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By Root 315 0

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