An illustrious sex tourist

In 1849, the 27-year-old aspiring writer Gustave Flaubert embarked on a 9-month tour of Egypt. He was accompanied by a photographer/journalist friend with the delightful name of Maxime Du Camp. They duly visited the Pyramids and assorted temples and mosques. They sailed along the Nile and made camel trips across the desert. They quizzed people they met - from religious dignitaries to snake charmers - about their lives and beliefs. They had a genuine curiosity about everything going on around them.

In Cairo and other places they indulged another shared enthusiasm: brothels. Flaubert, in particular, was to be a lifelong frequenter of prostitutes. He later wrote, 'It may be a perverted taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects... The idea of prostitution is a meeting place of so many elements - lust, bitterness, complete absence of human contact, muscular frenzy, the clink of gold - that to peer into it deeply makes one reel.'

His strong preference was for female prostitutes, but in Egypt he was not averse to a bit of experimentation. Of sex with boys, he wrote in a letter to a friend, 'Here it is quite accepted. One admits one's sodomy, and it is spoken of at table in the hotel. Sometimes you do a bit of denying, and then everybody teases you and you end up confessing... It's at the baths that such things take place. You reserve the bath for yourself (five francs including masseurs, pipe, coffee, sheet and towel) and you skewer your lad in one of the rooms.'

His favourite boy at a Cairo establishment ('a pockmarked young rascal wearing a white turban') was absent one day and another masseur started 'rubbing me gently, and when he came to the noble parts he lifted up my boules d'amour to clean them, then continuing to rub my chest with his left hand he began to pull with his right on my prick, and as he drew it up and down he leaned over my shoulder and said, 'baksheesh, baksheesh'.' Before Sawatdee readers get too excited, 'he was a man in his fifties, ignoble, disgusting' and Flaubert pushed him away, then 'laughed aloud like a dirty old man, and the shadowy vault of the bath echoed with the sound.'

When Flaubert and Du Camp moved on to other parts of the 'Orient' (what we would now call the Middle East), they found that they had both contracted syphilis. They assumed it came from female prostitutes and, given some of their choices, this was not surprising. Flaubert describes one of them, for instance, as 'fat and lubricious, on top of whom I enjoyed myself immensely and who smelled of rancid butter.' He was to require mercury treatments for the rest of his life. He had fretted constantly about his future while in Egypt. In 1856, five years after his return to France, Madame Bovary was published amid official controversy and popular acclaim and his literary reputation grew steadily from then on.

I have taken the above quotes from an excellent Penguin Classic called Flaubert in Egypt (ed. F. Steegmuller). Consisting mainly of extracts from his letters and travel notes, with a few passages from Du Camp added by way of contrast, it is sometimes lyrical, sometimes bawdy, sometimes brutal and always well-observed. I can recommend it.