Nestor L'Hôte

In the book Travellers in Egypt, Diane Harlé (in charge of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre Museum) publishes a nine-page article with this title: The Unknown Nestor L'Hôte, maybe the only one readable in English at that time (1998).

In his notebooks and in numerous letters (mainly sent to his parents), Nestor L'Hôte describes his fascination for Egypt, but also the very hard working conditions of his three expeditions.

L'Hôte's style can be appreciated through these few lines, written on September 23, 1828: "(...) Nothing that we know in Europe, either by description or by painting, could give an idea of that extraordinary view.

It was the time of the day when the sun, having lost his greatest power, still threw a bright light and enveloped the atmosphere with a vague hue, a luminous and speckled mist which appears in certain regions of the globe.

Imagine, beyond this sparkling gauze, an unlimited plain crossed by a large river which, like a silver blade, appears out of the haze along the horizon and on your right bathes the walls of twenty palaces; beyond the river, on this side, are the Pyramids of Giza whose proud mass has braved centuries and survived destruction; in front and towards the background are the Pyramids of Sakkarah, much older; a girdle of sand surrounds them and cuts off the horizon on that side; beyond the Pyramids is a pleasant plain, intersected by numerous divisions of the river into so many ribbons, from which rise minarets, villages and thick woods.