The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [24]
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