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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