Is our overwhelming desire to travel a real psychological condition or a side effect of tech-driven narcissism? We trace the origins of clinical wanderlust back to 19th-century France.

In the summer of 1886, Jean-Albert Dadas, a gas fitter from Bordeaux, woke up in a local hospital, diabolically exhausted.

Though he had almost no memory of it, Dadas—a dead ringer for the French valet Passepartout from Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days—had returned from what was, in anyone’s book, an epic journey.

During the four years’ prior, Dadas went AWOL from the French army; wandered through Prague on foot; was attacked savagely by a dog near Berlin; was arrested in Moscow for resembling a member of a nihilist movement responsible for the assassination of a czar; and subsequently sent to do time in Constantinople before being sent home by French consulate officials.

And for Dadas, it wasn’t even the first time this kind of thing had happened.