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Following our recent publication of Théophile Gautier's 'Constantinople', our latest addition to his series of travel writings, 'Egypt', is now available here.

In August 1869 Gautier was invited by the Khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, to attend the inauguration of the Suez Canal, due to take place on November 17th. Unfortunately, in Marseille, on October 8th, after dinner in the evening, he fell on the stairs, dislocated his left shoulder, and fractured his humerus. He continued his journey, aboard the Moeris, with two companions, Florian-Pharaon, editor-in-chief of La France and Auguste Marc, editor of L’Illustration, and reached Cairo, via Alexandria, on October 16th. Cairo was the third of the three ‘cities of his dreams’, the other two being Granada and Venice. Greatly limited in what he was able to see and do, due to his accident, after viewing the Pyramids from the Citadel, and visiting the port of Cairo on the Nile, he chose not to accompany his companions to Upper Egypt, attended the inauguration of the Suez Canal, and left Cairo for Italy in December. This memoir includes a description of the trip, and by way of an epilogue, is supplemented, here, by his note of 1872, regarding a travel book by Paul-Marie Lenoir, a student of one of Gautier’s friends, the artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, whom Lenoir accompanied on two tours of Egypt. Both items were published posthumously in the collection L’Orient of 1877.