Constantinople (1852)

Gautier, Théophile (1811–1872), translated by Kline, A. S. (contact-email)

In June of 1852, Gautier travelled to Constantinople, where his common-law wife Ernesta Grisi, an opera singer, and the sister of Carlotta Grisi, the ballet-dancer, was on tour. Estelle, the younger daughter of Theophile and Ernesta, who was four years old, was also there with her mother. It was not the happiest of sojourns, the tour went badly, and Gautier was in financial difficulty. His guide to the city was Oscar Marinitsch, a French-speaking Levantine who had previously accompanied Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp in their travels in the Levant in 1850. Gautier, Ernesta and Estelle returned to France, via Athens and Venice, at the end of September.

Gautier's text surprises with its modernity, focusing on the ongoing transformation of Turkish society. He questions and often regrets the Westernisation that is invading the old city - preferring to stray from the well-beaten tourist trails and delve into the labyrinth of "miserable and neglected Istanbul."

This enhanced translation has been designed to offer maximum compatibility with current search engines. Among other modifications, the proper names of people and places, and the titles given to works of art, have been fully researched, modernised, and expanded; comments in parentheses have been added here and there to provide a reference, or clarify meaning; and minor typographic or factual errors, for example incorrect attributions and dates, in the original text, have been eliminated from this new translation.

Author Details

Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was born in Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrénées region of south-west France, his family moving to Paris in 1814. He was a friend, at school, of the poet Gérard de Nerval, who introduced him to Victor Hugo. Gautier contributed to various journals, including La Presse, throughout his life, which offered opportunities for travel in Spain (1840), Algeria (1845, 1862), Italy (1850), Russia (1858-59, 1861), and Egypt (1869). He was a devotee of the ballet, writing a number of scenarios including that of Giselle. At the time of the 1848 Revolution, he expressed strong support for the ideals of the second Republic, a support which he maintained for the rest of his life.

A successor to the first wave of Romantic writers, including Chateaubriand and Lamartine, he directed the Revue de Paris from 1851 to 1856, worked as a journalist for La Presse and Le Moniteur universel, and in 1856 became editor of L’Artiste, in which he published numerous editorials asserting his doctrine of ‘Art for art’s sake’. Saint-Beuve secured him critical acclaim, he became chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1862, and in 1868 was granted the sinecure of librarian to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Napoleon III, having been introduced to her salon.

Gautier remained in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the aftermath of the Commune of 1871, dying of heart disease at the age of sixty-one in 1872.

Though ostensibly a Romantic poet, Gautier may be seen as a forerunner to, or point of reference for, a number of divergent poetic movements including symbolism and modernism.

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Kline, A. S.

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