The Art of Travel

by Alain De Botton

  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 exp
ression 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.'