186 ORIENT ALISM interested not only in the content of what he sees but—like Renan — in how he sees, the way by which the Orient, sometimes horribly but always attractively, seems to present itself to him. Flaubert is its best audience: . . . Kasr el-’Aini Hospital. Well maintained. The work of Clot Bey—his hand is still to be seen. Pretty cases of syphilis; in the ward of Abbas’s Mamelukes, several have it in the arse. At a sign from the doctor, they all stood up on their beds, undid their trouserbelts (it was like army drill), and opened their anuses with their fingers to show their chancres. Enormous infundibula; one had a growth of hair inside his anus. One old man’s prick entirely devoid of skin; I recoiled from the stench. A rachitic: hands curved backward, nails as long as claws; one could see the bone structure of his torso as clearly as a skeleton; the rest of his body, too, was fantastically thin, and his head was ringed with whitish leprosy. Dissecting room: . . . On the table an Arab cadaver, wide open; beautiful black hair. . . .1¢7 The lurid detail of this scene is related to many scenes in Flaubert’s novels, in which illness is presented to us as if in a clinical theater. His fascination with dissection and beauty recalls, for instance, the final scene of Salammb6é, culminating in Matho’s ceremonial death. In such scenes, sentiments of repulsion or sympathy are repressed entirely; what matters is the correct rendering of exact detail. The most celebrated moments in Flaubert’s Oriental travel have to do with Kuchuk Hanem, a famous Egyptian dancer and courtesan he encountered in Wadi Halfa. He had read in Lane about the almehs and the khawals, dancing girls and boys respectively, but it was his imagination rather than Lane’s that could immediately grasp as well as enjoy the almost metaphysical paradox of the almeh’s profession and the meaning of her name. (in Vicrory, Joseph Conrad was to repeat Flaubert's observation by making his musician heroine—Alma—irresistibly attractive and dangerous to Axel Heyst.) Alemah in Arabic means a learned woman. It was the name given to women in conservative eighteenth-century Egyptian society who were accomplished reciters of poetry. By the mid-nineteenth century the title was used as a sort of guild name for dancers who were also prostitutes, and such was Kuchuk Hanem, whose dance “L'Abeille” Flaubert watched before he slept with her. She was surely the prototype of several of his novels’ female characters in her learned sensuality, delicacy, and (accord 

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 187 ing to Flaubert) mindless coarseness. What he especially liked about her was that she seemed to place no demands on him, while the “Nauseating odor” of her bedbugs mingled enchantingly with “the scent of her skin, which was dripping with sandalwood.” After his voyage, he had written Louise Colet reassuringly that “the oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man.” Kuchuk’s dumb and irreducible sexuality allowed Flaubert’s mind to wander in ruminations whose haunting power over him reminds us somewhat of Deslauriers and Frédéric Moreau at the end of [Education sentimentale: As for me, I scarcely shut my eyes. Watching that beautiful creature asleep (she snored, her head against my arm: I had slipped my forefinger under her necklace), my night was one long, infinitely intense reverie---that was why I stayed. I thought of my nights in Paris brothels—a whole series of old memories came back-—and I thought of her, of her dance, of her voice as she sang songs that for me were without meaning and even without distinguishable words.#* The Oriental woman is an occasion and an opportunity for Flaubert’s musings; he is entranced by her self-sufficiency, by her emotional carelessness, and also by what, lying next to him, she allows him to think. Less a woman than a display of impressive but verbally inexpressive femininity, Kuchuk is the prototype of Flaubert’s Salammb6 and Salomé, as well as of all the versions of carnal female temptation to which his Saint Anthony is subject. Like the Queen of Sheba (who also danced “The Bee”) she could say—were she able to speak——“Je ne suis pas une femme, je suis un monde”? Looked at from another angle Kuchuk is a disturbing symbol of fecundity, peculiarly Oriental in her luxuriant and seemingly unbounded sexuality. Her home near the upper reaches of the Nile occupied a position structurally similar to the place where the veil of Tanit— the goddess described as Omniféconde—is concealed in Salammbé."© Yet like Tanit, Salomé, and Salammbéo herself, Kuchuk was doomed to remain barren, corrupting. without issue. How much she and the Oriental world she lived in came to intensify for Flaubert his own sense of barrenness is indicated in the following: We have a farge orchestra, a rich palette, a variety of resources. We know many more tricks and dodges, probably, than were ever known before, No, what we lack is the intrinsic principle, the soul