ABSTRACT
Throughout the nineteenth century, life is on the move. People are constantly leaving and, in the wake of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, Colet, and many others, the trip to the Orient becomes a necessary passage for the artist in training (even if only to ironize about it à la Flaubert). Whether motivated by a romantic taste for exoticism or by a literary colonialism in search of new territory and material, the disorientations offered by orientalism serve as both process and theme in the literature of the period.
