BOOKS, PRINTS, AND TRAVEL: READING IN THE GAPS OF THE ORIENTALIST ARCHIVE ELISABETH A. FRASER Writing to Madame de Re ´camier during an arduous voyage to the Levant in 1817 and 1818, the beleaguered Comte Auguste de Forbin pleaded passionately for letters from her to alleviate the horrors of his journey: a difficult passage at sea, the death of a hired travelling companion, heat and plague. ‘I need them, I have been cruelly tested.... Never was a voyage more unfortunate,’ he wrote. Subse- quent letters describe his ‘terrible fear’ of the plague in Constantinople (‘death is everywhere’), and the ‘devouring heat’ of Egypt. 1 And yet Forbin later made light of the journey’s difficulties in his published account, the Voyage dans le Levant (1819), a sentiment reinforced by Franc ¸ois-Rene´ de Chateaubriand in his review: ‘The Comte de Forbin’s publication will finally prove that today one can do quickly and easily what in the past demanded much time and effort.’ 2 Similarly, the Comte Marie-Gabriel de Choiseul-Gouffier’s magnificent Voyage pittoresque de la Gre `ce (1782–1822), one of Forbin’s primary models, gives no hint of the woes that dogged its production: revolution, legal battles, work lost in transport, dishonest printers, artists making off with commissioned drawings, and so on. To follow Choiseul-Gouffier’s trail through the archives is to wade in rancour, regret and litigiousness to a degree unsuspected by the reader of his serenely beautiful Voyage pittoresque. 3 In a departure from earlier writing on colonialism, scholars today expect to find this kind of contradiction in the accounts of European travellers about in the world. Travel was dangerous, difficult, expensive and politically fraught. Colonial travellers were not always the self-confident vehicles of projections and ideas passively absorbed by those they encountered as they are often assumed to be. Travellers, even in colonial contexts, were involved in processes of negotiation whose outcomes were not pre-ordained and in which the identity of all involved was at stake and subject to pressure. 4 Travel accounts correspondingly record subterranean uncertainties, often inadvertently, as well as triumphant imperi- alist messages. European world travellers, Nigel Leask has recently maintained, were more concerned with convincing their readers of their veracity than with purveying imperial sentiments. 5 Concerns about veracity were particularly at issue, I will argue in this article, in a specific type of representation: the illustrated travel book, which came into its own in the late eighteenth century. In that period, world travellers wrote about DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00610.x ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141–6790 . VOL 31 NO 3 . JUNE 2008 pp 342-367 342 & Association of Art Historians 2008. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.