"Guides: A Protest" is a humorous and sharp personal essay by Agnes Repplier in which she chronicles her exasperating experiences with professional guides and dragomans encountered during travels through Sicily, Constantinople, Athens, Cairo, Naples, and Rome. Repplier opens by adapting a wry observation from Sir George Cornwall Lewis, suggesting that travel would be enjoyable if not for its guides. She notes that while Mark Twain found comic material in dealing with guides, not every traveler possesses that temperament, and she argues that since Baedeker guidebooks have made reliable information widely accessible, hired guides have become unnecessary nuisances rather than practical necessities. The essay's central complaint is that guides do not merely offer their services but take possession of the traveler entirely, stripping away the pleasurable freedom of independent exploration. In Syracuse, a guide named Brocconi attaches himself to the author and her companions from the moment of arrival, following them through the streets, steering them to sites they would have preferred to discover alone, and making solitary wandering effectively impossible. Repplier describes the psychological capitulation that results, including purchasing his inferior photographs to avoid buying his dubious antiquities, and writing letters of recommendation for him out of social obligation, letters she later learns may mislead other travelers. In Constantinople, where she concedes that a dragoman is genuinely necessary for safety and navigation since Baedeker offers no coverage of the city, two rival dragomans fight physically at the railway station over the right to claim her party. The victor, a man named Demetrius, proves only marginally useful, offering information so vague and misdirected as to be nearly worthless, and explaining architectural features of insulting obviousness. The essay notes wryly that the American Legation's Kavasses, when they occasionally accompanied the party, treated both Demetrius and the travelers themselves with magnificent contempt, an experience Repplier describes as a salutary humiliation. In Athens, a pale and persistent guide she compares to the figure of Eugene Aram haunts her hotel room daily even while she is bedridden with illness, his visits feeling like the delivery of a lettre de cachet. When she recovers sufficiently to visit the Acropolis, she counts it among her keenest pleasures that she succeeded in ascending alone, experiencing the Parthenon and the sunset from the temple of Nike in unmediated solitude. In Cairo, Repplier contrasts the approaches of different nationalities, observing that English and German travelers generally refused guides while many Americans accepted permanent dragoman attendance. She recounts a memorable exchange in which an Englishwoman, asked whether a donkey-boy could explain anything at a mosque, replies that his certain silence is precisely his qualification, and that she would take the turbaned Turk who challenged her on the same condition. The essay also addresses sacristans in Italian churches, who interrupt prayer and contemplation to direct visitors toward artworks and relics with aggressive enthusiasm, treating spiritual visitors as indistinguishable from tourists and making quiet devotion essentially impossible. Repplier concludes by acknowledging that she could continue cataloguing grievances indefinitely but restrains herself. She closes with an act of deliberate fairness, praising a guide at the Castle of Sant'Angelo in Rome who, speaking no language but Italian and faced with a mixed international group, communicated everything through brilliant and wholly committed pantomime, enacting sleep, meals, Benvenuto Cellini's escape, Beatrice Cenci's execution, and even the firing of a cannon with complete seriousness and remarkable clarity. She admires his ingenuity and his single-minded purpose of being understood, and though she refuses to classify so capable and inventive a performer as a mere guide, she ends the essay on this note of qualified, generous, and honest praise.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1920 · Genre: Essay, Social Criticism, Satire