Une géographie olfactive vers la fin du XIXe siècle : l’ailleurs européen et oriental dans les chroniques de Maupassant
Olfactory geography of the late 19th century European and Oriental elsewhere through the chronicles of Maupassant

Summary/Abstract: Like most of his contemporaries, Guy de Maupassant had a passion for travel, being motivated by his profession - writer and journalist at the same time -, by his illness or by his need to discover more or less distant regions, in France as well as in other countries, such as the French colonies, Algeria and Tunisia. These experiences offered him the material for several chronicles published in newspapers he contributed to. Whatever his topic– his adoptive town, Paris, where he lived after 1872, other different western towns he had visited, or the Desert, the Elsewhere that people coveted during this period –, Maupassant’s writing manner often reveals a strong odour of the sensitive traveller. In fact, for him, the European space has, as well as the Eastern world, not only a visual register (colours and shapes) and an auditory one (made by sounds), but also an endless variety of rich smells with symbolic values. Our analysis will highlight this extraordinary olfactory sensitivity, whose nuances, perceived during travelling, include the smells of death, like the corpses rotting on the fields or like sewage in Venice, as well as the oriental fragrances that connote, for an Occidental, femininity, love and pleasure, giving the Elsewhere an aura of legend that recalls the “Arabian Nights”.

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