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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implausibly, as bored on the Nile as he had been in Rouen: ‘Flaubert shared none of my exultation; he was quiet and withdrawn.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