Scènes de la vie orientale, i: Les Femmes du Caire; ii: Les Femmes du Liban by Gérard de Nerval (review)

Gérard de Nerval’s voyage to the Middle East lasted the entire year of 1843. He left Marseille by postal steamer on 1 January and returned in late December. Nerval and his travelling companion, Joseph de Fonfride, landed in Alexandria and spent three months in Egypt, in and around Cairo and the Nile Delta, and then another three months in Lebanon and Syria, staying in Beirut for most of that time. Unlike Gustave Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp, who made a similar journey seven years later, they did not travel to Upper Egypt or to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. On the journey back to France, they spent time in Cyprus, Rhodes, Smyrna, Istanbul, parts of Greece and Malta. Upon his return, Nerval published a long series of articles, recounting his travels and his impressions of the Middle East, from 1844 to 1850, in three prominent journals, L’Artiste, La Revue des Deux Mondes, and Le National. Those articles were republished, in 1848 and 1850, in two volumes, entitled Scènes de la vie orientale, i: Les Femmes du Caire, and ii: Les Femmes du Liban. Nerval then further revised the book, adding and removing material, and published it anew as his Voyage en Orient in 1851. Although modern critical editions have appeared, most notably the one edited by Claude Pichois (in Œuvres complètes, ii (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)), the edition under review is the first to present the Scènes de la vie orientale as originally published in book form, in 1848 and 1850. The editor, Philippe Destruel, is currently preparing a new critical edition of the revised and augmented Voyage en Orient of 1851. The project is an admirable one, as it brings much-needed clarity to the problem of which parts of this material were published where and when. In the Scènes de la vie orientale, Destruel provides a substantial Introduction in which he summarizes Nerval’s journey and his preparations for undertaking it, which included extensive reading of works by earlier travellers and commentators. He assesses Nerval’s special focus on the conditions in which women were living in the region and comments on his acquisition of a female slave, Zeynab, in Cairo, and on his implausible planned marriage to the Lebanese woman Saléma, in Beirut. There is also useful analysis of Nerval’s evocation of landscapes, of city life, and of his reactions to unfamiliar experiences. Detailed footnotes document the places and the people Nerval encountered on his journey and provide details of his extensive borrowings from the works of earlier writers, including William Lane. There is a list of variants appearing in the articles as originally published. Volume ii includes several useful appendices: a bibliographical listing of all of Nerval’s articles dealing with his journey, a comprehensive set of reviews that appeared after the work’s publication in book form, and three indexes: of proper names and characters, of place names, and of book titles. This well-documented edition thus fully elucidates a text that previously appeared enigmatic.