Engraving from Edward Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1842): Private Houses in Cairo
run-down, ravaged, in ruins, full of thorns or tall weeds, and where a cow escaped from a neighbouring field has come to graze quietly. Admit that this is better than some policeman in uniform! How stupid order is!'
(II) THE EXOTICISM OF SHITTING DONKEYS
‘Yesterday we were at a café that is one of the best in Cairo,' wrote Flaubert a few months after his arrival in the capital, ‘and where there were at the same time as ourselves, inside, a donkey shitting and a gentleman pissing in a corner. No one finds such things odd; no one says anything.' And in Flaubert's eyes, they were right not to. Central to Flaubert's philosophy was the belief that humans were not simply spiritual creatures but also pissing and shitting ones, and that we should integrate the ramifications of this blunt idea into our view of the world. ‘I can't believe that man's body composed as it is of mud and shit and equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or the crab louse, contains anything pure and immaterial,' he told Ernest Chevalier. Which was not to say that we humans were without any higher dimensions; it was just that the prudery and self-righteousness of the age aroused in Flaubert a desire to remind others of mankind's impurities, occasionally by taking the side of café urinators (or even the Marquis de Sade, advocate of buggery, incest, rape and underage sex: ‘I've just read a biographical article about de Sade by [the famous critic] Janin,' he informed Chevalier, ‘which filled me with revulsion—revulsion against Janin, needless to say, who held forth on behalf of morality, philanthropy, deflowered virgins…').
Flaubert found and welcomed in Egyptian culture a readiness to accept life's duality: shit-mind, life-death, sexuality-purity madness-sanity People belched to their hearts' content in restaurants. A boy of six or seven, passing Flaubert in a Cairo street, cried out in greeting, ‘I wish you all kinds of prosperity, especially a long prick.' Edward Lane also noted this duality, though he reacted to it more in the manner of Janin than of Flaubert: ‘The most immodest freedom of conversation is indulged in by persons of both sexes, and of every station of life, in Egypt; even by the most virtuous and respectable women. From persons of the best education, expressions are often heard so obscene as only to be fit for a low brothel; and things are named, and subjects talked of, by the most genteel women, without any idea of their being indecorous, in the hearing of men, that many prostitutes in our country would probably abstain from mentioning.'
(III) THE EXOTICISM OF CAMELS
‘One of the finest things is the camel,' wrote Flaubert from Cairo. ‘I never tire of watching this strange beast that 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 elsewhere! While letting your eyes wander all over her, you imagine love affairs for her, you ascribe deep feelings to her. You think of what her bedroom could look like, and a thousand things besides… right down to the battered slippers into which she must slip her feet when she gets out of bed.'
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…'.