| Summary: | Leaving for the Orient, the young Flaubert was marked by Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, which steered the genre of travel writing towards autobiography. Here, we examine in his travel notes and correspondence three examples of a personal past emerging – first, a recent past, that of the first version of La Tentation de saint Antoine, which Flaubert is thinking back to during his encounter with a Coptic priest; then, a more distant past, that of his own youth resurfacing in the Kuchuk-Hanem episode by the Nile; finally, an imagined past, associated with a former life, reappearing like a ghost in the Greek village of Topolia. Before he espoused the principle of literary impersonality, Flaubert considered travel writing as a form in which the ‘I’ could reveal itself freely; it re-emerged in more indirect ways in the works that followed.
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