Egypt (1869)

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

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

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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