Théophile Gautier’s The Romance of a Mummy, published in 1857, is one of the finest examples of nineteenth-century Egyptomania in fiction. An English lord excavating a tomb near Thebes discovers the perfectly preserved mummy of a beautiful young woman, and through her diary the reader is transported back to the Egypt of the Exodus. Gautier’s prose is sumptuous, his archaeological imagination extraordinary.
The volume also includes shorter Egyptian pieces from Gautier’s essays and tales. Download this public-domain text as a free EPUB and indulge in one of the great acts of historical imagination in French Romantic literature.