BIOGRAPHY: DAVID L PARRISreviews A Winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of EgyptBy Anthony Sattin Hutchinson, 291pp, £20
TRAVEL WRITING, like picaresque novels, is episodic; while the picaro goes from adventure to adventure, the traveller goes from place to place: movement and adventure are linked. The récit de voyageis a kind of tunnel, on whose walls various scenes and monuments are painted.
Lovers of travel literature, Egypt, French literature and history, or just the 19th century generally, will welcome Anthony Sattin's elegantly-written and carefully researched A Winter on the Nile.
Sattin’s originality is not in any reworking of the “tunnel” model of travel writing: Egypt along the Nile from Alexandria to Abu Simbel typifies it more than most places. Rather, this book’s special take is that Sattin puts two important 19th-century personalities down the same tunnel.
The journeys of Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale are known: Francis Steegmuller's Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour(Penguin) accounts for one, and Sattin's own Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849-1850 (Parkway Publishing) tells the other. This book's originality is the discovery that 28-year-old Flaubert and 29-year-old Nightingale arrived in Alexandria in November 1849 within three days of each other, checking into hotels on opposite sides of the same square.
Neither was alone; she was travelling with the Bracebridges, a childless couple who took her under their wing; he was travelling with fellow writer Maxime Du Camp. Both parties were accompanied by a domestic – a maid for Mrs Bracebridge and a valet for Du Camp – as well as a drogoman(interpreter and factotum).
Florence Nightingale is infinitely more complex and subtle than the heroine of the Crimea I had imagined (she may have been Sattin's favourite also). Neither she nor Flaubert as yet amounted to much, but both had a sense of their destiny, or in her case "calling", for although a Unitarian by upbringing (she was open-minded in religion, admired Catholic nuns, and at Philae left a crucifix buried in the temple of Osiris) she felt that God had spoken to her. Flaubert had already written a draft of La Tentation de Saint Antoine(translated into English by Lafcadio Hearn) which, after a four-day reading, his friends had told him to burn (a very much reworked text eventually saw the light of day in 1874).
It was on her return journey that Nightingale finally made contact with the German deaconesses of Kaiserwerth who were the models for her work in Scutari less than a decade later. According to Du Camp (in a perhaps unreliable later account) it was at the second Nile cataract that Flaubert hit on the name “Bovary” (perhaps inspired by the owner of the Hôtel du Nil, an M Bouvaret).
This was neither traveller’s first journey: Nightingale, whose father had provided her with an enviable education, travelled through France and Italy with her parents in 1837 and met notables of French society including Madame Recamier and Chateaubriand in Paris; in 1847 she undertook a further continental tour, this time with the Bracebridges.
Flaubert had travelled to the South of France and Corsica in 1840 as a reward for passing his baccalauréat, and had also accompanied his sister on her honeymoon in 1845, when he saw Brueghel’s Temptation of Saint Anthony which was so to mark him, and led him to study oriental subjects.
What is remarkable about both Nightingale and Flaubert is not how distant and different they are, but how far their preoccupations prefigure our own: Nightingale is desperate to escape the bind in which women of her time found themselves, subject first to a father, then to a husband; Flaubert had an active and fitfully appeased libido, seeing (like many westerners) the “orient” as a place of sexual excess.
The difficulty is that although Nightingale and Flaubert came very close to meeting several times, their closest contact was on a ferry from Alexandria to Cairo, of which Flaubert records: “An English family: hideous, the mother looking like a sick old parrot (because of her green eyeshade attached to her bonnet)”. Then as now, Egypt is ambivalent, at once Moslem and also the site of a historic culture, not quite familiar, but mentioned in classical literature and the Bible. Both travellers seek the “oriental”, Flaubert in particular finding Alexandria too “western”. Both really feel more at ease the further south they travel, and occasionally uneasy with the social reality they discover.
SATTIN HAS PICKED HIS WAY through a complex mass of evidence. Nightingale’s thoughts are contained in her letters home, but also in two diaries, one intended for circulation, the other private. Flaubert’s are from letters to his mother and friends, as well as from Maxime Du Camp, whose published (1854) account omits all mention of Flaubert. One often feels it would be nice to have more of the “raw documents”.
Sattin chooses these two travellers for the extraordinary coincidence of their being in the same places at the same time. However, it is clear both Du Camp and the Bracebridges are following a well-established routine of western travel, and English and French visitors to Egypt in the 19th century were numerous (see Travellers in Egypt,edited by Paul Starkey and Janet Starkey). Napoleon's brief invasion of Egypt was the starting point of an extraordinary scholarly enterprise, the Description de l'Égypte(1809-1824, see online at descegy.bibalex.org) while France's colonisation of Algeria led to a great enthusiasm for "orientalism" in literature and painting. Readers who enjoy A Winter on the Nilewill wish to follow up some of these leads to get a bigger overall view.
David L Parris is Senior Lecturer in French and Fellow of Trinity College. He is the author of two recent books of Egyptian authors writing in French: Albert Cossery, montreur d'hommes: l'œuvre en langue française d'un auteur égyptien(Peter Lang) and Albert Adès et Albert Josipovici: Écrivains d'Egypte d'expression française au début du XXe siècle(L'Harmattan)
