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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.

We wish to examine here the meaning of certain choices made by Taylor and Nodier in their Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France from the point of vue of the “portrait of a countryside”: wish to show the remains of a disappearing France; anchoring in a genre which appeared at the end of the previous century; refusal to adopt the division into departments inherited from the Revolution on behalf of the provinces of the Old Regime; attention paid to natural and intangible heritage; concern to present monuments from different points of vue; integration into the project of the most recent dissemination channels of image. This is based on the collection of the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques published between 1820 and 1878 and on the archives kept at the Taylor Foundation.

The diversification of travel modes and types of travellers that characterizes the 19th century does not put an end to the arts of travel that marked the previous centuries: they diversify in their own way, their supports multiply, specialize and adapt to these new conditions, while focusing, through the guides, on a previously infrequent practice of travel: leisure travel. The emergence of tourism and the joint access of travelogues to literature also contribute, throughout the century, to the evolution of the apodemic genre, of which the present study intends to offer only some features.

The article compares a vast period of different depictions of the lived experiences of travellers in Siberia (17th - 20th centuries). Although their initial intentions were similar, the position of writers regarding their experiences radically differs depending on the period. In fact, 17th-century travel literature recounts the arduous conditions of journeying without describing its toll on the body. Descriptions of the physical effects on the body do not truly appear in texts until the 18th century and during the 19th century, probably linked to a new concern for comfort. From then on, rendering the physical and mental effort had an important place in travel discourse.