In 1849, Gustave Flaubert needed a holiday. His personal life was not going well. I am not sure what was wrong with his relationship with his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, but it was not a small thing. His idea of a love letter was to pontificate: “Love is not and should not be the main thing in life. It should stay on the back burner.” When he particularly wanted to be romantic, he confided to Louise how splendid it would be if she were dead. Perhaps the fact that he could never be bothered to visit her was his way of approximating such a glorious tragedy.
Flaubert’s greater distress, however, was professional. He was determined to write a celebrated novel. Toward that end, he had just toiled through eighteen months working on The Temptation of Saint Anthony. A true sacrifice for a man of the world, he had even spent interminable hours reading the church fathers. Still, it had been worth it. He was elated with his own triumph. The hour of his adoration was at hand.
He invited two close friends—Maxime Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet—for a private reading. The manuscript was 541 pages long. In exchange for their attentive ears for the best part of four days straight, Flaubert promised to defer to their literary judgment. Du Camp and Bouilhet did not soften the blow: “We think you ought to throw the whole of that into the fire, and never speak of it again.” Faithful are the wounds of friends.
In 1849, Florence Nightingale needed a holiday. Her personal life was not going well. She was being pursued by Richard Monckton Milnes, a dashing Member of Parliament and a witty poet, regarded by many as an eminently suitable suitor. Some more cautious souls, however, found him too rakish. (This without even knowing the main of it. The Victorian period was the great age of gentlemen collectors, and Monckton Milnes opted not for seashells or butterflies or weaponry but rather pornography. A friend observed that his collection was unrivalled upon earth before adding wryly that one could presume and in heaven as well.)
Nightingale was genuinely fond of Monckton Milnes. On one memorable day they visited an Oxford don who did his best to meet the obligation to be eccentric inherent in such a position by keeping a tame bear cub. When the animal became irritable and others were frightened, Flo and Richard successfully managed to pacify it. Anthony Sattin records the lesson Nightingale learned: “If they could work together to mesmerise a bear, what else might they achieve?” Still, she drew back from condemning herself to a lifelong sentence on an upper-class Victorian treadmill: the vapid duties of a society hostess were not for her. She needed the courage to say “no,” a decision that would signal to her parents that she was not just waiting for a better marriage partner: she was going rogue.
Her greater distress, therefore, was professional. By then 29 years old, she had felt a divine call to service as a teenager. Ever since then she had been determined to do something substantial rather than trivial with her life. She longed to be a nurse. Hotel maids today are more respected than nurses were at that time, but the duties are comparable. Nurses were not offering medical care—doctors did that—they were just there to fetch and clean. In addition to being deemed dirty, disgusting work that only lower-class women did, nursing also carried a taint of immorality: nurses were assumed to be gin-soaked and sexually loose. Nightingale was from a wealthy, well-connected, socially élite family. Her parents would no more consider her becoming a nurse than a saloon dancer. But the divine call persisted.
Flaubert and Nightingale both responded to their sloughs of despond by escaping to Egypt. Anthony Sattin’s A Winter On the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt deftly traces their parallel journeys: “for they were at the same stage in their lives, both in their late twenties, both in despair of ever fulfilling their dreams, but on the cusp of achieving more than ever they had dared hope.” In a delightful coup, he even found the exact, mathematical point of intersection. On November 25, 1849, they both were on the same ferry to Cairo. Flaubert recorded the encounter in his journal, observing that he had seen: “an English family: hideous, the mother looking like a sick old parrot (because of her green eyeshade attached to her bonnet).” Julian Barnes was clearly on to something with Flaubert’s parrot. If only there was more in this entry on Flaubert’s nightingale.
Flo was actually travelling with Charles and Selina Bracebridge, so it was Selina who had the fowl apparel. Nightingale would not have minded the assumption, however (she certainly thought of Selina as a mother to her), nor would her curiosity have been aroused by a Frenchman of comparable age being on the same barge. Her account could not have been more blasé: “The canal perfectly uninteresting, the day gloomy. I was not very well.”
Miss Nightingale and Monsieur Flaubert were very different people with quite distinct reactions and interests. Nightingale was a humanitarian, whereas Flaubert had the natural aptitude to be a slave trader. She was outraged and distressed by an experience early in the trip of seeing a policeman beating a boy whom he thought was a thief. Flaubert’s reaction to this aspect of Eastern life was to revel in the amusing quaintness of the place: “All the old comic business of the beaten slave, of the coarse trafficker in women, of the thieving merchant, is here very fresh, very true, charming.” Indeed, the novelist was essentially a lowlife tourist looking for a foreign sex industry. He was so cold-bloodedly practical as to take an interpreter in with him to a prostitute’s bedroom. He would then presume that her perfunctory compliment that he had nice eyes was not part of the service for which he was paying but rather a tribute to his innate ability to inspire love. (As it might have offered some comfort to readers, one regrets Sattin’s failure to mention that Flaubert would suffer from syphilis.)
The Frenchman’s reaction to the ostensible sites of such a journey was listless indifference: “Egyptian temples bore me profoundly.” Nightingale, by contrast, was enraptured. But when her party finally reached the pyramids, it was her turn to refuse to be impressed: “Hardly anything can be imagined more vulgar, more uninteresting than a pyramid in itself, set up upon a tray, like a clipt yew in a public-house garden; it represents no idea; it appeals to no feeling; it tries to call forth no part of you, but the vulgarest part—astonishment at size—at the expense.” She was well aware that people back home assumed that these wonders of the ancient world would provoke lofty musings, and she teased such expectations: “The stones certainly were remarkably large, the view was remarkably large, the European names cut there were remarkably large. Here are three sentiments: which will you have?”
Sattin knows how to tell a compelling Eastern tale, but he does not always place Nightingale in context. He seems unaware that she was an Anglican, referring to her throughout as “a Unitarian.” At one point he says that Flo and her sister could not go away to school because their family was Unitarian, but fortunately their father could give them a good education at home as he was a Cambridge graduate. This explanation, alas, is incoherent (a Unitarian could not have obtained a Cambridge degree). Sattin does not even pause to reflect when informing us that Nightingale was pleased to discover that Hermes had an inkling of the truth of the Holy Trinity.
More subtly, Sattin exaggerates what Nightingale found in Egypt. Victorian trunks were commodious things. Much of what he thinks she discovered there she actually brought with her. At the heart of Sattin’s story is a gripping evocation of the thrill that it gave Nightingale to map in situ the similarities between Osiris and Christ. This is strikingly told: Nightingale even dramatically buried her crucifix in the Osiris chamber. Nevertheless, this little piece of comparative religion was merely an application of beliefs that were already established in Nightingale’s mind. Likewise, Sattin makes much of her going to Egypt and hearing the voice of the Almighty. Clearly he doesn’t realize just how loquacious Nightingale’s God was.
The Nile did get both of these figures flowing toward their destinies once again. Flaubert could record at last: “The pot has suddenly begun to boil, I have a burning desire to write.” He toyed with various new projects befitting his lascivious brain, including One Night of Don Juan, but there are clues that perhaps the idea for his greatest novel was already forming.
More than merely renewing her resolve to pursue a life of service, Nightingale stealthily arranged to visit a German Protestant venture in proper nursing on the way back home. Her parents cracked under the continual pressure, and Florence Nightingale was at last released to fulfill her calling. Four years later, the Crimean War was not going well and she was sent back to the East, this time at the head of an experimental unit of nurses. Soon she was one of the most famous people in Britain. At the beginning of October 1856, a grateful and curious Queen Victoria invited Nightingale to come and visit her at Balmoral Castle. That same week, the Revue de Paris carried the first installment of Madame Bovary. Neither figure ever returned to Egypt.
Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, is the author most recently of A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians, published in March by Oxford University Press.
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