The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [26]
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 expression in his maturity. On his return from Egypt, Flaubert attempted to explain his theory of national identity (though not