Flaubert to Louis Bouilhet

Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert to Louis Bouilhet, 15 January 18

This letter of sexual adventure is by Gustave Flaubert, the French novelist, to his school friend and fellow writer Louis Bouilhet. In 1849-50, aged around thirty, Flaubert travelled through the Middle East from Greece to Istanbul and Beirut, sightseeing and experiencing as much as he could in the backstreets and bathhouses. His letters describe encounters with girls and boys, joking that he travels for 'educational purposes'. His risky adventures cost him dear - he was tormented for the rest of his life by the infections he contracted there and this contributed to his decision not to marry or have children.

On his return, he started work on his masterpiece, Madame Bovary the story of a disastrous adulterous affair. He prided himself on his search for the precise word in his writing - 'la mot juste' - exhausting himself with this exacting perfectionism that meant he published many fewer works than his equals, Balzac and Zola. But even in this letter, set in a Cairo bathhouse, the wit is as acute as the style is meticulous.

Speaking of bardashes, this is what I know about them. Here it is quite accepted. One admits one's sodomy, and it is spoken of at a table in the hotel. Sometimes you do a bit of denying, and then everybody teases you and you end up confessing. Travelling as we are for educational purposes, and charged with a mission by the government, we have considered it our duty to indulge in this form of ejaculation. So far the occasion has not presented itself. We continue to seek it, however. 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. Be informed, furthermore, that all the bath-boys are bardashes. The final masseurs, the ones who come to rub you when all the rest is done, are usually quite nice young boys. We had our eye on one in an establishment very near our hotel. I reserved the bath exclusively for myself. I went, and the rascal was away that day! I was alone in the hot room, watching the daylight fade through the great circles of glass in the dome. Hot water was flowing everywhere; stretched out indolently I thought of a quantity of things as my pores tranquilly dilated. It is very voluptuous and sweetly melancholy to take a bath like that quite alone, lost in those dim rooms where the slightest noise reverberates like cannon shot, while the naked kellaks call out to one another as they massage you, turning you over like embalmers preparing you for the tomb. That day (the day before yesterday, Monday), my kellak was 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'. He was a man in his fifties, ignoble, disgusting-imagine the effect. and the word 'baksheesh, baksheesh'. I pushed him award little, saying 'làh, lah' (no, no) - he thought I was angry and took on a craven look - then I gave him a few pats on the shoulder, saying 'làh, lah' again but more gently - he smiled a smile that meant 'You're not fooling me - you like as much as anybody, but today you've decided against it for some reason. As for me, I laughed aloud like a dirty old man and the shadowy vault of the bath echoed with the sound...