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 of species or gender) to Louise Colet (‘my sultan'): ‘As to the idea of a native country, that is to say a certain bit of ground traced out on a map and separated from other bits by a red or blue line: no. For me, my native country is the country I love, meaning the one that makes me dream, that makes me feel well. I am as much Chinese as I am French, and I cannot rejoice about our victories over the Arabs because I am saddened by their defeats. I love those harsh, enduring, hardy people, the last of the primitives, who at midday lie down in the shade under the bellies of their camels and, while smoking their chibouks, poke fun at our good civilisation, which quivers with rage over it'
Louise replied that she found it absurd to think of Flaubert as being either Chinese or Arab, a retort that provoked the novelist, in a letter written a few days later, to return to his charge with greater emphasis and irritation: Tm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country—that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black—has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.'
We are all of us, without ever having any say in the matter, scattered at birth by the wind onto various countries, but like Flaubert, we are in adulthood granted the freedom imaginatively to re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances. When we grow weary of our official nationality (from Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas: ‘FRENCH—”How proud one is to be French when one looks at the Colonne Vendóme!” ‘), we may withdraw to those parts of ourselves that are more Bedouin than Norman, that delight in riding on a camel through a khamsin, in sitting in a café beside a shitting donkey and in engaging in what Edward Lane called ‘licentious conversation'.
When asked where he came from, Socrates said not ‘From Athens' but ‘From the world.' Flaubert was from Rouen (in his youthful account, a place drowning in ‘merde', whose good citizens ‘jerk themselves silly' on Sundays out of boredom), and yet Abu Chanab, the Father of the Moustache, might have answered, perhaps a little from Egypt, too.
IV
On Curiosity
1.
In the springtime I was invited to Madrid to attend a three-day conference that was scheduled to end on a Friday afternoon. Because I had never visited the city before and had been told on several occasions of its many attractions (which were apparently not limited to museums), I decided to extend my stay by a few days. My hosts had booked me a hotel on a wide, tree-lined avenue in the southeastern part of the city. My room overlooked a courtyard in which a short man with a certain resemblance to Philip II occasionally stood and smoked a cigarette while tapping his foot on the steel door of what I supposed was a cellar. On the Friday evening, I retired early to my room. I had not revealed to my hosts that I would be staying the weekend, for fear of forcing them into a halfhearted hospitality from which neither side would benefit. But my decision also meant that I had to go without dinner, for I realised on walking back to the hotel that I was too shy to venture alone into any of the neighbourhood restaurants, all dark, wood-panelled places, many with a ham hanging from the ceiling, where I risked becoming an object of curiosity and pity. So I ate a packet of paprika-flavoured crisps from the minibar and, after watching the news on satellite television, fell asleep.
When I awoke the next morning, it was to an intense lethargy, as though my veins had become silted up with fine sugar or sand. Sunlight shone through the pink-and-grey plastic-coated curtains, and traffic could be heard along the avenue. On the desk lay several magazines provided by the hotel, offering information about the city and two guidebooks that I had brought from home. In their different ways, they conspired to suggest that an exciting and multifarious phenomenon called Madrid was waiting to be discovered outside, promising an embarrassment of monuments, churches, museums, fountains, plazas and shopping streets. And yet the prospect of those enticements, about which I had heard so much and which I knew I was privileged to be able to see, merely provoked in me a combination of listlessness and self-disgust at the contrast between my own indolence and what I imagined would have been the eagerness of more normal visitors. My overwhelming wish was to remain in bed and, if possible, catch an early flight home.