear sir, who am speaking to you now, was at X this morning. I took the train to Y, transacted my business there, and by Z o'clock was back here.'

PRETENSION:

BIBLE—Oldest book in the world.

BEDROOM—In an old castle: Henry IV always spent a night in it.

MUSHROOMS—Should be bought only at the market.

CRUSADES—Benefited Venetian trade.

DIDEROT—Always followed by d'Alembert.

MELON—Good topic for dinnertime conversation. Is it a vegetable or a fruit? The English eat it for dessert, which is astonishing.

STROLL—Always take one after dinner; it helps with digestion.

SNAKES—All poisonous.

OLD PEOPLE—When discussing a flood, thunderstorm, etc., they cannot remember ever having seen a worse one.

PRISSINESS/REPRESSED SEXUALITY:

BLONDES—Hotter than brunettes (see also BRUNETTES).

BRUNETTES—Hotter than blondes (see also BLONDES).

SEX—Word to avoid. Say instead, ‘Intimacy occurred …'.

5.

Given all this, it appears to be no coincidence, no mere accident of fashion, that it was specifically the Middle East that Flaubert was interested in. It was temperamentally a logical fit. What he loved in Egypt could be traced back to central facets of his personality. Egypt lent support to ideas and values that were part of his identity but for which his own society had little sympathy.

(i) THE EXOTICISM OF CHAOS

From the day he disembarked in Alexandria, Flaubert noticed and felt at home in the chaos, both visual and auditory, of Egyptian life: boatmen shouting, Nubian porters hawking, merchants bargaining, the sounds of chickens being killed, donkeys being whipped, camels groaning.

In the streets there were, he said, ‘guttural intonations that sound like the cries of wild beasts, and laughter, and flowing white robes, and ivory teeth flashing between thick lips and flat Negro noses, and dusty feet and necklaces and bracelets. ‘It is like being hurled while still asleep into the midst of a Beethoven symphony, with the brasses at their most earsplitting, the basses rumbling, and the flutes sighing away; each detail reaches out to grip you; it pinches you; and the more you concentrate on it, the less you grasp the whole… it is such a bewildering chaos of colours that your poor imagination is dazzled as though by continuous fireworks as you go about staring at minarets thick with white storks, at tired slaves stretched out in the sun on house terraces, at the patterns of sycamore branches against walls, with camel bells ringing in your ears and great herds of black goats bleating in the streets amidst the horses and the donkeys and the peddlers.'

Flaubert's aesthetic was a rich one. He liked purple, gold and turquoise and thus welcomed the colours of Egyptian architecture. In his book The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, first published in 1833 and revised in 1842, the English traveller Edward Lane described the interiors typical of Egyptian merchants' houses:

Bazaar of the Silk Mercers, Cairo, lithograph by Louis Haghe after a drawing by David Roberts

‘There are, besides the windows of lattice-work, others, of coloured glass, representing bunches of flowers, peacocks, and other gay and gaudy objects, or merely fanciful patterns. … On the plastered walls of some apartments are rude paintings of the temple of Mecca, or of the tomb of the Prophet, or of flowers and other objects, executed by native Muslim artists. … Sometimes the walls are beautifully ornamented with Arabic inscriptions of maxims in an embellished style.'

The baroque quality of Egypt extended to the language used by Egyptians in even the most ordinary situations. Flaubert recorded some examples: ‘A while ago when I was looking at seeds in a shop, a woman to whom I had given something said, “Blessings on you, my sweet lord; God grant that you return safe and sound to your native land.”… When [Maxime Du Camp] asked a groom if he wasn't tired, the answer was, “The pleasure of being seen by you suffices.” ‘

Why did the chaos, the richness, so touch Flaubert? Because of his belief that life was fundamentally chaotic and that aside from art, all attempts to create order implied a censorious and prudish denial of our condition. He expressed his feelings to his mistress Louise Colet, in a letter written during a trip to London in September 1851, only a few months after his return from Egypt: ‘We've just come back from a walk in Highgate Cemetery. What a gross corruption of Egyptian and Etruscan architecture it all is! How neat and tidy it is! The people in there seem to have died wearing white gloves. I hate little gardens around graves, with well-raked flower beds and flowers in bloom. This antithesis has always seemed to me to have come out of a bad novel. When it comes to cemeteries, I like those that are

Engraving from Edward Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1842): Private Houses in Cairo

run-down, ravaged, in ruins, full of thorns or tall weeds, and where a cow escaped from a neighbouring field has come to graze quietly. Admit that this is better than some policeman in uniform! How stupid order is!'

(II) THE EXOTICISM OF SHITTING DONKEYS

‘Yesterday we were at a café that is one of the best in Cairo,' wrote Flaubert a few months after his arrival in the capital, ‘and where there were at the same time as ourselves, inside, a donkey shitting and a gentleman pissing in a corner. No one finds such things odd; no one says anything.' And in Flaubert's eyes, they were right not to. Central to Flaubert's philosophy was the belief that humans were not simply spiritual creatures but also pissing and shitting ones, and that we should integrate the ramifications of this blunt idea into our view of the world. ‘I can't believe that man's body composed as it is of mud and shit and equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or the crab louse, contains anything pure and immaterial,' he told Ernest Chevalier. Which was not to say that we humans were without any higher dimensions; it was just that the prudery and self-righteousness of the age aroused in Flaubert a desire to remind others of mankind's impurities, occasionally by taking the side of café urinators (or even the Marquis de Sade, advocate of buggery, incest, rape and underage sex: ‘I've just read a biographical article about de Sade by [the famous critic] Janin,' he informed Chevalier, ‘which filled me with revulsion—revulsion against Janin, needless to say, who held forth on behalf of morality, philanthropy, deflowered virgins…').

Flaubert found and welcomed in Egyptian culture a readiness to accept life's duality: shit-mind, life-death, sexuality-purity madness-sanity People belched to their hearts' content in restaurants. A boy of six or seven, passing Flaubert in a Cairo street, cried out in greeting, ‘I wish you all kinds of prosperity, especially a long prick.' Edward Lane also noted this duality, though he reacted to it more in the manner of Janin than of Flaubert: ‘The most immodest freedom of conversation is indulged in by persons of both sexes, and of every station of life, in Egypt; even by the most virtuous and respectable women. From persons of the best education, expressions are often heard so obscene as only to be fit for a low brothel; and things are named, and subjects talked of, by the most genteel women, without any idea of their being indecorous, in the hearing of men, that many prostitutes in our country would probably abstain from mentioning.'

(III) THE EXOTICISM OF CAMELS

‘One of the finest things is the camel,' wrote Flaubert from Cairo. ‘I never tire of watching this strange beast that lurches like a donkey and sways its neck like a swan. Its cry is something that I wear myself out trying to imitate—I hope to bring it back with me, but it's hard to reproduce: a rattle with a kind of tremulous gargling as an accompaniment.' Writing to a family friend a few months after he left Egypt, he listed the things that had most impressed him in that country: the pyramids, the temple at Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, some dancers in Cairo, a painter named Hassan el Bilbeis. ‘But my real passion is the camel (please don't think I'm joking): nothing has a more singular grace than this melancholic animal. You have to see a group of them in the desert when they advance in single file across the horizon, like soldiers; their necks stick out like those of ostriches, and they keep going, going. …'

Why did Flaubert so admire the camel? Because he identified with its stoicism and ungainliness. He was touched by its sad expression and its combination of awkwardness and fatalistic resilience. The people of Egypt seemed to share some of the camel's qualities, exhibiting a silent strength and humility that contrasted with the bourgeois arrogance of Flaubert's own Norman neighbours.

Flaubert had since childhood resented the optimism of his country—a resentment he would express in Madame Bovary, through his description of the cruel scientific faith of the most detestable character, the pharmacist Homais—and himself had a predictably darker outlook: ‘At the end of the day shit. With that mighty word, you can console yourself for all human miseries, so I enjoy repeating it: shit, shit' It was a philosophy reflected in the sad, noble yet slightly mischievous eyes of the Egyptian camel.

6.

In Amsterdam, on the corner of Tweede Helmers Straat and Eerste Constantijn Huygens Straat, I notice a woman in her late twenties pushing a bicycle along the pavement. Her auburn hair is drawn into a bun, she is wearing a long grey coat, an orange pullover, flat brown shoes and a pair of practical-looking glasses. It seems that this is her part of town, for she walks confidently and without curiosity. In a basket attached to the handlebars of her bicycle is a loaf of bread and a carton on which is written ‘Goodappeltje.' She sees nothing peculiar in the proximity of that t and j, stuck together without a vowel, on her apple-juice carton. There is nothing exotic for her in pushing a bicycle to the shops, or in the shape of those tall apartment blocks with their hooks on the top floor for hoisting furniture.

Desire elicits a need to understand. Where is she going? What are her thoughts? Who are her friends? On the riverboat that carried him and Du Camp to Marseilles, where they were to catch the steamer for Alexandria, Flaubert was overcome by similar questions about another woman. While other passengers gazed absentmind-edly at the scenery, Flaubert fixed his eyes on a woman on deck. She was, he wrote in his Egyptian travel journal, ‘a young and slender creature wearing a long green veil over her straw hat. Under her silk jacket, she had on a short frock coat with a velvet collar and pockets on either side in which she had put her hands. Two rows of buttons ran down her front, holding her in tightly and tracing the outline of her hips, from which flowed the numerous pleats of her dress, which rubbed against her knees in the wind. She wore tight black gloves and spent most of the journey leaning against the railing and looking out at the banks of the river. … I'm obsessed with inventing stories for people I come across. An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they're from, their names, what they're thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, whom they've loved, what they dream of… and if they happen to be women (especially youngish ones), then the urge becomes intense. How quickly you would want to see that one naked, admit it, and naked through to her heart. How you try to learn where she's coming from, where she's going, why she's here and not elsewhere! While letting your eyes wander all over her, you imagine love affairs for her, you ascribe deep feelings to her. You think of what her bedroom could look like, and a thousand things besides… right down to the battered slippers into which she must slip her feet when she gets out of bed.'

Eugene Delacroix, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1834

To the appeal that an attractive person might possess in one's own country is added, in an exotic land, an attraction deriving from his or her location. If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another country, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

In his Moroccan paintings, Delacroix appeared to suggest how desire for a place might fuel desire for the people within it. Of the subjects of his Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1849), for example, the viewer might long to know, as Flaubert longed to know of the women he passed, ‘their names, what they're thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, whom they've loved, what they dream of…'.

Flaubert's legendary sexual experience in Egypt was commercial, but not unfeeling. It took place in the small town of Esna, on the western bank of the Nile, some fifty kilometres south of Luxor. Flaubert and Du Camp stopped in Esna for the night and were introduced to a famous courtesan, who also had a reputation as an almeh, or learned woman. The word prostitute does not capture the dignity of Kuchuk Hanem's role. Flaubert desired her at first sight: ‘Her skin, particularly on her body is slightly coffee-coloured. When she bends, her flesh ripples into bronze ridges. Her eyes are dark and enormous. Her eyebrows are black, her nostrils open and wide; broad shoulders, full, apple-shaped breasts… black hair that is wavy, unruly, pulled straight back on each side from a centre part beginning at the forehead She has one upper incisor, on the right, that is starting to go bad.'

She invited Flaubert back to her modest house. It was an unusually cold night, with a clear sky. In his notebook, the Frenchman recorded: ‘We went to bed … she fell asleep with her hand in mine. She snored. The lamp, shining feebly, cast a triangular gleam, the colour of pale metal, on her beautiful forehead; the rest of her face was in shadow. Her little dog slept on my silk jacket on the divan. Since she had complained of a cough, I put my pelisse over her blanket I gave myself over to intense reveries, full of reminiscences. The feeling of her stomach against my buttocks. Her mound, warmer than her stomach, heated me like a hot iron… we told each other a great many things through touch. As she slept, she kept contracting her hands and thighs mechanically, as if involuntarily shuddering. … How flattering it would be to one's pride if at the moment of leaving one could be sure of having left some memory behind, so that she would think of one more than of the others who have been there, and keep one in her heart!'

Dreams of Kuchuk Hanem accompanied Flaubert down the Nile. On their way back from Philae and Aswan, he and Du Camp stopped off at Esna to visit her once more. Their second meeting made Flaubert even more melancholy: ‘Infinite sadness… this is the end; I'll not see her again, and gradually her face will fade from my memory' It never did.

7.

We are taught to be suspicious of the exotic reveries of European men who spend nights with locals while travelling through Oriental lands. Was Flaubert's enthusiasm for Egypt anything more than a fantasy of an alternative to the homeland he resented, a childhood idealisation of the ‘Orient' extended into adulthood?

However vague his vision of Egypt may have been at the beginning of his journey Flaubert could, after a stay of nine months, claim a genuine understanding of the country. Within three days of arriving in Alexandria, he began to study its language and history. He hired a teacher to talk him through Muslim customs, at the rate of three francs an hour, four hours a day. After two months, he sketched plans for a book to be entitled Muslim Customs (never written), which was to contain chapters on birth, circumcision, marriage, the pilgrimage to Mecca, death rites and the Last Judgement. He memorised passages of the Koran from Guillaume Pauthier's Les Livres sacres de l'Orient and read the major European works on Egypt, among them C. F. Volney's Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie and Chardin's Voyages en Perse et autres lieux de l'Orient In Cairo, he had conversations with the Copt bishop and explored the Armenian, Greek and Sunnite communities. His dark skin tone, beard and moustache and command of the language often caused him to be mistaken for a native. He wore a large white cotton Nubian shirt trimmed with red pompons and shaved his head, leaving only a single lock at the occiput, ‘by which Mohammed lifts one up on Judgement Day' He even acquired a local name, as he explained to his mother: ‘Since the Egyptians have great difficulty pronouncing French names, they invent their own for us Franks. Can you guess? Abu Chanab, which means “Father of the Moustache”. That word abu, “father,” is applied to anyone important in whatever field is being spoken about; thus merchants selling various commodities are referred to as Father of the Shoes, Father of the Glue, Father of the Mustard, etc'

For Flaubert, properly understanding Egypt meant discovering that it was not, after all, everything it had seemed to be from the distance of Rouen. Naturally, there were disappointments. To judge by the account of their Egyptian journey written many years after the fact by an embittered Maxime Du Camp—who was patently keen to

Gustave Flaubert in Cairo, 1850, in the garden of his hotel

take aim at an author more celebrated than he, to whom he was, moreover, no longer so close—Flaubert was, implausibly, as bored on the Nile as he had been in Rouen: ‘Flaubert shared none of my exultation; he was quiet and withdrawn. He was averse to movement and action. He would have liked to travel, if he could have done, stretched out on a sofa and not stirring, watching landscapes, ruins and cities pass before him like the screen of a panorama mechanically unwinding. From our very first days in Cairo I had been aware of his lassitude and boredom: this journey which he had so cherished as a dream and whose realisation had seemed to him so impossible, did not satisfy him. I was very direct; I said to him, “If you wish to return to France, I will send my servant to accompany you.” He replied, “No, I began it, and I'll go through with it; you take care of the itineraries, and I'll fit in—it's the same to me whether I go right or left.” The temples seemed to him always alike, the mosques and the landscapes all the same. I am not sure that when gazing at the island of Elephantine he did not sigh for the meadows of Sotteville, or long for the Seine when he saw the Nile.'

Du Camp's charge was not altogether unfounded. In a moment of dejection near Aswan, Flaubert had written in his diary, ‘The Egyptian temples bore me profoundly. Are they going to become like the churches in Brittany, the waterfalls in the Pyrenees? O necessity! To do what you are supposed to do, to be always, according to the circumstances (and despite the aversion of the moment), what a young man, or a tourist, or an artist, or a son, or a citizen, etc., is supposed to be!' Camped at Philae a few days later, he continued: ‘I don't stir from the island and am depressed. What is it, O Lord, this permanent lassitude that I drag about with me?… Deianira's tunic was no less completely welded to Hercules' back than boredom to my life! It eats into it more slowly, that's all'

And desperately though Flaubert had hoped to escape what he deemed to be the extraordinary idiocy of the modern European bourgeoisie, he found that it followed him everywhere: ‘Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it without being broken by it In Alexandria, a certain Thompson, of Sunderland, has in scribed his name in letters six feet high on Pompey's Pillar. You can read it from a quarter of a mile away. You can't see the pillar without seeing Thompson's name and consequently thinking of Thompson. This cretin has thus become part of the monument and has perpetuated himself along with it. But what am I saying? He has in fact overwhelmed it with the splendour of his gigantic lettering. … All imbeciles are more or less Thompsons from Sunderland. How many of them one comes across in life, in the most beautiful places and in front of the finest views! When travelling, one meets them often… but as they go by quickly, one can laugh at them. It's not like in ordinary life, where they end up making one fierce.'

Yet none of this meant that Flaubert's original attraction to Egypt had been misconceived. He simply replaced an absurdly idealised image with a more realistic but nevertheless still profoundly admiring one, he exchanged a youthful crush for a knowledgeable love. Irritated by Du Camp's caricature of him as the disappointed tourist, he told Alfred le Poitevin, A bourgeois would say, “If you go, you'll be greatly disillusioned.” But I have rarely experienced disillusion, having had few illusions. What a stupid platitude, always to glorify the lie and say that poetry lives on illusions!'

Writing to his mother, he accurately defined what his journey had taught him: ‘You ask whether the Orient is all I imagined it to be. Yes, it is—and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind.'

8.

When the time came for him and Du Camp to leave Egypt, Flaubert was distraught. ‘When will I see a palm tree again? When will I climb on a dromedary again?' he asked, and throughout the rest of his life he was to return constantly to the country in his mind. A few days before his death, in 1880, he would tell his niece Caroline, ‘For the past two weeks I have been gripped by the desire to see a palm tree standing out against the blue sky, and to hear a stork clacking its beak at the top of a minaret'

Flaubert's lifelong relationship with Egypt seems like an invitation to deepen and respect our own attraction to certain countries. From his adolescence onwards, Flaubert insisted that he was not French. His hatred of his nation and its people was so profound as to make a mockery of his civil status. Hence he proposed a new method for ascribing nationality: not according to the country of a person's birth or ancestral origins, but instead according to the places to which he or she was attracted. (It was only logical for him to extend this more flexible concept of identity to gender and species, and consequently to declare on occasion that contrary to appearances, he was in truth a woman, a camel and a bear: ‘I want to buy myself a beautiful bear—a painting of one, that is—frame it and hang it in my bedroom, with Portrait of Gustave Flaubert written beneath it, to suggest my moral disposition and social habits,' he announced.)

Flaubert's first development of the idea that he belonged somewhere other than France came in a letter he wrote as a schoolboy, on his return from a holiday in Corsica: Tm disgusted to be back in this damned country where one sees the sun in the sky about as often as a diamond in a pig's arse. I don't give a shit for Normandy and la belle France.… I think I must have been transplanted by the winds to this land of mud; surely I was born elsewhere—I've always had what seem to be memories or intuitions of perfumed shores and blue seas. I was born to be the emperor of Cochin-China, to smoke hundred-foot-long pipes, to have six thousand wives and fourteen hundred catamites, scimitars to slice off heads I don't like the looks of, Numidian horses, marble pools.'

The alternative to la belle France may have been impractical, but the underlying principle of the letter—the belief that he had been ‘transplanted by the winds'—was to find repeated and more reasoned expression in his maturity. On his return from Egypt, Flaubert attempted to explain his theory of national identity (though not of species or gender) to Louise Colet (‘my sultan'): ‘As to the idea of a native country, that is to say a certain bit of ground traced out on a map and separated from other bits by a red or blue line: no. For me, my native country is the country I love, meaning the one that makes me dream, that makes me feel well. I am as much Chinese as I am French, and I cannot rejoice about our victories over the Arabs because I am saddened by their defeats. I love those harsh, enduring, hardy people, the last of the primitives, who at midday lie down in the shade under the bellies of their camels and, while smoking their chibouks, poke fun at our good civilisation, which quivers with rage over it'

Louise replied that she found it absurd to think of Flaubert as being either Chinese or Arab, a retort that provoked the novelist, in a letter written a few days later, to return to his charge with greater emphasis and irritation: Tm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country—that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black—has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.'

We are all of us, without ever having any say in the matter, scattered at birth by the wind onto various countries, but like Flaubert, we are in adulthood granted the freedom imaginatively to re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances. When we grow weary of our official nationality (from Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas: ‘FRENCH—”How proud one is to be French when one looks at the Colonne Vendóme!” ‘), we may withdraw to those parts of ourselves that are more Bedouin than Norman, that delight in riding on a camel through a khamsin, in sitting in a café beside a shitting donkey and in engaging in what Edward Lane called ‘licentious conversation'.

When asked where he came from, Socrates said not ‘From Athens' but ‘From the world.' Flaubert was from Rouen (in his youthful account, a place drowning in ‘merde', whose good citizens ‘jerk themselves silly' on Sundays out of boredom), and yet Abu Chanab, the Father of the Moustache, might have answered, perhaps a little from Egypt, too.