![]() ![]() Mailcoaches, riverboats and railways took Flaubert to Marseille. Travelling from Paris to Cairo in November 1849 was a considerable adventure. ![]() It would take him 40 years - all the rest of his life - to possess his experience of the east. But what Flaubert found in the orient was more interesting and more perplexing than anything he had been led to expect. His imagination was already well supplied with the fascinating miscellaneous stuff of bourgeois orientalism. He was 27 years old and still unpublished. Painters and poets, journalists, antiquarians, interior designers and architects all fed the immense popular appetite for things conventionally oriental.Īny 19th-century Frenchman who actually went to Egypt was in for a surprise. Egypt was the orient, a country of the mind, a grand theatre of sensuality, despotism, slavery, polygamy, cruelty, mystery and terror. The east was Egypt, a place at the very limit of the European imagination, scarcely a career, more like aholiday, a glorious idea, a splendid cultural fantasy. But if you were French, then the east was different. The east meant India, the British empire. ![]() ![]() 'The east is a career!" said Benjamin Disraeli. ![]()
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