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What kind of literarity does Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne represents? This paper tries to answer the question by pointing out that it is primarily a matter of posture. From the nonchalant journalist to the ‘literary daguerreotype’, Gautier defines the literary act as the unfolding of the competence all (good) author should have: describing.

Invited by the Egyptian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Théophile Gautier embarks in Marseille on 9 October 1869 with a large French delegation to attend the solemn inauguration of the Suez Canal in the presence of Empress Eugénie and Khedive Ismail. The readers of the Journal officiel are looking forward to a detailed account of the ceremony – scheduled on 17 November – from their preferred traveller and writer.Nevertheless, an unforeseen event will question both the travel and its account : on the first sailing night, Gautier slips in a staircase and dislocates his shoulder… The project is going bad, and the tours in Cairo and Upper Egypt must be abandoned.Gautier’s last travel will thus end in a forced and prolonged rest in Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo, but the constraints it provokes are very interesting for who is looking for unfinished travels. He will have to compensate the main reason of a trip : movement, which is forbidden to an injured man in a country with yet very poor infrastructures. He will therefore ensure that Egypt comes to him, as he cannot go toward it: he changes his hotel room into a kind of “window open to the world”, which, in any event, allows him to enjoy the Oriental show. Another Gautier’s strategy: to change a trivial scene into an unrecorded painting, whose strangeness may exceed the local realities, already shown by the Orientalist painters, so to be the finest way of demonstrating his ability for a writer at the height of his artistic powers.A last point may deserve our attention: Gautier will dare to offer an unfinished travelogue to his readers, since only six papers will be published in the Journal officiel. Even the report of the inauguration is missing, whereas he could attend it after having built up his strength. Has he been casual? Did he refuse to commit to promoting the declining Second Empire? We must consider the meaning of this gap and, largely, of this unwittingly unfinished travel as of its paradoxical account, whose non-completion is, by contrast, due to its author.

In the 1853 travel account Constantinople, Théophile Gautier describes the parodic and popular Turkish Karagiozis theatre. Made up of flat 2D puppets played behind a curtain, this type of show is performed during the festive period of Ramadan. The stories present the characters and traditions of the population in a burlesque and subversive style. By contrasting the licentious figure of Karagiozis with established norms, Gautier shows that his experience as a traveller can be imaginatively shared even with readers who have remained in France.