Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

A classic of travel literature.

At once a classic of travel literature and a penetrating portrait of a sensibility on tour, Flaubert in Egypt wonderfully captures the young writer's impressions during his 1849 voyage to the "Orient." Using diaries, letters, travel notes, and the evidence of Flaubert's traveling companion Maxime Du Camp, Francis Steegmuller reconstructs this formative journey - through the bazaars and brothels of Cairo, down the length of the Nile, to the fabled Red Sea.

Library Journal

This 1972 volume was gleaned from Flaubert's diaries, letters, and travel notes. It reconstructs an 1849 trip to Egypt, Cairo, and the Red Sea area.

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a prominent physician. A solitary child, he was attracted to literature at an early age, and after his recovery from a nervous breakdown suffered while a law student, he turned his total energies to writing. Aside from journeys to the Near East, Greece, Italy, and North Africa, and a stormy liaison with the poetess Louise Colet, his life was dedicated to the practice of his art. The form of his work was marked by intense aesthetic scrupulousness and passionate pursuit of le mot juste; its content alternately reflected scorn for French bourgeois society and a romantic taste for exotic historical subject matter. The success of Madame Bovary (1857) was ensured by government prosecution for “immorality”; Salammbô (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) received a cool public reception; not until the publication of Three Tales (1877) was his genius popularly acknowledged. Among fellow writers, however, his reputation was supreme. His circle of friends included Turgenev and the Goncourt brothers, while the young Guy de Maupassant underwent an arduous literary apprenticeship under his direction. Increasing personal isolation and financial insecurity troubled his last years. His final bitterness and disillusion were vividly evidenced in the savagely satiric Bouvard and Pécuchet, left unfinished at his death in 1880.