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 wells, hyenas howl from beneath the mummies of kings?'
As it happened, he would, for when Gustave was twenty-four, his father died unexpectedly, leaving him a fortune that allowed him to sidestep the bourgeois career he had seemed destined for, with its attendant small talk about drowned cattle. He began at once to plan an Egyptian trip, assisted in the task by his friend Maxime Du Camp, a fellow student who shared his passion for the East and combined it with the practical turn of mind that was a necessary requirement for anyone wishing to undertake a journey there.
The two Oriental enthusiasts left Paris at the end of October 1849 and after a stormy sea crossing from Marseilles arrived in Alexandria in the middle of November. ‘When we were two hours out from the coast of Egypt, I went up to the bow with the chief quartermaster and saw the seraglio of Abbas Pasha like a black dome on the blue of the Mediterranean,' Flaubert reported to his mother. ‘The sun was beating down on it. I had my first sight of the Orient through, or rather in, a glowing light that was like melted silver on the sea. Soon the shore became distinguishable; the first thing we saw on land was a pair of camels led by their driver, and then, on the dock, some Arabs peacefully fishing. We landed amidst the most deafening uproar imaginable: Negroes, Negresses, camels, turbans, cudgellings to right and left, and earsplitting guttural cries. I gulped down a whole bellyful of colours, like a donkey filling himself with hay'
3.
In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel in the Jordaan district and after lunch in a café [roggebrood met baring en uitjes) went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert's Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern-day Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar (far more regular than English or North American brickwork, and exposed to view, unlike the bricks on French or German buildings); long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows; bicycles parked outside every house (recalling university towns); street furniture displaying a certain democratic scruffiness; an absence of ostentatious buildings; straight streets interspersed with small parks, suggesting the hand of planners with dreams of a socialist garden city. In one street lined with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. I wanted to stand by the curtainless window at dusk, looking out at the identical apartment opposite, and then snack my way through an erwentsoep metroggebrooden spek before retiring to read in bed in a white room with white sheets.
Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be.
My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to a financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness and light.
In the more fugitive, trivial association of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and
Street in Amsterdam
change—from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as welclass="underline" we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.
And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality.
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
4.
To understand why Flaubert found Egypt exotic, it may hence be useful first to examine his feelings towards France. What would strike him as exotic—that is, both new and valuable—about Egypt was in many ways the obverse of what drove him to rage at home. And that was, baldly stated, the beliefs and behaviour of the French bourgeoisie, which since the fall of Napoleon had become the dominant force in society, determining the tenor of the press, politics, manners and public life. For Flaubert, the French bourgeoisie was a repository of the most extreme prudery, snobbery, smugness, racism and pomposity. ‘It's strange how the most banal utterances [of the bourgeoisie] sometimes make me marvel,' he complained in stifled rage. ‘There are gestures, sounds of people's voices, that I cannot get over, silly remarks that almost give me vertigo. … The bourgeois … is for me something unfathomable.' He nevertheless spent thirty years trying to fathom it, most comprehensively in his Dictionary of Received Ideas, a satirical catalogue of the French bourgeoisie's more striking sheeplike prejudices.