Flaubert's Parrot
Julian Barnes
To Pat
When you write the biography of a
friend,
you must do it as if you were taking
revenge for him.
Flaubert, letter to Enest Feydeau,
1872
Note
I am grateful to James Fenton and
the Salamander Press for permission to reprint the
lines from 'A German Requiem' on
page 115. The translations in this book are by
Geoffrey Braithwaite; though he
would have been lost without the impeccable example
of Francis Steegmuller.
J.B.
1: Flaubert's Parrot
Six North Africans were playing
boules beneath Flaubert's statue. Clean cracks sounded
over the grumble of jammed traffic.
With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a
brown hand dispatched a silver
globe. It landed, hopped heavily, and curved in a slow
scatter of hard dust. The thrower
remained a stylish, temporary statue: knees not quite
unbent, and the right hand
ecstatically spread. I noticed a furled white shirt, a bare
forearm and a blob on the back of
the wrist. Not a watch, as I first thought, or a tattoo, but
a coloured transfer: the face of a
political sage much admired in the desert.
Let me start with the statue: the
one above, the permanent, unstylish one, the one crying
cupreous tears, the floppy-tied,
square-waistcoated, baggy-trousered, stragglemoustached,
wary, aloof bequeathed image of the
man. Flaubert doesn't return the gaze.
He stares south from the place des
Carmes towards the Cathedral, out over the city he
despised, and which in turn has
largely ignored him. The head is defensively high: only
the pigeons can see the full extent
of the writer's baldness.
This statue isn't the original one.
The Germans took the first Flaubert away in 1941, along
with the railings and door-knockers.
Perhaps he was processed into cap-badges. For a
decade or so, the pedestal was
empty. Then a Mayor of Rouen who was keen on statues
rediscovered the original plaster
cast—made by a Russian called Leopold Bernstamm—
and the city council approved the
making of a new image. Rouen bought itself a proper
metal statue in 93 per cent copper
and 7 per cent tin: the founders, Rudier of Châtillonsous-
Bagneux, assert that such an alloy
is guarantee against corrosion. Two other towns,
Trouville and Barentin, contributed
to the project and received stone statues. These have
worn less well. At Trouville
Flaubert's upper thigh has had to be patched, and bits of his
moustache have fallen off.
structural wires poke out like twigs from a concrete stub on
his upper lip.
Perhaps the foundry's assurances can
be believed; perhaps this second-impression statue
will last. But I see no particular
grounds for confidence. Nothing much else to do with
Flaubert has ever lasted. He died
little more than a hundred years ago, and all that
remains of him is paper. Paper,
ideas, phrases, metaphors, structured prose which turns
into sound. This, as it happens, is
precisely what he would have wanted; it's only his
admirers who sentimentally complain.
The writer's house at Croisset was knocked down
shortly after his death and replaced
by a factory for extracting alcohol from damaged
wheat. It wouldn't take much to get
rid of his effigy either: if one statue-loving Mayor can
put it up, another—perhaps a bookish
party-liner who has half-read Sartre on Flaubert—
might zealously take it down.
I begin with the statue, because
that's where I began the whole project. Why does the
writing make us chase the writer?
Why can't we leave well alone? Why aren't the books
enough? Flaubert wanted them to be:
few writers believed more in the objectivity of the
written text and the insignificance
of the writer's personality; yet still we disobediently
pursue. The image, the face, the
signature; the 93 per cent copper statue and the Nadar
photograph; the scrap of clothing
and the lock of hair. What makes us randy for relics?
Don't we believe the words enough?
Do we think the leavings of a life contain some
ancillary truth? When Robert Louis
Stevenson died, his business-minded Scottish nanny
quietly began selling hair which she
claimed to have cut from the writer's head forty
years earlier. The believers, the
seekers, the pursuers bought enough of it to stuff a sofa.
I decided to save Croisset until
later. I had five days in Rouen, and childhood instinct still
makes me keep the best until last.
Does the same impulse sometimes operate with
writers? Hold off, hold off, the
best is yet to come? If so, then how tantalising are the
unfinished books. A pair of them
come at once to mind: Bouvard et Pécuchet, where
Flaubert sought to enclose and
subdue the whole world, the whole of human striving and
human failing; and L'Idiot de la
famille, where Sartre sought to enclose the whole of
Flaubert: enclose and subdue the
master writer, the master bourgeois, the terror, the
enemy, the sage. A stroke terminated
the first project; blindness abbreviated the second.
I thought of writing books myself
once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a
doctor, married with children. You
can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that. Being
a doctor was what I did well. My
wife…died. My children are scattered now; they write
whenever guilt impels. They have
their own lives, naturally. 'Life! Life! To have
erections!' I was reading that
Flaubertian exclamation the other day. It made me feel like
a stone statue with a patched upper
thigh.
The unwritten books? They aren't a
cause for resentment. There are too many books
already. Besides, I remember the end
of L'Education sentimentale. Frédéric and his
companion Deslauriers are looking
back over their lives. Their final, favourite memory is
of a visit to a brothel years
before, when they were still schoolboys. They had planned the
trip in detail, had their hair
specially curled for the occasion, and had even stolen flowers
for the girls. But when they got to
the brothel, Frédéric lost his nerve, and they both ran
away. Such was the best day of their
lives. Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure,
Flaubert implies, the pleasure of
anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment's
desolate attic?
I spent my first day wandering about
Rouen, trying to recognise parts of it from when I'd
come through in 1944. Large areas
were bombed and shelled, of course; after forty years
they're still patching up the
Cathedral. I didn't find much to colour in the monochrome
memories. Next day I drove west to
Caen and then north to the beaches. You follow a
series of weathered tin signs,
erected by the Ministère des Travaux Publics et des
Transports. This way for the Circuit
des Plages de Débarquement: a tourist route of the
landings. East of Arromanches lie
the British and Canadian beaches—Gold, Juno, Sword.
Not an imaginative choice of words;
so much less memorable than Omaha and Utah.
Unless, of course, it's the actions
that make the words memorable, and not the other way
round.
Graye-sur-Mer, Courseulles-sur-Mer, Ver-sur-Mer,
Asnelles, Arromanches. Down tiny
sidestreets you suddenly come across
a place des Royal Engineers or a place W.
Churchill. Rusting tanks stand guard
over beach huts; slab monuments like ships' funnels
announce in English and French:
'Here on the 6th June 1944 Europe was liberated by the
heroism of the Allied Forces.' It is
very quiet, and not at, all sinister. At Arromanches I
put two one-franc pieces into the
Télescope Panoramique (Très Puissant 15/6o Longue
Durée) and traced the curving morse
of the Mulberry Harbour far out to sea. Dot, dash,
dash, dash went the concrete
caissons, with the unhurried water between them. Shags had
colonised these square boulders of
wartime junk.
I lunched at the Hôtel de
died—the sudden friends those years
produced—and yet I felt unmoved. 50th Armoured
Division, Second British Army.
Memories came out of hiding, but not emotions; not even
the memories of emotions. After
lunch I went to the museum and watched a film about
the landings, then drove ten
kilometres to Bayeux to examine that other cross-Channel
invasion of nine centuries earlier.
Queen Matilda's tapestry is like horizontal cinema, the
frames joined edge to edge. Both
events seemed equally strange: one too distant to be
true, the other too familiar to be
true. How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so?
When I was a medical student some
pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into the
hall a piglet which had been smeared
with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded
capture, squealed a lot. People fell
over trying to grasp it, and were made to look
ridiculous in the process. The past
often seems to behave like that piglet.
On my third day in Rouen I walked to
the Hôtel-Dieu, the hospital where Gustave's father
had been head surgeon, and where the
writer spent his childhood. Along the avenue
Gustave Flaubert, past the
Imprimerie Flaubert and a snack-bar called Le Flaubert: you
certainly feel you're going in the
right direction. Parked near the hospital was a large
white Peugeot hatchback: it was
painted with blue stars, a telephone number and the
words AMBULANCE FLAUBERT. The writer
as healer? Unlikely. I remembered
George Sand's matronly rebuke to her
younger colleague. 'You produce desolation,' she
wrote, 'and I produce consolation.'
The Peugeot should have read AMBULANCE
GEORGE SAND.
At the Hôtel-Dieu I was admitted by
a gaunt, fidgety gardien whose white coat puzzled
me. He wasn't a doctor, a pharmacien
or a cricket umpire. White coats imply antisepsis
and clean judgment. Why should a
museum caretaker wear one—to protect Gustave's
childhood from germs? He explained
that the museum was devoted partly to Flaubert and
partly to medical history, then
hurried me round, locking the doors behind us with noisy
efficiency. I was shown the room
where Gustave was born, his eau-de-Cologne pot,
tobacco jar and first magazine
article. Various images of the writer confirmed the dire
early shift he underwent from
handsome youth to paunchy, balding burgher. Syphilis,
some conclude. Normal
nineteenth-century ageing, others reply. Perhaps it was merely
that his body had a sense of
decorum: when the mind inside declared itself prematurely
old, the flesh did its best to
conform. I kept reminding myself that he had fair hair. It's
hard to remember: photographs make
everyone seem dark.
The other rooms contained medical
instruments of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries: heavy metal relics coming
to sharp points, and enema pumps of a calibre which
surprised even me. Medicine then
must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent
business; nowadays it is all pills
and bureaucracy. Or is it just that the past seems to
contain more local colour than the
present? I studied the doctoral thesis of Gustave's
brother Achille: it was called 'Some
Considerations on the Moment of Operation on the
Strangulated Hernia'. A fraternal
parallel: Achille's thesis later became Gustave's
metaphor. 'I feel, against the
stupidity of my time, floods of hatred which choke me. Shit
rises to my mouth as in the case of
a strangulated hernia. But I want to keep it, fix it,
harden it; I want to concoct a paste
with which I shall cover the nineteenth century, in the
same way as they paint Indian
pagodas with cow dung.'
The conjunction of these two museums
seemed odd at first. It made sense when I
remembered Lemot's famous cartoon of
Flaubert dissecting Emma Bovary. It shows the
novelist flourishing on the end of a
large fork the dripping heart he has triumphantly torn
from his heroine's body. He
brandishes the organ aloft like a prize surgical exhibit, while
on the left of the drawing the feet
of the recumbent, violated Emma are just visible. The
writer as butcher, the writer as
sensitive brute.
Then I saw the parrot. It sat in a
small alcove, bright green and perky-eyed, with its head
at an inquiring angle. 'Psittacus,'
ran the inscription on the end of its perch: 'Parrot
borrowed by G. Flaubert from the
Museum of Rouen and placed on his work-table during
the writing of Un coeur simple,
where it is called Loulou, the parrot of Félicité, the
principal character in the tale.' A
Xeroxed letter from Flaubert confirmed the fact: the
parrot, he wrote, had been on his
desk for three weeks, and the sight of it was beginning
to irritate him.
Loulou was in fine condition, the
feathers as crisp and the eye as irritating as they must
have been a hundred years earlier. I
gazed at the bird, and to my surprise felt ardently in
touch with this writer who
disdainfully forbade posterity to take any personal interest in
him. His statue was a retread; his
house had been knocked down; his books naturally had
their own life—responses to them
weren't responses to him. But here, in this
unexceptional green parrot,
preserved in a routine yet mysterious fashion, was something
which made me feel I had almost
known the writer. I was both moved and cheered.
On the way back to my hotel I bought
a student text of Un coeur simple. Perhaps you
know the story. It's about a poor,
uneducated servant-woman called Félicité, who serves
the same mistress for half a
century, unresentfully sacrificing her own life to those of
others. She becomes attached, in
turn, to a rough fiancé, to her mistress's children, to her
nephew, and to an old man with a
cancerous arm. All of them are casually taken from
her: they die, or depart, or simply
forget her. It is an existence in which, not surprisingly,
the consolations of religion come to
make up for the desolations of life.
The final object in Félicité's
ever—diminishing chain of attachments is Loulou, the
parrot. When, in due course, he too
dies, Félicité has him stuffed. She keeps the adored
relic beside her, and even takes to
saying her prayers while kneeling before him. A
doctrinal confusion develops in her
simple mind: she wonders whether the Holy Ghost,
conventionally represented as a
dove, would not be better portrayed as a parrot. Logic is
certainly on her side: parrots and
Holy Ghosts can speak, whereas doves cannot. At the
end of the story, Félicité herself
dies. 'There was a smile on her lips. The movements of
her heart slowed down beat by beat,
each time more distant, like a fountain running dry
or an echo disappearing; and as she
breathed her final breath she thought she saw, as the
heavens opened for her, a gigantic
parrot hovering above her head.'
The control of tone is vital.
Imagine the technical difficulty of writing a story in which a
badly stuffed bird with a ridiculous
name ends up standing in for one third of the Trinity,
and in which the intention is
neither satirical, sentimental, nor blasphemous. Imagine
further telling such a story from
the point of view of an ignorant old woman without
making it sound derogatory or coy.
But then the aim of Un coeur simple is quite
elsewhere: the parrot is a perfect
and controlled example of the Flaubertian grotesque.
We can, if we wish (and if we
disobey Flaubert), submit the bird to additional
interpretation. For instance, there
are submerged parallels between the life of the
prematurely aged novelist and the
maturely aged Félicité. Critics have sent in the ferrets.
Both of them were solitary; both of
them had lives stained with loss; both of them,
though full of grief, were
persevering. Those keen to push things further suggest that the
incident in which Félicité is struck
down by a mail-coach on the road to Honfleur is a
submerged reference to Gustave's
first epileptic fit, when he was struck down on the road
outside Bourg-Achard. I don't know.
How submerged does a reference have to be before
it drowns?
In one cardinal way, of course,
Félicité is the complete opposite of Flaubert: she is
virtually inarticulate. But you
could argue that this is where Loulou comes in. The parrot,
the articulate beast, a rare
creature that makes human sounds. Not for nothing does
Félicité confuse Loulou with the
Holy Ghost, the giver of tongues.
Félicité + Loulou = Flaubert? Not
exactly; but you could claim that he is present in both
of them. Félicité encloses his
character; Loulou encloses his voice. You could say that the
parrot, representing clever
vocalisation without much brain power, was Pure Word. If
you were a French academic, you
might say that he was un symbole de Logos. Being
English, I hasten back to the
corporeal: to that svelte, perky creature I had seen at the
Hôtel-Dieu. I imagined Loulou
sitting on the other side of Flaubert's desk and staring
back at him like some taunting
reflection from a funfair mirror. No wonder three weeks
of its parodic presence caused
irritation. Is the writer much more than a sophisticated
parrot?
We should perhaps note at this point
the four principal encounters between the novelist
and a member of the parrot family.
In the 1830s, during their annual holiday at Trouville,
the Flaubert household regularly
used to visit a retired sea-captain called Pierre Barbey;
his ménage, we are told, included a
magnificent parrot. In 1845 Gustave was travelling
through Antibes, on his way to
Italy, when he came across a sick parakeet which merited
an entry in his diary; the bird used
to perch carefully on the mudguard of its owner's light
cart, and at dinnertime would be
brought in and placed on the mantelpiece. The diarist
notes the 'strange love' clearly
evident between man and pet. In 1851, returning from the
Orient via Venice, Flaubert heard a
parrot in a gilt cage calling out over the Grand Canal
its imitation of a gondolier: 'Fà
eh, capo die.' In 1853 he was again in Trouville; lodging
with a pharmacien, he found himself
constantly irritated by a parrot which screamed, 'Astu
déjeuné, Jako?' and 'Cocu, mon petit coco.' It also whistled' J'ai du bon tabac.' Was
any of these four birds, in whole or
in part, the inspiration behind Loulou? And did
Flaubert see another living parrot
between 1853 and 1876, when he borrowed a stuffed
one from the Museum of Rouen? I
leave such matters to the professionals.
I sat on my hotel bed; from a
neighbouring room a telephone imitated the cry of other
telephones. I thought about the
parrot in its alcove barely half a mile away. A cheeky
bird, inducing affection, even
reverence. What had Flaubert done with it after finishing
Un coeur simple? Did he put it away
in a cupboard and forget about its irritating
existence until he was searching for
an extra blanket? And what happened, four years
later, when an apoplectic stroke
left him dying on his sofa? Did he perhaps imagine,
hovering above him, a gigantic
parrot—this time not a welcome from the Holy Ghost but
a farewell from the Word?
'I am bothered by my tendency to
metaphor, decidedly excessive. I am devoured by
comparisons as one is by lice, and I
spend my time doing nothing but squashing them.'
Words came easily to Flaubert; but
he also saw the underlying inadequacy of the Word.
Remember his sad definition from
Madame Bovary: 'Language is like a cracked kettle on
which we beat out tunes for bears to
dance to, while all the time we long to move the
stars to pity.' So you can take the
novelist either way: as a pertinacious and finished
stylist; or as one who considered
language tragically insufficient. Sartreans prefer the
second option: for them Loulou's
inability to do more than repeat at second hand the
phrases he hears is an indirect
confession of the novelist's own failure. The parrot/writer
feebly accepts language as something
received, imitative and inert. Sartre himself
rebuked Flaubert for passivity, for
belief (or collusion in the belief) that on est parlé—
one is spoken.
Did that burst of bubbles announce
the gurgling death of another submerged reference?
The point at which you suspect too
much is being read into a story is when you feel most
vulnerable, isolated, and perhaps
stupid. Is a critic wrong to read Loulou as a symbol of
the Word? Is a reader wrong—worse,
sentimental—to think of that parrot at the Hôtel-
Dieu as an emblem of the writer's
voice? That's what I did. Perhaps this makes me as
simple-minded as Félicité.
But whether you call it a tale or a
text, Un coeur simple echoes on in the brain. Allow me
to cite David Hockney, benign if
unspecific, in his autobiography: 'The story really
affected me, and I felt it was a
subject I could get into and really use.' In 1974 Mr
Hockney produced a pair of etchings:
a burlesque version of Félicité's view of Abroad (a
monkey stealing away with a woman
over its shoulder), and a tranquil scene ofFélicité
asleep with Loulou. Perhaps he will
do some more in due course.
On my last day in Rouen I drove out
to Croisset. Normandy rain was falling, soft and
dense. What was formerly a remote
village on the banks of the Seine, backdropped by
green hills, has now become engulfed
by thumping dockland. Pile-drivers echo, gantries
hang over you, and the river is
thickly commercial. Passing lorries rattle the windows of
the inevitable Bar Le Flaubert.
Gustave noted and approved the
oriental habit of knocking down the houses of the dead;
so perhaps he would have been less
hurt than his readers, his pursuers, by the destruction
of his own house. The factory for
extracting alcohol from damaged wheat was pulled
down in its turn; and on the site
there now stands, more appropriately, a large paper-mill.
All that remains of Flaubert's
residence is a small one-storey pavilion a few hundred
yards down the road: a summer house
to which the writer would retire when needing
even more solitude than usual. It
now looks shabby and pointless, but at least it's
something. On the terrace outside, a
stump of fluted column, dug up at Carthage, has
been erected to commemorate the
author of Salammbô. I pushed the gate; an Alsatian
began barking, and a white-haired
gardienne approached. No white coat for her, but a
well-cut blue uniform. As I cranked
up my French I remembered the trademark of the
Carthaginian interpreters in
Salammbô: each, as a symbol of his profession, has a parrot
tattooed on his chest. Today the
brown wrist of the African boules-player wears a Mao
transfer.
The pavilion contains a single room,
square with a tented ceiling. I was reminded of
Félicité's room: 'It had the
simultaneous air of a chapel and a bazaar.' Here too were the
ironic conjunctions—trivial
knick-knack beside solemn relic—of the Flaubertian
grotesque. The items on display were
so poorly arranged that I frequently had to get
down on my knees to squint into the
cabinets: the posture of the devout, but also of the
junk-shop treasure-hunter.
Félicité found consolation in her
assembly of stray objects, united only by their owner's
affection. Flaubert did the same,
preserving trivia fragrant with memories. Years after his
mother's death he would still
sometimes ask for her old shawl and hat, then sit down with
them to dream a little. The visitor
to the Croisset pavilion can almost do the same: the
exhibits, carelessly laid out, catch
your heart at random. Portraits, photographs, a clay
bust; pipes, a tobacco jar, a letter
opener; a toad-inkwell with a gaping mouth; the gold
Buddha which stood on the writer's
desk and never irritated him; a lock of hair, blonder,
naturally, than in the photographs.
Two exhibits in a side cabinet are
easy to miss: a small tumbler from which Flaubert took
his last drink of water a few
moments before he died; and a crumpled pad of white
handkerchief with which he mopped
his brow in perhaps the last gesture of his life. Such
ordinary props, which seemed to
forbid wailing and melodrama, made me feel I had been
present at the death of a friend. I
was almost embarrassed: three days before I had stood
unmoved on a beach where close
companions had been killed. Perhaps this is the
advantage of making friends with
those already dead: your feelings towards them never
cool.
Then I saw it. Crouched on top of a
high cupboard was another parrot. Also bright green.
Also, according to both the
gardienne and the label on its perch, the very parrot which
Flaubert harrowed from the Museum of
Rouen for the writing of Un coeur simple. I
asked permission to take the second
Loulou down, set him carefully on the corner of a
display cabinet, and removed his
glass dome.
How do you compare two parrots, one
already idealised by memory and metaphor, the
other a squawking intruder? My
initial response was that the second seemed less
authentic than the first, mainly
because it had a more benign air. The head was set
straighter on the body, and its
expression was less irritating than that of the bird at the
Hôtel-Dieu. Then I realised the
fallacy in this: Flaubert, after all, hadn't been given a
choice of parrots; and even this
second one, which looked the calmer company, might
well get on your nerves after a
couple of weeks.
I mentioned the question of
authenticity to the gardienne. She was, understandably, on
the side of her own parrot, and
confidently discounted the claims of the Hôtel-Dieu. I
wondered if somebody knew the
answer. I wondered if it mattered to anyone except me,
who had rashly invested significance
in the first parrot. The writer's voice—what makes
you think it can be located that
easily? Such was the rebuke offered by the second parrot.
As I stood looking at the possibly
inauthentic Loulou, the sun lit up that corner of the
room and turned his plumage more
sharply yellow. I replaced the bird and thought: I am
now older than Flaubert ever was. It
seemed a presumptuous thing to be; sad and
unmerited.
Is it ever the right time to die? It
wasn't for Flaubert; or for George Sand, who didn't live
to read Un coeur simple. 'I had
begun it solely on account of her, only to please her. She
died while I was in the midst of
this work. So it is with all our dreams.' Is it better not to
have the dreams, the work, and then
the desolation of uncompleted work? Perhaps, like
Frédéric and Deslauriers, we should
prefer the consolation of non-fulfilment: the planned
visit to the brothel, the pleasure
of anticipation, and then, years later, not the memory of
deeds but the memory of past
anticipations? Wouldn't that keep it all cleaner and less
painful?
After I got home the duplicate
parrots continued to flutter in my mind: one of them
amiable and straightforward, the
other cocky and interrogatory. I wrote letters to various
academics who might know if either
of the parrots had been properly authenticated. I
wrote to the French Embassy and to
the editor of the Michelin guide-books. I also wrote
to Mr Hockney. I told him about my
trip and asked if he'd ever been to Rouen; I
wondered if he'd had one or other of
the parrots in mind when etching his portrait of the
sleeping Félicité. If not, then
perhaps he in his turn had borrowed a parrot from a museum
and used it as a model. I warned him
of the dangerous tendency in this species to
posthumous parthenogenesis.
I hoped to get my replies quite
soon.
2: Chronology
1821
Birth of Gustave Flaubert, second so
of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, head surgeon
at the Hôtel-Dieu, Rouen, and of
Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert, née Fleuriot.
The family belongs to the successful
professional middle class, and owns several
properties in the vicinity of Rouen.
A stable, enlightened, encouraging and
normally ambitious background.
1825
Entry into service with the Flaubert
family of Julie, Gustave's nurse, who remains
with them until the writer's death
fifty-five years later. Few servant problems will
trouble his life.
c.1830
Meets Ernest Chevalier, his first close
friend. A succession of intense, loyal and
fertile friendships will sustain
Flaubert throughout his life: of particular note are
those with Alfred Le Poittevin,
Maxime du Camp, Louis Bouilhet and George
Sand. Gustave inspires friendship
easily, and fosters it with a teasing, affectionate
manner.
1831-2
Enters the Collège de Rouen and
proves an impressive student, strong in history
and literature. His earliest piece
of writing to come down to us, an essay on
Corneille, dates from 1831. Throughout
his adolescence he composes abundantly,
both drama and fiction.
1836
Meets Elisa Schlesinger, wife of a
German music publisher, in Trouville and
conceives an 'enormous' passion for
her. This passion illuminates the rest of his
adolescence. She treats him with
great kindness and affection; they remain in
touch for the next forty years.
Looking back, he is relieved she didn't return his
passion: 'Happiness is like the pox.
Catch it too soon, and it wrecks your
constitution.'
c.1836
Gustave's sexual initiation with one
of his mother's maids. This is the start of an
active and colourful erotic career,
veering from brothel to salon, from Cairo bathhouse
boy to Parisian poetess. In early
manhood he is extremely attractive to
women and his speed of sexual
recuperation is, by his own account, very
impressive; but even in later life
his courtly manner, intelligence and fame ensure
that he is not unattended.
1837
His first published work appears in
the Rouen magazine Le Colibri.
1840
Passes his baccalauréat. Travels to
the Pyrenees with a family friend, Dr Jules
Cloquet. Though often considered an
unbudgeable hermit, Flaubert in fact travels
extensively: to Italy and
Switzerland (1845), Brittany (1847), Egypt, Palestine,
Syria, Turkey, Greece and Italy
(1849-51), England (1851, 1865, 1866, 1871),
Algeria and Tunisia (1858), Germany
(1865), Belgium (1871) and Switzerland
(1874). Compare the case of his
alter ego Louis Bouilhet, who dreamed of China
and never got to England.
1843
As a law student in Paris, he meets
Victor Hugo.
1844
Gustave's first epileptic attack
puts an end to his legal studies in Paris and
confines him to the new family house
at Croisset. Abandoning the law, however,
causes little pain, and since his
confinement brings both the solitude and the stable
base needed for a life of writing,
the attack proves beneficial in the long run.
1846
Meets Louise Colet, 'the Muse', and
begins his most celebrated affair: a
prolonged, passionate, fighting
two-parter (1846-8, 1851-4). Though ill-matched
in temperament and incompatible in
aesthetics, Gustave and Louise nevertheless
last together far longer than most
would have predicted. Should we regret the end
of their affair? Only because it
means the end of Gustave's resplendent letters to
her.
1851-7
The writing, publication, trial and
triumphant acquittal of Madame Bovary. A
succès de scandale, praised by
authors as diverse as Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve and
Baudelaire. In 1846, doubting his
ability ever to write anything worth publishing,
Gustave had announced, 'If I do make
an appearance, one day, it will be in full
armour.' Now his breastplate dazzles
and his lance is everywhere. The curé of
Canteleu, the next village to Croisset,
forbids his parishioners to read the novel.
After 18S7, literary success leads
naturally to social success: Flaubert is seen
more in Paris. He meets the
Goncourts, Renan, Gautier, Baudelaire and Sainte-
Beuve. In 1862 the series of
literary dinners at Magny's are instituted: Flaubert is
a regular from December of that
year.
1862
Publication of Salammb&oocirc;.
Succès fou. Sainte-Beuve writes to Matthew
Arngld: 'Salammb&oocirc; is our
great event!' The novel provides the theme for
several costume balls in Paris. It
even provides the name for a new brand of petit
four.
1863
Flaubert begins to frequent the
salon of Princesse Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I.
The bear of Croisset eases into the
pelt of the social lion. He himself receives on
Sunday afternoons. The year also
contains his first exchange of letters with
George Sand, and his meeting with
Turgenev. His friendship with the Russian
novelist marks the beginning of a
wider European fame.
1864
Presentation to the Emperor Napoleon
III at Compiegne. The peak of Gustave's
social success. He sends camellias
to the Empress.
1866
Created chevalier de
1869
Publication of L'Education
sentimentale: Flaubert always claims it as a chef-
d'oeuvre. Despite the legend of
heroic struggle (which he himself initiates),
writing comes easily to Flaubert. He
complains a lot, but such complaints are
always couched in letters of
astonishing fluency. For a quarter of a century he
produces one large, solid book,
requiring considerable research, every five to
seven years. He might agonise over
the word, the phrase, the assonance, but he
never endures a writer's block.
1874
Publication of
commercial success.
1877
Publication of Trois Contes. A
critical and popular success: for the first time
Flaubert receives a favourable
review from Le Figaro; the book goes through five
editions in three years. Flaubert
begins work on Bouvard et Pécuchet. During
these final years, his pre-eminence
among French novelists is admitted by the
next generation. He is fêted and
revered. His Sunday afternoons become famous
events in literary society; Henry
James calls on the Master. In 1879 Gustave's
friends institute the annual Saint
Polycarpe dinners in his honour. In 1880 the five
co-authors of Les Soirées de Médan,
including Zola and Maupassant, present him
with an inscribed copy: the gift can
be seen as a symbolic salute to Realism from
Naturalism.
188o
Full of honour, widely loved, and
still working hard to the end, Gustave Flaubert
dies at Croisset.
II
1817
Death of Caroline Flaubert (aged
twenty months), the second child of Achille-
Cléophas Flaubert and
Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert.
1819
Death of Emile-Cléophas Flaubert
(aged eight months), their third child.
1821
Birth of Gustave Flaubert, their
fifth child.
1822
Death of Jules Alfred Flaubert (aged
three years and five months), their fourth
child. His brother Gustave, born
entre deux morts, is delicate and not expected to
live long. Dr Flaubert buys a family
plot at the Cimetière Monumental and has a
small grave dug in preparation for
Gustave. Surprisingly, he survives. He proves a
slow child, content too sit for
hours with his finger in his mouth and an 'almost
stupid' expression on his face. For
Sartre, he is 'the family idiot'.
1836
The start of a hopeless, obsessive
passion for Elisa Schlesinger which cauterises
his heart and renders him incapable
of ever fully loving another woman. Looking
back, he records: 'Each of us
possesses in his heart a royal chamber. I have
bricked mine up.'
1839
Expelled from the Collège de Rouen
for rowdyism and disobedience.
1843
The Faculty of Law at Paris
announces its first-year examination results. The
examiners declare their views by
means of red or black balls. Gustave receives
two red and two black, and is
therefore failed.
1844
Shattering first attack of epilepsy;
others are to follow. 'Each attack', Gustave
writes later, 'was like a
haemorrhage of the nervous system…It was a snatching of
the soul from the body,
excruciating.' He is bled, given pills and infusions, put on
a special diet, forbidden alcohol
and tobacco; a regime of strict confinement and
maternal care is necessary if he is
not to claim his place at the cemetery. Without
having entered the world, Gustave
now retires from it. 'So, you are guarded like a
young girl?' Louise Colet later
taunts, accurately. For all but the last eight years of
his life, Mme Flaubert watches
suffocatingly over his welfare and censors his
travel plans. Gradually, over the
decades, her frailty overtakes his: by the time he
has almost ceased to be a worry to
her, she has become a burden to him.
1846
Death of Gustave's father, quickly
followed by that of his beloved sister Caroline
(aged twenty-one), which thrusts on
to him proxy fatherhood of his niece.
Throughout his life, he is
constantly bruised by the deaths of those close to him.
And there are other ways for friends
to die: in June Alfred Le Poittevin marries.
Gustave feels it is his third
bereavement of the year: 'You are doing something
abnormal,' he complains. To Maxime
du Camp that year he writes, 'Tears are to
the heart what water is to a fish.'
Is it a consolation that in the same year he meets
Louise Colet? Pedantry and
recalcitrance are mismatched with immoderation and
possessiveness. A mere six days
after she becomes his mistress, the pattern of
their relationship is set: 'Moderate
your cries!' he complains to her. 'They are
torturing me. What do you want me to
do? Am I to leave everything and live in
Paris? Impossible.' This impossible
relationship drags on nevertheless for eight
years; Louise is puzzlingly unable
to grasp that Gustave can love her without ever
wanting to see her. 'If I were a
woman,' he writes after six years, 'I wouldn't want
myself for a lover. A one-night
stand, yes; but an intimate relationship, no.'
1848
Death of Alfred Le Poittevin, aged
thirty-two. 'I see that I've never loved
anyone—man or woman—as I loved him.'
Twenty-five years later: 'Not a day
passes that I don't think of him.'
1849
Gustave reads his first full-length
adult work,
his two closest friends, Bouilhet
and Du Camp. The reading takes four days, at the
rate of eight hours per day. After
embarrassed consultation, the listeners tell him
throw it on the fire.
1850
In Egypt, Gustave catches syphilis.
Much of his hair falls out; he grows stout.
Mme Flaubert, meeting him in Rome
the following year, scarcely recognises her
son, and finds that he has become
very coarse. Middle age begins here. 'Scarcely
are you born before you begin
rotting.' Over the years all but one of his teeth will
fall out; his saliva will be
permanently blackened by mercury treatment.
1851-7
Madame Bovary. The composition is
painful—'Writing this book I am like a man
playing the piano with lead balls
attached to his knuckles'—and the prosecution
frightening. In later years Flaubert
comes to resent the insistent fame of his
masterpiece, which makes others see
him as a one-book author. He tells Du Camp
that if ever he had a stroke of good
luck on the Bourse he would buy up 'at any
cost' all copies of Madame Bovary in
circulation: 'I should throw them into the
fire, and never hear of them again.'
1862
Elisa Schlesinger is interned in a
mental hospital; she is diagnosed as suffering
from 'acute melancholia'. After the
publication of Salammbô, Flaubert begins to
run with rich friends. But he
remains childlike in financial matters: his mother has
to sell property to pay his debts.
In 1867 he secretly hands over control of his
financial affairs to his niece's
husband, Ernest Commanville. Over the next
thirteen years, through
extravagance, incompetent management and bad luck,
Flaubert loses all his money.
1869
Death of Louis Bouilhet, whom he had
once called 'the seltzer water which helped
me digest life'. 'In losing my
Bouilhet, I had lost my midwife, the man who saw
more deeply into my thought than I
did myself.' Death also of Sainte-Beuve.
'Another one gone! The little band
is diminishing! Who is there to talk about
literature with now?' Publication of
L'Education sentimentale; a critical and
commercial flop. Of the hundred and
fifty complimentary copies sent to friends
and acquaintances, barely thirty are
even acknowledged.
1870
Death of Jules de Goncourt: only
three of the seven friends who started the
Magny dinners in 1862 are now left.
During the Franco-Prussian war, the enemy
occupies Croisset. Ashamed of being
French, Flaubert stops wearing his Légion
d'honneur, and resolves to ask
Turgenev what he has to do to take Russian
citizenship.
1872
Death of Mme Flaubert: 'I have
realised during the last fortnight that my poor
dear old mother was the person I
loved the most. It's as if part of my entrails had
been torn out.' Death also of
Gautier. 'With him, the last of my intimate friends is
gone. The list is closed.'
1874
Flaubert makes his theatrical début
with Le Candidat. It is a complete flop; actors
leave the stage with tears in their
eyes. The play is taken off after four
performances. Publication of
Flaubert notes, 'by everything from
the Figaro to the Revue des deux mondes…
What comes as a surprise is the
hatred underlying much of this criticism—hatred
for me, for my person—deliberate
denigration…This avalanche of abuse does
depress me.'
1875
The financial ruin of Ernest
Commanville drags Flaubert down too. He sells his
farm at Deauville; he has to plead
with his niece not to turn him out of Croisset.
She and Commanville nickname him
'the consumer'. In 1879 he is reduced to
accepting a state pension arranged
for him by friends.
1876
Death of Louise Colet. Death of
George Sand. 'My heart is becoming a
necropolis.' Gustave's last years
are arid and solitary. He tells his niece he regrets
not having married.
1880
Impoverished, lonely and exhausted,
Gustave Flaubert dies. Zola, in his obituary
notice, comments that he was unknown
to four-fifths of Rouen, and detested by
the other fifth. He leaves Bouvard
et Pécuchet unfinished. Some say the labour of
the novel killed him; Turgenev told
him before he started that it would be better
as a short story. After the funeral
a group of mourners, including the poets
François Coppée and Théodore de
Banville, have dinner in Rouen to honour the
departed writer. They discover, on
sitting down to table, that they are thirteen.
The superstitious Banville insists
that another guest be found, and Gautier's sonin-
law Emile Bergerat is sent to scour
the streets. After several rebuffs he returns
with a private on leave. The soldier
has never heard of Flaubert, but is longing to
meet Coppée.
III
1842
Me and my books, in the same
apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.
1846
When I was still quite young I had a
complete presentiment of life. It was like the
nauseating smell of cooking escaping
from a ventilator: you don't have to have
eaten it to know that it would make
you throw up.
1846
I did with you what I have done
before with those I loved best: I showed them the
bottom of the bag, and the acrid
dust that rose from it made them choke.
1846
My life is riveted to that of
another [Mme Flaubert], and will be so as long as that
other life endures. A piece of
seaweed blowing in the wind, I am held to the rock
by a single hardy thread. If it
broke, where would this poor useless plant fly off
to?
1846
You want to prune the tree. Its
unruly branches, thick with leaves, push out in all
directions to sniff the air and the
sun. But you want to make me into a charming
espalier, stretched against a wall,
bearing fine fruit that a child could pick without
even using a ladder.
1846
Don't think that I belong to that
vulgar race of men who feel disgust after
pleasure, and for whom love exists
only as lust. No: in me, what rises doesn't
subside so quickly. Moss grows on
the castles ofmy heart as soon as they are
built; but it takes some time for
them to fall into ruin, if they ever completely do.
1846
I am like a cigar: you have to suck
on the end to get me going.
1846
Amongst those who go to sea there
are the navigators who discover new worlds,
adding continents to the earth and
stars to the heavens: they are the masters, the
great, the eternally splendid. Then
there are those who spit terror from their gunports,
who pillage, who grow rich and fat.
Others go off in search of gold and silk
under foreign skies. Still others
catch salmon for the gourmet or cod for the poor.
I am the obscure and patient
pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters
and comes up with empty hands and a
blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me
down into the abysses of thought,
down into those innermost recesses which
never cease to fascinate the strong.
I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art,
where others voyage or fight; and
from time to time I'll entertain myself by diving
for those green and yellow shells
that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for
myself and cover the walls of my hut
with them.
1846
I am only a literary lizard basking
the day away beneath the great sun of Beauty.
That's all.
1846
Deep within me there is a radical,
intimate, bitter and incessant boredom which
prevents me from enjoying anything
and which smothers my soul. It reappears at
any excuse, just as the swollen
corpses of drowned dogs pop to the surface despite
the stones that have been tied round
their necks.
1847
People are like food. There are lots
of bourgeois who seem to me like boiled beef:
all steam, no juice, and no taste
(it fills you up straight away and is much eaten by
bumpkins). Other people are like
white meat, freshwater fish, slender eels from
the muddy river-bed, oysters (of
varying degrees of saltiness), calves' heads, and
sugared porridge. Me? I'm like a
runny, stinking macaroni cheese, which you
have to eat a lot of times before
you develop a taste for it. You do finally get to
like it, but only after it has made
your stomach heave on countless occasions.
1847
Some people have a tender heart and
a tough mind. I'm the opposite: I have a
tender mind but a rough heart. I'm
like a coconut which keeps its milk locked
away beneath several layers of wood.
You need an axe to open it, and then what
do you find as often as not? A sort
of sour cream.
1847
You had hoped to find in me a fire
which scorched and blazed and illuminated
everything; which shed a cheerful
light, dried out damp wainscoting, made the air
healthier and rekindled life. Alas!
I'm only a poor nightlight, whose red wick
splutters in a lake of bad oil full
of water and bits of dust.
1851
With me, friendship is like the
camel: once started, there is no way of stopping it.
1852
As you get older, the heart sheds
its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against
certain winds. Each day tears away a
few more leaves; and then there are the
storms which break off several
branches at one go. And while nature's greenery
grows back again in the spring, that
of the heart never grows back.
1852
What an awful thing life is, isn't
it? It's like soup with lots of hairs floating on the
surface. You have to eat it
nevertheless.
1852
I laugh at everything, even at that
which I love the most. There is no fact, thing,
feeling or person over which I have
not blithely run my clownishness, like an iron
roller imparting sheen to cloth.
1852
I love my work with a frantic and
perverted love, as an ascetic loves the hair-shirt
which scratches his belly.
1852
All of us Normans have a little
cider in our veins: it's a bitter, fermented drink
which sometimes bursts the bung.
1853
As for this business of my moving at
once to Paris, we'll have to put it off, or
rather settle it here and now. This
is impossible for me now…I know myself well
enough, and it would mean losing a
whole winter, and perhaps the whole book.
Bouilhet can talk: he's happy
writing anywhere; he's been working away for a
dozen years despite continual
disturbances…But I am like a row of milk-pans: if
you want the cream to form, you have
to leave them exactly where they are.
1853
I'm dazzled by your facility. In ten
days you'll have written six stories! I don't
understand it…I'm like one of those
old aqueducts: there's so much rubbish
clogging up the banks of my thought
that it flows slowly, and only spills from the
end of my pen drop by drop.
1854
I pigeon-hole my life, and keep
everything in its place; I'm as full of drawers and
compartments as an old travelling
trunk, all roped up and fastened with three big
leather straps.
1854
You ask for love, you complain that
I don't send you flowers? Flowers, indeed! If
that's what you want, find yourself
some wet-eared boy stuffed with fine manners
and all the right ideas. I'm like
the tiger, which has bristles of hair at the end of its
cock, with which it lacerates the
female.
1857
Books aren't made in the way that
babies are: they are made like pyramids.
There's some long-pondered plan, and
then great blocks of stone are placed one
on top of the other, and it's
back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all
to no purpose! It just stands like
that in the desert! But it towers over it
prodigiously. Jackals piss at the
base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it,
etc. Continue this comparison.
1857
There is a Latin phrase which means
roughly, 'To pick up a farthing from the shit
with your teeth.' It was a
rhetorical figure applied to the miserly. I am like them: I
will stop at nothing to find gold.
1867
It's true that many things infuriate
me. The day I stop being indignant I shall fall
flat on my face, like a doll when
you take away its prop.
1872
My heart remains intact, but my
feelings are sharpened on the one hand and
dulled on the other, like an old
knife that has been too often sharpened, which has
notches, and breaks easily.
1872
Never have things of the spirit
counted for so little. Never has hatred for
everything great been so manifest -
disdain for Beauty, execration of literature. I
have always tried to live in an
ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls,
threatening to undermine it.
1873
I still carry on turning out my
sentences, like a bourgeois turning out napkin rings
on a lathe in his attic. It gives me
something to do, and it affords me some private
pleasure.
1875
Despite your advice, I can't manage
to 'harden myself…My sensitivities are all
aquiver—my nerves and my brain are
sick, very sick; I feel them to be so. But
there I go, complaining again, and I
don't want to distress you. I'll confine myself
to your mention of a 'rock'. Know,
then, that very old granite sometimes turns into
layers of clay.
1875
I feel uprooted, like a mass of dead
seaweed tossed here and there in the waves.
188o
When will the book be finished?
That's the question. If it is to appear next winter,
I haven't a minute to lose between
now and then. But there are moments when I'm
so tired that I feel I'm liquefying
like an old Camembert.
3: Finders Keepers
You can define a net in one of two
ways, depending on your point of view. Normally,
you would say that it is a meshed
instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with
no great injury to logic, reverse
the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer
once did: he called it a collection
of holes tied together with string.
You can do the same with a
biography. The trawling net fills, then the biographer hauls it
in, sorts, throws back, stores,
fillets and sells. Yet consider what he doesn't catch: there is
always far more of that. The
biography stands, fat and worthy—burgherish on the shelf,
boastful and sedate: a shilling life
will give you all the facts, a ten-pound one all the
hypotheses as well. But think of
everything that got away, that fled with the last deathbed
exhalation of the biographee. What
chance would the craftiest biographer stand against
the subject who saw him coming and
decided to amuse himself?
I first met Ed Winterton when he put
his hand on mine in the Europa Hotel. Just my little
joke; though true as well. It was at
a provincial booksellers' fair and I had reached a little
more quickly than he for the same
copy of Turgenev's Literary Reminiscences. The
conjunction induced immediate
apologies, as embarrassed on his side as they were on
mine. When we each realised that
bibliophilic lust was the only emotion which had
produced this laying on of hands, Ed
murmured,
'Step outside and let's discuss it.'
Over an indifferent pot of tea we
revealed our separate paths to the same book. I
explained about Flaubert; he
announced his interest in Gosse and in English literary
society towards the end of the last
century. I meet few American academics, and was
pleasantly surprised that this one
was bored by Bloomsbury, and happy to leave the
modern movement to his younger and
more ambitious colleagues. But then Ed Winterton
liked to present himself as a
failure. He was in his early forties, balding, with a pinky
glabrous complexion and square
rimless spectacles: the banker type of academic,
circumspect and moral. He bought
English clothes without looking at all English. He
remained the sort of American who
always wears a mackintosh in London because he
knows that in this city rain falls
out of a clear sky. He was even wearing his mackintosh
in the lounge of the Europa Hotel.
His air of failure had nothing
desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an
unresented realisation that he was
not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to
ensure only that he failed in a
correct and acceptable fashion. At one point, when
discussing the improbability of his
Gosse biography ever being finished, let alone
published, he paused and dropped his
voice:
'But in any case I sometimes wonder
if Mr Gosse would have approved of what I'm
doing.'
'You mean…' I knew little of Gosse,
and my widened eyes hinted perhaps too clearly at
naked laundresses, illegitimate
half-castes and dismembered bodies.
'Oh no, no, no. Just the thought of
writing about him. He might think it was a bit of
a…low blow.'
I let him have the Turgenev, of
course, if only to escape a discussion about the morality
of possession. I didn't see where
ethics came into the ownership of a second-hand book;
but Ed did. He promised to be in
touch if ever he ran down another copy. Then we briefly
discussed the rights and wrongs of
my paying for his tea.
I didn't expect to hear from him
again, let alone on the subject which provoked his letter
to me about a year later. 'Are you
interested at all in Juliet Herbert? It sounds a
fascinating relationship, judging by
the material. I'll be in London in August, if you will.
Ever, Ed (Winterton).'
What does the fiancée feel when she
snaps open the box and sees the ring set in purple
velvet? I never asked my wife; and
it's too late now. Or what did Flaubert feel as he
waited for the dawn on top of the
Great Pyramid and finally saw that crack of gold shine
from the purple velvet of the night?
Astonishment, awe and a fierce glee came into my
heart as I read those two words in
Ed's letter. No, not 'Juliet Herbert', the other two: first
'fascinating' and then 'material'.
And beyond glee, beyond hard work as well, was there
something else? A shameful thought
of an honorary degree somewhere?
Juliet Herbert is a great hole tied
together with string. She became governess to Flaubert's
niece Caroline at some time in the
mid-1850s, and remained at Croisset for a few
undetermined years; then she
returned to London. Flaubert wrote to her, and she to him;
they visited one another every so
often. Beyond this, we know nothing. Not a single letter
to or from her has survived. We know
almost nothing about her family. We do not even
know what she looked like. No
description of her survives, and none of Flaubert's friends
thought to mention her after his
death, when most other women of importance in his life
were being memorialised.
Biographers disagree about Juliet
Herbert. For some, the shortage of evidence indicates
that she was of small significance
in Flaubert's life; others conclude from this absence
precisely the opposite, and assert
that the tantalising governess was certainly one of the
writer's mistresses, possibly the
Great Unknown Passion of his life, and perhaps even his
fiancée. Hypothesis is spun directly
from the temperament of the biographer. Can we
deduce love for Juliet Herbert from
the fact that Gustave called his greyhound Julio?
Some can. It seems a little
tendentious to me. And if we do, what do we then deduce from
the fact that in various letters
Gustave addresses his niece as 'Loulou', the name he later
transfers to Félicité's parrot? Or
from the fact that George Sand had a ram called
Gustave?
Flaubert's one overt reference to
Juliet Herbert comes in a letter to Bouilhet, written after
the latter had visited Croisset:
Since I saw you excited by the
governess, I too have become excited. At table, my eyes
willingly followed the gentle slope
of her breast. I believe she notices this for, five or six
times per meal, she looks as if she
had caught the sun. What a pretty comparison one
could make between the slope of the
breast and the glacis of a fortress. The cupids tumble
about on it, as they storm the
citadel. (To be said in our Sheikh's voice) 'Well, I certainly
know what piece of artillery I'd be
pointing in that direction.'
Should we jump to conclusions?
Frankly, this is the kind of boastful, nudging stuff that
Flaubert was always writing to his
male friends. I find it unconvincing myself: true desire
isn't so easily diverted into
metaphor. But then, all biographers secretly want to annex
and channel the sex-lives of their
subjects; you must make your judgment on me as well
as on Flaubert.
Had Ed really discovered some Juliet
Herbert material? I admit I began feeling
possessive in advance. I imagined
myself presenting it in one of the more important
literary journals; perhaps I might
let the TLS have it. 'Juliet Herbert: A Mystery Solved,
by Geoffrey Braithwaite',
illustrated with one of those photographs in which you can't
quite read the handwriting. I also
began to worry at the thought of Ed blurting out his
discovery on campus and guilelessly
yielding up his cache to some ambitious Gallicist
with an astronaut's haircut.
But these were unworthy and, I hope,
untypical feelings. Mostly, I was thrilled at the idea
of discovering the secret of Gustave
and Juliet's relationship (what else could the word
'fascinating' mean in Ed's letter?).
I was also thrilled that the material might help me
imagine even more exactly what
Flaubert was like. The net was being pulled tighter.
Would we find out, for instance, how
the writer behaved in London?
This was of particular interest.
Cultural exchange between England and France in the
nineteenth century was at best
pragmatic. French writers didn't cross the Channel to
discuss aesthetics with their
English counterparts; they were either running from
prosecution or looking for a job.
Hugo and Zola came over as exiles; Verlaine and
Mallarme came over as schoolmasters.
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, chronically poor yet
crazily practical, came over in
search of an heiress. A Parisian marriage-broker had kitted
him out for the expedition with a
fur overcoat, a repeating alarm watch and a new set of
false teeth, all to be paid for when
the writer landed the heiress's dowry. But Villiers,
tirelessly accident-prone, botched
the wooing. The heiress rejected him, the broker turned
up to reclaim the coat and watch,
and the discarded suitor was left adrift in London, full
of teeth but penniless.
So what of Flaubert? We know little
about his four trips to England. We know that the
Great Exhibition of 1851 secured his
unexpected approval—'a very fine thing, despite
being admired by everyone'—but his
notes on this first visit amount to a mere seven
pages: two on the British Museum,
plus five on the Chinese and Indian sections at Crystal
Palace. What were his first
impressions of us? He must have told Juliet. Did we live up to
our entries in his Dictionnaire des
idées reçues (ENGLISHMEN: All rich.
ENGLISHWOMEN: Express surprise that
they produce pretty children)?
And what of subsequent visits, when
he had become author of the notorious Madame
Bovary? Did he search out English
writers? Did he search out English brothels? Did he
cosily stay at home with Juliet,
staring at her over dinner and then storming her fortress?
Were they perhaps (I half-hoped so)
merely friends? Was Flaubert's English as hit-ormiss
as it seems from his letters? Did he
talk only Shakespearean? And did he complain
much about the fog?
When I met Ed at the restaurant, he
was looking even less successful than before. He told
me about budget cuts, a cruel world,
and his own lack of publications. I deduced, rather
than heard, that he had been sacked.
He explained the irony of his dismissal: it sprang
from his devotion to his work, his
unwillingness to do Gosse anything less than justice
when presenting him to the world.
Academic superiors had suggested that he cut corners.
Well, he wouldn't do so. He
respected writing and writers too much for that. 'I mean,
don't we owe these fellers something
in return?' he concluded.
Perhaps I offered slightly less than
the expected sympathy. But then, can you alter the
way luck flows? Just for once, it
was flowing for me. I had ordered my dinner quickly,
scarcely caring what I ate; Ed had
pondered the menu as if he were Verlaine being bought
his first square meal in months.
Listening to Ed's tedious lament for himself and watching
him slowly consume whitebait at the
same time had used up my patience; though it had
not diminished my excitement.
'Right,' I said, as we started our
main course, 'Juliet Herbert.'
'Oh,' he said, 'yes.' I could see he
might need prodding. 'It's an odd story.'
'It would be.'
'Yes.' Ed seemed a little pained,
almost embarrassed. 'Well, I was over here about six
months ago, tracking down one of Mr
Gosse's distant descendants. Not that I expected to
find anything. It was just that, as
far as I knew, nobody had ever talked to the lady in
question, and I thought it was
my…duty to see her. Perhaps some family legend I hadn't
accounted for had come down to her.'
'And?'
'And? Oh, it hadn't. No, she wasn't
really of any help. It was a nice day, though. Kent.' He
looked pained again; he seemed to
miss the mackintosh which the waiter had ruthlessly
deprived him of. 'Ah, but I see what
you mean. What had come down to her was the
letters. Now let me get this right;
you'll correct me, I hope. Juliet Herbert died 1909 or
so? Yes. She had a cousin, woman
cousin. Yes. Now, this woman found the letters and
took them to Mr Gosse, asked him his
opinion of their value. Mr Gosse thought he was
being touched for money, so he said
they were interesting but not worth anything.
Whereupon this cousin apparently
just handed them over to him and said, If they're not
worth anything, you take them. Which
he did.'
'How do you know all this?'
'There was a letter attached in Mr
Gosse's hand.'
'And so?'
'And so they came down to this lady.
Kent. I'm afraid she asked me the same question.
Were they worth anything? I regret I
behaved in a rather immoral fashion. I told her they
had been valuable when Gosse had
examined them, but they weren't any more. I said they
were still quite interesting, but
they weren't worth much because half of them were
written in French. Then I bought
them off her for fifty pounds.'
'Good God.' No wonder he looked
shifty.
'Yes, it was rather bad, wasn't it?
I can't really excuse myself; though the fact that Mr
Gosse himself had lied when
obtaining them did seem to blur the issue. It raises an
interesting ethical point, don't you
think? The fact is, I was rather depressed at losing my
job, and I thought I'd take them
home and sell them and then be able to carry on with my
book.'
'How many letters are there?'
'About seventy-five. Three dozen or
so on each side. That's how we settled on the price—
a pound apiece for the ones in
English, fifty pence for the ones in French.'
'Good God.' I wondered what they
might be worth. Perhaps a thousand times what he
paid for them. Or more.
'Yes.'
'Well, go on, tell me about them.'
'Ah.' He paused, and gave me a look
which might have been roguish if he hadn't been
such a meek, pedantic fellow.
Probably he was enjoying my excitement. 'Well, fire away.
What do you want to know?'
'You have read them?'
'Oh yes.'
'And, and…' I didn't know what to
ask. Ed was definitely enjoying this now. 'And—did
they have an affair? They did,
didn't they?'
'Oh yes, certainly.'
'And when did it start? Soon after
she got to Croisset?'
'Oh yes, quite soon.'
Well, that unravelled the letter to
Bouilhet: Flaubert was playing the tease, pretending he
had just as much, or just as little,
chance as his friend with the governess; whereas in
fact…
'And it continued all the time she
was there?'
'Oh yes.'
'And when he came to England?'
'Yes, that too.'
'And was she his fiancée?'
'It's hard to say. Pretty nearly,
I'd guess. There are some references in both their letters,
mostly jocular. Remarks about the
little English governess trapping the famous French
man of letters; what would she do if
he were imprisoned for another outrage against
public morals; that sort of thing.'
'Well, well, well. And do we find
out what she was like?'
'What she was like? Oh, you mean to
look at?'
'Yes. There wasn't…there wasn't…' He
sensed my hope. '…a photograph?'
'A photograph? Yes, several, as a
matter of fact; from some Chelsea studio, printed on
heavy card. He must have asked her
to send him some. Is that of interest?'
'It's incredible. What did she look
like?'
'Pretty nice in an unmemorable sort
of way. Dark hair, strong jaw, good nose. I didn't
look too closely; not really my
type.'
'And did they get on well together?'
I hardly knew what I wanted to ask any more.
Flaubert's English fiancée, I was
thinking to myself. By Geoffrey Braithwaite.
'Oh yes, they seemed to. They seemed
very fond. He'd mastered quite a range of English
endearments by the end.'
'So he could manage the language?'
'Oh yes, there are several long
passages of English in his letters.'
'And did he like London?'
'He liked it. How could he not? It
was his fiancée's city of residence.'
Dear old Gustave, I murmured to
myself; I felt quite tender towards him. Here, in this
city, a century and a few years ago,
with a compatriot of mine who had captured his
heart. 'Did he complain about the
fog?'
'Of course. He wrote something like,
How do you manage to live with such fog? By the
time a gentleman has recognised a
lady as she comes at him out of the fog, it is already
too late to raise his hat. I'm
surprised the race doesn't die out when such conditions make
difficult the natural courtesies.'
Oh yes, that was the tone—elegant,
teasing, slightly lubricious. 'And what about the
Great Exhibition? Does he go into
detail about that? I bet he rather liked it.'
'He did. Of course, that was a few
years before they first met, but he does mention it in a
sentimental fashion—wonders if he
might unknowingly have passed her in the crowds.
He thought it was a bit awful, but
also really rather splendid. He seems to have looked at
all the exhibits as if they were an
enormous display of source material for him.'
'And. Hmm.' Well, why not. 'I
suppose he didn't go to any brothels?'
Ed looked at me rather crossly.
'Well, he was writing to his girl-friend, wasn't he? He'd
hardly be boasting about that.'
'No, of course not.' I felt
chastened. I also felt exhilarated. My letters. My letters.
Winterton was planning to let me
publish them, wasn't he?
'So when can I see them? You did
bring them with you?'
'Oh no.'
'You didn't?' Well, no doubt it was
sensible to keep them all in a safe place. Travel has its
dangers. Unless…unless there was
something I hadn't understood. Perhaps…did he want
money? I suddenly realised I knew
absolutely nothing about Ed Winterton, except that he
was the owner of my copy of
Turgenev's Literary Reminiscences. 'You didn't even bring
a single one with you?'
'No. You see, I burnt them.'
You what?'
'Yes, well, that's what I mean by
its being an odd story.'
'It sounds like a criminal story at
the moment.'
'I was sure you'd understand,' he
said, much to my surprise; then smiled broadly. 'I mean,
you of all people. In fact, at first
I decided not to tell anyone at all, but then I remembered
you. I thought that one person in
the business ought to be told. Just for the record.'
'Go on.' The man was a maniac, that
much was plain. No wonder they'd kicked him out of
his university. If only they'd done
it years earlier.
'Well, you see, they were full of
fascinating stuff, the letters. Very long, a lot of them, full
of reflections about other writers,
public life, and so on. They were even more unbuttoned
than his normal letters. Perhaps it
was because he was sending them out of the country
that he allowed himself such
freedom.' Did this criminal, this sham, this failure, this
murderer, this bald pyromaniac know
what he was doing to me? Very probably he did.
'And her letters were really quite
fine in their way too. Told her whole life story. Very
revealing about Flaubert. Full of
nostalgic descriptions of home life at Croisset. She
obviously had a very good eye.
Noticed things I shouldn't think anyone else would have
done.'
'Go on.' I waved grimly at the
waiter. I wasn't sure I could stay there much longer. I
wanted to tell Winterton how really
pleased I was that the British had burnt the White
House to the ground.
'No doubt you're wondering why I
destroyed the letters. I can see you're kind of edgy
about something. Well, in the very
last communication between the two of them, he says
that in the event of his death, her
letters will be sent back to her, and she is to burn both
sides of the correspondence.'
'Did he give any reasons?'
'No.'
This seemed strange, assuming that
the maniac was telling the truth. But then Gustave did
burn much of his correspondence with
Du Camp. Perhaps some temporary pride in his
family origins had asserted itself
and he didn't want the world to know that he had nearly
married an English governess. Or
perhaps he didn't want us to know that his famous
devotion to solitude and art had
nearly been overthrown. But the world would know. I
would tell it, one way or another.
'So you see, of course, I didn't
have any alternative. I mean, if your business is writers,
you have to behave towards them with
integrity, don't you? You have to do what they
say, even if other people don't.'
What a smug, moralising bastard he was. He wore ethics
the way tarts wear make-up. And then
he managed to mix into the same expression both
the earlier shiftiness and the later
smugness. 'There was also something else in this last
letter of his. A rather strange
instruction on top of asking Miss Herbert to burn the
correspondence. He said, If anyone
ever asks you what my letters contained, or what my
life was like, please lie to them.
Or rather, since I cannot ask you of all people to lie, just
tell them what it is you think they
want to hear.'
I felt like Villiers de l'Isle-Adam:
someone had lent me a fur overcoat and a repeating
watch for a few days, then cruelly
snatched them back. It was lucky that the waiter
returned at that point. Besides,
Winterton was not as stupid as all that: he had pushed his
chair well back from the table and
was playing with his fingernails. 'The pity of it is,' he
said, as I tucked away my credit
card, 'that I probably now won't be able to finance Mr
Gosse. But I'm sure you'll agree
it's been an interesting moral decision.'
I think the remark I then made was
deeply unfair to Mr Gosse both as a writer and as a
sexual being; but I do not see how I
could have avoided it.
4: The Flaubert Bestiary
I attract mad people and animals.
Letter to Alfred Le Poittevin, 26 May
1845
The Bear
Gustave was the Bear. His sister
Caroline was the Rat—'your dear rat', 'your faithful rat'
she signs herself, 'little rat',
'Ah, rat, good rat, old rat', 'old rat, naughty old rat, good rat,
poor old rat' he addresses her—but
Gustave was the Bear. When he was only twenty,
people found him 'an odd fellow, a
bear, a young man out of the ordinary'; and even
before his epileptic seizure and
confinement at Croisset, the image had established itself:
'I am a bear and I want to stay a bear
in my den, in my lair, in my skin, in my old bear's
skin; I want to live quietly, far
away from the bourgeois and the bourgeoises.' After his
attack, the beast confirmed itself:
'I live alone, like a bear.' (The word 'alone' in this
sentence is best glossed as: 'alone
except for my parents, my sister, the servants, our dog,
Caroline's goat, and my regular
visits from Alfred Le Poittevin'.)
He recovered, he was allowed to
travel; in December 1850 he wrote to his mother from
Constantinople, expanding the image
of the Bear. It now explained not just his character,
but also his literary strategy:
If you participate in life, you
don't see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it
too much. The artist, to my way of
thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.
All the misfortunes Providence
inflicts on him come from his stubbornness in denying
that maxim…So (and this is my
conclusion) I am resigned to living as I have lived: alone,
with my throng of great men as my
only cronies—a bear, with my bear-rug for company.
The 'throng of cronies', needless to
say, aren't house-guests but companions picked from
his library shelves. As for the
bear-rug, he was always concerned about it: he wrote twice
from
the East (Constantinople, April 1850; Benisouef, June 1850) asking his mother
to
take
care of it. His niece Caroline also remembered this central feature of his
study. She
would
be taken there for her lessons at one o'clock: the shutters would be closed to
keep
out
the heat, and the darkened room filled with the smell of joss-sticks and
tobacco. 'With
one
bound I would throw myself on the large white bearskin, which I adored, and
cover
its
great head with kisses.'
Once
you catch your bear, says the Macedonian proverb, it will dance for you.
Gustave
didn't
dance; Flaubear was nobody's bear. (How would you fiddle that into French?
Gourstave,
perhaps.)
BEAR:
Generally called Martin. Quote the story of the old soldier who saw that a
watch
had
fallen into a bear-pit, climbed down into it, and was eaten.
Dictionnaire
des idées reçues
Gustave
is other animals as well. In his youth he is clusters of beasts: hungry to see
Ernest
Chevalier, he is 'a lion, a tiger—a tiger from India, a boa constrictor'
(1841);
feeling
a rare plenitude of strength, he is 'an ox, sphinx, bittern, elephant, whale'
(1841).
Subsequently,
he takes them one at a time. He is an oyster in its shell (1845); a snail in
its
shell
(1851); a hedgehog rolling up to protect itself (1853, 1857). He is a literary
lizard
basking
in the sun of Beauty (1846), and a warbler with a shrill cry which hides in the
depths
of the woods and is heard only by itself (also 1846). He becomes as soft and
nervous
as a cow (1867); he feels as worn out as a donkey (1867); yet still he splashes
in
the
Seine like a porpoise (1870). He works like a mule (1852); he lives a life
which
would
kill three rhinos (1872); he works 'like XV oxen' (1878); though he advises
Louise
Colet
to burrow away at her work like a mole (1853). To Louise he resembles 'a wild
buffalo
of the American prairie' (1846). To George Sand, however, he seems 'gentle as a
lamb'
(1866)—which he denies (1869)—and the pair of them chatter away like magpies
(1866);
ten years later, at her funeral, he weeps like a calf (1876). Alone in his
study, he
finishes
the story he wrote especially for her, the story about the parrot; he bellows
it out
'like
a gorilla' (1876).
He
flirts occasionally with the rhinoceros and the camel as self-images, but mainly,
secretly,
essentially, he is the Bear: a stubborn bear (1852), a bear thrust deeper into
bearishness
by the stupidity of his age (1853), a mangy bear (1854), even a stuffed bear
(1869);
and so on own to the very last year of his life, when he is still 'roaring as
oudly as
any
bear in its cave' (1880). Note that in Hérodias, Flaubert's last completed
work, the
imprisoned
prophet Iaokanann, when ordered to stop howling his denunciations against a
corrupt
world, replies that he too will continue crying out 'like a bear'.
Language
is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to,
while
all
the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Madame
Bovary
There
were still bears around in Gourstave's time: brown bears in the Alps, reddish
bears
in
Savoy. Bear hams were available from superior dealers in salted provisions.
Alexandre
Dumas
ate bear steak at the Hôtel de
Dictionnaire
de cuisine (1870), he noted that 'bear meat is now eaten by all the peoples of
Europe'.
From the chef to Their Majesties of Prussia Dumas obtained a recipe for bear's
paws,
Moscow style. Buy the paws skinned. Wash, salt, and marinade for three days.
Casserole
with bacon and vegetables for seven or eight hours; drain, wipe, sprinkle with
pepper,
and turn in melted lard. Roll in breadcrumbs and grill for half an hour. Serve
with
a
piquant sauce and two spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly.
It
is not known whether Flaubear ever ate his namesake. He ate dromedary in
Damascus
in
1850. It seems a reasonable guess that if he had eaten bear he would have
commented
on
such ipsophagy.
Exactly
what species of bear was Flaubear? We can track his spoor through the Letters.
At
first he is just an unspecified ours, a bear (1841). He's still
unspecified—though owner
of
a den—in
fur).
In June 1845 he wants to buy a painting of a bear for his room and entitle it
'Portrait
of
Gustave Flaubert'—'to indicate my moral disposition and my social temperament'.
So
far
we (and he too, perhaps) have been imagining a dark animal: an American brown
bear,
a Russian black bear, a reddish bear from Savoy. But in September 1845 Gustave
firmly
announces himself to be 'a white bear'.
Why?
Is it because he's a bear who is also a white European? Is it perhaps an
identity
taken
from the white bearskin rug on his study floor (which he first mentions in a
letter to
Louise
Colet of August 1846, telling her that he likes to stretch out on it during the
day.
Maybe
he chose his species so that he could lie on his rug, punning and camouflaged)?
Or
is this coloration indicative of a further shift away from humanity, a progression
to the
extremes
of ursinity? The brown, the black, the reddish bear are not that far from man,
from
man's cities, man's friendship even. The coloured bears can mostly be tamed.
But
the
white, the polar bear? It doesn't dance for man's pleasure; it doesn't eat
berries; it can't
be
trapped by a weakness for honey.
Other
bears are used. The Romans imported bears from Britain for their games. The
Kamchatkans,
a people of eastern Siberia, used to employ the intestines of bears as
facemasks
to
protect them from the glare of the sun; and they used the sharpened
shoulderblade
for
cutting grass. But the white bear, Thalarctos maritimus, is the aristocrat of
bears.
Aloof, distant, stylishly diving for fish, roughly ambushing seals when they
come
up
for air. The maritime bear. They travel great distances, carried along on
floating packice.
One
winter in the last century twelve great white bears got as far south as Iceland
by
this
method; imagine them riding down on their melting thrones to make a terrifying,
godlike
landfall. William Scoresby, the Arctic explorer, noted that the liver of the
bear is
poisonous—the
only part of any quadruped known to be so. Among zoo-keepers there is
no
known test for pregnancy in the polar bear. Strange facts that Flaubert might
not have
found
strange.
When
the Yakuts, a Siberian people, meet a bear, they doff their caps, greet him,
call him
master,
old man or grandfather, and promise not to attack him or even speak ill of him.
But
if he looks as though he may pounce on them, they shoot at him, and if they
kill him,
they
cut him in pieces and roast him and regale themselves, repeating all the while,
'It is
the
Russians who are eating you, not us.'
A.-F.
Aulagnier, Dictionnaire des aliments et boissons
Were
there other reasons why he chose to be a bear? The figurative sense of ours is
much
the
same as in English: a rough, wild fellow. Ours is slang for a police cell.
Avoir ses
ours,
to have one's bears, means 'to have the curse' (presumably because at such
times a
woman
is supposed to behave like a bear with a sore head). Etymologists trace this
colloquialism
to the turn of the century (Flaubert doesn't use it; he prefers the redcoats
have
landed, and other humorous variations thereon. On one occasion, having worried
over
Louise Colet's irregularity, he finally notes with relief that Lord Palmerston
has
arrived).
Un ours mal léché, a badly licked bear, is someone uncouth and misanthropic.
More
apt for Flaubert, un ours was nineteenth-century slang for a play which had
been
frequently
submitted and turned down, but eventually accepted.
No
doubt Flaubert knew
Gardens.
There once was a bear, an ugly and deformed creature, who hid from the world
and
lived all alone in a wood. After a while he became melancholy and frantic—'for
indeed,
Reason seldom resides long among Anchorites'. So he set off and met a gardener,
who
had also lived a hermetic life, and also longed for company. The bear moved
into the
gardener's
hovel. The gardener had become a hermit because he could not abide fools;
but
since the bear spoke scarcely three words in the course of the day, he was able
to get
on
with his work without disturbance. The bear used to go hunting, and bring home
game
for
both of them. When the gardener went to sleep, the bear would sit beside him
devotedly
and chase away the flies that tried to settle on his face. One day, a fly
landed
on
the tip of the man's nose, and declined to be driven away. The bear became
extremely
angry
with the fly, and eventually seized a huge stone and succeeded in killing it.
Unfortunately,
in the process he beat the gardener's brains out.
Perhaps
Louise Colet knew the story too.
The
Camel
If
Gustave hadn't been the Bear, he might have been the Camel. In January 1852 he
writes
to Louise and explains, yet again, his incorrigibility: he is as he is, he
cannot
change,
he does not have a say in the matter, he is subject to the gravity of, things,
that
gravity
'which makes the polar bear inhabit the icy regions and the camel walk upon the
sand'.
Why the camel? Perhaps because it is a fine example of the Flaubertian
grotesque:
it
cannot help being serious and comic at the same time. He reports from Cairo:
'One of
the
finest things is the camel. I never tire of watching this strange beast that
lurches like a
turkey
and sways its neck like a swan. Its cry is something I wear myself out trying
to
imitate—I
hope to bring it back with me—but it's hard to reproduce—a rattle with a kind
of
tremendous gargling as an accompaniment.'
The
species also exhibited a character trait which was familiar to Gustave: 'I am,
in both
my
physical and my mental activity, like the dromedary, which it is very hard to
get
going
and very hard, once it is going, to stop; continuity is what I need, whether of
rest or
of
motion.' This 1853 analogy, once it has got going, also proves hard to stop: it
is still
running
in a letter to George Sand of 1868.
Chameau,
camel, was slang for an old courtesan. I do not think this association would
have
put Flaubert off.
The
Sheep
Flaubert
loved fairs: the tumblers, the giantesses, the freaks, the dancing bears. In
Marseilles
he visited a quayside booth advertising 'sheep-women', who ran around while
sailors
tugged at their fleeces to see if they were real. This was not a high-class
show:
'nothing
could be stupider or filthier', he reported. He was far more impressed at the
fair
in
Guérande, an old fortified town north-west of St Nazaire, which he visited
during his
walking
tour of Brittany with Du Camp in
Picardy
accent advertised 'a young phenomenon': it turned out to be a five-legged sheep
with
a tail in the shape of a trumpet. Flaubert was delighted, both with the freak
and with
its
owner. He admired the beast rapturously; he took the owner out to dinner,
assured him
he
would make a fortune, and advised him to write to King Louis Philippe on the
matter.
By
the end of the evening, to Du Camp's clear disapproval, they were calling one
another
tu.
'The
young phenomenon' fascinated Flaubert, and became part of his teasing
vocabulary.
As
he and Du Camp tramped along, he would introduce his friend to the trees and
the
bushes
with mock gravity: 'May I present the young phenomenon?' At Brest, Gustave fell
in
with the sly Picard and his freak once again, dined and got drunk with him, and
further
praised
the magnificence of his animal. He was often thus overcome by frivolous manias;
Du
Camp waited for this one to run its course like a fever.
The
following year, in Paris, Du Camp was ill, and confined to bed in his
apartment. At
four
o'clock one afternoon he heard a commotion on the landing outside, and his door
was
flung open. Gustave strode in, followed by the five-legged sheep and the
showman in
the
blue blouse. Some fair at the Invalides or the Champs-Elysées had disgorged
them,
and
Flaubert was eager to share their rediscovery with his friend. Du Camp drily
notes
that
the sheep 'did not conduct itself well'. Nor did Gustave—shouting for wine,
leading
the
animal round the room and bellowing its virtues: 'The young phenomenon is three
years
old, has passed the Académie de Médecine, and has been honoured by visits from
several
crowned heads, etc.' After a quarter of an hour the sick Du Camp had had
enough.
'I
dismissed the sheep and its proprietor, and had my room swept.'
But
the sheep had left its droppings in Flaubert's memory as well. A year before
his death
he
was still reminding Du Camp about his surprise arrival with the young
phenomenon,
and
still laughing as much as the day it had happened.
The
Monkey, the Donkey, the Ostrich, the Second Donkey, and Maxime du Camp
A
week ago I saw a monkey in the street jump on a donkey and try to wank him
off—the
donkey
brayed and kicked, the monkey's owner shouted, the monkey itself squealed—
apart
from two or three children who laughed and me who found it very funny, no one
paid
any attention. When I described this to M. Bellin, the secretary at the
consulate, he
told
me of having seen an ostrich trying to rape a donkey. Max had himself wanked
off
the
other day in a deserted section among some ruins and said it was very good.
Letter
to Louis Bouilhet, Cairo, January 15th, 1850
The
Parrot
Parrots
are human to begin with; etymologically, that is. Perroquet is a diminutive of
Pierrot;
parrot comes from Pierre; Spanish perico derives from Pedro. For the Greeks,
their
ability to speak was an item in the philosophical debate over the differences
between
man
and the animals. Aelian reports that 'the Brahmins honour them above all other
birds.
And they add that it is only reasonable to do so; for the parrot alone can give
a
good
imitation of the human voice.' Aristotle and Pliny note that the bird is
extremely
lecherous
when drunk. More pertinently, Buffon observes that it is prone to epilepsy.
Flaubert
knew of this fraternal weakness: the notes he took on parrots when researching
Un
coeur simple include a list of their maladies—gout, epilepsy, aphtha and throat
ulcers.
To
recapitulate. First there is Loulou, Félicité's parrot. Then there are the two
contending
stuffed
parrots, one at the Hôtel-Dieu and one at Croisset. Then there are the three
live
parrots,
two at Trouville and one at Venice; plus the sick parakeet at Antibes. As a
possible
source for Loulou we can, I think, eliminate the mother of a 'hideous' English
family
encountered by Gustave on the boat from Alexandria to Cairo: with a green
eyeshade
attached to her bonnet, she looked 'like a sick old parrot'.
Caroline,
in her Souvenirs intimes, remarks that 'Félicité and her parrot really lived'
and
directs
us towards the first Trouville parrot, that of Captain Barbey, as the true
ancestor
of
Loulou. But this doesn't answer the more important question: how, and when, did
a
simple
(if magnificent) living bird of the 1830s get turned into a complicated,
transcendent
parrot of the 1870s? We probably shan't ever find out; but we can suggest a
point
at which the transformation might have begun.
The
second, uncompleted part of Bouvard et Pécuchet was to consist mainly of 'La
Copie',
an enormous dossier of oddities, idiocies and self-condemning quotations, which
the
two clerks were solemnly to copy out for their own edification, and which
Flaubert
would
reproduce with a more sardonic intent. Among the thousands of press cuttings he
collected
for possible inclusion in the dossier is the following story, clipped from
L'Opinion
nationale of June 20th, 1863:
'In
Géurouville, near Arlon, there lived a man who owned a magnificent parrot. It
was his
sole
love. As a young man, he had been the victim of an ill-starred passion; the
experience
had made him misanthropic, and now he lived alone with his parrot. He had
taught
the bird to pronounce the name of his lost love, and this name was repeated a
hundred
times a day. This was the bird's only talent, but in the eyes of its owner, the
unfortunate
Henri K—, it was a talent worth all the others. Every time he heard the sacred
name
pronounced by this strange voice, Henri thrilled with joy; it seemed to him
like a
voice
from beyond the grave, something mysterious and superhuman.
'Solitude
enflamed the imagination of Henri K—, and gradually the parrot began to take
on
a rare significance in his mind. For him it became a kind ofholy bird: he would
handle
it
with deep respect, and spend hours in rapt contemplation ofit. Then the parrot,
returning
its master's gaze with an unflinching eye, would murmur the cabbalistic word,
and
Henri's soul would be filled with the memory of his lost happiness. This
strange life
lasted
several years. One day, however, people noticed that Henri K—was looking
gloomier
than usual; and there was a strange, wild light in his eye. The parrot had
died.
'Henri
K—continued to live alone, now completely so. He had no link with the outside
world.
He became more and more wrapped up in himself. Sometimes he would not leave
his
room for days on end. He would eat whatever food was brought him, but took no
notice
of anyone. Gradually he began to believe that he himself had turned into a
parrot.
As
if in imitation of the dead bird, he would squawk out the name he loved to
hear; he
would
try walking like a parrot, perching on things, and extending his arms as if he
had
wings
to beat.
'Sometimes,
he would lose his temper and start breaking the furniture; and his family
decided
to send him to the maison de santé at Gheel. On the journey there, however, he
escaped
during the night. The next morning they found him perched in a tree. Persuading
him
to come down proved very difficult, until someone had the idea of placing at
the foot
of
his tree an enormous parrot-cage. On seeing this, the unfortunate monomaniac
climbed
down
and was recaptured. He is now in the maison de santé at Gheel.'
We
know that Flaubert was struck by this newspaper story. After the line,
'gradually the
parrot
began to take on a rare significance in his mind', he made the following
annotation:
'Change
the animal: make it a dog instead of a parrot.' Some brief plan for a future
work,
no
doubt. But when, finally, the story of Loulou and Félicité came to be written,
it was
the
parrot which stayed in place, and the owner who was changed.
Before
Un coeur simple, parrots flit briefly through Flaubert's work, and through his
letters.
Explaining to Louise the pull of foreign lands (December 11th, 1846), Gustave
writes:
'When we are children, we all want to live in the country of parrots and
candied
dates.'
Comforting a sad and discouraged Louise (March 27th, 1853), he reminds her that
we
are all caged birds, and that life weighs the heaviest on those with the
largest wings:
'We
are all to a greater or lesser degree eagles or canaries, parrots or vultures.'
Denying to
Louise
that he is vain (December 9th, 1852), he distinguishes between Pride and
Vanity:
'Pride
is a wild beast which lives in caves and roams the desert; Vanity, on the other
hand,
is a parrot which hops from branch to branch and chatters away in full view.'
Describing
to Louise the heroic quest for style that Madame Bovary represents (April
19th,
1852), he explains: 'How many times have I fallen flat on my face, just when I
thought
I had it within my grasp. Still, I feel that I mustn't die without making sure
that
the
style I can hear inside my head comes roaring out and drowns the cries of
parrots and
cicadas.'
In
Salammbô, as I have already mentioned, the Carthaginian translators have
parrots
tattooed
on their chests (a detail perhaps more apt than authentic?); in the same novel,
some
of the Barbarians have 'sunshades in their hands or parrots on their shoulders';
while
the furnishings of Salammbô's terrace include a small ivory bed whose cushions
are
stuffed
with parrot feathers—'for this was a prophetic bird, consecrated to the gods'.
There
are no parrots in Madame Bovary or Bouvard et Pécuchet; no entry for
PERROQUET
in the Dictionnaire des idées reçues; and only a couple of brief mentions
in
slaughter
during Julien's first hunt—roosting grouse have their legs cut off, and
lowflying
cranes
are snapped out of the sky by the huntsman's whip—but the parrot remains
unmentioned
and unharmed. In the second hunt, however, when Julien's ability to kill
evaporates,
when the animals become elusive, threatening observers of their stumbling
pursuer,
the parrot makes an appearance. Flashes of light in the forest, which Julien
assumed
to be stars low in the sky, prove to be the eyes of watching beasts: wild cats,
squirrels,
owls, parrots and monkeys.
And
let's not forget the parrot that wasn't there. In L'Education sentimentale
Frédéric
wanders
through an area of Paris wrecked by the 1848 uprising. He walks past barricades
which
have been torn down; he sees black pools that must be blood; houses have their
blinds
hanging like rags from a single nail. Here and there amid the chaos, delicate
things
have
survived by chance. Frédéric peers in at a window. He sees a clock, some
prints—
and
a parrot's perch.
It
isn't so different, the way we wander through the past. Lost, disordered,
fearful, we
follow
what signs there remain; we read the street names, but cannot be confident
where
we
are. All around is wreckage. These people never stopped fighting. Then we see a
house;
a writer's house, perhaps. There is a plaque on the front wall. 'Gustave
Flaubert,
French
writer, 1821-1880, lived here while—' but then the letters shrink impossibly,
as if
on
some optician's chart. We walk closer. We look in at a window. Yes, it's true;
despite
the
carnage some delicate things have survived. A clock still ticks. Prints on the
wall
remind
us that art was once appreciated here. A parrot's perch catches the eye. We
look
for
the parrot. Where is the parrot? We still hear its voice; but all we can see is
a bare
wooden
perch. The bird has flown.
Dogs
1
The Dog Romantic. This was a large Newfoundland, the property of Elisa
Schlesinger.
If
we believe Du Camp, he was called Nero; if we believe Goncourt, he was called
Thabor.
Gustave met Mme Schlesinger at Trouville: he was fourteen and a half, she
twenty-six.
She was beautiful, her husband was rich; she wore an immense straw hat, and
her
well-modelled shoulders could be glimpsed through her muslin dress. Nero, or
Thabor,
went everywhere with her. Gustave often followed at a discreet distance. Once,
on
the dunes, she opened her dress and suckled her baby. He was lost, helpless,
tortured,
fallen.
Ever afterwards he would maintain that the brief summer of 1836 had cauterised
his
heart. (We are at liberty, of course, to disbelieve him. What did the Goncourts
say?
'Though
perfectly frank by nature, he is never wholly sincere in what he says he feels
and
suffers
and loves.') And whom did he first tell of this passion? His schoolfriends? His
mother?
Mme Schlesinger herself? No: he told Nero (or Thabor). He would take the
Newfoundland
for walks across the Trouville sands, and in the soft secrecy of a dune he
would
drop down on his knees and wrap his arms around the dog. Then he would kiss it
where
he knew its mistress's lips had been not long before (the location of the kiss
remains
a matter of debate: some say on the muzzle, some say on the top of the head);
he
would
whisper in shaggy ear of Nero (or Thabor) the secrets he longed to whisper in
the
ear
that lay between the muslin dress and the straw hat; and he would burst into
tears.
The
memory of Mme Schlesinger, and her presence too, pursued Flaubert for the rest
of
his
life. What happened to the dog is not recorded.
2
The Dog Practical. Not sufficient study, to my mind, has been made of the pets
which
were
kept at Croisset. They flicker into brief existence, sometimes with a name
attached,
sometimes
not; we rarely know when or how they were acquired, and when or how they
died.
Let us assemble them:
•
In
1840 Gustave's sister Caroline has a goat called Souvit.
•
In
1840 the family has a black Newfoundland bitch called Néo (perhaps this name
influenced
Du Camp's memory of Mme Schlesinger's Newfoundland).
•
In
1853 Gustave dines alone at Croisset with an unnamed dog.
•
In
1854 Gustave dines with a dog named Dakno; probably the same animal as
above.
•
In
1856-7 his niece Caroline has a pet rabbit.
•
In
1856 he exhibits on his lawn a stuffed crocodile he has brought back from the
East:
enabling it to bask in the sun again for the first time in 3,000 years.
•
In
slaughter.
•
In
1866 Gustave dines alone with a bowl of goldfish.
•
In
1867 the pet dog (no name, no breed) is killed by poison which has been laid
down
for rats.
•
In
1872 Gustave acquires Julio, a greyhound.
•
Note:
If we are to complete the list of known domestic creatures to which Gustave
played
host, we must record that in October 1842 he suffered an infestation of
crab-lice.
Of
the pets listed above, the only one about which we have proper information is
Julio. In
April
1872 Mme Flaubert died; Gustave was left alone in the big house, having meals
at a
large
table 'tête-à-tête with myself'. In September his friend Edmond Laporte offered
him
a
greyhound. Flaubert hesitated, being frightened of rabies, but eventually
accepted it. He
named
the dog Julio (in honour of Juliet Herbert?—if you wish) and quickly grew fond
of
it.
By the end of the month he was writing to his niece that—his sole distraction
(thirtysix
years
after casting his arms round Mme Schlesinger's Newfoundland) was to embrace
his
'pauvre chien'. 'His calm and his beauty make one jealous.'
The
greyhound became his final companion at Croisset. An unlikely couple: the
stout,
sedentary
novelist and the sleek racing dog. Julio's own private life began to feature in
Flaubert's
correspondence: he announced that the dog had become 'morganatically united'
with
'a young person' of the neighbourhood. Owner and pet even got ill together: in
the
spring
of 1879 Flaubert had rheumatism and a swollen foot, while Julio had an
unspecified
canine disease. 'He is exactly like a person,' Gustave wrote. 'He makes little
gestures
that are profoundly human.' Both of them recovered, and staggered on through
the
year. The winter of 1879-80 was exceptionally cold. Flaubert's housekeeper made
Julio
a coat out of an old pair of trousers. They got through the winter together.
Flaubert
died
in the spring.
What
happened to the dog is not recorded.
3
The Dog Figurative. Madame Bovary has a dog, given to her by a game-keeper
whose
chest
infection has been cured by her husband. It is une petite levrette d'Italie: a
small
Italian
greyhound bitch. Nabokov, who is exceedingly peremptory with all translators of
Flaubert,
renders this as whippet. Whether he is zoologically correct or not, he certainly
loses
the sex of the animal, which seems to me important. This dog is given a passing
significance
as…less than a symbol, not exactly a metaphor; call it a figure. Emma
acquires
the greyhound while she and Charles are still living at Tostes: the time of
early,
inchoate
stirrings of dissatisfaction within her; the time of boredom and discontent,
but
not
yet of corruption. She takes her greyhound for walks, and the animal becomes,
tactfully,
briefly, for half a paragraph or so, something more than just a dog. 'At first
her
thoughts
would wander aimlessly, like her greyhound, which ran in circles, yapping after
yellow
butterflies, chasing field-mice and nibbling at poppies on the edge of a
cornfield.
Then,
gradually, her ideas would come together until, sitting on a stretch of grass
and
stabbing
at it with the end ofher parasol, she would repeat to herself, "Oh God,
why did I
get
married?"'
That
is the first appearance of the dog, a delicate insertion; afterwards, Emma
holds its
head
and kisses it (as Gustave had done to Nero/Thabor): the dog has a melancholy
expression,
and she talks to it as if to someone in need of consolation. She is talking, in
other
words (and in both senses), to herself. The dog's second appearance is also its
last.
Charles
and Emma move from Tostes to Yonville—a journey which marks Emma's shift
from
dreams and fantasies to reality and corruption. Note also the traveller who
shares
the
coach with them: the ironically named Monsieur Lheureux, the fancy-goods dealer
and
part-time usurer who finally ensnares Emma (financial corruption marks her fall
as
much
as sexual corruption). On the journey, Emma's greyhound escapes. They spend a
good
quarter of an hour whistling for it, and then give up. M. Lheureux plies Emma
with
a
foretaste of false comfort: he tells her consoling stories of lost dogs which
have
returned
to their masterss despite great distances; why, there was even one that made it
all
the
way back to Paris from Constantinople. Emma's reaction to these stories is not
recorded.
What
happened to the dog is also not recorded.
4
The Dog Drowned and the Dog Fantastical. In January 1852 Flaubert and Du Camp
were
in Greece. They visited Marathón, Eleusis and Salamís. They met General
Morandi,
a
soldier of fortune who had fought at Missolonghi, and who indignantly denied to
them
the
calumny put about by the British aristocracy that Byron had deteriorated
morally
while
in Greece: 'He was magnificent,' the General told them. 'He looked like
Achilles.'
Du
Camp records how they visited Thermopylae and re-read their Plutarch on the
battlefield.
On January 12th they were heading towards Eleuthera—the two friends, a
dragoman,
and an armed policeman they employed as a guard—when the weather
worsened.
Rain fell heavily; the plain they were crossing became inundated; the
policeman's
Scotch terrier was suddenly carried away and drowned in a swollen torrent.
The
rain turned to snow, and darkness closed in. Clouds shut out the stars; their
solitude
was
complete.
An
hour passed, then another; snow gathered thickly in the folds of their clothes;
they
missed
their road. The policeman fired some pistol shots in the air, but there was no
answer.
Saturated, and very cold, they faced the prospect of a night in the saddle amid
inhospitable
terrain. The policeman was grieving for his Scotch terrier, while the
dragoman—a
fellow with big, prominent eyes like a lobster's—had proved singularly
incompetent
throughout the trip; even his cooking had been a failure. They were riding
cautiously,
straining their eyes for a distant light, when the policeman shouted, 'Halt!' A
dog
was barking somewhere in the far distance. It was then that the dragoman
displayed
his
sole talent: the ability to bark like a dog. He began to do so with a desperate
vigour.
When
he stopped, they listened, and heard answering barks. The dragoman howled
again.
Slowly
they advanced, stopping every so often to bark and be barked back at, then
reorienting
themselves. After half an hour of marching towards the ever-loudening
village
dog, they eventually found shelter for the night.
What
happened to the dragoman is not recorded.
Note:
Is it fair to add that Gustave's journal offers a different version of the
story? He
agrees
about the weather; he agrees about the date; he agrees that the dragoman
couldn't
cook
(a constant offering of lamb and hard-boiled eggs drove him to lunch on dry
bread).
Strangely,
though, he doesn't mention reading Plutarch on the battlefield. The
policeman's
dog (breed unidentified in Flaubert's version) wasn't carried away by a
torrent;
it just drowned in deep water. As for the barking dragoman, Gustave merely
records
that when they heard the village dog in the distance, he ordered the policeman
to
fire
his pistol in the air. The dog barked its reply; the policeman fired again; and
by this
more
ordinary means they progressed towards shelter.
What
happened to the truth is not recorded.
5:
Snap!
In
the more bookish areas of English middle-class society, whenever a coincidence
occurs
there is usually someone at hand to comment, 'It's just like Anthony Powell.'
Often
the
coincidence turns out, on the shortest examination, to be unremarkable:
typically, it
might
consist of two acquaintances from school or university running into one another
after
a gap of several years. But the name of Powell is invoked to give legitimacy to
the
event;
it's rather like getting the priest to bless your car.
I
don't much care for coincidences. There's something spooky about them: you
sense
momentarily
what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself
looking
over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan. I
prefer
to feel that things are chaotic, free-wheeling, permanently as well as
temporarily
crazy—to
feel the certainty of human ignorance, brutality and folly. 'Whatever else
happens,'
Flaubert wrote when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, 'we shall remain
stupid.'
Mere boastful pessimism? Or a necessary razing of expectation before anything
can
be properly thought, or done, or written?
I
don't even care for harmless, comic coincidences. I once went out to dinner and
discovered
that the seven other people present had all just finished reading A Dance to
the
Music of Time. I didn't relish this: not least because it meant that I didn't
break my
silence
until the cheese course.
And
as for coincidences in books—there's something cheap and sentimental about the
device;
it can't help always seeming aesthetically gimcrack. That troubadour who passes
by
just in time to rescue the girl from a hedgerow scuffle; the sudden but
convenient
Dickensian
benefactors; the neat shipwreck on a foreign shore which reunites siblings
and
lovers. I once disparaged this lazy stratagem to a poet I met, a man presumably
skilled
in the coincidences of rhyme. 'Perhaps,' he replied with a genial loftiness,
'you
have
too prosaic a mind?'
'But
surely,' I came back, rather pleased with myself, 'a prosaic mind is the best
judge of
prose?'
I'd
ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely.
Coincidences
would be permitted in the picaresque; that's where they belong. Go on, take
them:
let the pilot whose parachute has failed to open land in the haystack, let the
virtuous
pauper with the gangrenous foot discover the buried treasure—it's all right, it
doesn't
really matter…
One
way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That's
what smart
people
do. Irony is, after all, the modern mode, a drinking companion for resonance
and
wit.
Who could be against it? And yet sometimes I wonder if the wittiest, most
resonant
irony
isn't just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence.
I
don't know what Flaubert thought about coincidence. I had hoped for some
characteristic
entry in his unflaggingly ironic Dictionnaire des idées revues; but it jumps
pointedly
from cognac to coitus. Still, his love of irony is plain; it's one of the most
modern
things about him. In Egypt he was delighted to discover that almeh, the word
for
'bluestocking',
had gradually lost this original meaning and come to signify 'whore'.
Do
ironies accrete around the ironist? Flaubert certainly thought so. The
celebrations for
the
centenary of Voltaire's death in 1878 were stage-managed by the chocolate firm
of
Menier.
'That poor old genius,' Gustave commented, 'how irony never quits him.' It
badgered
Gustave too. When he wrote of himself, 'I attract mad people and animals',
perhaps
he should have added 'and ironies'.
Take
Madame Bovary. It was prosecuted for obscenity by Ernest Pinard, the advocate
who
also enjoys the shabby fame of leading the case against Les Fleurs du mal. Some
years
after Bovary had been cleared, Pinard was discovered to be the anonymous author
of
a collection of priapic verses. The novelist was much amused.
And
then, take the book itself. Two of the best-remembered things in it are Emma's
adulterous
drive in the curtained cab (a passage found especially scandalous by
rightthinkers),
and
the very last line of the novel—'He has just received the Legion of
Honour'—which
confirms the bourgeois apotheosis of the pharmacist Homais. Now, the
idea
for the curtained cab appears to have come to Flaubert as a result of his own
eccentric
conduct in Paris when anxious to avoid running into Louise Colet. To avoid
being
recognised, he took to driving everywhere in a closed cab. Thus, he maintained
his
chastity
by using a device he would later employ to facilitate his heroine's sexual
indulgence.
With
Homais's Légion d'honneur, it's the other way round: life imitates and ironises
art.
Barely
ten years after that final line of Madame Bovary was written, Flaubert, arch
antibourgeois
and
virile hater of governments, allowed himself to be created a chevalier of
the
Légion d'honneur. Consequently, the last line of his life parroted the last
line of his
masterpiece:
at his funeral a picket of soldiers turned up to fire a volley over the coffin,
and
thus bid the state's traditional farewell to one of its most improbable and
sardonic
chevaliers.
And
if you don't like these ironies, I have others.
1:
DAWN AT THE PYRAMIDS
In
December 1849 Flaubert and Du Camp climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops. They
had
slept beside it the previous night, and rose at five to make sure of reaching
the top by
sunrise.
Gustave washed his face in a canvas pail; a jackal howled; he smoked a pipe.
Then,
with two Arabs pushing him and two pulling, he was bundled slowly up the high
stones
of the Pyramid to the summit. Du Camp—the first man to photograph the
Sphinx—was
there already. Ahead of them lay the Nile, bathed in mist, like a white sea;
behind
them lay the dark desert, like a petrified purple ocean. At last, a streak of
orange
light
appeared to the east; and gradually the white sea in front of them became an
immense
expanse of fertile green, while the purple ocean behind turned shimmering
white.
The rising sun lit up the topmost stones of the Pyramid, and Flaubert, looking
down
at his feet, noticed a small business-card pinned in place. 'Humbert,
Frotteur', it
read,
and gave a Rouen address.
What
a moment of perfectly targeted irony. A modernist moment, too: this is the sort
of
exchange,
in which the everyday tampers with the sublime, that we like to think of
proprietorially
as typical of our own wry and unfoolable age. We thank Flaubert for
picking
it up; in a sense, the irony wasn't there until he observed it. Other visitors
might
have
seen the business-card as merely a piece of litter—it could have stayed there,
its
drawing-pins
slowly rusting, for years; but Flaubert gave it function.
And
if we are feeling interpretative, we can look further into this brief event.
Isn't it,
perhaps,
a notable historical coincidence that the greatest European novelist of the
nineteenth
century should be introduced at the Pyramids to one of the twentieth century's
most
notorious fictional characters? That Flaubert, still damp from skewering boys
in
Cairo
bath-houses, should fall on the name of Nabokov's seducer of underage American
girlhood?
And further, what is the profession of this single-barrelled version of Humbert
Humbert?
He is a frotteur. Literally, a French polisher; but also, the sort of sexual
deviant
who
loves the rub of the crowd.
And
that's not all. Now for the irony about the irony. It turns out, from
Flaubert's travel
notes,
that the business-card wasn't pinned in place by Monsieur Frotteur himself; it
was
put
there by the lithe and thoughtful Maxime du Camp, who had scampered ahead in
the
purple
night and laid out this little mousetrap for his friend's sensibility. The
balance of
our
response shifts with this knowledge: Flaubert becomes plodding and predictable;
Du
Camp
becomes the wit, the dandy, the teaser of modernism before modernism has
declared
itself.
But
then we read on again. If we turn to Flaubert's letters, we discover him, some
days
after
the incident, writing to his mother about the sublime surprise of the
discovery. 'And
to
think that I had specially brought that card all the way from Croisset and
didn't even
get
to put it in place! The villain took advantage of my forgetfulness and
discovered the
wonderfully
apposite business-card in the bottom of my folding hat.' So, ever stranger:
Flaubert,
when he left home, was already preparing the special effects which would later
appear
entirely characteristic of how he perceived the world. Ironies breed; realities
recede.
And why, just out of interest, did he take his folding hat to the Pyramids?
2:
DESERT ISLAND DISCS
Gustave
used to look back on his summer holidays at Trouville—spent between Captain
Barbey's
parrot and Mme Schlesinger's dog—as among the few tranquil times of his life.
Reminiscing
from the autumn of his mid-twenties, he told Louise Colet that 'the greatest
events
of my life have been a few thoughts, reading, certain sunsets by the sea at
Trouville,
and conversations of five or six hours on the trot with a friend [Alfred Le
Poittevin]
who is now married and lost to me.'
In
Trouville he met Gertrude and Harriet Collier, daughters of a British naval
attaché.
Both,
it seems, became enamoured of him. Harriet gave him her portrait, which hung
over
the chimney-piece at Croisset; but it was of Gertrude that he was fonder. Her
feelings
for him may be guessed at from a text she wrote decades later, after Gustave's
death.
Adopting the style of romantic fiction, and using disguised names, she boasts
that
'I
loved him passionately, adoringly. Years have passed over my head but I have
never
felt
the worship, the love and yet the fear that took possession of my soul then.
Something
told me I should never be his…But I knew, in the deepest recesses of my
heart,
how truly I could love him, honour him and obey him.'
Gertrude's
lush memoir might well be fanciful: what, after all, is more sentimentally
alluring
than a dead genius and an adolescent beach holiday? But perhaps it wasn't.
Gustave
and Gertrude kept in distant touch along the decades. He sent her a copy of
Madame
Bovary (she thanked him, pronounced the novel 'hideous', and quoted at him
Philip
James Bailey, author of Festus, on the writer's duty to give moral instruction
to the
reader);
and forty years after that first meeting in Trouville she came to visit him at
Croisset.
The handsome, blond cavalier of her youth was now bald and red-faced, with
only
a couple of teeth left in his head. But his gallantry remained in good health.
'My old
friend,
my youth,' he wrote to her afterwards, 'during the long years I have lived
without
knowing
your whereabouts, there was perhaps not a single day when I did not think of
you.
During
the course of those long years (in 1847, to be precise, the year after Flaubert
was
recalling
his Trouville sunsets to Louise) Gertrude had promised to love, honour and
obey
someone else: an English economist called Charles Tennant. While Flaubert
slowly
attained
European fame as a novelist, Gertrude was herself to publish a book: an edition
of
her grandfather's journal, called France on the Eve of the Great Revolution.
She died
in
1918 at the age of ninety-nine; and she had a daughter, Dorothy, who married
the
explorer
Henry Morton Stanley.
On
one of Stanley's trips to Africa, his party got into difficulties. The explorer
was
obliged
gradually to discard all his unnecessary belongings. It was, in a way, a
reverse,
real-life
version of 'Desert Island Discs': instead of being equipped with things to make
life
in the tropics more bearable, Stanley was having to get rid of things to
survive there.
Books
were obviously supernumerary, and he began jettisoning them until he got down
to
those
two which every guest on 'Desert Island Discs' is furnished with as a bare,
civilised
minimum:
the Bible and Shakespeare. Stanley's third book, the one he threw out before
reducing
himself to this final minimum, was Salammbô.
3:
THE SNAP OF COFFINS
The
weary, valetudinarian tone of Flaubert's letter to Louise Colet about the
sunsets was
not
a pose. 1846, after all, was the year when first his father and then his sister
Caroline
had
died. 'What a house!' he wrote. 'What a hell!' All night Gustave watched beside
his
sister's
corpse: she lying in her white wedding-dress, he sitting and reading Montaigne.
On
the morning of the funeral, he gave her a last farewell kiss as she lay in her
coffin. For
the
second time in three months he heard the battering sound of hobnailed boots
climbing
the
wooden stairs to fetch a body. Mourning was scarcely possible that day:
practicalities
supervened.
There was a lock of Caroline's hair to be cut, and plaster casts of her face
and
hands
to be taken: 'I saw the great paws of those louts touching her and covering her
face
with
plaster.' Great louts are necessary for funerals.
The
trail to the cemetery was familiar from the time before. At the graveside
Caroline's
husband
broke down. Gustave watched as the coffin was lowered. Suddenly, it got stuck:
the
hole had been dug too narrow. The gravediggers got hold of the coffin and shook
it;
they
pulled it this way and that, twisted it, hacked at it with a spade, levered at
it with
crowbars;
but still it wouldn't move. Finally, one of them placed his foot flat on the
box,
right
over Caroline's face, and forced it down into the grave.
Gustave
had a bust made of that face; it presided over his study all his working life,
until
his
own death, in the same house, in 1880. Maupassant helped lay out the body.
Flaubert's
niece asked for the traditional cast of the writer's hand to be taken. This
proved
impossible:
the fist was too tightly clenched in its terminal seizure.
The
procession set off, first to the church at Canteleu, then to the Cimetière
Monumental,
where
the picket of soldiers fired its ludicrous gloss on the last line of Madame
Bovary. A
few
words were spoken, then the coffin was lowered. It got stuck. The width had
been
correctly
judged on this occasion; but the gravediggers had skimped on the length. Sons
of
louts grappled with the coffin in vain; they could neither cram it in nor twist
it out.
After
a few embarrassed minutes the mourners slowly departed, leaving Flaubert jammed
into
the ground at an oblique angle.
The
Normans are a famously stingy race, and doubtless their gravediggers are no
exception;
perhaps they resent every superfluous sod they cut, and maintained this
resentment
as a professional tradition from 1846 to 1880. Perhaps Nabokov had read
Flaubert's
letters before writing Lolita. Perhaps H. M. Stanley's admiration for
Flaubert's
African
novel isn't entirely surprising. Perhaps what we read as brute coincidence,
silky
irony,
or brave, far-sighted modernism, looked quite different at the time. Flaubert
took
Monsieur
Humbert's business-card all the way from Rouen to the Pyramids. Was it meant
to
be a chuckling advertisement for his own sensibility; a tease about the gritty,
unpolishable
surface of the desert; or might it just have been a joke on us?
6:
Emma Bovary's Eyes
Let
me tell you why I hate critics. Not for the normal reasons: that they're failed
creators
(they
usually aren't; they may be failed critics, but that's another matter); or that
they're
by
nature carping, jealous and vain (they usually aren't; if anything, they might
better be
accused
of over-generosity, of upgrading the second-rate so that their own fine
discriminations
thereby appear the rarer). No, the reason I hate critics—well, some of the
time—is
that they write sentences like this:
Flaubert
does not build up his characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external
description;
in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that on one occasion he
gives
Emma brown eyes (14); on another deep black eyes (15); and on another blue eyes
(16).
This
precise and disheartening indictment was drawn up by the late Dr Enid Starkie,
Reader
Emeritus in French Literature at the University of Oxford, and Flaubert's most
exhaustive
British biographer. The numbers in her text refer to footnotes in which she
spears
the novelist with chapter and verse.
I
once heard Dr Starkie lecture, and I'm glad to report that she had an atrocious
French
accent;
one of those deliveries full of dame-school confidence and absolutely no ear,
swerving
between workaday correctness and farcical error, often within the same word.
Naturally,
this didn't affect her competence to teach at the University of Oxford, because
until
quite recently the place preferred to treat modern languages as if they were
dead:
this
made them more respectable, more like the distant perfections of Latin and
Greek.
Even
so, it did strike me as peculiar that someone who lived by French literature
should
be
so calamitously inadequate at making the basic words of the language sound as
they
did
when her subjects, her heroes (her paymasters, too, you could say), first
pronounced
them.
You
might think this a cheap revenge on a dead lady critic simply for pointing out
that
Flaubert
didn't have a very reliable notion of Emma Bovary's eyes. But then I don't hold
with
the precept de mortuis nil nisi bonum (I speak as a doctor, after all); and
it's hard to
underestimate
the irritation when a critic points out something like that to you. The
irritation
isn't with Dr Starkie, not at first—she was only, as they say, doing her
job—but
with
Flaubert. So that painstaking genius couldn't even keep the eyes of his most
famous
character
a consistent colour? Ha. And then, unable to be cross with him for long, you
shift
your feelings over to the critic.
I
must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the
heroine's
rainbow
eyes. Should I have? Would you? Was I perhaps too busy noticing things that Dr
Starkie
was missing (though what they might have been I can't for the moment think)?
Put
it another way: is there a perfect reader somewhere, a total reader? Does Dr
Starkie's
reading
of Madame Bovary contain all the responses which I have when I read the book,
and
then add a whole lot more, so that my reading is in a way pointless? Well, I
hope not.
My
reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but
it's not
pointless
in terms of pleasure. I can't prove that lay readers enjoy books more than
professional
critics; but I can tell you one advantage we have over them. We can forget.
Dr
Starkie and her kind are cursed with memory: the books they teach and write
about
can
never fade from their brains. They become family. Perhaps this is why some
critics
develop
a faintly patronising tone towards their subjects. They act as if Flaubert, or
Milton,
or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale
powder,
was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of
course,
it's her house, and everybody's living in it rent free; but even so, surely it
is, well,
you
know…time?
Whereas
the common but passionate reader is allowed to forget; he can go away, be
unfaithful
with other writers, come back and be entranced again. Domesticity need never
intrude
on the relationship; it may be sporadic, but when there it is always intense.
There's
none of the daily rancour which develops when people live bovinely together. I
never
find myself, fatigue in the voice, reminding Flaubert to hang up the bathmat or
use
the
lavatory brush. Which is what Dr Starkie can't help herself doing. Look,
writers aren't
perfect,
I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing
rule
is, If they seem so, they can't be. I never thought my wife was perfect. I
loved her,
but
I never deceived myself. I remember…But I'll keep that for another time.
I'll
remember instead another lecture I once attended, some years ago at the
Cheltenham
Literary
Festival. It was given by a professor from Cambridge, Christopher Ricks, and it
was
a very shiny performance. His bald head was shiny; his black shoes were shiny;
and
his
lecture was very shiny indeed. Its theme was Mistakes in Literature and Whether
They
Matter. Yevtushenko, for example, apparently made a howler in one of his poems
about
the American nightingale. Pushkin was quite wrong about the sort of military
dress
worn
at balls. John Wain was wrong about the Hiroshima pilot. Nabokov was wrong—
rather
surprising, this—about the phonetics of the name Lolita. There were other
examples:
Coleridge, Yeats and Browning were some of those caught out not knowing a
hawk
from a handsaw, or not even knowing what a handsaw was in the first place.
Two
examples particularly struck me. The first was a remarkable discovery about
Lord of
the
Flies. In the famous scene where Piggy's spectacles are used for the
rediscovery of
fire,
William Golding got his optics wrong. Completely back to front, in fact. Piggy
is
short-sighted;
and the spectacles he would have been prescribed for this condition could
not
possibly have been used as burning glasses. Whichever way you held them, they
would
have been quite unable to make the rays of the sun converge.
The
second example concerned 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. 'Into the valley of
Death/Rode
the six hundred.' Tennyson wrote the poem very quickly, after reading a
report
in The Times which included the phrase 'someone had blundered'. He also relied
on
an
earlier account which had mentioned '607 sabres'. Subsequently, however, the
number
of
those who took part in what Camille Rousset called ce terrible et sanglant
steeplechase
was officially corrected to 673. 'Into the valley of Death/Rode the six
hundred
and seventy-three'? Not quite enough swing to it, somehow. Perhaps it could
have
been rounded up to seven hundred—still not quite accurate, but at least more
accurate?
Tennyson considered the matter and decided to leave the poem as he had
written
it: 'Six is much better than seven hundred (as I think) metrically so keep it.'
Not
putting '673' or '700' or 'c. 700' instead of '600' hardly seems to qualify as
a Mistake
to
me. The shakiness of Golding's optics, on the other hand, must definitely be
classed as
an
error. The next qestion is, Does it matter? As far as I can remember Professor
Ricks's
lecture,
his argument was that if the factual side of literature becomes unreliable,
then
ploys
such as irony and fantasy become much harder to use. If you don't know what's
true,
or what's meant to be true, then the value of what isn't true, or isn't meant
to be true,
becomes
diminished. This seems to me a very sound argument; though I do wonder to
how
many cases of literary mistake it actually applies. With Piggy's glasses, I
should
think
that (a) very few people, apart from oculists, opticians and bespectacled
professors
of
English would notice; and (b) when they do notice, they merely detonate the
error—
like
blowing up a small bomb with a controlled explosion. What's more, this
detonation
(which
takes place on a remote beach, with only a dog as witness) doesn't set fire to
other
parts
of the novel.
Mistakes
like Golding's are 'external mistakes'—disparities between what the book claims
to
be the case, and what we know the reality to be; often they merely indicate a
lack of
specific
technical knowledge on the writer's part. The sin is pardonable. What, though,
about
'internal mistakes', when the writer claims two incompatible things within his
own
creation?
Emma's eyes are brown, Emma's eyes are blue. Alas, this can be put down only
to
incompetence, to sloppy literary habits. I read the other day a well-praised
first novel
in
which the narrator—who is both sexually inexperienced and an amateur of French
literature—comically
rehearses to himself the best way to kiss a girl without being
rebuffed:
'With a slow, sensual, irresistible strength, draw her gradually towards you
while
gazing into her eyes as if you had just been given a copy of the first,
suppressed
edition
of Madame Bovary.'
I
thought this was quite neatly put, indeed rather amusing. The only trouble is,
there's no
such
thing as a 'first, suppressed edition of Madame Bovary'. The novel, as I should
have
thought
was tolerably well known, first appeared serially in the Revue de Paris; then
came
the prosecution for obscenity; and only after the acquittal was the work
published in
book
form. I expect the young novelist (it seems unfair to give his name) was
thinking of
the
'first, suppressed edition' of Les Fleurs du mal. No doubt he'll get it right
in time for
his
second edition; if there is one.
Eyes
of brown, eyes of blue. Does it matter? Not, does it matter if the writer
contradicts
himself;
but, does it matter what colour they are anyway? I feel sorry for novelists
when
they
have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring
is
decided
upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and
honesty.
Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and
jealousy.
Her eyes are brown: reliability and common sense. Her eyes are violet: the
novel
is by Raymond Chandler. How can you escape all this without some haversack of a
parenthesis
about the lady's character? Her eyes are mud-coloured; her eyes changed hue
according
to the contact lenses she wore; he never looked her in the eye. Well, take your
pick.
My wife's eyes were greeny-blue, which makes her story a long one. And so I
suspect
that in the writer's moments of private candour, he probably admits the
pointlessness
of describing eyes. He slowly imagines the character, moulds her into
shape,
and then—probably the last thing of all—pops a pair of glass eyes into those
empty
sockets. Eyes? Oh yes, she'd better have eyes, he reflects, with a weary
courtesy.
Bouvard
and Pécuchet, during their investigations into literature, find that they lose
respect
for an author when he strays into error. I am more surprised by how few
mistakes
writers
make. So the Bishop of Liège dies fifteen years before he should: does this
invalidate
Quentin Durward? It's a trivial offence, something tossed to the reviewers. I
see
the novelist at the stern rail of a cross-Channel ferry, throwing bits of
gristle from his
sandwich
to the hovering gulls.
I
was too far away to observe what colour Enid Starkie's eyes were; all I
remember of her
is
that she dressed like a matelot, walked like a scrum-half, and had an atrocious
French
accent.
But I'll tell you another thing. The Reader Emeritus in French Literature at
the
University
of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, who was 'well known
for
her studies of the lives and works of writers such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Gautier,
Eliot
and Gide' (I quote her dust-wrapper; first edition, of course), who devoted two
large
books
and many years of her life to the author of Madame Bovary, chose as
frontispiece
to
her first volume a portrait of 'Gustave Flaubert by an unknown painter'. It's
the first
thing
we see; it is, if you like, the moment at which Dr Starkie introduces us to
Flaubert.
The
only trouble is, it isn't him. It's a portrait of Louis Bouilhet, as everyone
from the
gardienne
of Croisset onwards and upwards will tell you. So what do we make of that
once
we've stopped chuckling?
Perhaps
you still think I'm merely being vengeful towards a dead scholar who can't
answer
for herself. Well, maybe I am. But then, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And
I'll
tell
you something else. I've just reread Madame Bovary.
On
one occasion he gives Emma brown eyes (14); on another deep black eyes (15);
and
on
another blue eyes (16).
And
the moral of it all, I suppose, is: Never take fright at a footnote. Here are
the six
references
Flaubert makes to Emma Bovary's eyes in the course of the book. It is clearly
a
subject of some importance to the novelist:
1.
(Emma's first appearance) 'In so far as she was beautiful, this beauty lay in
her eyes:
although
they were brown, they would appear black because of her lashes…'
2.
(Described by her adoring husband early in their marriage) 'Her eyes seemed
bigger to
him,
especially when she was just waking up and fluttered her lids several times in
succession;
they were black when she was in shadow and dark blue in full daylight; and
they
seemed to contain layer upon layer of colours, which were thicker in hue deep
down,
and
became lighter towards the enamel-like surface.'
3.
(At a candlelit ball) 'Her black eyes appeared even blacker.'
4.
(On first meeting Leon) 'Fixing him with her large, wide-open black eyes'.
5.
(Indoors, as she appears to Rodolphe when he first examines her) 'Her black
eyes'.
6.
(Emma looking in a mirror, indoors, in the evening; she has just been seduced
by
Rodolphe)
'Her eyes had never been so large, so black, nor contained such depth.'
How
did the critic put it? 'Flaubert does not build up characters, as did Balzac,
by
objective,
external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance
that…'
It would be interesting to compare the time spent by Flaubert making sure that
his
heroine
had the rare and difficult eyes of a tragic adulteress with the time spent by
Dr
Starkie
in carelessly selling him short.
And
one final thing, just to make absolutely sure. Our earliest substantial source
of
knowledge
about Flaubert is Maxime du Camp's Souvenirs littéraires (Hachette, Paris,
1882-3,
2 vols): gossipy, vain, self-justifying and unreliable, yet historically
essential. On
page
306 of the first volume (Remington & Co., London, 1893, no translator
credited) Du
Camp
describes in great detail the woman on whom Emma Bovary was based. She was,
he
tells us, the second wife of a medical officer from Bon-Lecours, near Rouen:
This
second wife was not beautiful; she was small, had dull yellow hair, and a face
covered
with freckles. She was full of pretension, and despised her husband, whom she
considered
a fool. Round and fair in person, her small bones were well-covered, and in
her
carriage and her general bearing there were flexible, undulating movements,
like
those
of an eel. Her voice, vulgarised by its Lower Normandy accent, was full of
caressing
tones, and her eyes, of uncertain colour, green, grey, or blue, according to
the
light,
had a pleading expression, which never left them.
Dr
Starkie appears to have been serenely unaware of this enlightening passage. All
in all,
it
seems a magisterial negligence towards a writer who must, one way and another,
have
paid
a lot of her gas bills. Quite simply, it makes me furious. Now do you
understand
why
I hate critics? I could try and describe to you the expression in my eyes at
this
moment;
but they are far too discoloured with rage.
7:
Cross Channel
Listen.
Rattarattarattaratta. And then—shhh—over there. Fattafattafattafatta. And
again.
Rattarattarattaratta—fattafattafattafatta. A soft November swell has set the
tables
rattling
metallically at one another across the bar. An insistent approach from a table
close
at hand; a pause while some unheard throb shifts across the boat; and then a
softer
reply
from the other side. Call and response, call and response; like a pair of mechanical
birds
in a cage. Listen to the pattern: rattarattarattaratta fattafattafattafatta
rattarattarattaratta
fattafattafattafatta. Continuity, stability, mutual reliance, it says; yet
a
change of wind or tide could end it all.
The
curving windows at the stern are freckled with spray; through one of them you
can
make
out a set of fat capstans and a listless macaroni of sodden rope. The seagulls
have
long
since given up on this ferry. They cawed us out of Newhaven, had a look at the
weather,
noted the lack of sandwich packs on the rear promenade, and turned back. Who
can
blame them? They could have followed us the four hours to Dieppe in the hope of
picking
up trade on the way back; but that makes for a ten-hour day. By now they will
be
digging
worms on some damp football pitch in Rottingdean.
Beneath
the window is a bilingual rubbish bin with a spelling mistake. The top line
says
PAPIERS
(how official the French sounds: 'Driving licence! Identity card!' it seems to
command).
The English translation underneath reads LITTERS. What a difference a
single
consonant makes. The first time Flaubert saw his name advertised—as the author
of
Madame Bovary, shortly to be serialised in the Revue de Paris—it was spelt
Faubert.
'If
I make an appearance one day, it will be in full armour,' had been his boast;
but even
in
full armour the armpit and the groin are never completely protected. As he
pointed out
to
Bouilhet, the Revue's version of his name was only a letter away from an unwanted
commercial
pun: Faubet being the name of a grocer in the rue Richelieu, just opposite the
Comédie-Française.
'Even before I've appeared, they skin me alive.'
I
like these out-of-season crossings. When you're young you prefer the vulgar
months, the
fullness
of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the
months
that can't make up their minds. Perhaps it's a way of admitting that things
can't
ever
bear the same certainty again. Or perhaps it's just a way of admitting a
preference for
empty
ferries.
There
can't be more than half a dozen people in the bar. One of them is stretched out
on a
banquette;
the lulling rattle of the tables is coaxing its first snore from him. At this
time
of
the year there are no school parties; the video games, disco and cinema are
silent; even
the
barman chats.
This
is the third time I've made the trip in a year. November, March, November. Just
for a
couple
of nights in Dieppe: though I sometimes take the car and get down to Rouen.
It's
not
long, but it's enough to make the change. It is a change. The light over the
Channel,
for
instance, looks quite different from the French side: clearer, yet more
volatile. The
sky
is a theatre of possibilities. I'm not romanticising. Go into the art galleries
along the
Normandy
coast and you'll see what the local painters liked to paint, over and over
again:
the
view north. A strip of beach, the sea, and the eventful sky. English painters
never did
the
same, clustering at Hastings or Margate or Eastbourne to gaze out at a grumpy,
monotonous
Channel.
I
don't just go for the light. I go for those things you forget about until you
see them
again.
The way they butcher meat. The seriousness of their pharmacies. The behaviour
of
their
children in restaurants. The road signs (France is the only country I know
where
drivers
are warned about beetroot on the road: BETTERAVES, I once saw in a red
warning
triangle, with a picture of a car slipping out of control). Beaux-arts town
halls.
Wine-tasting
in smelly chalk-caves by the side of the road. I could go on, but that's
enough,
or I'll soon be babbling about lime trees and petanque and eating bread dipped
in
rough
red wine—what they call la soupe à perroquet, parrot soup. Everyone has a
private
list,
and those of other people quickly appear vain and sentimental. I read a list
the other
day
headed 'What I Like'. It went: 'Salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the
smell
of
new-cut hay [would you read on?]…roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely
held
political
convictions, Glenn Gould…' The list, which is by Roland Barthes, continues, as
lists
do. One item you approve, the next stirs irritation. After 'Medoc wine' and
'having
change',
Barthes approves of 'Bouvard et Pécuchet'. Good; fine; we'll read on. What's
next?
'Walking in sandals on the lanes of south-west France.' It's enough to make you
drive
all the way to south-west France and strew some beetroot on the lanes.
My
list mentions pharmacies. They always seem more singleminded in France. They
don't
stock beachballs or colour film or snorkelling equipment or burglar alarms. The
assistants
know what they are doing, and never try to sell you barley sugar on the way
out.
I find myself deferring to them as if they were consultants.
My
wife and I once went into a pharmacie in Montauban and requested a packet of
bandages.
What was it for, they asked. Ellen tapped her heel, where the strap of a new
pair
of sandals had rubbed up a blister. The pharmacien came out from behind his
counter,
sat her down, removed her sandal with the tenderness of a foot-fetishist,
examined
her heel, cleaned it with a piece of gauze, stood up, turned to me gravely, as
if
there
were something which really ought to be kept from my wife, and quietly
explained,
'That,
Monsieur, is a blister.' The spirit of Homais still reigns, I thought, as he
sold us a
packet
of bandages.
The
spirit of Homais: progress, rationalism, science, fraud. 'We must march with
the
century'
are almost his first words; and he marches all the way to the Légion d'honneur.
When
Emma Bovary dies, her body is watched over by two people: the priest, and
Homais
the pharmacien. Representing the old orthodoxy and the new. It's like some
piece
of
nineteenth-century allegorical sculpture: Religion and Science Watching
Together
over
the Body of Sin. From a painting by G. F. Watts. Except that both the cleric
and the
man
of science manage to fall asleep over the body. United at first only by
philosophic
error,
they quickly establish the deeper unity of joint snorers.
Flaubert
didn't believe in progress: especially not in moral progress, which is all that
matters.
The age he lived in was stupid; the new age, brought in by the Franco-Prussian
war,
would be even stupider. Of course some things would change: the spirit of
Homais
was
winning. Soon everybody with a club foot would be entitled to a misconceived
operation
which would lead to an amputated leg; but what did that signify? 'The whole
dream
of democracy,' he wrote, 'is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity
attained
by
the bourgeoisie.'
That
line often makes people edgy. Isn't it perfectly fair? Over the last hundred
years the
proletariat
has schooled itself in the pretensions of the bourgeoisie; while the
bourgeoisie,
less
confident of its ascendancy, has become more sly and deceitful. Is this
progress?
Study
a packed cross-Channel ferry if you want to see a modern ship of fools. There
they
all
are: working out the profit on their duty-free; having more drinks at the bar
than they
want;
playing the fruit machines; aimlessly circling the deck; making up their minds
how
honest
to be at customs; waiting for the next order from the ship's crew as if the
crossing
of
the Red Sea depended on it. I do not criticise, I merely observe; and I'm not
sure what I
would
think if everyone lined the rail to admire the play of light on the water and
started
discussing
Boudin. I am no different, by the way: I stock up on duty-free and await orders
like
the rest of them. My point is merely this: Flaubert was right.
The
fat lorry-driver on the banquette is snoring like a pasha. I've fetched myself
another
whisky;
I hope you don't mind. Just getting braced to tell you about…what? about
whom?
Three stories contend within me. One about Flaubert, one about Ellen, one about
myself.
My own is the simplest of the three—it hardly amounts to more than a
convincing
proof of my existence—and yet I find it the hardest to begin. My wife's is
more
complicated, and more urgent; yet I resist that too. Keeping the best for last,
as I
was
saying earlier? I don't think so; rather the opposite, if anything. But by the
time I tell
you
her story I want you to be prepared: that's to say, I want you to have had
enough of
books,
and parrots, and lost letters, and bears, and the opinions of Dr Enid Starkie,
and
even
the opinions of Dr Geoffrey Braithwaite. Books are not life, however much we
might
prefer it if they were. Ellen's is a true story; perhaps it is even the reason
why I am
telling
you Flaubert's story instead.
You
expect something from me too, don't you? It's like that nowadays. People assume
they
own part of you, on no matter how small an acquaintance; while if you are
reckless
enough
to write a book, this puts your bank account, your medical records, and the
state
of
your marriage irrevocably into the public domain. Flaubert disapproved. 'The
artist
must
manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.' For the religious,
death
destroys
the body and liberates the spirit; for the artist, death destroys the
personality and
liberates
the work. That's the theory, anyway. Of course, it frequently goes wrong. Look
what
happened to Flaubert: a century after his death Sartre, like some brawny,
desperate
lifeguard,
spent ten years beating on his chest and blowing into his mouth; ten years
trying
to yank him back to consciousness, just so that he could sit him up on the sands
and
tell him exactly what he thought of him.
And
what do people think of him now? How do they think of him? As a bald man with a
drooping
moustache; as the hermit of Croisset, the man who said 'Madame Bovary, c'est
moi';
as the incorrigible aesthete, the bourgeois bourgeoisophobe? Confident scraps
of
wisdom,
hand-me-down summaries for those in a hurry. Flaubert would hardly have been
surprised
at the lazy rush to understand. It was an impulse out of which he made a whole
book
(or at least a whole appendix): the Dictionnaire des idées reçues.
At
the simplest level, his Dictionary is a catalogue of clichés (DOG: Especially
created to
save
its master's life. A dog is man's best friend) and cod definitions (CRAYFISH:
Female
of the lobster). Beyond this it's a handbook of fake advice, both social
(LIGHT:
Always
say Fiat lux! when lighting a candle) and aesthetic (RAILWAY STATIONS:
Always
go into ecstasies about them; cite them as models of architecture). At some
times
the
manner is sly and teasing, at others so challengingly straight-faced that you
find
yourself
half-believing it (MACARONI: When prepared in the Italian style, is served
with
the fingers). It reads like a confirmation present specially written by a
malicious,
rakehell
uncle for a serious-minded adolescent with ambitions to get on in society.
Study
it
carefully and you would never say anything wrong, while never getting anything
right
(HALBERD:
When you see a heavy cloud, never fail to say: 'It's going to rain halberds.'
In
Switzerland, all the men carry halberds. ABSINTHE: Extremely violent poison: a
single
glass and you're dead. Always drunk by journalists while writing their
articles.
Has
killed more soldiers than the Bedouin).
Flaubert's
dictionary offers a course in irony: from entry to entry, you can see him
applying
it in various thicknesses, like a cross-Channel painter darkening the sky with
another
wash. It tempts me to write a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas about Gustave
himself.
Just a short one: a booby-trapped pocket guide; something straight-faced yet
misleading.
The received wisdom in pellet form, with some of the pellets poisoned. This
is
the attraction, and also the danger, of irony: the way it permits a writer to
be seemingly
absent
from his work, yet in fact hintingly present. You can have your cake and eat
it; the
only
trouble is, you get fat.
What
might we say of Flaubert in this new Dictionary? We might set him down,
perhaps,
as
a 'bourgeois individualist'; yes, that sounds smug enough, dishonest enough.
It's a
characterisation
which always remains unshaken by the fact that Flaubert loathed the
bourgeoisie.
And how about 'individualist', or its equivalent? 'In the ideal I have of Art,
I
think
that one must not show one's own, and that the artist must no more appear in
his
work
than God does in nature. Man is nothing, the work of art everything…It would be
very
pleasant for me to say what I think and relieve Monsieur Gustave Flaubert's
feelings
by
means of such utterances; but what is the importance of the said gentleman?'
This
demand for authorial absence ran deeper still. Some writers ostensibly agree
with
the
principle, yet sneak in at the back door and cosh the reader with a highly
personal
style.
The murder is perfectly executed, except that the baseball bat left at the
scene of the
crime
is sticky with fingerprints. Flaubert is different. He believed in style; more
than
anyone.
He worked doggedly for beauty, sonority, exactness; perfection—but never the
monogrammed
perfection of a writer like Wilde. Style is a function of theme. Style is not
imposed
on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought. The correct
word,
the
true phrase, the perfect sentence are always 'out there' somewhere; the
writer's task is
to
locate them by whatever means he can. For some this means no more than a trip
to the
supermarket
and a loading-up of the metal basket; for others it means being lost on a
plain
in Greece, in the dark, in snow, in the rain, and finding what you seek only by
some
rare
trick such as barking like a dog.
In
our pragmatic and knowing century we probably find such ambition a little
provincial
(well,
Turgenev did call Flaubert naïve). We no longer believe that language and
reality
'match
up' so congruently—indeed, we probably think that words give birth to things as
much
as things give birth to words. But if we find Flaubert naïve or—more likely—
unsuccessful,
we shouldn't patronise his seriousness or his bold loneliness. This was, after
all,
the century of Balzac and of Hugo, with orchidaceous Romanticism at one end of
it
and
gnomic Symbolism at the other. Flaubert's planned invisibility in a century of
babbling
personalities and shrieking styles might be characterised in one oftwo ways: as
classical,
or modem. Looking back to the seventeenth century, or forward to the late
twentieth
century. Contemporary critics who pompously reclassify all novels and plays
and
poems as texts—the author to the guillotine!—shouldn't skip lightly over
Flaubert. A
century
before them he was preparing texts and denying the significance of his own
personality.
'The
author in his book must be like God in his universe, everywhere present and
nowhere
visible.' Of course, this has been keenly misread in our century. Look at
Sartre
and
Camus. God is dead, they told us, and therefore so is the God-like novelist.
Omniscience
is impossible, man's knowledge is partial, therefore the novel itself must be
partial.
That sounds not just splendid, but logical as well. But is it either? The
novel, after
all,
didn't arise when belief in God arose; nor, for that matter, is there much
correlation
between
those novelists who believed most strongly in the omniscient narrator and those
who
believed most strongly in the omniscient creator. I cite George Eliot alongside
Flaubert.
More
to the point, the assumed divinity of the nineteenth-century novelist was only
ever a
technical
device; and the partiality of the modem novelist is just as much a ploy. When a
contemporary
narrator hesitates, claims uncertainty, misunderstands, plays games and
falls
into error, does the reader in fact conclude that reality is being more
authentically
rendered?
When the writer provides two different endings to his novel (why two? why
not
a hundred?), does the reader seriously imagine he is being 'offered a choice'
and that
the
work is reflecting life's variable outcomes? Such a 'choice' is never real,
because the
reader
is obliged to consume both endings. In life, we make a decision—or a decision
makes
us—and we go one way; had we made a different decision (as I once told my wife;
though
I don't think she was in a condition to appreciate my wisdom), we would have
been
elsewhere. The novel with two endings doesn't reproduce this reality: it merely
takes
us down two diverging paths. It's a form of cubism, I suppose. And that's all
right;
but
let's not deceive ourselves about the artifice involved.
After
all, if novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of life's possibilities,
this is what
they'd
do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various
colours.
Each
would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional
Unhappy
Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist
Arbitrary
Ending; End of the World Ending; Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque
Ending;
Surrealist Ending; and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to
destroy
the envelopes you didn't select. That's what I call offering the reader a
choice of
endings;
but you may find me quite unreasonably literal-minded.
As
for the hesitating narrator—look, I'm afraid you've run into one right now. It
might be
because
I'm English. You'd guessed that, at least—that I'm English? I…I…Look at that
seagull
up there. I hadn't spotted him before. Slipstreaming away, waiting for the bits
of
gristle
from the sandwiches. Listen, I hope you won't think this rude, but I really
must
take
a turn on deck; it's becoming quite stuffy in the bar here. Why don't we meet
on the
boat
back instead? The two o'clock ferry, Thursday? I'm sure I'll feel more like it
then.
All
right? What? No, you can't come on deck with me. For God's sake. Besides, I'm
going
to
the lavatory first. I can't have you following me in there, peering round from
the next
stall.
I
apologise; I didn't mean that. Two o'clock, in the bar, as the ferry sails? Oh,
and one last
word.
The cheese shop in the Grande Rue: don't miss it. I think the name's Leroux. I
suggest
you get a Brillat-Savarin. You won't get a good one in England unless you bring
it
back yourself. They're kept too cold, or they have chemicals injected into them
to delay
the
ripening, or something. That is, if you like cheese…
How
do we seize the past? How do we seize the foreign past? We read, we learn, we
ask,
we
remember, we are humble; and then a casual detail shifts everything. Flaubert
was a
giant;
they all said so. He towered over everybody like a strapping Gallic chieftain.
And
yet
he was only six feet tall: we have this on his own authority. Tall, but not
gigantic;
shorter
than I am, in fact, and when I am in France I never find myself towering over
people
like a Gallic chieftain.
So
Gustave was a six-foot giant, and the world shrinks just a little with that
knowledge.
The
giants were not so tall (were the dwarfs therefore shorter too?). The fat men:
were
they
less fat because they were smaller, and so you needed less stomach to appear
fat; or
were
they more fat, because they developed the same stomachs, but had even less
frame
to
support them? How can we know such trivial, crucial details? We can study files
for
decades,
but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that
history
is
merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending
to be a
parliamentary
report.
I
have a small watercolour of Rouen on my wall by Arthur Frederick Payne (born
Newarke,
Leicester, 1831, working 1849-84). It shows the city from Bonsecours
churchyard:
the bridges, the spires, the river bending away past Croisset. It was painted
on
May 4th, 1856. Flaubert finished Madame Bovary on April 30th, 1856: there at
Croisset,
there where I can jab my finger, between two spreading and unknowing
sploshes
of watercolour. So near and yet so far. Is this history, then—a swift,
confident
amateur's
watercolour?
I'm
not sure what I believe about the past. I just want to know if fat people were
fatter
then.
And were mad people madder? There was a lunatic called Mirabeau in the Rouen
asylum
who was popular with doctors and medical students at the Hôtel-Dieu because of
a
particular talent: in exchange for a cup of coffee he would copulate on the
dissecting
table
with a female corpse. (Does the cup of coffee make him more, or less, mad?) One
day,
however, Mirabeau was to prove a coward: Flaubert reports that he funked his
task
when
faced with a woman who had been guillotined. No doubt they offered him two cups
of
coffee, extra sugar, a slug of cognac? (And does this prove him saner, or
madder, this
need
for a face, however dead?)
Nowadays
we aren't allowed to use the word mad. What lunacy. The few psychiatrists I
respect
always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words. Dead, I
say,
and dying, and mad, and adultery. I don't say passed on, or slipping away, or
terminal
(oh, he's terminal? Which one? Euston, St Pancras, the Gare St Lazare?), or
personality
disorder, or fooling around, bit on the side, well she's away a lot visiting
her
sister.
I say mad and adultery, that's what I say. Mad has the right sound to it. It's
an
ordinary
word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van.
Terrible
things are also ordinary. Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his
lecture
on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the
conventional'.
Any
history of adultery would doubtless quote Emma's seduction in that careering
cab:
it's
probably the most famous act of infidelity in the whole of nineteenth-century
fiction.
Easy
enough for the reader to imagine such a precisely described scene, and to get
it
right,
you'd think. Yes indeed. But still easy enough to get it just a tiny bit wrong.
I cite
G.
M. Musgrave, sketcher, traveller, memoirist, and vicar of Borden, Kent: author
of The
Parson,
Pen and Pencil, or, Reminiscences and Illustrations of an Excursion to Paris,
Tours,
and Rouen, in the Summer of 1847; with a few Memoranda on French Farming
(Richard
Bentley, London, 1848) and of A Ramble Through Normandy, or, Scenes,
Characters
and Incidents in a Sketching Excursion Through Calvados (David Bogue,
London,
185S). On page 522 of the latter work the Reverend Musgrave is visiting
Rouen—'the
Manchester of France', he calls it—at a time when Flaubert is still flailing
away
at his Bovary. His account of the city includes the following aside:
I
was mentioning, just now, the cab-stand. The carriages stationed there are the
most
dumpy
vehicles, I conceive, of their kind, in Europe. I could with ease place my arm
on
the
roof as I stood by one of them in the road. They are well-built, neat, and
cleanly little
chariots,
with two good lamps; and 'cut' about the streets like Tom Thumb's coach.
So
our view suddenly lurches: the famous seduction would have been even more
cramped,
and even less romantic, than we might previously have assumed. This piece of
information
is, as far as I am aware, hitherto unrecorded in the extensive annotations
which
have been inflicted on the novel; and I herewith offer it in a spirit of
humility for
use
by professional scholars.
The
tall, the fat, the mad. And then there are the colours. When he was researching
for
Madame
Bovary, Flaubert spent a whole afternoon examining the countryside through
pieces
of coloured glass. Would he have seen what we now see? Presumably. But what
about
this: in 1853, at Trouville, he watched the sun go down over the sea, and
declared
that
it resembled a large disc of redcurrant jam. Vivid enough. But was redcurrant
jam the
same
colour in Normandy in 1853 as it is now? (Would any pots of it have survived,
so
that
we could check? And how would we know the colour had remained the same in the
intervening
years?) It's the sort of thing you fret about. I decided to write to the
Grocers'
Company
about the matter. Unlike some of my other correspondents, they replied
promptly.
They were also reassuring: redcurrant jam is one of the purest jams, they said,
and
though an 1853 Rouennais pot might not have been quite so clear as a modern one
because
of the use of unrefined sugar, the colour would have been almost exactly the
same.
So at least that's all right: now we can go ahead and confidently imagine the
sunset.
But
you see what I mean? (As for my other questions: a pot of the jam could indeed
have
survived
until now, but would almost certainly have turned brown, unless kept
completely
sealed in a dry, airy, pitch-dark room.)
The
Reverend George M. Musgrave was a digressive but observant fellow. He was more
than
a little inclined to pomposity ('I am bound to speak in terms of high eulogium
on the
subject
of Rouen's literary reputation'), but his fussiness over detail makes him a
useful
informant.
He notes the French love of leeks and the French abhorrence of rain. He
interrogates
everyone: a Rouen merchant who amazes him by not having heard of mint
sauce,
and a canon of Evreux who informs him that in France the men read too much,
while
the women read next to nothing (O rarer still Emma Bovary!). While in Rouen he
visits
the Cimetière Monumental the year after Gustave's father and sister were buried
there,
and approves its innovative policy of allowing families to buy freehold plots.
Elsewhere,
he investigates a fertiliser factory, the Bayeux tapestry, and the lunatic
asylum
at
Caen where Beau Brummell died in 1840 (was Brummell mad? The attendants
remembered
him well: un bon enfant, they said, drank only barley water mixed with a
very
little wine).
Musgrave
also went to the fair at Guibray, and there among the freak shows was The
Largest
Fat Boy in France: Aimable Jouvin, born at Herblay in 1840, now aged fourteen,
admission
a penny farthing. How fat was the fat boy? Our rambling sketcher didn't, alas,
go
in himself and record the young phenomenon with his pencil; but he waited while
a
French
cavalryman paid his penny farthing, entered the caravan, and emerged mouthing
'some
very choice Norman phraseology'. Though Musgrave did not bring himself to ask
the
soldier what he had seen, his impression was 'that Aimable had not been
fattened up
to
the mark of the visitor's large expectations'.
At
Caen Musgrave went to a regatta, where seven thousand spectators lined the
dockside.
Most
of them were men, and most of these were peasants wearing their best blue
blouses.
The
mass effect was of a light but most brilliant ultramarine. It was a particular,
exact
colour;
Musgrave had seen it only once before, in a special department of the Bank of
England
where they incinerated notes which had been taken out of circulation. Banknote
paper
was then prepared with a colouring agent made from cobalt, silex, salt and
potash:
if
you set light to a bundle of money, the cinder would take on the extraordinary
tint that
Musgrave
saw on the Caen dockside. The colour of France.
As
he travelled on, this colour and its cruder associates became more apparent. The
men's
blouses
and hose were blue; three-quarters of the women's gowns were blue. The horses'
housings
and collar-decorations were blue; so were the carts, the name-boards of the
villages,
the agricultural implements, wheelbarrows and waterbutts. In many of the towns
the
houses displayed the cerulean hue, both inside and out. Musgrave found himself
compelled
to remark to a Frenchman he met that 'there was more blue in his country than
in
any region of the world with which I was acquainted.'
We
look at the sun through smoked glass; we must look at the past through coloured
glass.
Thank
you. Santé. You got your cheese, I hope? You won't mind a word of advice? Eat
it.
Don't
put it in a plastic bag in the fridge and save it for visitors; before you know
where
you
are it'll have swollen to three times its size and smell like a chemical
factory. You'll
open
the bag and be putting your face into a bad marriage.
'Giving
the public details about oneself is a bourgeois temptation that I have always
resisted'
(1879). But here goes. You know my name of course: Geoffrey Braithwaite.
Don't
miss out the l or you'll start turning me into a Parisian grocer. No; just my
joke.
Look.
You know those personal advertisements in magazines like the New Statesman? I
thought
I might do it like that.
60+
widowed doctor, children grown up, active, cheerful if inclined to melancholy,
kindly,
non-smoker, amateur Flaubert scholar, likes reading, food, travel to familiar
places,
old films, has friends, but seeks…
You
see the problem. But seeks… Do I? What do I seek? A tender fortyish div or wid
for
companionship
stroke marriage? No. Mature lady for country walks, occasional dining?
No.
Bisexual couple for gleesome threesomes? Certainly not. I always read those
pining
paragraphs
in the back of magazines, though I never feel like replying; and I've just
realised
why. Because I don't believe any of them. They aren't lying—indeed, they're all
trying
to be utterly sincere—but they aren't telling the truth. The column distorts
the way
the
advertisers describe themselves. No one would think of himself as an active
nonsmoker
inclined
to melancholy if that wasn't encouraged, even demanded, by the form.
Two
conclusions: first, that you can't define yourself directly, just by looking
face-on into
the
mirror; and second, that Flaubert was, as always, right. Style does arise from
subjectmatter.
Try
as they might, those advertisers are always beaten down by the form; they are
forced—even
at the one time they need to be candidly personal—into an unwished
impersonality.
You
can see, at least, the colour of my eyes. Not as complicated as Emma Bovary's,
are
they?
But do they help you? They might mislead. I'm not being coy; I'm trying to be
useful.
Do you know the colour of Flaubert's eyes? No, you don't: for the simple reason
that
I suppressed it a few pages ago. I didn't want you to be tempted by cheap
conclusions.
See how carefully I look after you. You don't like it? I know you don't like
it.
All right. Well, according to Du Camp, Gustave the Gallic chieftain, the
six-foot giant
with
a voice like a trumpet, had 'large eyes as grey as the sea'.
I
was reading Mauriac the other day: the Mémoires intérieurs, written at the very
end of
his
life. It's the time when the final pellets of vanity accumulate into a cyst,
when the self
starts
up its last pathetic murmur of 'Remember me, remember me…'; it's the time when
the
autobiographies get written, the last boasts are made, and the memories which
no one
else's
brain still holds are written down with a false idea of value.
But
that's just what Mauriac declines to do. He writes his 'Mémoires', but they
aren't his
memoirs.
We are spared the counting-games and spelling-bees of childhood, that first
servant-girl
in the humid attic, the canny uncle with metal teeth and a headful of stories—
or
whatever. Instead, Mauriac tells us about the books he's read, the painters
he's liked,
the
plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines
his
own
faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memoirs'
is like
meeting
a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me, that's misleading. If you want to
know
what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in
the
window.'
You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty
walls,
cables and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a
few
feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements;
and
though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then
there
is
a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever.
Well,
you know I've got brown eyes; make of that what you will. Six foot one; grey
hair;
good
health. But what matters about me? Only what I know, what I believe, what I can
tell
you. Nothing much about my character matters. No, that's not true. I'm honest,
I'd
better
tell you that. I'm aiming to tell the truth; though mistakes are, I suppose,
inevitable.
And
if I make them, at least I'm in good company. The Times, in its obituary
column,
May
10th, 1880, claims that Flaubert wrote a book called Bouvard et Peluchet, and
that
he
'at first adopted his father's profession—that of surgeon'. My Encyclopaedia
Britannica,
eleventh edition (the best, they say), suggests that Charles Bovary is a
portrait
of
the novelist's father. The author of this article, a certain 'E.G.', turns out
to have been
Edmund
Gosse. I snorted a bit when I read that. I have a little less time for 'Mr'
Gosse
since
my encounter with Ed Winterton.
I'm
honest, I'm reliable. When I was a doctor I never killed a single patient,
which is
more
of a boast than you might imagine. People trusted me; they kept coming back, at
any
rate. And I was good with the dying. I never got drunk—that is, I never got too
drunk;
I never wrote prescriptions for imaginary patients; I never made advances to
women
in my surgery. I sound like a plaster saint. I'm not.
No,
I didn't kill my wife. I might have known you'd think that. First you find out
that
she's
dead; then, a while later, I say that I never killed a single patient. Aha, who
did you
kill,
then? The question no doubt appears logical. How easy it is to set off
speculation.
There
was a man called Ledoux who maliciously claimed that Flaubert had committed
suicide;
he wasted a lot of people's time. I'll tell you about him later. But it all
goes to
prove
my point: what knowledge is useful, what knowledge is true? Either I have to
give
you
so much information about myself that you are forced to admit that I could no
more
have
killed my wife than Flaubert could have committed suicide; or else I merely
say,
That's
all, that's enough. No more. J'y suis, j'y reste.
I
could play the Mauriac game, perhaps. Tell you how I brought myself up on
Wells,
Huxley
and Shaw; how I prefer George Eliot and even Thackeray to Dickens; how I like
Orwell,
Hardy and Housman, and dislike the Auden-Spender-Isherwood crew (preaching
socialism
as a sideshoot of homosexual law reform); how I'm saving Virginia Woolf for
when
I'm dead. The younger fellows? Today's fellows? Well, they each seem to do one
thing
well enough, but fail to realise that literature depends on doing several
things well
at
the same time. I could go on at great length on all these topics; it would be
very
pleasant
for me to say what I think and relieve Monsieur Geoffrey Braithwaite's feelings
by
means of such utterances. But what is the importance of the said gentleman?
I'd
rather play a different version. Some Italian once wrote that the critic
secretly wants to
kill
the writer. Is that true? Up to a point. We all hate golden eggs. Bloody golden
eggs
again,
you can hear the critics mutter as a good novelist produces yet another good
novel;
haven't
we had enough omelettes this year?
But
if not that, then many critics would like to be dictators of literature, to
regulate the
past,
and to set out with quiet authority the future direction of the art. This
month,
everyone
must write about this; next month, nobody is allowed to write about that.
Soand-
so
will not be reprinted until we say so. All copies of this seductively bad novel
must
be
destroyed at once. (You think I am joking? In March 1983, the newspaper
Libération
urged
that the French Minister for Women's Rights should put on her Index for 'public
provocation
to sexist hatred' the following works: Pantagruel, Jude the Obscure,
Baudelaire's
poems, all Kafka, The Snows of Kilimanjaro—and Madame Bovary.) Still,
let's
play. I'll go first.
1.
There shall be no more novels in which a group of people, isolated by
circumstances,
revert
to the 'natural condition' of man, become essential, poor, bare, forked
creatures. All
that
may be written is one short story, the final one of the genre, the cork in the
bottle. I'll
write
it for you. A group of travellers are shipwrecked, or airwrecked, somewhere, no
doubt
on an island. One of them, a large, powerful, dislikeable man, has a gun. He
forces
all
the others to live in a sandpit of their own digging. Every so often, he takes
one of his
prisoners
out, shoots him or her, and eats the carcass. The food tastes good, and he
grows
fat.
When he has shot and eaten his final prisoner, he begins to worry what he will
do for
food;
but fortunately a seaplane arrives at this point and rescues him. He tells the
world
that
he was the sole survivor of the original wreck, and that he has sustained
himself by
eating
berries, leaves and roots. The world marvels at his fine physical condition,
and a
poster
bearing his photograph is displayed in the windows of vegetarian food shops. He
is
never
found out.
You
see how easy it is to write, how much fun it is? That's why I'd ban the genre.
2.
There shall be no more novels about incest. No, not even ones in very bad
taste.
3.
No novels set in abattoirs. This is, I admit, a rather small genre at the
moment; but I
have
recently noticed increasing use of the abattoir in short stories. It must be
nipped in
the
bud.
4.
There is to be a twenty-year ban on novels set in Oxford or Cambridge, and a
ten-year
ban
on other university fiction. No ban on fiction set in polytechnics (though no
subsidy
to
encourage it). No ban on novels set in primary schools; a ten-year ban on
secondaryschool
fiction.
A partial ban on growing-up novels (one per author allowed). A partial
ban
on novels written in the historic present (again, one per author). A total ban
on novels
in
which the main character is a journalist or a television presenter.
curb
the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony. Ah, the propinquity of
cheap
life
and expensive principles, of religion and banditry, of surprising honour and
random
cruelty.
Ah, the daiquiri bird which incubates its eggs on the wing; ah, the fredonna
tree
whose
roots grow at the tips of its branches, and whose fibres assist the hunchback
to
impregnate
by telepathy the haughty wife of the hacienda owner; ah, the opera house now
overgrown
by jungle. Permit me to rap on the table and murmur 'Pass!' Novels set in the
Arctic
and the Antarctic will receive a development grant.
6a.
No scenes in which carnal connection takes place between a human being and an
animal.
The woman and the porpoise, for instance, whose tender coupling symbolises a
wider
mending of those gossamer threads which formerly bound the world together in
peaceable
companionship. No, none of that.
6b.
No scenes in which carnal connection takes place between man and woman
(porpoise-like,
you might say) in the shower. My reasons are primarily aesthetic, but also
medical.
7.
No novels about small, hitherto forgotten wars in distant parts of the British
Empire, in
the
painstaking course of which we learn, first, that the British are averagely
wicked and,
second,
that war is very nasty indeed.
8.
No novels in which the narrator, or any of the characters, is identified simply
by an
initial
letter. Still they go on doing it!
9.
There shall be no more novels which are really about other novels. No 'modern
versions',
reworkings, sequels or prequels. No imaginative completions of works left
unfinished
on their author's death. Instead, every writer is to be issued with a sampler
in
coloured
wools to hang over the fireplace. It reads: Knit Your Own Stuff.
10.
There shall be a twenty-year ban on God; or rather, on the allegorical,
metaphorical,
allusive,
offstage, imprecise and ambiguous uses of God. The bearded head gardener who
is
always tending the apple tree; the wise old sea-captain who never rushes to
judgment;
the
character you're not quite introduced to, but who is giving you a creepy
feeling by
Chapter
Four…pack them off into storage, all of them. God is permitted only as a
verifiable
divinity who gets extremely cross at man's transgressions.
So
how do we seize the past? As it recedes, does it come into focus? Some think
so. We
know
more, we discover extra documents, we use infra-red light to pierce erasures in
the
correspondence,
and we are free of contemporary prejudice; so we understand better. Is
that
it? I wonder. Take Gustave's sex-life. For years it was assumed that the bear
of
Croisset
broke out of his bearishness solely with Louise Colet—'The only sentimental
episode
of any importance in the life of Flaubert,' Emile Faguet declared. But then
Elisa
Schlesinger
is discovered—the bricked-up royal chamber in Gustave's heart, the slowburning
fire,
the adolescent passion never consummated. Next, more letters come into
view,
and the Egyptian journals. The life begins to reek of actresses; the bedding of
Bouilhet
is announced; Flaubert himself admits a taste for Cairo bath-house boys. At
last
we
see the whole shape of his carnality; he is ambi-sexual, omni-experienced.
But
not so fast. Sartre decrees that Gustave was never homosexual; merely passive
and
feminine
in his psychology. The byplay with Bouilhet was just teasing, the outer edge of
vivid
male friendship: Gustave never committed a single homosexual act in all his
life.
He
says he did, but that was boastful invention: Bouilhet asked for salacities
from Cairo,
and
Flaubert provided them. (Are we convinced by this? Sartre accuses Flaubert of
wishful
thinking. Might we not accuse Sartre of the same? Wouldn't he prefer Flaubert
the
trembling bourgeois, joking on the edge of a sin he fears to commit, rather
than
Flaubert
the daredevil, the subversive indulger?) And in the meantime, we are also being
encouraged
to shift our view of Mme Schlesinger. Current belief among Flaubertistes is
that
the relationship was consummated after all: either in 1848 or, more probably,
in the
early
months of 1843
The
past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along
the stern
rail
there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given
distance. If the
boat
is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to
tell the
whole,
the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again,
we
return
to our normal activity: scurrying from one tele scope to another, seeing the
sharpness
fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does
clear,
we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.
Isn't
the sea calmer than the other day? And heading north—the light that Boudin saw.
What
does this journey seem like to those who aren't British—as they head towards
the
land
of embarrassment and breakfast? Do they make nervous jokes about fog and
porridge?
Flaubert found London scaring; it was an unhealthy city, he declared, where it
was
impossible to find a pot-au-feu. On the other hand, Britain was the home of
Shakespeare,
clear thinking and political liberty, the land where Voltaire had been
welcomed
and to which Zola would flee.
Now
what is it? First slum of Europe, one of our poets called it not long ago.
First
hypermarket
of Europe might be more like it. Voltaire praised our attitude to commerce,
and
the lack of snobbery which allowed the younger sons of the gentry to become
businessmen.
Now the day-trippers arrive from Holland and Belgium, Germany and
France,
excited about the weakness of the pound and eager to get into Marks &
Spencer.
Commerce,
Voltaire declared, was the base on which the greatness of our nation was
built;
now it's all that keeps us from going bankrupt.
When
I drive off the boat, I always have a desire to go through the Red Channel. I
never
have
more than the permitted amount of duty-free goods; I've never imported plants,
or
dogs,
or drugs, or uncooked meat, or firearms; and yet I constantly find myself
wanting to
turn
the wheel and head for the Red Channel. It always feels like an admission of
failure
to
come back from the Continent and have nothing to show for it. Would you read
this,
please,
sir? Yes. Have you understood it, sir? Yes. Have you anything to declare? Yes,
I'd
like
to declare a small case of French flu, a dangerous fondness for Flaubert, a
childish
delight
in French road-signs, and a love of the light as you look north. Is there any
duty to
pay
on any of these? There ought to be.
Oh,
and I've got this cheese, too. A Brillat-Savarin. That fellow behind me has got
one
too.
I told him you always had to declare your cheese at customs. Say cheese.
I
hope you don't think I'm being enigmatic, by the way. If I'm irritating, it's
probably
because
I'm embarrassed; I told you I don't like the full face. But I really am trying
to
make
things easier for you. Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of
all. Not
writing
a tune is easier than writing one. Not rhyming is easier than rhyming. I don't
mean
art should be as clear as the instructions on a packet of seeds; I'm saying
that you
trust
the mystifier more if you know he's deliberately choosing not to be lucid. You
trust
Picasso
all the way because he could draw like Ingres.
But
what helps? What do we need to know? Not everything. Everything confuses.
Directness
also confuses. The full-face portrait staring back at you hypnotises. Flaubert
is
usually
looking away in his portraits and photographs. He's looking away so that you
can't
catch his eye; he's also looking away because what he can see over your
shoulder is
more
interesting than your shoulder.
Directness
confuses. I told you my name: Geoffrey Braithwaite. Has that helped? A little;
at
least it's better than 'B' or 'G' or 'the man' or 'the amateur of cheeses'. And
if you hadn't
seen
me, what would you have deduced from the name? Middle-class professional man;
solicitor
perhaps; denizen of pine-and-heather country; pepper-and-salt tweeds; a
moustache
hinting—perhaps fraudulently—at a military past; a sensible wife; perhaps a
little
boating at weekends; more of a gin than a whisky man; and so on?
I
am—was—a doctor, first-generation professional class; as you see, there's no
moustache,
though I have the military past which men of my age couldn't avoid; I live in
Essex,
most characterless and therefore most acceptable of the Home Counties; whisky,
not
gin; no tweed at all; and no boating. Near enough, and yet not near enough, you
see.
As
for my wife, she was not sensible. That was one of the last words anyone would
apply
to
her. They inject soft cheeses, as I said, to stop them ripening too quickly.
But they
always
do ripen; it's in their nature. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate.
Both go
mouldy.
I
was going to put my photograph in the front of the book. Not vanity; just
trying to be
helpful.
But I'm afraid it was rather an old photograph, taken about ten years ago. I
haven't
got a more recent one. That's something you find: after a certain age, people
stop
photographing
you. Or rather, they photograph you only on formal occasions: birthdays,
weddings,
Christmas. A flushed and jolly character raises his glass among friends and
family—how
real, how reliable is that evidence? What would the photos of my twenty
fifth
wedding anniversary have revealed? Certainly not the truth; so perhaps it's as
well
they
were never taken.
Flaubert's
niece Caroline says that towards the end of his life he regretted not having had
a
wife and family. Her account is, however, rather spare. The two of them were
walking
by
the Seine after a visit to some friends. '"They got it right," he
said to me, alluding to
that
household with its charming and honest children. "Yes," he repeated
to himself
gravely,
"they got it right." I did not trouble his thoughts, but remained
silent at his side.
This
walk was one of our last.'
I
rather wish she had troubled his thoughts. Did he really mean it? Should we
take the
remark
as more than the reflex perversity of a man who dreamed of Egypt while in
Normandy,
and of Normandy while in Egypt? Was he doing more than praise the
particular
talents of the family they had just visited? After all, had he wanted to praise
the
institution
of marriage itself, he could have turned to his niece and regretted his
solitary
life
by admitting, 'You got it right.' But he didn't, of course; because she got it
wrong. She
married
a weakling who turned into a bankrupt, and in helping save her husband she
bankrupted
her uncle. The case of Caroline is instructive—gloomily so to Flaubert.
Her
own father had been as much of a weakling as her husband subsequently became;
Gustave
supplanted him. In her Souvenirs intimes Caroline recalls her uncle's return from
Egypt
when she was a small girl: he arrives home unexpectedly one evening, wakes her,
picks
her up out of bed, bursts out laughing because her nightdress extends far below
her
feet,
and plants great kisses on her cheeks. He has just come from outdoors: his
moustache
is cold, and damp with dew. She is frightened, and much relieved when he
puts
her down. What is this but a textbook account of the absent father's alarming
return
to
the household—the return from the war, from business, from abroad, from
philandering,
from danger?
He
adored her. In London he carried her round the Great Exhibition; this time she
was
happy
to be in his arms, safe from the frightening crowds. He taught her history: the
story
of
Pelopidas and Epaminondas; he taught her geography, taking a shovel and pail of
water
into the garden, where he would build for her instructive peninsulas, islands,
gulfs
and
promontories. She loved her childhood with him, and the memory of it survived
the
misfortunes
of her adult life. In 1930, when she was eighty-four, Caroline met Willa
Cather
in Aix-les-Bains, and recalled the hours spent eighty years earlier on a rug in
the
corner
of Gustave's study: he working, she reading, in strict but proudly observed
silence.
'She
liked to think, as she lay in her corner, that she was shut in a cage with some
powerful
wild animal, a tiger or a lion or a bear, who had devoured his keeper and would
spring
upon anyone else who opened his door but with whom she was "quite safe and
conceited",
as she said with a chuckle.'
But
then the necessities of adulthood arrived. He advised her badly, and she
married a
weakling.
She became a snob; she thought only of smart society; and finally she tried to
turn
her uncle out of the very house in which the most useful things she knew had
been
inserted
into her brain.
Epaminondas
was a Theban general, held to be living proof of all the virtues; he led a
career
of principled carnage, and founded the city of Megalopolis. As he lay dying,
one
of
those present lamented his lack of issue. He replied, 'I leave two children,
Leuctra and
Mantinea'—the
sites of his two most famous victories. Flaubert might have made a
similar
avowal—'I leave two children, Bouvard and Pécuchet'—because his only child,
the
niece who became a daughter, had departed into disapproving adulthood. To her,
and
to
her husband, he had become 'the consumer'.
Gustave
taught Caroline about literature. I quote her: 'He considered no book dangerous
that
was well written.' Move forward seventy years or so to a different household in
another
part of France. This time there is a bookish boy, a mother, and a friend of the
mother's
called Mme Picard. The boy later wrote his memoirs; again, I quote: 'Mme
Picard's
opinion was that a child should be allowed to read everything. "No book
can be
dangerous
if it is well written."' The boy, aware of Mme Picard's frequently
expressed
view,
deliberately exploits her presence and asks his mother's permission to read a
particular
and notorious novel. 'But if my little darling reads books like that at his
age,'
says
the mother, 'what will he do when he grows up?' 'I shall live them out!' he
replies. It
was
one of the cleverest retorts of his childhood; it went down in family history,
and it
won
him—or so we are left to assume—readership of the novel. The boy was Jean-Paul
Sartre.
The book was Madame Bovary.
Does
the world progress? Or does it merely shuttle back and forth like a ferry? An
hour
from
the English coast and the clear sky disappears. Cloud and rain escort you back
to
where
you belong. As the weather changes, the boat begins to roll a little, and the
tables
in
the bar resume their metallic conversation. Rattarattarattaratta, fattafattafattafatta.
Call
and response, call and response. Now it sounds to me like the final stages of a
marriage:
two separated parties, screwed to their own particular pieces of floor;
uttering
routine
chatter while the rain begins to fall. My wife…Not now, not now.
Pécuchet,
during his geological investigations, speculates on what would happen if there
were
an earthquake beneath the English Channel. The water, he concludes, would rush
out
into the Atlantic; the coasts of England and France would totter, shift and
reunite; the
Channel
would cease to exist. On hearing his friend's predictions, Bouvard runs away in
terror.
For myself, I do not think we need to be quite so pessimistic.
You
won't forget about the cheese, will you? Don't grow a chemical plant in your
fridge.
I
didn't ask if you were married. My compliments, or not, as the case may be.
I
think I shall go through the Red Channel this time. I feel the need for some
company.
The
Reverend Musgrave's opinion was that French douaniers behaved like gentlemen,
while
English customs officers were ruffians. But I find them all quite sympathetic,
if you
treat
them properly.
8:
The Train-spotter's Guide to Flaubert
1.
The house at Croisset—a long, white, eighteenth-century property on the banks
of the
Seine—was
perfect for Flaubert. It was isolated, yet close to Rouen and thence to Paris.
It
was
large enough for him to have a grand study with five windows; yet small enough
for
him
to discourage visitors without obvious discourtesy. It gave him, too, if he
wanted it,
an
unthreatened view of passing life: from the terrace he could train his opera
glasses on
the
pleasure-steamers taking Sunday lunchers to
grew
accustomed to cet original de Monsieur Flaubert, and were disappointed if they
didn't
spot him, in Nubian shirt and silk skullcap, gazing back at them, taking the
novelist's
view.
Caroline
has described the quiet evenings of her childhood at Croisset. It was a curious
menage:
the girl, the uncle, the grandmother—a solitary representative of each
generation,
like one of those squeezed houses you sometimes see with a single room on
each
storey. (The French call such a house un bâton de perroquet, a parrot's perch.)
The
three
of them, she recalled, would often sit at the balcony of the little pavilion
and watch
the
confident arrival of the night. On the far bank they might just discern the
silhouette of
a
straining horse on the tow-path; from nearby they might just hear a discreet
splosh as
the
eel-fishermen cast off and slipped out into the stream.
Why
did Dr Flaubert sell his property at Déville to buy this house? Traditionally,
as a
refuge
for his invalid son, who had just suffered his first attack of epilepsy. But
the
property
at Déville would have been sold anyway. The Paris-to-Rouen railway was being
extended
to Le Havre, and the line cut straight through Dr Flaubert's land; part of it
was
to
be compulsorily purchased. You could say that Gustave was shepherded into
creative
retreat
at Croisset by epilepsy. You could also say he was driven there by the railway.
2.
Gustave belonged to the first railway generation in France; and he hated the
invention.
For
a start, it was an odious means of transport. 'I get so fed up on a train that
after five
minutes
I'm howling with boredom. Passengers think it's a neglected dog; not at all,
it's
M.
Flaubert, sighing.' Secondly, it produced a new figure at the dinner table: the
railway
bore.
Conversation on the topic gave Flaubert a colique des wagons; in June 1843 he
pronounced
the railways to be the third most boring subject imaginable after Mme
Lafarge
(an arsenic poisoner) and the death of the Duc d'Orléans (killed in his
carriage
the
previous year). Louise Colet, striving for modernity in her poem '
allowed
Jean, her soldier returning from the wars in search of his Jeanneton, to notice
the
running
smoke of a train. Flaubert cut the line. 'Jean doesn't give a damn about that
sort
thing,'
he growled, 'and nor do I.'
But
he didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people
with the
illusion
of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance?
The
railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid
together.
In one of his earliest letters, written when he was fifteen, he lists the
misdeeds
of
modern civilisation: 'Railways, poisons, enema pumps, cream tarts, royalty and
the
guillotine.'
Two years later, in his essay on Rabelais, the list of enemies has altered—all
except
the first item: 'Railways, factories, chemists and mathematicians.' He never
changed.
3.
'Superior to everything is—Art. A book of poetry is preferable to a railway.'
Intimate
Notebook, 1840
4.
The function of the railway in Flaubert's affair with Louise Colet has, to my
mind,
been
rather underestimated. Consider the mechanics of their relationship. She lived
in
Paris,
he at Croisset; he wouldn't come to the capital, she wasn't allowed to visit
him in
the
country. So they would meet approximately half-way, at Mantes. where the Hôtel
du
Grand
Cerf would allow them a night or two of lurid rapture and false promises.
Afterwards,
the following cycle would take place: Louise would assume an early
rendezvous;
Gustave would put her off; Louise would plead, grow angry, threaten;
Gustave
would reluctantly give in and agree to another meeting. It would last just long
enough
to sate his desires and rekindle her expectations. And so this grumbling threelegged
race
was run. Did Gustave ever reflect on the fate of an earlier visitor to the
town?
It
was at the capture of Mantes that William the Conqueror fell from his horse and
received
the injury from which he later died in Rouen.
The
Paris-to-Rouen railway—built by the English—opened on May 9th, 1843, barely
three
years before Gustave and Louise met. The journey to Mantes, for each of them,
was
cut
from a day to a couple of hours. Imagine what it would have been like without
the
railway.
They would have travelled by diligence or river-steamer; they would have been
tired
and perhaps irritable on seeing one another again. Fatigue affects desire. But
in view
of
the difficulties, more would have been expected of the occasion: more in
time—an
extra
day perhaps—and more in emotional commitment. This is just my theory, of
course.
But if the telephone in our century has made adultery both simpler and harder
(assignations
are easier, but so is checking up), the railway in the last century had a
similar
effect. (Has anyone made a comparative study of the spread of railways and the
spread
of adultery? I can imagine village priests delivering sermons on the Devil's
invention
and being mocked for it; but if they did, they were right.) The railway made it
worth
while for Gustave: he could get to Mantes and back without too much trouble;
and
Louise's
complaints perhaps seemed a reasonable price to pay for such accessible
pleasure.
The railway made it worthwhile for Louise: Gustave was never really far away,
however
severe he sounded in his letters; the next one would surely say that they could
meet
again, that only two hours separated them. And the railway made it worthwhile
for
us,
who can now read the letters which resulted from that prolonged erotic oscillation.
5a.
September 1846: the first meeting at Mantes. The only problem was Gustave's
mother.
She had not as yet been officially informed of Louise's existence. Indeed, Mme
Colet
was obliged to send all her love letters to Gustave via Maxime du Camp, who
then
readdressed
them in fresh envelopes. How would Mme Flaubert react to Gustave's
sudden
nocturnal absence? What could he tell her? A lie, of course: 'une petite
histoire
que
ma mère a crue,' he boasted, like a proud six-year-old, and set off for Mantes.
But
Mme Flaubert didn't believe his petite histoire. She slept less that night than
Gustave
and
Louise did. Something had made her uneasy; perhaps the recent cascade of
letters
from
Maxime du Camp. So the next morning she went to Rouen station, and when her
son,
still wearing a fresh crust of pride and sex, got off the train, she was
waiting for him
on
the platform. 'She didn't utter any reproach, but her face was the greatest
reproach
anyone
could make.'
They
talk about the sadness of departure; what about the guilt of arrival?
5b.
Louise, of course, could play the platform scene as well. Her habit of
jealously
bursting
in on Gustave when he was dining with friends was notorious. She always
expected
to find a rival; but there was no rival, unless you count Emma Bovary. On one
occasion,
Du Camp records, 'Flaubert was leaving Paris for Rouen when she entered the
waiting-room
of the station and went through such tragic scenes that the railway officials
were
obliged to interfere. Flaubert was distressed and begged for mercy, but she
gave him
no
quarter.'
6.
It is a little-known fact that Flaubert travelled on the London Underground. I
quote
items
from his skeleton travel diary of 1867:
Monday
26 June. (on the train from Newhaven). A few insignificant stations with
posters,
just
as at stations on the outskirts of Paris. Arrival at Victoria.
Monday
3 July. Bought a railway timetable.
Friday
7 July. Underground railway—Hornsey. Mrs Farmer… To Charing Cross station
for
information.
He
does not deign to compare the British and the French railways. This is perhaps
a pity.
Our
friend the Reverend G. M. Musgrave, disembarking at Boulogne a dozen years
earlier,
was much impressed by the French system: 'The contrivances for receiving,
weighing,
marking and paying for luggage were simple and excellent. Regularity,
precision,
and punctuality did the work well in every department. Much civility, much
comfort
(comfort in France!) made every arrangement pleasurable; and all this without
more
vociferation or commotion than prevails at Paddington; to say nothing of the
second-class
carriage being nearly equal to our first. Shame to England that it should be
thus!'
7.
'RAILWAYS: If Napoleon had had them at his disposition, he would have been
invincible.
Always go into ecstasies about their invention, and say: "I, Monsieur, I
who
am
even now speaking to you, was only this morning at X…; I left by the X-o'clock
train;
I
did the business I had to do there; and by X-o'clock I was back."'
Dictionnaire
de idées reçues
8.
I took the train from Rouen (Rive Droite). There were blue plastic seats and a
warning
in
four languages not to lean out of the window; English, I noticed, requires more
words
than
French, German or Italian to convey this advice. I sat beneath a metal-framed
photograph
(black and white) of fishing-boats at the Île d'Oléron. Next to me an elderly
couple
were reading a story in Paris-Normandie about a charcutier, fou d'amour, who
had
killed a family of seven. On the window was a small sticker I hadn't seen
before: 'Ne
jetez
pas l'énergie par les fenêtres en les ouvrant en période de chauffage.' Do not
throw
energy
out of the windows—How un-English the phrasing was; logical yet fanciful at the
same
time.
I
was being observant, you see. A single ticket costs 35 francs. The journey
takes a
minute
or so under the hour: half what it took in Flaubert's day. Oissel is the first
stop;
then
Le Vaudreuil—ville nouvelle; Gaillon (Aubevoye), with its Grand Marnier
warehouse.
Musgrave suggested the scenery along this stretch of the Seine reminded him
of
Norfolk: 'More like English scenery than any district I had seen in Europe.'
The ticketcollector
raps
on the door jamb with his punch: metal on metal, an order you obey.
Vernon;
then, on your left, the broad Seine conducts you into Mantes.
Six,
place de
finished;
already it exhibited the confident innocence of the usurper. The Grand Cerf?
Yes,
indeed, they told me at the tabac, the old building had stood until a year or
so ago. I
went
back and stared again. All that now remained of the hotel was a couple of tall
stone
gateposts
some thirty feet apart. I gazed at them hopelessly. On the train, I had been
unable
to imagine Flaubert (howling like an impatient dog? grumbling? ardent?) making
the
same journey; now at this point of pilgrimage, the gateposts were no help in
thinking
my
way back to the hot reunions of Gustave and Louise. Why should they be? We are
too
impertinent
with the past, counting on it in this way for a reliablefrisson. Why should it
lay
our game?
Grumpily
I circled the church (Michelin one star), bought a newspaper, drank a cup of
coffee,
read about the charcutier, fou d'amour, and decided to take the next train
back.
The
road leading to the station is called avenue Franklin Roosevelt, though the
reality is a
little
less grand than the name. Fifty yards from the end, on the left, I came across
a caferestaurant.
It
was called Le Perroquet. Outside, on the pavement, a fretworked wooden
parrot
with garish green plumage was holding the lunch menu in its beak. The building
had
one of those brightly timbered exteriors which assert more age than they
probably
possess.
I don't know if it would have been there in Flaubert's day. But I know this.
Sometimes
the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes
merely
the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest.
9.
Trains play little part in Flaubert's fiction. This shows accuracy, however,
not
prejudice:
most of his work is set before the English navvies and engineers descended on
Normandy.
Bouvard et Pécuchet pokes over into the railway age, but neither of his
opinionated
copyists, perhaps surprisingly, has a published view on the new mode of
transport.
Trains
occur only in L'Education sentimentale. They are first mentioned as a not very
arresting
topic of conversation at a soirée given by the Dambreuses. The first real
train,
and
the first real journey, occur in Part Two, Chapter Three, when Frédéric goes to
Creil
in
the hope of seducing Mme Arnoux. Given the benign impatience of his traveller,
Flaubert
informs the excursion with an approving lyricism: green plains, stations
slipping
by
like little stage sets, fleecy smoke from the engine dancing briefly on the
grass before
dispersing.
There are several more railway journeys in the novel, and the passengers
seem
happy enough; at least, none of them howls with boredom like a neglected dog.
And
though Flaubert aggressively excised from '
running
smoke on the horizon, this doesn't debar from his own countryside (Part Three,
Chapter
Four) 'the smoke of a railway engine stretching out in a horizontal line, like
a
gigantic
ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away.'
We
may detect his private opinion only at one point. Pellerin, the artist among
Frédéric's
companions,
a man who specialises in complete theories and incomplete sketches,
produces
one of his rare finished paintings. Flaubert allows himself a private smile:
'It
represented
the Republic, or Progress, or Civilisation, in the figure of Jesus Christ,
driving
a locomotive through a virgin forest.'
10.
The penultimate sentence of Gustave's life, uttered as he stood feeling dizzy
but not at
all
alarmed: 'I think I'm going to have a kind of fainting fit. It's lucky it should
happen
today;
it would have been a great nuisance tomorrow, in the train.'
11.
At the buffers. Croisset today. The vast paper factory was churning away on the
site
of
Flaubert's house. I wandered inside; they were happy to show me round. I gazed
at the
pistons,
the steam, the vats and the slopping trays: so much wetness to produce
something
as
dry as paper. I asked my guide if they made the sort of paper that was used for
books;
she
said they made every sort of paper. The tour, I realised, would not prove
sentimental.
Above
our heads a huge drum of paper, some twenty feet wide, was slowly tracking
along
on a conveyor. It seemed out of proportion to its surroundings, like a piece of
pop
sculpture
on a deliberately provoking scale. I remarked that it resembled a gigantic roll
of
lavatory
paper; my guide confirmed that this was exactly what it was.
Outside
the thumping factory things were scarcely quieter. Lorries bullied past on the
road
that had once been a tow-path; pile-drivers banged on both sides of the river;
no boat
could
pass without hooting. Flaubert used to claim that Pascal had once visited the
house
at
Croisset; and a tenacious local legend maintained that Abbé Prévost wrote Manon
Lescaut
there. Nowadays there is no one left to repeat such fictions; and no one to
believe
them
either.
A
sullen Normandy rain was falling. I thought of the horse's silhouette on the
far bank,
and
the quiet splosh as the eel-fishermen cast off. Could even eels live in this
cheerless
commercial
conduit? If they did, they would probably taste of diesel and detergent. My
eye
moved upriver, and suddenly I noticed it, squat and shuddering. A train. I'd
seen the
rails
before, a set laid between the road and the water; the rain was now making them
glisten
and smirk—I'd assumed without thinking that they were for the straddling dock
cranes
to run on. But no: he hasn't even been spared this. The swaddled goods train
was
drawn
up about two hundred yards away, ready to make its run past Flaubert's
pavilion. It
would
doubtless hoot derisively as it drew level; perhaps it was carrying poisons,
enema
pumps
and cream tarts, or supplies for chemists and mathematicians. I didn't want to
see
the
event (irony can be heavy-handed as well as ruthless). I climbed into my car
and
drove
off.
The
Flaubert Apocrypha
It
is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It
is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.
It
is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
But
it's also what they didn't build. It's the houses they dreamed and sketched.
It's the
brusque
boulevards of the imagination; it's that untaken, sauntering path between
toupeed
cottages;
it's the trompe l'oeil cul-de-sac which bluffs you into the belief that you're
entering
some smart avenue.
Do
the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume
that the
apocryphal
bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects,
embarrassing
first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly
rehabilitated
by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea
isn't
always abandoned because it fails some quality-control test. The imagination
doesn't
crop
annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there:
sometimes
too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of
glut
there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the
writer
nervously
visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work
downstairs,
up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown
collapse
and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?
With
Flaubert, the apocrypha cast a second shadow. If the sweetest moment in life is
a
visit
to the brothel which doesn't come off, perhaps the sweetest moment in writing
is the
arrival
of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied
with a
definite
shape, which never needs be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its
author.
Of
course, the published works themselves aren't immutable: they might now look
different
had Flaubert been awarded time and money to put his literary estate in order.
Bouvard
et Pécuchet would have been finished; Madame Bovary might have been
suppressed
(how seriously do we take Gustave's petulance against the overbearing fame
of
the book? a little seriously); and L'Education sentimentale might have had a
different
ending.
Du Camp records his friend's dismay at the book's historical misfortune: a year
after
publication came the Franco-Prussian war, and it seemed to Gustave that the
invasion
and the debacle at Sedan would have provided a grand, public and irrebuttable
conclusion
to a novel which set out to trace the moral failure of a generation.
'Imagine',
Du Camp reports him as saying, 'the capital one might have made out of
certain
incidents. Here, for instance, is one which would have been excellent in
calibre.
The
capitulation has been signed, the army is under arrest, the Emperor, sunk back
in a
corner
of his large carriage, is gloomy and dull-eyed; he smokes a cigarette to keep
himself
in countenance and, though a tempest is raging within him, tries to appear
impassive.
Beside him are his aides-de-camp and a Prussian General. All are silent, each
glance
is lowered; there is pain in every heart.
'Where
the two roads cross the procession is stopped by a column of prisoners guarded
by
some
Uhlans, who wear the chapska perched on their ear, and ride with couched
lances.
The
carriage has to be stopped before the human flood, which advances amid a cloud of
dust,
reddened by the rays of the sun. The men walk dragging their feet and with
slouched
shoulders. The Emperor's languid eye contemplates this crowd. What a strange
way
to review his troops. He thinks of previous reviews, of the drums beating, of
the
waving
standards, of his generals covered with gold lace and saluting him with their
swords,
and of his guard shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!"
'A
prisoner recognises him and salutes him, then another and another.
'Suddenly
a Zouave leaves the ranks, shakes his fist and cries, "Ah! There you are,
you
villain;
we have been ruined by you!"
'Then
ten thousand men yell insults, wave their arms threateningly, spit upon the
carriage,
and
pass like a whirlwind of curses. The Emperor still remains immovable without
making
a sign or uttering a word, but, he thinks, "Those are the men they used to
call my
Praetorian
Guards!"
'Well,
what do you think of that for a situation? It is pretty powerful, is it not?
That would
have
made rather a stirring final scene for my Education! I cannot console myself
for
having
missed it.'
Should
we mourn such a lost ending? And how do we assess it? Du Camp probably
coarsened
it in the retelling, and there would have been many Flaubertian redraftings
before
publication. Its appeal is clear: the fortissimo climax, the public conclusion
to a
nation's
private failing. But does the book need such an ending? Having had 1848, do we
need
1870 as well? Better to let the novel die away in disenchantment; better the
downbeat
reminiscing of two friends than a swirling salon-picture.
For
the Apocrypha proper, let us be systematic.
1.
Autobiography. 'One day, if I write my memoirs—the only thing I shall write
well, if
ever
I put myself to the task of doing it—you will find a place in them, and what a
place!
For
you have blown a large breach in the walls of my existence.' Gustave writes
this in
one
of his earliest letters to Louise Colet; and over a seven-year period (1846-53)
he
makes
occasional references to the planned autobiography. Then he announces its
official
abandonment.
But was it ever more than just a project for a project? 'I'll put you in my
memoirs'
is one of the handier clichés of literary wooing. File it alongside 'I'll put
you in
motion
pictures', 'I could immortalise you in paint', 'I can just see your neck in
marble',
etc,
etc.
2.
Translations. Lost works, rather than strict apocrypha; but we might note here:
a) Juliet
Herbert's
translation of Madame Bovary, which the novelist oversaw, and which he
proclaimed
'a masterpiece'; b) the translation referred to in a letter of 1844: 'I have
read
Candide
twenty times. I have translated it into English…' This does not sound like a
school
exercise: more like a piece of self-imposed apprenticeship. Judging from
Gustave's
erratic use of English in his letters, the translation probably added a layer
of
unintentional
comedy to the intentions of the original. He couldn't even copy English
place-names
accurately: in 1866, making notes on the 'coloured Minton tiles' at the South
Kensington
Museum, he turns Stoke-upon-Trent into 'Stroke-upon-Trend'.
3.
Fiction. This section of the Apocrypha contains a large amount of juvenilia,
useful
mainly
to the psychobiographer. But the books a writer fails to write in his
adolescence
are
of a different nature from the books he fails to write once he has announced
his
profession.
These are the not-books for which he must take responsibility.
In
1850, while in Egypt, Flaubert spends two days pondering the story of
Mycerinus, a
pious
king of the fourth dynasty who is credited with reopening temples closed by his
predecessors.
In a letter to Bouilhet, however, the novelist characterises his subject more
crudely
as 'the king who fucks his daughter'. Perhaps Flaubert's interest was
encouraged
by
the discovery (or indeed the memory) that in 1837 the king's sarcophagus had
been
excavated
by the British and shipped back to London. Gustave would have been able to
inspect
it when he visited the British Museum in 1851.
I
tried to inspect it myself the other day. The sarcophagus, they told me, is not
one of the
Museum's
more interesting possessions, and hasn't been on display since 1904. Though
believed
to be fourth dynasty when it was shipped, it later turned out to be
twenty-sixth
dynasty:
the portions of mummified body inside might, or equally might not, be those of
Mycerinus.
I felt disappointed, but also relieved: what if Flaubert had continued with his
project,
and inserted a meticulously researched description of the king's tomb? Dr Enid
Starkie
would have been given the chance to swat another Mistake in Literature.
(Perhaps
I should award Dr Starkie an entry in my pocket guide to Flaubert; or would
that
be
unnecessarily vindictive? S for Sade, or S for Starkie? It's coming along well,
by the
way,
Braithwaite's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. All you need to know about Flaubert
to
know
as much as the next person! Only a few more entries and I'll be finished. The
letter
X
is going to be a problem, I can see. There's nothing under X in Flaubert's own
Dictionary.)
In
1850, from Constantinople, Flaubert announces three projects: 'Une nuit de Don
Juan'
(which
reaches the planning stage); 'Anubis', the story of 'the woman who wants to be
fucked
by a god'; and 'My Flemish novel about the young girl who dies a virgin and a
mystic…in
a little provincial town, at the bottom of a garden planted with cabbages and
bulrushes…'
Gustave complains in this letter to Bouilhet about the dangers of planning a
project
too thoroughly: 'It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect
your
children
who are still to be born, you don't get horny enough actually to father them.'
In
the
present cases, Gustave didn't get horny enough; though some see in his third
project a
vague
forerunner of either Madame Bovary or Un coeur simple.
In
1852-3 Gustave makes serious plans for '
and
bawling novel', whose hero lives a typically Flaubertian double life, being
happy in
his
dreams and unhappy in his real life. Its conclusion, of course: that happiness
exists
only
in the imagination.
In
1853, 'one of my old dreams' is resuscitated: a novel about chivalry. Despite
Ariosto
such
a project is still feasible, Gustave declares: the additional elements he will
bring to
the
subject are 'terror and a broader poetry'.
In
1861: 'I've long been meditating a novel on insanity, or rather on how one
becomes
insane.'
From about this time, or a little later, he was also meditating, according to
Du
Camp,
a novel about the theatre; he would sit in the green room jotting down the
confidences
of over-candid actresses. 'Only Le Sage in Gil Blas has touched upon the
truth.
I will reveal it in all its nakedness, for it is impossible to imagine how
comic it is.'
From
this point on, Flaubert must have known that any full-length novel would
probably
take
him five to seven years; and therefore that most of his back-burner projects
would
inevitably
boil themselves dry in the pot. From the last dozen years of his life we find
four
main ideas, plus an intriguing fifth, a sort of roman trouvé.
a)
'Harel-Bey', an Eastern story. 'If I were younger and had the money, I'd go
back to the
Orient—to
study the modern Orient, the Orient of the Isthmus of Suez. A big book about
that
is one of my old dreams. I'd like to show a civilised man who turns barbarian,
and a
barbarian
who becomes a civilised man—to develop that contrast between two worlds
that
end up merging…But it's too late.'
b)
A book about the Battle of Thermopylae, which he planned to write after
finishing
Bouvard
et Pécuchet.
c)
A novel featuring several generations of a Rouen family.
d)
If you cut a flatworm in half, the head will grow a new tail; more
surprisingly, the tail
will
grow a new head. This is what happened with the regretted ending to L'Education
sentimentale:
it generated an entire novel of its own, called first 'Under Napoleon III', and
later
'A Parisian Household'. 'I will write a novel about the Empire [Du Camp reports
him
saying]
and bring in the evening receptions at Compiegne, with all the ambassadors,
marshals
and senators ratding their decorations as they bend to the ground to kiss the
hand
of the Prince Imperial. Yes indeed! The period will furnish material for some
capital
books.'
e)
The roman trouvé was found by Charles Lapierre, editor of Le Nouvelliste de
Rouen.
Dining
at Croisset one evening, Lapierre told Flaubert the scandalous history of
Mademoiselle
de P—. She had been born into the Normandy nobility, had connections at
Court,
and was appointed reader to the Empress Eugene. Her beauty, they said, was
enough
to damn a saint. It was certainly enough to damn her: an open liaison with an
officer
of the Imperial Guard caused her dismissal. Subsequently she became one of the
queens
of the Parisian demi-monde, ruling in the late 1860s over a loucher version of
the
Court
from which she had been excluded. During the Franco-Prussian War, she
disappeared
from sight (along with the rest of her profession), and afterwards her star
waned.
She descended, by all accounts, to the lowest levels of harlotry. And yet,
encouragingly
(for fiction as well as for herself), she proved able to rise again: she
became
the established mistress of a cavalry officer, and by the time she died was the
legal
wife of an admiral.
Flaubert
was delighted with the story: 'Do you know, Lapierre, you've just given me the
subject
of a novel, the counterpart of my Bovary, a Bovary of high society. What an
attractive
figure!' He copied down the story at once, and began to make notes on it. But
the
novel was never written, and the notes have never been found.
All
these unwritten books tantalise. Yet they can, to an extent, be filled out,
ordered,
reimagined.
They can be studied in academies. A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare
at
it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel. The
same is
true
with these stubs of books.
But
what of the unled lives? These, perhaps, are more truly tantalising; these are
the real
apocrypha.
Thermopylae instead of Bouvard et Pécuchet? Well, it's still a book. But if
Gustave
himself had changed course? It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most
people
aren't
writers, and very little harm comes to them. A phrenologist—that careers master
of
the
nineteenth century—once examined Flaubert and told him he was cut out to be a
tamer
of wild beasts. Not so inaccurate either. That quote again: 'I attract mad
people and
animals.'
It
is not just the life that we know. It is not just the life that has been
successfully hidden.
It
is not just the lies about the life, some of which cannot now be disbelieved. It
is also
the
life that was not led.
'Am
I to be a king, or just a pig?' Gustave writes in his Intimate Notebook. At
nineteen, it
always
looks as simple as this. There is the life, and then there is the not-life; the
life of
ambition
served, or the life of porcine failure. Others try and tell you about your
future,
but
you never really believe them. 'Many things', Gustave writes at this time,
'have been
predicted
to me: 1) that I'll learn to dance; 2) that I'll marry. We'll see—I don't
believe it.'
He
never married, and he never learned to dance. He was so resistant to dancing
that most
of
the principal male characters in his novels take sympathetic action and refuse
to dance
as
well.
What
did he learn instead? Instead he learned that life is not a choice between
murdering
your
way to the throne or slopping back in a sty; that there are swinish kings and
regal
hogs;
that the king may envy the pig; and that the possibilities of the not-life will
always
change
tormentingly to fit the particular embarrassments of the lived life.
At
seventeen, he announces that he wants to spend his whole life in a ruined
castle by the
sea.
At
eighteen, he decides that some freakish wind must have mistakenly transplanted
him
to
France: he was born, he declares, to be Emperor of Cochin-China, to smoke
36-fathom
pipes,
to have 6,000 wives and 1,400 catamites; but instead, displaced by this
meteorological
hazard, he is left with immense, insatiable desires, fierce boredom, and an
attack
of the yawns.
At
nineteen, he thinks that after he's finished his legal studies he'll go off and
become a
Turk
in Turkey, or a muleteer in Spain, or a cameleer in Egypt.
At
twenty, he still wants to become a muleteer, though by now the Spanish location
has
been
narrowed to that of Andalusia. Other career possibilities include the life of a
lazzarone
in Naples; though he'd settle for being the driver of the coach which plies
between
Nimes and Marseilles. Yet is any of this rare enough? The ease with which even
the
bourgeois travel nowadays comes as an agony to one who has 'the Bosphorus in
the
soul'.
At
twenty-four, with his father and sister newly dead, he plans what to do with
his life
should
his mother die as well: he would sell up everything and live in Rome, Syracuse
or
Naples.
Still
twenty-four, and presenting himself to Louise Colet as a fellow of infinite
whim, he
claims
that he has thought long and very seriously about the idea of becoming a bandit
in
Smyrna.
But at the very least 'someday I shall go and live far away from here and never
be
heard of again'. Perhaps Louise is little amused by Ottoman banditry; for now a
more
domestic
fantasy appears. If only he were free, he would leave Croisset and come to live
with
her in Paris. He imagines their life together, their marriage, a sweet
existence of
mutual
love and mutual companionship. He imagines their having a child together; he
imagines
Louise's death and his own subsequent tenderness in caring for the motherless
infant
(we do not, alas, have Louise's response to this particular flight). The exotic
appeal
of
the domestic does not, however, last. Within a month the tense of the verb
curdles: 'It
seems
to me that if I had been your husband, we would have been happy together. After
we'd
been happy, then we would have hated one another. This is normal.' Louise is
expected
to be grateful that Gustave's far-sightedness has spared her such an
unsatisfactory
life.
So
instead, and still twenty-four, Gustave sits over a map with Du Camp and plans
a
monster
journey to Asia. It would last six years and would cost, at their own rough
estimate,
three million six hundred thousand and a few odd francs.
At
twenty-five he wants to be a Brahmin: the mystic dance, the long hair, the face
dripping
with holy butter. He officially renounces wanting to be a Camaldolese, a
brigand
or
a Turk. 'Now it's a Brahmin, or nothing at all—which would be simpler.' Go on,
be
nothing
at all, life urges. Being a pig is simple.
At
twenty-nine, inspired by Humboldt, he wants to go off and live in South
America,
among
the savannahs, and never be heard of again.
At
thirty he muses—as he did throughout his life—on his own previous incarnations,
on
his
apocryphal or metempsychotic lives in the more interesting times of Louis XIV,
Nero
and
Pericles. Of one preincarnation he is certain: he was, at some point during the
Roman
Empire,
the director of a troupe of travelling comedians, the sort of plausible rogue
who
bought
women in Sicily and turned them into actresses, a rowdy mixture of teacher,
pimp
and
artist. (Reading Plautus has reminded Gustave of this previous life: it gives
him le
frisson
historique.) Here we should also note Gustave's apocryphal ancestry: he liked
to
claim
that he had Red Indian blood in his veins. This seems to have been not quite
the
case;
though one of his ancestors did emigrate to Canada in the seventeenth century
and
become
a beaver-trapper.
Still
thirty, he projects a seemingly more probable life, but one which proves
equally to
be
a not-life. He and Bouilhet play at imagining themselves old men, patients in
some
hospice
for incurables: ancients who sweep the streets and babble to one another of
that.
happy
time when they were both thirty and walked all the way to
mocked
senility was never attained: Bouilhet died at forty-eight, Flaubert at
fifty-eight.
At
thirty-one, he remarks to Louise—a parenthesis to a hypothesis—that if he had
ever
had
a son, he would have taken great pleasure in procuring women for him.
Also
at thirty-one, he reports a brief, untypical lapse to Louise: the desire to
chuck in
literature.
He will come and live with her, inside her, his head between her breasts; he is
fed
up, he says, with masturbating that head of his to make the phrases spurt. But
this
fantasy
is also a chilling tease: it's recounted in the past tense, as something which
Gustave,
in a moment of weakness, fleetingly imagined himself doing. He would always
rather
have his head between his own hands than between Louise's breasts.
At
thirty-two, he confesses to Louise the manner in which he has spent many hours
of his
life:
imagining what he would do if he had an income of a million francs a year. In
such
dreams
servants would ease him into shoes studded with diamonds; he would cock an ear
to
the whinny of his coach-horses, whose splendour would make England die of
jealousy;
he
would give oyster banquets, and have his dining-room surrounded by espaliers of
flowering
jasmine, out of which bright finches would swoop. But this, at a million a
year,
was
a cheap dream. Du Camp reports Gustave's plan for 'A Winter in Paris'—an
extravaganza
incorporating the luxury of the Roman Empire, the refinement of the
Renaissance,
and the faerie of the Thousand and One Nights. The Winter had been
seriously
costed, and it came out at twelve thousand million francs 'at the most'. Du
Camp
also
adds, more generally, that 'when these dreams took possession of him, he became
almost
rigid, and reminded one of an opium-eater in a state of trance. He seemed to
have
his
head in the clouds, to be living in a dream of gold. This habit was one reason
why he
found
steady work difficult.'
At
thirty-five, he reveals 'my private dream': to buy a little palazzo on the
Grand Canal. A
few
months later, a kiosk on the Bosphorus is added to the real estate in his head.
A few
months
more, and he is ready to leave for the East, to stay there, to die there. The
painter
Camille
Rogier, who lives in Beirut, has invited him. He could go; just like that. He
could;
he doesn't.
At
thirty-five, however, the apocryphal life, the not-life, begins to die away.
The reason is
clear:
the real life has really begun. Gustave was thirty-five when Madame Bovary came
out
in book form. The fantasies are no longer needed; or rather, different,
particular,
practical
fantasies are now required. For the world, he will play the Hermit of Croisset;
for
his friends in Paris, he will play the Idiot of the Salons; for George Sand he
will play
the
Reverend Father Cruchard, a fashionable Jesuit who enjoys hearing the
confessions of
society
women; for his intimate circle he will play Saint Polycarpe, that obscure
Bishop
of
Smyrna, martyred in the nick of time at the age of ninety-five, who pre-echoed
Flaubert
by stopping up his ears and crying out, 'Oh Lord! Into what an age you have
caused
me to be born!' But these identities are no longer lurid alibis towards which
he
might
credibly escape; they are playthings, alternative lives issued under licence by
the
celebrated
author. He does not run off to become a bandit in Smyrna; instead, he
summons
the useful Bishop of Smyrna to live within his skin. He has proved not a tamer
of
wild beasts, but a tamer of wild lives. Pacification of the apocryphal is
complete:
writing
can begin.
10:
The Case Against
What
makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the
best?
Does
curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to
know
the
worst is love's favourite perversion?
For
some, this curiosity operates as baleful fantasy. I had a patient once, a
respectable
nine-to-fiver
otherwise untouched by imagination, who confessed that while making love
to
his wife he liked to picture her spread blissfully beneath mountainous
hidalgos, sleek
lascars,
rummaging dwarfs. Shock me, the fantasy urges, appal me. For others, the search
is
real. I have known couples to take pride in one another's tawdry behaviour:
each
pursuing
the other's folly, the other's vanity, the other's weakness. What were they
really
after?
Something, evidently, which lay beyond what they appeared to seek. Perhaps some
final
confirmation that mankind itself was ineradicably corrupt, that life was indeed
just a
gaudy
nightmare in the head of an imbecile?
I
loved Ellen, and I wanted to know the worst. I never provoked her; I was
cautious and
defensive,
as is my habit; I didn't even ask questions; but I wanted to know the worst.
Ellen
never returned this caress. She was fond of me—she would automatically agree,
as
if
the matter weren't worth discussing, that she loved me—but she unquestioningly
believed
the best about me. That's the difference. She didn't ever search for that
sliding
panel
which opens the secret chamber of the heart, the chamber where memory and
corpses
are kept. Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn't open; sometimes it
opens,
and
your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you've looked.
That's the
real
distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who
don't,
but
between those who want to know everything and those who don't. This search is a
sign
of love, I maintain.
It's
similar with books. Not quite the same, of course (it never is); but similar.
If you quite
enjoy
a writer's work, if you turn the page approvingly yet don't mind being
interrupted,
then
you tend to like that author unthinkingly. Good chap, you assume. Sound fellow.
They
say he strangled an entire pack of Wolf Cubs and fed their bodies to a school
of
carp?
Oh no, I'm sure he didn't: sound fellow, good chap. But if you love a writer,
if you
depend
upon the drip-feed of his intelligence, if you want to pursue him and find him—
despite
edicts to the contrary—then it's impossible to know too much. You seek the vice
as
well. A pack of Wolf Cubs, eh? Was that twenty-seven or twenty-eight? And did
he
have
their little scarves sewn up into a patchwork quilt? And is it true that as he
ascended
the
scaffold he quoted from the Book of Jonah?And that he bequeathed his carp pond
to
the
local Boy Scouts?
But
here's the difference. With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst—be it
infidelity
or
lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark—you are almost relieved. Life is as
I
thought
it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment? With a writer you love, the
instinct
is to defend. This is what I meant earlier: perhaps love for a writer is the
purest,
the
steadiest form of love. And so your defence comes the more easily. The fact of
the
matter
is, carp are an endangered species, and everyone knows that the only diet they
will
accept
if the winter has been especially harsh and the spring turns wet before St Oursin's
Day
is that of young minced Wolf Cub. Of course he knew he would hang for the
offence,
but he also knew that humanity is not an endangered species, and reckoned
therefore
that twenty-seven (did you say twenty-eight?) Wolf Cubs plus one middle
ranking
author (he was always ridiculously modest about his talents) were a trivial
price
to
pay for the survival of an entire breed of fish. Take the long view: did we
need so
many
Wolf Cubs? They would only have grown up and become Boy Scouts. And if
you're
still mired in sentimentality, look at it this way: the admission fees so far
received
from
visitors to the carp pond have already enabled the Boy Scouts to build and
maintain
several
church halls in the area.
So
go on. Read the charge-sheet. I had expected it at some point. But don't forget
this:
Gustave
has been in the dock before. How many offences are there this time?
1.
That he hated humanity.
Yes,
yes, of course. You always say that. I'll give you two sorts of answer. First,
let's start
with
basics. He loved his mother: doesn't that warm your silly, sentimental,
twentiethcentury
heart?
He loved his father. He loved his sister. He loved his niece. He loved his
friends.
He admired certain individuals. But his affections were always specific; they
were
not given away to all comers. This seems enough to me. You want him to do more?
You
want him to 'love humanity', to goose the human race? But that means nothing.
Loving
humanity means as much and as little as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky
Way.
You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren't treating yourself to
easy
self-congratulation,
seeking approval, making certain you're on the right side?
Secondly,
even if he did hate humanity—or was profoundly unimpressed by it, as I would
prefer
to say—was he wrong? You, clearly, are quite impressed by humanity: it's all
clever
irrigation schemes, missionary work and micro-electronics to you. Forgive him
for
seeing
it differently. It's clear we're going to have to discuss this at some length.
But let
me
first, briefly, quote to you one of your wise men of the twentieth century:
Freud. Not,
you
will agree, someone with an axe to grind? You want his summing-up on the human
race,
ten years before his death? 'In the depths of my heart I can't help being
convinced
that
my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.' This from the man
that
most
people, for most of this century, believed most thoroughly understood the human
heart.
It is a little embarrassing, is it not?
But
come, it's time for you to be rather more specific.
2.
That he hated democracy.
La
démocrasserie, as he called it in a letter to Taine. Which do you prefer—
democrappery
or democrassness? Democrappiness, perhaps? He was, it is true, very
unimpressed
by it. From which you should not conclude that he favoured tyranny, or
absolute
monarchy, or bourgeois monarchy, or bureaucratised totalitarianism, or anarchy,
or
whatever. His preferred model of government was a Chinese one—that of the
Mandarinate;
though he readily admitted that its chances of introduction into France were
extremely
small. The Mandarinate seems a step back to you? But you forgive Voltaire his
enthusiasm
for enlightened monarchy: why not forgive Flaubert, a century later, his
enthusiasm
for enlightened oligarchy? He did not, at least, entertain the childish fantasy
of
some literati: that writers are better fitted to run the world than anybody
else.
The
main point is this: Flaubert thought democracy merely a stage in the history of
government,
and he thought it a typical vanity on our part to assume that it represented
the
finest, proudest way for men to rule one another. He believed in—or rather, he
did not
fail
to notice—the perpetual evolution of humanity, and therefore the evolution of
its
social
forms: 'Democracy isn't mankind's last word, any more than slavery was, or
feudalism
was, or monarchy was.' The best form of government, he maintained, is one
that
is dying, because this means it's giving way to something else.
3.
That he didn't believe in progress.
I
cite the twentieth century in his defence.
4.
That he wasn't interested enough in politics.
Interested
'enough'? You admit, at least, that he was interested. You are suggesting,
tactfully,
that he didn't like what he saw (correct), and that if he had seen more, he
would
perhaps
have come round to your way of thinking in these matters (incorrect). I should
like
to make two points, the first of which I shall put into italics, since this
seems to be
your
favourite mode of utterance. Literature includes politics, and not vice versa.
This
isn't
a fashionable view, neither with writers nor politicians, but you will forgive
me.
Novelists
who think their writing an instrument of politics seem to me to degrade writing
and
foolishly exalt politics. No, I'm not saying they should be forbidden from
having
political
opinions or from making political statements. It's just that they should call
that
part
of their work journalism. The writer who imagines that the novel is the most
effective
way of taking part in politics is usually a bad novelist, a bad journalist, and
a
bad
politician.
Du
Camp followed politics carefully, Flaubert sporadically. Which do you prefer?
The
former.
And which of them was the greater writer? The latter. And what were their
politics?
Du Camp became a lethargic meliorist; Flaubert remained 'an enraged liberal'.
Does
that surprise you? But even if Flaubert had described himself as a lethargic
meliorist,
I should make the same point: what a curious vanity it is of the present to
expect
the past to suck up to it. The present looks back at some great figure of an
earlier
century
and wonders, Was he on our side? Was he a goodie? What a lack of selfconfidence
this
implies: the present wants both to patronise the past by adjudicating on its
political
acceptability, and also to be flattered by it, to be patted on the back and
told to
keep
up the good work. If this is what you understand by Monsieur Flaubert not being
'interested
enough' in politics, then I'm afraid my client must plead guilty.
5.
That he was against the Commune.
Well,
what I've said above is part of the answer. But there is also this
consideration, this
incredible
weakness of character on my client's part: he was on the whole against people
killing
one another. Call it squeamishness, but he did disapprove. He never killed
anyone
himself,
I have to admit; in fact, he never even tried. He promises to do better in
future.
6.
That he was unpatriotic.
Permit
me a short laugh. Ah. That's better. I thought patriotism was a bad thing
nowadays.
I thought we would all rather betray our country than our friends. Is that not
so?
Have things turned upside down yet again? What am I expected to say? On
September
22nd, 1870, Flaubert bought himself a revolver; at Croisset, he drilled his
ragged
collection of men in expectation of a Prussian advance; he took them out on
night
patrols;
he told them to shoot him if he tried to run away. By the time the Prussians
came,
there
was not much he could sensibly do except look after his aged mother. He could
perhaps
have submitted himself to some army medical board, but whether they would
have
enthused over the application of a 48-year-old epileptic syphilitic with no
military
experience
except that acquired while shooting wild-life in the desert—
7.
That he shot wild-life in the desert.
Oh,
for Christ's sake. We plead noli contendere. And besides I haven't finished
with the
question
of patriotism. May I instruct you briefly on the nature of the novelist? What
is
the
easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society
in
which
he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly
about its
follies.
'I am as much a Chinaman as a Frenchman,' Flaubert declared. Not, that is, more
of
a Chinaman: had he been born in Peking, no doubt he would have disappointed
patriots
there too. The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving
dishonourably,
foolishly, viciously. The writer must be universal in sympathy and an
outcast
by nature: only then can he see clearly. Flaubert always sides with minorities,
with
'the Bedouin, the Heretic, the philosopher, the hermit, the Poet'. In 1867
forty-three
gypsies
pitched camp in the Cours
Rouennais.
Flaubert delighted in their presence and gave them money. No doubt you
wish
to pat him on the head for this. If he'd known he was gaining the approval of
the
future,
he'd probably have kept the money to himself.
8.
That he didn't involve himself in life.
'You
can depict wine, love, women and glory on the condition that you're not a
drunkard,
a
lover, a husband or a private in the ranks. If you participate in life, you
don't see it
clearly:
you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much.' This isn't a reply of
guilty, it's
a
complaint that the charge is wrongly phrased. What do you mean by life?
Politics?
We've
dealt with that. The emotional life? Through his family, friends and
mistresses,
Gustave
knew all the stations of the cross. Marriage, you mean perhaps? A curious
complaint,
though not a new one. Does marriage produce better novels than
bachelorhood?
Are the philoprogenitive better writers than the childless? I should like to
see
your statistics.
The
best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
Are we
confident
that our judgment in the matter is better than his? Flaubert was more
'involved',
to
use your term, than many: Henry James by comparison was a nun. Flaubert may
have
tried
to live in an ivory tower—
8.
That he tried to live in an ivory tower.
but
he failed. 'I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit
is beating at
its
walls, threatening to undermine it.'
Three
points need to be made. One is that the writer chooses—as far as he can—the
extent
of what you call his involvement in life: despite his reputation, Flaubert
occupied a
half-and-half
position. 'It isn't the drunkard who writes the drinking song': he knew that.
On
the other hand, it isn't the teetotaller either. He put it best, perhaps, when
he said that
the
writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
Secondly,
when readers complain about the lives of writers—why didn't he do this; why
didn't
he protest to the newspapers about that; why wasn't he more involved in life?—
aren't
they really asking a simpler, and vainer, question: why isn't he more like us?
But if
a
writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer: it's as
uncomplicated as
that.
Thirdly,
what is the thrust of the complaint as far as the books are concerned?
Presumably
the regret that Flaubert wasn't more involved in life isn't just a
philanthropic
wish
for him: if only old Gustave had had a wife and kiddies, he wouldn't have been
so
glum
about the whole shooting-match? If only he'd got caught up in politics, or good
works,
or become a governor of his old school, he'd have been taken out of himself
more?
Presumably you think there are faults in the books which could have been
remedied
by a change in the writer's life. If so, I think it is up to you to state them.
For
myself,
I cannot think that, for instance, the portrait of provincial manners in Madame
Bovary
is lacking in some particular aspect which would have been remedied had its
author
clinked tankards of cider every evening with some gouty Norman bergère.
9.
That he was a pessimist.
Ah.
I begin to see what you mean. You wish his books were a bit more cheerful, a
bit
more…how
would you put it, life-enhancing? What a curious idea of literature you do
have.
Is your PhD from Bucharest? I didn't know one had to defend authors for being
pessimists.
This is a new one. I decline to do so. Flaubert said: 'You don't make art out
of
good
intentions.' He also said: 'The public wants works which flatter its illusions.'
10.
That he teaches no positive virtues.
Now
you are coming out into the open. So this is how we are to judge our writers—on
their
'positive virtues'? Well, I suppose I must play your game briefly: it's what
you have
to
do in the courts. Take all the obscenity trials from Madame Bovary to Lady
Chatterley's
Lover: there's always some element of games-playing, of compliance, in the
defence.
Others might call it tactical hypocrisy. (Is this book sexy? No, M'Lud, we hold
that
it would have an emetic, not a mimetic, effect on any reader. Does this book
encourage
adultery? No, M'Lud, look how the miserable sinner who gives herself time
and
time again to riotous pleasure is punished in the end. Does this book attack
marriage?
No,
M'Lud, it portrays a vile and hopeless marriage so that others may learn that
only by
following
Christian instructions will their own marriages be happy. Is this book
blasphemous?
No, M'Lud, the novelist's thought is chaste.) As a forensic argument, of
course,
it has been successful; but I sometimes feel a residual bitterness that one of
these
defence
counsel, when speaking for a true work of literature, did not build his act on
simple
defiance. (Is this book sexy? M'Lud, we bloody well hope so. Does it encourage
adultery
and attack marriage? Spot on, M'Lud, that's exactly what my client is trying to
do.
Is this book blasphemous? For Christ's sake, M'Lud, the matter's as clear as
the
loincloth
on the Crucifixion. Put it this way, M'Lud: my client thinks that most of the
values
of the society in which he lives stink, and he hopes with this book to promote
fornication,
masturbation, adultery, the stoning of priests and, since we've temporarily got
your
attention, M'Lud, the suspension of corrupt judges by their earlobes. The
defence
rests
its case.)
So,
briefly: Flaubert teaches you to gaze upon the truth and not blink from its
consequences;
he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on the pillow of doubt; he
teaches
you to dissect out the constituent parts of reality, and to observe that Nature
is
always
a mixture of genres; he teaches you the most exact use of language; he teaches
you
not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills—literature is not a
pharmacopoeia;
he teaches the pre-eminence of Truth, Beauty, Feeling and Style. And if
you
study his pr to life, he teaches courage, stoicism, friendship; the importance
of
intelligence,
scepticism and wit; the folly of cheap patriotism; the virtue of being able to
remain
by yourself in your own room; the hatred of hypocrisy; distrust of the
doctrinaire;
the
need for plain speaking. Is that the way you like writers to be described (I do
not care
for
it much myself)? Is it enough? It's all I'm giving you for the moment: I seem
to be
embarrassing
my client.
11.
That he was a sadist.
Rubbish.
My client was a soft touch. Cite me a single sadistic, or even unkind, thing he
did
in his whole life. I'll tell you the unkindest thing I know about him: he was
caught
being
beastly to a woman at a party for no obvious reason. When asked why, he
replied,
'Because
she might want to come into my study.' That's the worst thing I know about my
client.
Unless you count the occasion in Egypt when he tried to go to bed with a
prostitute
while
suffering from the pox. That was a little deceitful, I admit. But he didn't
succeed:
the
girl, following the normal precautions of her profession, asked to examine him
and,
when
he refused, sent him packing.
He
read Sade, of course. What educated French writer doesn't? I gather he is
currently
popular
among Parisian intellectuals. My client told the Goncourt brothers that Sade
was
'entertaining
nonsense'. He kept a few gruesome mementoes around him, it is true; he
enjoyed
recounting horrors; there are lurid passages in his early work. But you say he
had
a
'Sadeian imagination'? I am puzzled. You specify: Salammbô contains scenes of
shocking
violence. I reply: do you think they didn't happen? Do you think the Ancient
World
was all rose petals, lute music, and plump vats of honey sealed with bear fat?
11a.
That there are a lot of animals slaughtered in his books.
He
isn't Walt Disney, no. He was interested in cruelty, I agree. He was interested
in
everything.
As well as Sade, there was Nero. But listen to what he says about them:
'These
monsters explain history for me.' He is, I must add, all of seventeen at the
time.
And
let me give you another quote: 'I love the vanquished, but I also love the
victors.' He
strives,
as I've said, to be as much a Chinaman as a Frenchman. There is an earthquake
in
Leghorn:
Flaubert doesn't cry out in sympathy. He feels as much sympathy for these
victims
as he does for slaves who died centuries earlier turning some tyrant's grindstone.
You
are shocked? It's called having a historical imagination. It's called being a
citizen,
not
just of the world, but of all time. It's what Flaubert described as being
'brother in God
to
everything that lives, from the giraffe and the crocodile to man'. It's called
being a
writer.
12.
That he was beastly to women.
Women
loved him. He enjoyed their company; they enjoyed his; he was gallant,
flirtatious;
he went to bed with them. He just didn't want to marry them. Is that a sin?
Perhaps
some of his sexual attitudes were pungently those of his time and his class;
but
who
then in the nineteenth century shall escape whipping? He stood, at least, for
honesty
in
sexual dealings: hence his preference for the prostitute over the grisette.
Such honesty
brought
him more trouble than hypocrisy would have done—with Louise Colet, for
instance.
When he told her the truth it sounded like cruelty. But she was a pest, wasn't
she?
(Let me answer my own question. I think she was a pest; she sounds like a pest;
though
admittedly we hear only Gustave's side of the story. Perhaps someone should
write
her account: yes, why not reconstruct Louise Colet's Version? I might do that.
Yes,
I
will.)
If
I may say so, a lot of your charges could probably be reclassified under a
single
heading:
That he wouldn't have liked us if he'd known us. To which he might be inclined
to
plead guilty; if only to see the expression on our face.
13
That he believed in Beauty.
I
think I've got something lodged in my ear. Probably a bit of wax. Just give me
a
moment
to grip my nose and blow out through my eardrums.
14.
That he was obsessed with style.
You
are babbling. Do you still think the novel divides, like Gaul, into three
parts—the
Idea,
the Form and the Style? If so, you are taking your own first tremulous steps
into
fiction.
You want some maxims for writing? Very well. Form isn't an overcoat flung over
the
flesh of thought (that old comparison, old in Flaubert's day); it's the flesh
of thought
itself.
You can no more imagine an Idea without a Form than a Form without an Idea.
Everything
in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the
story
of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings
are
true,
and let everything else go hang. When a line is good, it ceases to belong to
any
school.
A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry. If you happen to
write
well,
you are accused of lacking ideas.
All
these maxims are by Flaubert, except for the one by Bouilhet.
15.
That he didn't believe Art had a social purpose.
No,
he didn't. This is wearying. 'You provide desolation,' wrote George Sand, 'and
I
provide
consolation.' To which Flaubert replied, 'I cannot change my eyes.' The work of
art
is a pyramid which stands in the desert, uselessly: jackals piss at the base of
it, and
bourgeois
clamber to the top of it; continue this comparison. Do you want art to be a
healer?
Send for the AMBULANCE GEORGE SAND. Do you want art to tell the truth?
Send
for the AMBULANCE FLAUBERT: though don't be surprised, when it arrives, if it
runs
over your leg. Listen to Auden: 'Poetry makes nothing happen.' Do not imagine
that
Art
is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art
is not a
brassière.
At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassière is the
French
for
life jacket.
11:
Louise Colet's Version
Now
hear my story. I insist. Look, take my arm, like that, and let's just walk. I
have tales
to
tell; you will like them. We'll follow the quai, and cross that bridge—no, the
second
one—and
perhaps we could take a cognac somewhere, and wait until the gas-lamps dim,
and
then walk back. Come, you're surely not frightened of me? So why that look? You
think
I am a dangerous woman? Well, that's a form of flattery—I accept the
compliment.
Or
perhaps…perhaps it's what I might have to say that you're frightened of?
Aha…well,
it's
too late now. You have taken my arm; you cannot drop it. After all, I am older
than
you.
It is your job to protect me.
I
have no interest in slander. Slip your fingers down my forearm, if you want to;
yes,
there,
now feel the pulse. I am not vengeful tonight. Some friends say, Louise, you
must
answer
fire with fire, lie with lie. But I do not wish to. Of course I have lied in my
time; I
have—what
is that word your sex favours?—I have schemed. But women scheme when
they
are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out
of
arrogance.
You don't agree? I only speak from observation; yours may be different, I
grant.
But you see how calm I am? I am calm because I feel strong. And—what's that?
Perhaps,
if I am strong, then I am scheming like a man? Come, let's not be complicated.
I
did not need Gustave to come into my life. Look at the facts. I was
thirty-five, I was
beautiful,
I was…renowned. I had conquered first Aix, then Paris. I had won the
Academia's
poetry prize twice. I had translated Shakespeare. Victor Hugo called me
sister,
Béranger called me Muse. As for my private life: my husband was respect in his
profession;
my…protector was the most brilliant philosopher of his age. You haven't read
Victor
Cousin? Then you should. A fascinating mind. The only man who truly
understood
Plato. A friend of your philosopher Mr Mill. And then, there was—or there
was
soon to be—Musset, Vigny, Champfleury. I do not boast of my conquests; I do not
need
to. But you see my point. I was the candle; he was the moth. The mistress of
Socrates
deigned to cast her smile on this unknown poet. I was his catch; he wasn't
mine.
We
met at Pradier's. I could see the banality of that; though of course he
couldn't. The
sculptor's
studio, the free talk, the unclothed model, the mixture of demi-monde and
three-quarter-monde.
To me it was all familiar (why, only a few years before I'd danced
there
with a stiff-backed medical student by the name of Achille Flaubert). And, of
course,
I wasn't present as a spectator; I was there to sit for Pradier. Whereas
Gustave? I
do
not want to be harsh, but when I first set eyes on him I knew the type at once:
the big,
gangling
provincial, so eager and relieved to find himself at last in artistic circles.
I know
how
they talk, out in the provinces, with that mixture of fake self-confidence and
real
fear:
'Go to Pradier's, my boy, you'll always find some little actress there to be
your
mistress,
and grateful she'll be too.' And the boy in Toulouse or Poitiers or Bordeaux or
Rouen,
still secretly anxious about the long journey to the capital, feels his head
filling up
with
snobbery and lust. I understood, you see, because I had been a provincial
myself. I
had
made the journey from Aix a dozen years earlier. I had come a long way; and I
could
recognise
the signs of travel in others.
Gustave
was twenty-four. To my mind, age does not matter; love is what matters. I did
not
need to have Gustave in my life. If I had been looking for a lover—I admit my
husband's
fortunes were not at their brightest, and my friendship with the Philosopher
was
a little turbulent at that time—then I should not have chosen Gustave. But I
have no
stomach
for fat bankers. And besides, you do not look, you do not choose, do you? You
are
chosen; you are elected into love by a secret ballot against which there is no
appeal.
I
do not blush at the difference between our ages? Why should I? You men are so
conformist
in love, so provincial in imagination; that is why we have to flatter you, to
prop
you up with little lies. So: I was thirty-five, Gustave was twenty-four. I
state it and
pass
on. Perhaps you do not want to pass on; in which case I shall answer your
unspoken
question.
If you wish to examine the mental condition of the couple entering into such a
liaison,
then you do not need to look at mine. Examine Gustave's. Why? I will give you a
pair
of dates. I was born in
remember
Gustave's Madame Schlesinger, the woman who first cicatrised his adolescent
heart,
the woman with whom everything was doomed and hopeless, the woman of whom
he
used to boast furtively, the woman for whose sake he had bricked up his heart
(and
you
accuse our sex of vain romance?). Well, this Mme Schlesinger, I happen to know,
was
also born in 1810, and also in September. Eight days after me, to be precise,
on the
23rd.
You see?
You
look at me in a way that is familiar. I surmise that you want me to tell you
how
Gustave
was as a lover. Men, I know, talk of such things with eagerness, with a little
contempt;
it is as if they were describing the last meal they had, course by course. So
much
detachment. Women are not like that; or at least the details, the weaknesses
they
dwell
on in narration, are only rarely the physical ones that men delight in. We look
for
signs
that speak to us of character—good or bad. Men look only for signs which
flatter
them.
They are so vain in bed, much more vain than women. Outside, the sexes are more
evenly
matched, I admit.
I
will reply a little more freely, because you are who you are; and because it is
Gustave of
whom
I speak. He always used to lecture people, tell them about the honesty of the
artist,
the
necessity .not to speak like a bourgeois. Well, if I lift the sheets a little,
he has only
himself
to blame.
He
was eager, my Gustave. It was—God knows—never easy to persuade him to meet
me;
but once he was there…Whatever the battles that occurred between us, none of
them
was
fought in the province of the night. There, we embraced by lightning; there,
violent
wonder
lay entwined with soft playfulness. He cried a bottle of water from the River
Mississippi
with which, he said, he planned to baptise my breast as a sign of love. He was
a
strong young man, and I delighted in that strength: he once signed a letter to
me 'Your
wild
boy of Aveyron'.
He
had, of course, the eternal delusion of strong young men, that women gauge
passion
by
counting the number of times that the assault is renewed in the course of a
single
night.
Well, to some extent we do: who would deny that? It is flattering, is it not?
But it is
not
what counts finally. And after a while, there seems something almost military
about
it.
Gustave had a way of talking about the women he had enjoyed. He would recall
some
prostitute
he had frequented in the rue de
would
boast to me. It was his habitual turn of phrase. I found it coarse, but I did
not mind:
we
were artists together, you see. However, I noted the metaphor. The more shots
you
fire
into somebody, the more likely they are to be dead at the end of it. Is that
what men
want?
Do they need a corpse as proof of their virility? I suspect they do, and women,
with
the logic of flattery, remember to exclaim at the transporting moment, 'Oh, I
die! I
die!'
or some such phrase. After a bout of love, I often find that my brain is at its
sharpest;
I
see things clearly; I feel poetry coming to me. But I know better than to
interrupt the
hero
with my babblings; instead I ape the satisfied cadaver.
In
the province of the night there was harmony between us. Gustave was not shy.
Nor
was
he narrow in his tastes. I was—why should I be modest—undoubtedly the most
beautiful,
the most renowned, the most desirable woman with whom he ever slept (if I
had
any rival, it was only a strange beast I shall tell you of later). He was,
naturally,
sometimes
nervous in the face of my beauty; and at other times needlessly pleased with
himself.
I understood. Before me there had been prostitutes, of course, grisettes, and
friends.
Ernest, Alfred, Louis, Max: the band of students, that was how I thought of
them.
Sodality
confirmed by sodomy. No, perhaps that's unfair; I do not know precisely who,
precisely
when, precisely what; though I do know that Gustave was never tired of
doubles
ententes about la pipe. I also know he was never tired of gazing at me as I lay
on
my
front.
I
was different, you see. Prostitutes were uncomplicated; grisettes could be paid
off too;
men
were different—friendship, however deep, had its known limits. But love? And
losing
yourself? And some partnership, some equality? He didn't dare risk it. I was
the
only
woman to whom he was sufficiently drawn; and he chose, out of fear, to
humiliate
me.
I think we should feel sorry for Gustave.
He
used to send me flowers. Special flowers; the convention of an unconventional
lover.
He
sent me a rose once. He gathered it one Sunday morning at Croisset, from a
hedge in
his
garden. 'I kiss it,' he wrote. 'Put it quickly to your mouth, and then—you know
where…Adieu!
A thousand kisses. I am yours from night to day, from day to night.' Who
could
resist such sentiments? I kissed the rose, and that night, in bed, I placed it
where he
desired
me to. In the morning, when I awoke, the rose had by the motions of the night
been
reduced to its fragrant parts. The sheets smelt of Croisset—that place which I
did
not
yet know would be forbidden to me; there was a petal between two of my toes,
and a
thin
scratch down the inside of my right thigh. Gustave, eager and clumsy as he was,
had
forgotten
to smooth the stem of the rose.
The
next flower was not such a happy one. Gustave went off on his tour of Brittany.
Was
I
wrong to make a fuss? Three months! We had known one another less than a year,
all
Paris
knew of our passion, and he chose three months in the company of Du Camp! We
could
have been like George Sand and Chopin; greater than them! And Gustave insists
on
disappearing
for three months with that ambitious catamite of his. Was I wrong to make a
fuss?
Was it not a direct insult, an attempt to humiliate me? And yet he said, when I
expressed
my feelings to him in public (I am not ashamed of love—why should I be? I
would
declare myself in the waiting-room of a railway station if it were necessary),
he
said
that I was humiliating him. Imagine! He cast me off. Ultima, I wrote on the
last letter
he
sent me before his departure.
It
wasn't, of course, his last letter. No sooner was he striding across that
tedious
countryside,
pretending to be interested in disused châteaux and drab churches (three
months!),
than hean to miss me. The letters started to arrive, the apologies, the
confessions,
the pleas that I should reply to him. He was always like that. When he was at
Croisset,
he dreamed of the hot sand and the shimmering Nile; when he was on the Nile,
he
dreamed of damp fogs and shimmering Croisset. He didn't really like travel, of
course.
He
liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself. For
once I
agree
with Du Camp, who used to say that Gustave's preferred form of travel was to
lie
on
a divan and have the scenery carried past him. As for that famous oriental trip
of
theirs,
Du Camp (yes, the odious Du Camp, the unreliable Du Camp) maintained that
Gustave
spent most of the journey in a state of torpor.
But
anyway: while he was tramping through that dull and backward province with his
malign
companion, Gustave sent me another flower, plucked from beside the tomb of
Châteaubriand.
He wrote of the calm sea at St Malo, the pink sky, the sweet air. It makes
a
fine scene, does it not? The romantic grave on that rocky promontory; the great
man
lying
there, his head pointing out to sea, listening for all eternity to the comings
and
goings
of the tide; the young writer, with stirrings of genius inside him, kneels by
the
tomb,
watches the pink drain slowly from the evening sky, reflects—in the way young
men
are wont to do—on eternity, the fugitive nature of life and the consolations of
greatness,
then gathers a flower which has rooted itself in Châteaubriand's dust, and
sends
it
to his beautiful mistress in Paris…Could I be unmoved by such a gesture? Of
course
not.
But I could not help observing that a flower plucked from a grave brings with
it
certain
reverberations when sent to one who has written Ultima on a letter received not
long
before. And I also could not help observing that Gustave's letter was posted
from
Pontorson,
which is forty kilometres from St Malo. Did Gustave pick the flower for
himself
and then, after forty kilometres, grow weary of it? Or perhaps—such a
suggestion
arises
in me only because I have lain next to the contagious soul of Gustave
himself—did
he
gather it elsewhere? Did he think of the gesture a little too late? Who can
resist l'esprit
de
l'escalier, even in love?
My
flower—the one that I remember best out of many—was gathered where I said it
had
been.
In Windsor Park. It was after my tragic visit to Croisset and the humiliation
of not
being
received, after the brutality, the pain and the horror of it all. You have
heard
different
versions, no doubt? The truth is simple.
I
had to see him. We had to talk. You do not dismiss love in the way you dismiss
your
hairdresser.
He would not come to me in Paris; so I went to him. I took the train (beyond
Mantes,
this time) to Rouen. I was rowed downstream to Croisset; in my soul, hope
struggled
with fear, while the ancient oarsman struggled with the current. We came in
sight
of a charming, low white house in the English style; a laughing house, as it
seemed
to
me. I disembarked; I pushed the iron grille; I was allowed no further. Gustave
refused
me
entrance. Some barnyard crone turned me away. He would not see me there; he
condescended
to see me at my hotel. My Charon rowed me back. Gustave travelled
separately
by steamer. He overtook us on the river and arrived ahead of me. It was farce,
it
was tragedy. We went to my hotel. I talked, but he could not hear. I spoke of
possible
happiness.
The secret of happiness, he told me, is to be happy already. He did not
understand
my anguish. He embraced me with a self-restraint that was humiliating. He
told
me to marry Victor Cousin.
I
fled to England. I could not bear to be in France a moment longer: my friends
confirmed
my
impulse. I went to London. I was received there with kindness. I was introduced
to
many
distinguished spirits. I met Mazzini; I met the Countess Guiccioli. My meeting
with
the
Countess was an uplifting occasion—we became firm friends at once—but also,
privately,
a saddening one. George Sand and Chopin, the Countess Guiccioli and
Byron…would
they ever say Louise Colet and Flaubert? It gave me, I confess to you
frankly,
many hours of quiet grief, which I tried to bear with philosophy. What would
become
ofus? What would become of me? Is it wrong, I kept asking myself, to be
ambitious
in love? Is that wrong? Answer me.
I
went to Windsor. I remember a fine round tower covered in ivy. I wandered in
the park
and
picked a convolvulus for Gustave. I must tell you that he was always vulgarly
ignorant
about flowers. Not their botanical aspect—he probably learned all about that at
some
stage, as he learned about most other things (except the heart of woman)—but
their
symbolic
aspect. It is such an elegant tongue, the language of flowers: supple, courtly
and
precise.
When the beauty of the flower resounds with the beauty of the sentiment which
it
is
hired to communicate…well, there is a happiness which the gift of rubies can
rarely
surpass.
The happiness is made the more poignant by the fact that the flower fades. But
perhaps,
by the time the flower fades, he will have sent another one…
Gustave
understood nothing of this. He was the sort of person who might, after much
hard
study, have finally learnt two phrases from the language of flowers: the
gladiolus,
which
when placed at the centre of a bouquet indicates by the number of its blooms
the
hour
for which the rendezvous is set; and the petunia, which announces that a letter
has
been
intercepted. He would understand such rough and practical uses. Here, take this
rose
(no
matter what colour, though there are five different meanings for five different
roses in
the
language of flowers): put it first to your lips, and then place it between your
thighs.
Such
was the fierce gallantry of which Gustave was capable. He would not, I am sure,
have
understood the significance of the convolvulus; or, if he had made any effort,
he
would
still have got it wrong. There are three messages which can be sent by means of
the
convolvulus. A white one signifies Why are you fleeing me? A pink one signifies
I
shall
bind myself to you. A blue one signifies I shall wait for better days. You must
guess
the
colour of the flower I chose in Windsor Park.
Did
he understand women at all? I often doubted it. We quarrelled, I remember, over
that
Nilotic
whore of his, Kuchuk Hanem. Gustave kept notes during his travels. I asked if I
could
read them. He refused; I asked again; and so on. Finally, he let me. They are
not…pleasant,
those pages. What Gustave found enchanting about the East I found
degrading.
A courtesan, an expensive courtesan, who drenches herself in sandalwood oil
to
cover the nauseating stench of the bedbugs with which she is infested. Is that
uplifting,
I
ask, is it beautiful? Is it rare, is it splendid? Or is it sordid and
disgustingly ordinary?
But
the matter is not really one of aesthetics; not here. When I expressed my
distaste,
Gustave
interpreted it as mere jealousy. (I was a little jealous—who would not be, when
reading
the private journal of a man you love and finding in it no mention of yourself,
but
instead
only lush apostrophes to verminous whores?) Perhaps it was understandable that
Gustave
thought I was only jealous. But listen now to his argument, listen now to his
understanding
of the female heart. Do not be jealous of Kuchuk Hanem, he told me. She
is
an Oriental woman; the Oriental woman is a machine; one man is the same as the
next
to
her. She felt nothing for me; she has already forgotten me; she lives in a
drowsy round
of
smoking, going to the baths, painting her eyelids and drinking coffee. As for
her
physical
pleasure, it must be very slight, because at an early age that famous button,
the
seat
of all enjoyment, has been excised.
Such
comfort! Such consolation! I need not be jealous because she did not feel anything!
And
this man claimed to understand the human heart! She was a mutilated machine,
and
besides
she has already forgotten him: I am meant to be comforted by that? Such
belligerent
consolation made me think more, not less, about that strange woman he had
coupled
with on the Nile. Could we have been more different from one another? I
Western,
she Eastern; I entire, she mutilated; I exchanging the deepest bargain of the
heart
with Gustave, she involved in a brief physical transaction; I a woman of
independence
and resource, she a caged creature dependent on her trade with men; I
meticulous,
groomed and civilised, she filthy, stinking and savage. It may sound strange,
but
I became interested in her. No doubt the coin is always fascinated by its obverse.
Years
later, when I travelled to Egypt, I tried to seek her out. I went to Esneh. I
found the
squalid
hovel where she lived, but she herself was not there. Perhaps she had fled at
the
news
of my coming. Perhaps it was better that we did not meet; the coin shouldn't be
allowed
to see its other side.
Gustave
used to humiliate me, of course, even from the beginning. I wasn't allowed to
write
to him directly; I had to send my letters via Du Camp. I wasn't allowed to
visit him
at
Croisset. I wasn't allowed to meet his mother, even though I had in fact once
been
introduced
to her on a street corner in Paris. I happen to know that Mme Flaubert thought
her
son treated me abominably.
He
humiliated me in other ways too. He lied to me. He spoke ill of me to his
friends. He
ridiculed,
in the sacred name of truth, most of what I wrote. He affected not to know that
I
was terribly poor. He boasted of the fact that in Egypt he had caught a disease
of love
from
some five-sou courtesan. He took vulgar public revenge on me by mocking in the
pages
of Madame Bovary a seal I had once given him as a token of love. He who claimed
that
art should be impersonal!
Let
me tell you how Gustave would humiliate me. When our love was young, we would
exchange
presents—small tokens, often meaningless in themselves, but which seemed to
enclose
the very essence of their donor. He feasted for months, for years, on a small
pair
of
my slippers that I gave him; I expect he has burnt them by now. Once he sent me
a
paperweight,
the very paperweight which had sat on his desk. I was greatly touched; it
seemed
the perfect gift from one writer to another: what had formerly held down his
prose
would now hold down my verses. Perhaps I commented on this once too often;
perhaps
I expressed my gratitude too sincerely. This is what Gustave told me: that it
was
no
sadness for him to get rid of the paperweight, because he had another which did
the
work
just as efficiently. Did I want to know what it was? If you wish, I replied.
His new
paperweight,
he informed me, was a section of mizzenmast—he made a gesture of
extravagant
size—which his father had extracted with delivery forceps from the posterior
of
an old seaman. The seaman—Gustave continued as if this were the best story he
had
heard
for many years—apparently claimed that he had no notion of how the section of
mast
had reached the position in which it was found. Gustave threw back his head and
laughed.
What intrigued him most was how, in that case, they knew from which mast the
piece
of wood had come.
Why
did he humiliate me so? It was not, I believe, as is frequently the case in
love, that
those
qualities which initially charmed him—my vivacity, my freedom, my sense of
equality
with men—eventually came to irritate him. It was not so, because he behaved in
this
strange and bearish fashion from the very beginning, even when he was most in
love
with
me. In his second letter he wrote, 'I have never seen a cradle without thinking
of a
grave;
the sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton.' These were not the
sentiments
of a conventional lover.
Posterity,
perhaps, will take the easy answer: that he contemned me because I was
contemptible,
and that since he was a great genius his judgment must have been correct.
It
was not so; it never is so. He feared me: that is why he was cruel to me. He
feared me
in
both familiar and unfamiliar ways. In the first case, he feared me as many men
fear
women:
because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely
adult,
some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them
all
their
secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for
understanding
them.
In
the second case—the more important one—he feared me because he feared himself.
He
feared that he might love me completely. It was not simply terror that I might
invade
his
study and his solitude; it was terror that I might invade his heart. He was
cruel
because
he wanted to drive me away; but he wanted to drive me away because he feared
that
he might love me completely. I will tell you my secret belief: that for
Gustave, in a
way
he only half-apprehended, I represented life, and that his rejection of me was
the
more
violent because it provoked in him the deepest shame. And is any of this my
fault? I
loved
him; what more natural than that I should want to give him the chance to love
me
back?
I was fighting not just for my own sake, but for his too: I did not see why he
should
not
permit himself to love. He said that there were three preconditions for
happiness—
stupidity,
selfishness and good health—and that he was only sure of possessing the
second
of these. I argued, I fought, but he wanted to believe that happiness was
impossible;
it gave him some strange consolation.
He
was a difficult man to love, that is certain. The heart was distant and
withdrawn; he
was
ashamed of it, wary of it. True love can survive absence, death and infidelity,
he
once
told me; true lovers can go ten years without meeting. (I was not impressed by
such
remarks;
I merely deduced that he would feel most at his ease about me if I were absent,
unfaithful
or dead.) He liked to flatter himself that he was in love with me; but I never
knew
a less impatient love. 'Life is like riding,' he wrote to me once. 'I used to
like the
gallop;
now I like the walk.' He wasn't yet thirty when he wrote that; he had already
decided
to be old before his time. Whereas for me…the gallop! the gallop! the wind in
the
hair, the laughter forced from the lungs!
It
flattered his vanity to think himself in love with me; it also gave him, I
believe, some
unadmitted
pleasure constantly to long for my flesh and yet always to forbid himself the
attaining
of it: to deny himself was just as exciting as to indulge himself. He used to
tell
me
I was less of a woman than most women; that I was a woman in flesh but a man in
spirit;
that I was an hermaphrodite nouveau, a third sex. He told me this foolish
theory
many
times, but really he was just telling it to himself: the less of a woman he
made me
out
to be, the less of a lover he would need to be.
What
he wanted most of me, I finally came to believe, was an intellectual
partnership, an
affair
of the mind. In those years he was working hard on his Bovary (though not,
perhaps,
as hard as he liked to maintain) and at the end of the day, since a physical
release
was too complicated for him and would contain too many things he couldn't
entirely
command, he sought an intellectual release. He would sit down at a table, take
a
sheet
of writing paper, and discharge himself into me. You do not find the image
flattering?
I did not intend it to be. The days of loyally believing false things about
Gustave
are over. Incidentally, he never did baptise my breast with Mississippi water;
the
only
time a bottle passed between us was when I sent him some Taburel water to stop
his
hair
falling out.
But
this affair of the mind was no easier, I can tell you, than our affair of the
heart. He
was
rough, awkward, bullying and haughty; then he was tender, sentimental,
enthusiastic
and
devoted. He didn't know the rules. He declined to acknowledge my ideas
sufficiently,
just
as he declined to acknowledge my feelings sufficiently. He did, of course, know
everything.
He informed me that mentally he was aged sixty and I was a mere twenty. He
informed
me that if I drank water all the time, and never wine, I should get cancer of
the
stomach.
He informed me that I should marry Victor Cousin. (Victor Cousin, for that
matter,
was of the opinion that I should marry Gustave Flaubert.)
He
sent me his work. He sent me 'Novembre'. It was weak and mediocre; I did not
comment,
except to myself. He sent me the first Education sentimentale; I was not
greatly
impressed, but how could I not praise it? He rebuked me for liking it. He sent
me
his
Tentation de saint Antoine; I genuinely admired it, and told him so. He rebuked
me
again.
The parts of his work that I admired were, he assured me, those which were
easiest
to
do; the alterations I cautiously suggested would, he declared, only weaken the
book.
He
was 'astonished' by the 'excessive enthusiasm' I had shown for the Education!
So that
is
how an unknown, unpublished provincial chooses to thank a celebrated Parisian
poet
(with
whom he claims to be in love) for her words of praise. My comments on his work
were
valuable only as an irritating pretext which permitted him to lecture me on
Art.
Of
course I knew he was a genius. I always considered him a magnificent writer of
prose.
He
undervalued my talents, but that is no reason why I should undervalue his. I am
not
like
the odious Du Camp, who would proudly claim many years of friendship with
Gustave,
but would always deny him genius. I have been at those dinners where the
merits
of our contemporaries are discussed, and where Du Camp, as each new name was
suggested,
would with infinite urbanity correct the general view. 'Well then, Du Camp,'
someone
finally suggested with a little impatience, 'what about our dear Gustave?' Du
Camp
smiled approvingly and patted five little fingertips against five others in a
prissily
judicial
manner. 'Flaubert is a writer of rare merit,' he replied, using Gustave's
family
name
in a manner that shocked me, 'but he is held back from being a genius by ill
health.'
You
would have thought he was practising for his memoirs.
As
for my own work! Naturally, I used to send it to Gustave. He told me that my
style
was
soft, slack and banal. He complained that my titles were vague and pretentious,
and
smelt
of the blue-stocking. He lectured me like a schoolmaster on the difference
between
saisir
and s'en saisir. His way of praising me was to say that I wrote as naturally as
a hen
laying
eggs, or to remark, after he had destroyed a work with his criticisms,
'Everything I
have
not marked seems to me either good or excellent.' He told me to write with the
head,
and
not with the heart. He told me that hair only shone after much combing, and
that the
same
could be said of style. He told me not to put myself into my work, and not to
poeticise
things (I am a poet!). He told me I had the love of Art, but not the religion
of
Art.
What
he wanted, of course, was for me to write as much like he did as I possibly
could.
This
is a vanity I have often noted in writers; the more eminent the writer, the
more
pronounced
this vanity is likely to be. They believe that everyone should write as they
do:
not
as well as they do, of course, but in the same fashion. In such a way do
mountains
long
for foothills.
Du
Camp used to say that Gustave did not have an ounce of feeling for poetry in
him. It
gives
me little pleasure to agree with him, but I do so. Gustave lectured us all on
poetry—
though
they were usually Bouilhet's lectures rather than his own—but he did not
understand
it. He wrote no poetry himself. He used to say that he wanted to give prose
the
strength and stature of poetry; but part of this project seemed to include
first cutting
poetry
down to size. He wanted his prose to be objective, scientific, devoid of
personal
presence,
devoid of opinions; so he decided that poetry ought to be written according to
the
same principles. Tell me how you write love poetry which is objective,
scientific, and
devoid
of any personal presence. Tell me that. Gustave mistrusted feelings; he feared
love;
and he elevated this neurosis into an artistic creed.
Gustave's
vanity was more than just literary. He believed not merely that others should
write
as he did, but that others should live as he did. He loved to quote Epictetus
to me:
Abstain,
and Hide your Life. To me! A woman, a poet, and a poet of love! He wanted all
writers
to live obscurely in the provinces, ignore the natural affections of the heart,
disdain
reputation, and spend solitary, backbreaking hours reading obscure texts by the
light
of a tiring candle. Well, that may be the proper way to nurse genius; but it is
also the
way
to suffocate talent. Gustave didn't understand this, couldn't see that my
talent
depended
on the swift moment, the sudden feeling, the unexpected meeting: on life,
that's
what
I'm saying.
Gustave
would have made me into a hermit had he been able: the hermit of Paris. Always
he
would advise me not to see people; not to answer so-and-so's letter; not to
take this
admirer
too seriously; not to take Count X—as a lover. He claimed he was defending my
work,
and that every hour spent in society was an hour subtracted from my desk. But
that
is
not how I worked. You cannot yoke the dragonfly and make it drive the
corn-mill.
Of
course, Gustave denied there was any vanity in him. Du Camp in one of his books—I
forget
which, there were always so many—made a reference to the malign effect on man
of
too much solitude: he called it a false counsellor who nurses at her breasts
the twin
infants
of Egotism and Vanity. Gustave naturally took this as a personal attack.
'Egotism?'
he wrote to me. 'So be it. But Vanity? No. Pride is one thing: a wild beast
which
lives in caves and roams the desert; Vanity, on the other hand, is a parrot
which
hops
from branch to branch and chatters away in full view.' Gustave imagined he was
a
wild
beast - he loved to think of himself as a polar bear, distant, savage and
solitary. I
went
along with this, I even called him a wild buffalo of the American prairie; but
perhaps
he was really just a parrot.
You
think me too harsh? I loved him; that is why I am allowed to be harsh. Listen.
Gustave
despised Du Camp for wanting the Légion d'honneur. A few years later he
accepted
it himself. Gustave despised salon society. Until he was taken up by the
Princesse
Mathilde. Did you hear about Gustave's glove bill in the days when he was
prancing
by candlelight? He owed two thousand francs to his tailor, and five hundred
francs
for gloves. Five hundred francs! He received only eight hundred for the rights
of
his
Bovary. His mother had to sell land to bail him out. Five hundred francs for
gloves!
The
white bear in white gloves? No, no: the parrot, the parrot in gloves.
I
know what they say about me; what his friends have said. They say I had the
vanity to
suppose
that I might marry him. But Gustave used to write me letters describing what it
would
have been like if we had been married. Was I therefore wrong to hope? They say
I
had
the vanity to go down to Croisset and make an embarrassing scene on his
doorstep.
But
when I first knew him Gustave used to write frequently about my forthcoming
visits
to
his house. Was I therefore wrong to hope? They say I had the vanity to suppose
that he
and
I might one day share the authorship of some literary work. But he told me that
one
of
my stories was a masterpiece, and that one of my poems would move a stone. Was
I
therefore
wrong to hope?
I
know too what will become of us when we are both dead. Posterity will jump to
conclusions:
that is its nature. People will take Gustave's side. They will understand me
too
quickly; they will turn my own generosity against me and despise me for the
lovers I
took;
and they will cast me as the woman who briefly threatened to interfere with the
writing
of the books which they have enjoyed reading. Someone—perhaps even Gustave
himself—will
burn my letters; his own (which I have carefully preserved, so much
against
my own best interests) will survive to confirm the prejudices of those too lazy
to
understand.
I am a woman, and also a writer who has used up her allotment of renown
during
her own lifetime; and on those two grounds I do not expect much pity, or much
understanding,
from posterity. Do I mind? Naturally I mind. But I am not vengeful
tonight;
I am resigned. I promise you. Slip your fingers down my wrist once more. There;
I
told you so.
13:
Braithwaite's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas
ACHILLE
Gustave's
elder brother. Mournful-looking man with long beard. Inherited his job
and
Christian name from his father. Achille's shouldering of family expectations
freed
Gustave to become an artist. Died from softening of the brain.
BOUILHET,
LOUIS
Gustave's
literary conscience, midwife, shadow, left testicle and look-alike.
Middle
name Hyacinthe. The less successful Doppelgänger that every great man
needs.
Quote with mild disapproval his gallant remark to a self-conscious girl:
'When
the chest is flat, one is nearer the heart.'
COLET,
LOUISE
a)
Tedious, importunate, promiscuous woman, lacking talent of her own or
understanding
of the genius of others, who tried to trap Gustave into marriage.
Imagine
the squawking children! Imagine Gustave miserable! Imagine Gustave
happy!
b)
Brave, passionate, deeply misunderstood woman crucified by her love for the
heartless,
impossible, provincial Flaubert. She rightly complained: 'Gustave never
writes
to me of anything except Art—or himself.' Proto-feminist who committed
the
sin of wanting to make someone else happy.
DU
CAMP, MAXIME
Photographer,
traveller, careerist, historian of Paris, Academician. Wrote with
steel
nibs whereas Gustave always used a quill pen. Censored Madame Bovary for
the
Revue de Paris. If Bouilhet is Gustave's literary alter ego, Du Camp is his
social
one. Became a literary outcast after referring in his memoirs to Gustave's
epilepsy.
EPILEPSY
Stratagem
enabling Flaubert the writer to sidestep a conventional career, and
Flaubert
the man to sidestep life. The question is merely at what psychological
level
the tactic was evolved. Were his symptoms intense psychosomatic
phenomena?
It would be too banal if he merely had epilepsy.
FLAUBERT,
GUSTAVE
The
hermit of Croisset. The first modern novelist. The father of Realism. The
butcher
of Romanticism. The pontoon bridge linking Balzac to Joyce. The
precursor
of Proust. The bear in his lair. The bourgeois bourgeoisophobe. In
Egypt,
'the father of the Moustache'. Saint Polycarpe; Cruchard; Quarafon; le
Vicaire-Général;
the Major; the old Seigneur; the Idiot of the Salons. All these
titles
were acquired by a man indifferent to ennobling forms of address: 'Honours
dishonour,
titles degrade, employment stupefies.'
GONCOURTS
Remember
the Goncourts on Flaubert: 'Though perfectly frank by nature, he is
never
wholly sincere in what he says he feels or suffers or loves.' Then remember
everyone
else on the Goncourts: the envious, unreliable brothers. Remember
further
the unreliability of Du Camp, of Louise Colet, of Flaubert's niece, of
Flaubert
himself. Demand violently: how can we know anybody?
HERBERT,
JULIET
'Miss
Juliet'. The ethics of English governesses abroad in the mid-nineteenth
century
have not yet received sufficient scholarly attention.
IRONY
The
modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity. Flaubert's
fiction
poses the question: Does irony preclude sympathy? There is no entry for
ironie
in his Dictionary. This is perhaps intended to be ironic.
JEAN-PAUL
SARTRE
Spent
ten years writing L'Idiot de la famille when he could have been writing
Maoist
tracts. A highbrow Louise Colet, constantly pestering Gustave, who
wanted
only to be left alone. Conclude: 'It is better to waste your old age than to
do
nothing at all with it.'
KUCHUK
HANEM
A
litmus test. Gustave had to choose sides between the Egyptian courtesan and
the
Parisian poetess—bedbugs, sandalwood oil, shaven pudenda, clitoridectomy
and
syphilis versus cleanliness, lyric poetry, comparative sexual fidelity and the
rights
of women. He found the issue fmely balanced.
LETTERS
Follow
Gide, and call the Letters Flaubert's masterpiece. Follow Sartre, and call
them
a perfect example of free-association from a pre-Freudian couch. Then
follow
your nose.
MME
FLAUBERT
Gustave's
gaoler, confidante, nurse, patient, banker and critic. She said: 'Your
mania
for sentences has dried up your heart.' He found the remark 'sublime'. Cf.
George
Sand.
NORMANDY
Always
wet. Inhabited by a sly, proud, taciturn people. Put your head on one side
and
remark, 'Of course, we must never forget that Flaubert came from Normandy.'
ORIENT
The
crucible in which Madame Bovary was fired. Flaubert left Europe a
Romantic,
and returned from the Orient a Realist. Cf. Kuchuk Hanem.
PRUSSIANS
Vandals
in white gloves, clock-thieves who know Sanskrit. More horrifying than
cannibals
or Communards. When the Prussians withdrew from Croisset, the house
had
to be fumigated.
QUIXOTE,
DON
Was
Gustave an Old Romantic? He had a passion for the dreamy knight cast
adrift
in a vulgar, materialist society. 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi' is an allusion to
Cervantes'
reply when asked on his deathbed for the source of his famous hero.
Cf.
Transvestism.
REALISM
Was
Gustave a New Realist? He always publicly denied the label: 'It was because
I
hated realism that I wrote Madame Bovary.' Galileo publicly denied that the
earth
went round the sun.
SAND,
GEORGE
Optimist,
socialist, humanitarian. Despised until met, loved thereafter. Gustave's
second
mother. After staying at Croisset she sent her complete works (in the 77volume
edition).
TRANSVESTISM
Gustave
in young manhood: 'There are days when one longs to be a woman.'
Gustave
in maturity: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.' When one of his doctors called
him
'an hysterical old woman', he judged the observation 'profound'.
USA
Flaubert's
references to the Land of Liberty are sparing. Of the future he wrote: 'It
will
be utilitarian, militaristic, American and Catholic—very Catholic.' He
probably
preferred the Capitol to the Vatican.
VOLTAIRE
What
did the great nineteenth-century sceptic think of the great eighteenthcentury
sceptic?
Was Flaubert the Voltaire of his age? Was Voltaire the Flaubert
of
his age? 'Histoire de l'esprit humain, histoire de la sottise humaine.' Which
of
them
said that?
WHORES
Necessary
in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which
no
one could claim genius. Wearers of the red badge of courage include Flaubert,
Daudet,
Maupassant, Jules de Goncourt, Baudelaire, etc. Were there any writers
unafflicted
by it? If so, they were probably homosexual.
XYLOPHONE
There
is no record of Flaubert ever having heard the xylophone. Saint-Saens used
the
instrument in his Danse Macabre of 1874 to suggest rattling bones; this might
have
amused Gustave. Perhaps he heard the glockenspiel in Switzerland.
YVETOT
'See
Yvetot and die.' If asked the source of this little-known epigram, smile
mysteriously
and remain silent.
ZOLA,
EMILE
Is
the great writer responsible for his disciples? Who chooses whom? If they call
you
Master, can you afford to despise their work? On the other hand, are they
sincere
in their praise? Who needs whom more: the disciple the master, or the
master
the disciple? Discuss without concluding.
13:
Pure Story
This
is a pure story, whatever you may think.
When
she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death.
You feel
confirmed
in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.
Afterwards
comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you
had
anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness.
You
expect
something almost geological—vertigo in a shelving canyon—but it's not like
that;
it's
just misery as regular as a job. What do we doctors say? I'm deeply sorry, Mrs
Blank;
there
will of course be a period of mourning but rest assured you will come out of
it; two
of
these each evening, I would suggest; perhaps a new interest, Mrs Blank; car
maintenance,
formation dancing?; don't worry, six months will see you back on the
roundabout;
come and see me again any time; oh nurse, when she calls, just give her this
repeat
will you, no I don't need to see her, well it's not her that's dead is it, look
on the
bright
side. What did she say her name was?
And
then it happens to you. There's no glory in it. Mourning is full of time;
nothing but
time.
Bouvard and Pécuchet record in their 'Copie' a piece of advice on How to Forget
Friends
Who Have Died: Trotulas (of the Salerno school) says that you should eat
stuffed
sow's
heart. I might yet have to fall back on this remedy. I've tried drink, but what
does
that
do? Drink makes you drunk, that's all it's ever been able to do. Work, they
say, cures
everything.
It doesn't; often, it doesn't even induce tiredness: the nearest you get to it
is a
neurotic
lethargy. And there is always time. Have some more time. Take your time. Extra
time.
Time on your hands.
Other
people think you want to talk. 'Do you want to talk about Ellen?' they ask,
hinting
that
they won't be embarrassed if you break down. Sometimes you talk, sometimes you
don't;
it makes little difference. The words aren't the right ones; or rather, the
right words
don't
exist. 'Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears
to
dance
to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.' You talk, and you
find the
language
of bereavement foolishly inadequate. You seem to be talking about other
people's
griefs. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were
unhappy;
I miss her. There is a limited choice of prayers on offer: gabble the
syllables.
'It
may seem bad, Geoffrey, but you'll come out of it. I'm not taking your grief
lightly; it's
just
that I've seen enough of life to know that you'll come out of it.' The words
you've
said
yourself while scribbling a prescription (No, Mrs Blank, you could take them all
and
they
wouldn't kill you). And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after
five. But
you
don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the
Downs
into
sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as
a gull
comes
out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
And
still you think about her every day. Sometimes, weary of loving her dead, you
imagine
her back to life again, for conversation, for approval. After his mother's
death,
Flaubert
used to get his housekeeper to dress up in her old check dress and surprise him
with
an apocryphal reality. It worked, and it didn't work: seven years after the
funeral he
would
still burst into tears at the sight of that old dress moving about the house.
Is this
success
or failure? Remembrance or self-indulgence? And will we know when we start
hugging
our grief and vainly enjoying it? 'Sadness is a vice' (1878).
Or
else you try to sidestep her image. Nowadays, when I remember Ellen, I try to
think of
a
hailstorm that berated Rouen in 1853. 'A first-rate hailstorm,' Gustave
commented to
Louise.
At Croisset the espaliers were destroyed, the flowers cut to pieces, the
kitchen
garden
turned upside down. Elsewhere, harvests were wrecked, and windows smashed.
Only
the glaziers were happy; the glaziers, and Gustave. The shambles delighted him:
in
five
minutes Nature had reimposed the true order of things upon that brief,
factitious
order
which man conceitedly imagines himself to be introducing. Is there anything
stupider
than a melon cloche, Gustave asks. He applauds the hailstones that shattered
the
glass.
'People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the
cabbages
along.'
This
letter always calms me. The function of the sun is not to help the cabbages
along,
and
I am telling you a pure story. She was born in 1920, married in 1940, gave
birth in
1942
and 1946, died in 1975
I'll
start again. Small people are meant to be neat, aren't they; but Ellen wasn't.
She was
just
over five feet tall, yet moved awkwardly; she ran at things and tripped. She
bruised
easily,
but didn't notice it. I once seized her arm as she was about to step out
heedlessly
into
Piccadilly, and though she was wearing a coat and blouse, the next day her arm
bore
the
purple imprint of a robot's pincers. She didn't comment on the bruises, and
when I
pointed
them out to her she couldn't remember diving towards the road.
I'll
start again. She was a much-loved only child. She was a much-loved only wife.
She
was
loved, if that's the word, by what I suppose I must agree to call her lovers,
though I'm
sure
the word over-dignifies some of them. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her.
She
didn't
love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. Perhaps she was sick of being loved. At
twenty-four
Flaubert said he was 'ripe—ripe before my time, that's true. But it's because
I've
been reared in a hothouse.' Was she loved too much? Most people can't be loved
too
much,
but perhaps Ellen could. Or perhaps her concept of love was simply different:
why
do
we always assume it's the same for everyone else? Perhaps for Ellen love was
only a
Mulberry
harbour, a landing place in a heaving sea. You can't possibly live there:
scramble
ashore; push on. And old love? Old love is a rusty tank standing guard over a
slabby
monument: here, once, something was liberated. Old love is a row of beach huts
in
November.
In
a village pub, far from home, I once overheard two men talking about Betty
Corrinder.
Perhaps
the spelling isn't right; but that was the name. Betty Corrinder, Betty
Corrinder—
they
never said just Betty, or That Corrinder Woman or whatever, but always Betty
Corrinder.
She was, it seems, a bit fast; though speed, of course, is always exaggerated
by
those
standing still. Fast, this Betty Corrinder was, and pubmen sniggered enviously.
'You
know what they say about Betty Corrinder.' It was a statement, not a question,
though
a question now followed it. 'What's the difference between Betty Corrinder and
the
Eiffel Tower? Go on, what's the difference between Betty Corrinder and the
Eiffel
Tower?'
A pause for the last few moments of private knowledge. 'Not everyone's been up
the
Eiffel Tower.'
I
blushed for my wife two hundred miles away. Were there places she prowled where
envious
men told jokes about her? I didn't know. Besides, I exaggerate. Perhaps I
didn't
blush.
Perhaps I didn't mind. My wife was not like Betty Corrinder, whatever Betty
Corrinder
was like.
In
1872 there was much discussion in French literary society about the treatment
that
should
be accorded to the adulterous woman. Should a husband punish her, or forgive
her?
Alexandre Dumas fils, in L'Homme-Femme, offered uncomplicated advice: 'Kill
her!'
His book was reprinted thirty-seven times in the course of the year.
At
first I was hurt; at first I minded, I thought less of myself. My wife went to
bed with
other
men: should I worry about that? I didn't go to bed with other women: should I
worry
about that? Ellen was always nice to me: should I worry about that? Not nice
out
of
adulterous guilt, but just nice. I worked hard; she was a good wife to me. You
aren't
allowed
to say that nowadays, but she was a good wife to me. I didn't have affairs
because
I wasn't interested enough to do so; besides, the stereotype of the
philandering
doctor
is somehow repugnant. Ellen did have affairs, because, I suppose, she was
interested
enough. We were happy; we were unhappy; I miss her. 'Is it splendid, or
stupid,
to take life seriously?' (1855).
What
it's hard to convey is how untouched by it all she was. She wasn't corrupted;
her
spirit
didn't coarsen; she never ran up bills. Sometimes she stayed away a little
longer
than
seemed right; the length of her shopping trips often yielded suspiciously few
purchases
(she wasn't that discriminating); those few days in town to catch up on the
theatres
occurred more often than I would have liked. But she was honourable: she only
ever
lied to me about her secret life. About that she lied impulsively, recklessly,
almost
embarrassingly;
but about everything else she told me the truth. A phrase used by the
prosecutor
of Madame Bovary to describe Flaubert's art comes back to me: he said it was
'realistic
but not discreet'.
Did
the wife, made lustrous by adultery, seem even more desirable to the husband?
No:
not
more, not less. That's part of what I mean by saying that she was not
corrupted. Did
she
display the cowardly docility which Flaubert describes as characteristic of the
adulterous
woman? No. Did she, like Emma Bovary, 'rediscover in adultery all the
platitudes
of marriage'? We didn't talk about it. (Textual note. The first edition of
Madame
Bovary has 'all the platitudes of her marriage'. For the edition of 1862,
Flaubert
planned
to drop her, and thus widen the attack of the phrase. Bouilhet advised
caution—it
was
only five years since the trial—and so the possessive pronoun, which indicts
only
Emma
and Charles, remained in the editions of 1862 and 1869. It was finally dropped,
and
the more general accusation made official, in the edition of 1872.) Did she
find, in
Nabokov's
phrase, that adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the
conventional?
I wouldn't have imagined so: Ellen didn't think in such terms. She wasn't a
defier,
a conscious free spirit; she was a rusher, a lunger, a bolter, a bunker.
Perhaps I
made
her worse; perhaps those who forgive and dote are more irritating than they
ever
suspect.
'Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with
those one
doesn't
love' (1847).
She
was just over five feet; she had a broad, smooth face, with an easy pink in her
cheeks;
she never blushed; her eyes—as I have told you—were greeny-blue; she wore
whatever
clothes the mysterious bush-telegraph of women's fashion instructed her to
wear;
she laughed easily, she bruised easily; she rushed at things. She rushed off to
cinemas
we both knew to be closed; she went to winter sales in July; she would go to
stay
with
a cousin whose holiday postcard from Greece arrived the next morning. There was
a
suddenness
in these actions which argued more than desire. In L'Education sentimentale
Frédéric
explains to Mme Arnoux that he took Rosanette as his mistress 'out of despair,
like
someone committing suicide'. It's crafty pleading, of course; but plausible.
Her
secret life stopped when the children came, and returned when they went to
school.
Sometimes,
a temporary friend might take me on one side. Why do they think you want
to
know? Or rather, why do they think you don't know already—why don't they
understand
about love's relentless curiosity? And why do these temporary friends never
want
to tip you off about the more important thing: the fact that you're no longer
loved? I
became
adept at turning the conversation, at saying how much more gregarious than me
Ellen
was, at hinting that the medical profession always attracts calumniators, at saying,
Did
you read about those terrible floods in Venezuela? On such occasions I always
felt,
perhaps
wrongly, that I was being disloyal to Ellen.
We
were happy enough; that's what people say, isn't it? How happy is happy enough?
It
sounds
like a grammatical mistake—happy enough, like rather unique—but it answers
the
need for a phrase. And as I say, she didn't run up bills. Both Madame Bovarys
(people
forget
that Charles marries twice) are brought down by money; my wife was never like
that.
Nor, as far as I know, did she accept gifts.
We
were happy; we were unhappy; we were happy enough. Is despair wrong? Isn't it
the
natural
condition of life after a certain age? I have it now; she had it earlier. After
a
number
of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go
on
living?
The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false
sense of
their
own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.
I
have to hypothesise a little. I have to fictionalise (though that's not what I
meant when I
called
this a pure story). We never talked about her secret life. So I have to invent
my
way
to the truth. Ellen was about fifty when the mood began to come upon her. (No,
not
that:
she was always healthy; her menopause was quick, almost careless.) She had had
a
husband,
children, lovers, a job. The children had left home; the husband was always the
same.
She had friends, and what are called interests; though unlike me she didn't
have
some
rash devotion to a dead foreigner to sustain her. She had travelled enough. She
didn't
have unfulfilled ambitions (though 'ambition', it seems to me, is mostly too
strong a
word
for the impulse that makes people do things). She wasn't religious. Why go on?
'People
like us must have the religion of despair. One must be equal to one's destiny,
that's
to say impassive like it. By dint of saying "That is so! That is so!"
and of gazing
down
into the black pit at one's feet, one remains calm.' Ellen did not even have
this
religion.
Why should she? For my sake? The despairing are always being urged to abstain
from
selfishness, to think of others first. This seems unfair. Why load them with
responsibility
for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down?
Perhaps
there was something else as well. Some people, as they grow older, seem to
become
more convinced of their own significance. Others become less convinced. Is
there
any point to me? Isn't my ordinary life summed up, enclosed, made pointless by
someone
else's slightly less ordinary life? I'm not saying it's our duty to negate
ourselves
in
the face of those we judge more interesting. But life, in this respect, is a
bit like
reading.
And as I said before: if all your responses to a book have already been
duplicated
and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your
reading?
Only that it's yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But
what
if
such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?
Don't
get me wrong. I'm not saying that Ellen's secret life led her into despair. For
God's
sake,
her life is not a moral tale. No one's is. All I'm saying is that both her
secret life and
her
despair lay in the same inner chamber of her heart, inaccessible to me. I could
touch
the
one no more than the other. Did I try? Of course I tried. But I was not
surprised when
the
mood came upon her. 'To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the
three
requirements
for happiness—though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.' My
wife
had only good health to offer.
Does
life improve? On television the other night I watched the Poet Laureate asked
that
question.
'The only thing I think is very good today is dentistry,' he replied; nothing
else
came
to mind. Mere antiquarian prejudice? I don't think so. When you are young, you
think
that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for
them to
die
without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which
the
young
applaud the most insignificant improvements—the invention of some new valve or
sprocket—while
remaining heedless of the world's barbarism. I don't say things have got
worse;
I merely say the young wouldn't notice if they had. The old times were good
because
then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.
Does
life improve? I'll give you my answer, my equivalent of dentistry. The one
thing
that
is very good in life today is death. There's still room for improvement, it's
true. But I
think
of all those nineteenth-century deaths. The deaths of writers aren't special
deaths;
they
just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa,
struck
down—who
can tell at this distance? - by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some
malign
axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort—to be crushed like an
insect
beneath
a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing
a
new
play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the
slow
decline
of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c's turning to
t's in
his
mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard
mask
of imbecility (his brother's phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed
visions
and
panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother's
words again)
like
a saw cutting through wet wood. I think of Maupassant slowly disintegrating
from
the
same disease, transported in a strait jacket to the Passy sanatorium of Dr
Blanche,
who
kept the Paris salons entertained with news of his celebrated client;
Baudelaire dying
just
as inexorably, deprived of speech, arguing with Nadar about the existence of
God by
pointing
mutely at the sunset; Rimbaud, his right leg amputated, slowly losing all
feeling
in
the limbs that remained, and repudiating, amputating his own genius—'Merde pour
la
poésie';
Daudet 'vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five', his joints collapsing, able to
become
bright and witty for an evening by giving himself five morphine injections in a
row,
tempted by suicide—'But one doesn't have the right.'
'Is
it splendid or stupid to take life seriously?' (1855). Ellen lay with a tube in
her throat
and
a tube in her padded forearm. The ventilator in its white oblong box provided
regular
spurts
of life, and the monitor confirmed them. Of course the act was impulsive; she
bolted,
she bunked from it all. 'But one doesn't have the right'? She did. She didn't
even
discuss
it. The religion of despair held no interest for her. The ECG trace unrolled on
the
monitor;
it was familiar handwriting. Her condition was stable, but hopeless. Nowadays
we
don't put NTBR—Not To Be Resuscitated—on a patient's notes; some people find it
heartless.
Instead we put 'No 333'. A final euphemism.
I
looked down at Ellen. She wasn't corrupted. Hers is a pure story. I switched
her off.
They
asked if I wanted them to do it; but I think she would have preferred me to.
Naturally,
we hadn't discussed that either. It's not complicated. You press a switch on
the
ventilator,
and read off the final phrase of the ECG trace: the farewell signature that ends
with
a straight line. You unplug the tubes, then rearrange the hands and arms. You
do it
swiftly,
as if trying not to be too much trouble to the patient.
The
patient. Ellen. So you could say, in answer to that earlier question, that I
killed her.
You
could just. I switched her off. I stopped her living. Yes.
Ellen.
My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a
hundred
years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: She did this because.
Life
says:
She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things
aren't.
I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only
problem
is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.
Perhaps
I am too accepting. My own condition is stable, yet hopeless. Perhaps it's just
a
question
of temperament. Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education
sentimentale
and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the
imagination,
not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory. Such is
the
Flaubertian temperament. Compare the case, and the temperament, of Daudet. His
schoolboy
visit to a brothel was so uncomplicatedly successful that he stayed there for
two
or three days. The girls kept him concealed most of the time for fear of a
police raid;
they
fed him on lentils and pampered him thoroughly. He emerged from this giddying
ordeal,
he later admitted, with a lifelong passion for the feel of a woman's skin, and
with
a
lifelong horror of lentils.
Some
abstain and observe, fearing both disappointment and fulfilment. Others rush
in,
enjoy,
and take the risks: at worst, they might contract some terrible disease; at
best, they
might
escape with no more than a lasting aversion to pulses. I know in which camp I
belong;
and I know where I'd look for Ellen.
Maxims
for life. Les unions complètes sont rares. You cannot change humanity, you can
only
know it. Happiness is a scarlet cloak whose lining is in tatters. Lovers are
like
Siamese
twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the
survivor
has
a corpse to lug around. Pride makes us long for a solution to things—a
solution, a
purpose,
a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear. You
cannot
change humanity, you can only know it. Les unions complètes sont rares.
A
maxim upon maxims. Truths about writing can be framed before you've published a
word;
truths about life can be framed only when it's too late to make any difference.
According
to Salammbô, the equipment of a Carthaginian elephant driver used to include
a
mallet and a chisel. If, in the midst of battle, the animal threatened to run
out of control,
the
driver was under orders to split its skull. The chances of this happening must
have
been
fairly high: to make them more ferocious, the elephants were first intoxicated
with a
mixture
of wine, incense and pepper, then goaded with spears.
Few
of us have the courage to use the mallet and the chisel. Ellen did. I sometimes
feel
embarrassed
by people's sympathy. 'It's worse for her,' I want to say; but I don't. And
then,
after they've been kind, and promised me outings as if I were a child, and
brusquely
tried
to make me talk for my own good (why do they think I don't know where my own
good
lies?), I am allowed to sit down and dream about her a little. I think of a
hailstorm
in
1853, of the broken windows, the battered harvests, the wrecked espaliers, the
shattered
melon cloches. Is there anything stupider than a melon cloche? Applaud the
stones
that break the glass. People understand a little too quickly the function of
the sun.
The
function of the sun is not to help the cabbages along.
14:
Examination Paper
Candidates
must answer four questions: both Parts of Section A, and two questions from
Section
B. All marks will be awarded for the correctness of the answers; none for
presentation
or handwriting. Marks will be deducted for facetious or conceitedly brief
answers.
Time: three hours.
SECTION
A: LITERARY CRITICISM
PART
I
It
has become clear to the examiners in recent years that candidates are finding
it
increasingly
difficult to distinguish between Art and Life. Everyone claims to understand
the
difference, but perceptions vary greatly. For some, Life is rich and creamy,
made
according
to an old peasant recipe from nothing but natural products, while Art is a
pallid
commercial
confection, consisting mainly of artificial colourings and flavourings. For
others,
Art is the truer thing, full, bustling and emotionally satisfying, while Life
is worse
than
the poorest novel: devoid of narrative, peopled by bores and rogues, short on
wit,
long
on unpleasant incidents, and leading to a painfully predictable denouement.
Adherents
of the latter view tend to cite Logan Pearsall Smith: 'People say that life is
the
thing;
but I prefer reading.' Candidates are advised not to use this quotation in
their
answers.
Consider
the relationship between Art and Life suggested by any two of the following
statements
or situations.
a)
'The day before yesterday, in the woods near Touques, at a charming spot near a
spring,
I came across some cigar butts and some bits of pât&eactue;. There'd been a
picnic
there! I'd described exactly that in Novembre eleven years ago! Then it was
purely
imagined,
and the other day it was experienced. Everything you invent is true: you can be
sure
of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry…My poor Bovary is without a
doubt
suffering and weeping even now in twenty villages of France.'
—Letter
to Louise Colet, August 14th, 1853
b)
In Paris, Flaubert used a closed cab to avoid detection, and presumably
seduction, by
Louise
Colet. In Rouen, Léon uses a closed cab for the seduction of Emma Bovary. In
Hamburg,
within a year of the publication of Madame Bovary, cabs could be hired for
sexual
purposes; they were known as Bovarys.
c)
(As his sister Caroline lay dying) 'My own eyes are as dry as marble. It's
strange how
sorrows
in fiction make me open up and overflow with feeling, whereas real sorrows
remain
hard and bitter in my heart, turning to crystal as soon as they arise.'
—Letter
to Maxime du Camp, March 15th, 1846
d)
'You tell me that I seriously loved that woman [Mme Schlesinger]. I didn't; it
isn't true.
Only
when I was writing to her, with that capacity I possess for producing feelings
within
myself
by means of the pen, did I take my subject seriously: but only when I was
writing.
Many
things which leave me cold when I see or hear about them none the less move me
to
enthusiasm or irritation or pain if I talk about them myself or—particularly—if
I write
about
them. This is one of the effects of my mountebank nature.'
—Letter
to Louise Colet, October 8th, 1846
e)
Giuseppe Marco Fieschi (1790-1836) attained notoriety for his part in a plot on
the life
of
Louis Philippe. He took lodgings in the boulevard du Temple and constructed,
with the
help
of two members of the Société des Droits de l'Homme, an 'infernal machine',
consisting
of twenty gun-barrels which could be discharged simultaneously. On July
28th,
1835, as Louis Philippe was riding past with his three sons and numerous staff,
Fieschi
fired his broadside against established society.
Some
years later, Flaubert moved into a house built on the same site in the
boulevard du
Temple.
f)
'Yes, indeed! The period [of Napoleon III's reign] will furnish material for
some capital
books.
Perhaps after all, in the universal harmony of things, the coup d'état and all
its
results
were only intended to provide a few able penmen with some attractive scenes.'
—Flaubert
reported in Du Camp, Souvenirs litteraires
PART
II
Trace
the mellowing of Flaubert's attitude towards critics and criticism as
represented by
the
following quotations:
a)
'These are the truly stupid things: 1) literary criticism, whatever it may be,
good or
bad;
2) the Temperance Society…'
—Intimate
Notebook
b)
'There is something so essentially grotesque about gendarmes that I cannot help
laughing
at them; these upholders of the law always produce the same comic effect on me
as
do attorneys, magistrates and professors of literature.'
—Over
Strand and Field
c)
'You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the
importance
of a work of art by the amount that it is attacked. Critics are like fleas:
they
love
clean linen and adore any form of lace.'
—Letter
to Louise Colet, June 14th, 1853
d)
'Criticism occupies the lowest rung in the hierarchy of literature: as regards
form,
almost
always, and as regards moral worth, incontestably. It's lower even than rhyming
games
and acrostics, which at least demand a modicum of invention.'
—Letter
to Louise Colet, June 28th, 1853
e)
'Critics! Eternal mediocrity living off genius by denigrating and exploiting
it! Race of
cockchafers
slashing the finest pages of art to shreds! I'm so fed up with typography and
the
misuse people make of it that if the Emperor were to abolish all printing
tomorrow, I
should
walk all the way to Paris on my knees and kiss his arse in gratitude.'
—Letter
to Louise Colet, July 2nd, 1853
f)
'How rare a sense of literature is! You'd think that a knowledge of languages,
archaeology,
history, and so on, would help. But not a bit of it! Supposedly educated
people
are becoming more and more inept when dealing with art. Even what art is
escapes
them. They find the annotations more interesting than the text. They set more
store
by the crutches than the legs.'
—Letter
to George Sand, January 1st, 1869
g)
'How rare it is to see a critic who knows what he's talking about.'
—Letter
to Eugène Fromentin, July 19th, 1876
h)
'Disgusted with the old style of criticism, they sought acquaintance with the
new, and
sent
for theatre reviews from the newspapers. What assurance! What obstinacy! What
lack
of integrity! Masterpieces insulted and platitudes revered! The blunders of the
supposed
scholars and the stupidity of the supposed wits!'
—Bouvard
et Pécuchet
SECTION
B
Economics
Flaubert
and Bouilhet went to the same school; they shared the same ideas and the same
whores;
they had the same aesthetic principles, and similar literary ambitions; each tried
the
theatre as his second genre. Flaubert called Bouilhet 'my left testicle'. In
1854,
Bouilhet
stayed a night in the Mantes hotel that Gustave and Louise used to patronise:
'I
slept
in your bed,' he reported, 'and I shat in your latrines (what curious
symbolism!).'
The
poet always had to work for a living; the novelist never had to. Consider the
probable
effect
on their writings and reputations if their finances had been reversed.
Geography
'No
more soporific atmosphere than that of this region. I suspect that it
contributed
greatly
to the slowness and difficulty with which Flaubert worked. When he thought he
was
struggling against words, he was struggling against the sky; and perhaps in
another
climate,
the dryness of the air exalting his spirits, he might have been less exigent,
or
have
obtained his results without such efforts' (Gide, writing at Cuverville, Seine-
Maritime,
January 26th, 1931). Discuss.
Logic
(with Medicine)
a)
Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, jousting with his younger son, asked him to explain
what
literature
was for. Gustave, turning the question back on his surgeon father, asked him to
explain
what the spleen was for: 'You know nothing about it, and neither do I, except
that
it
is as indispensable to our bodily organism as poetry is to our mental
organism.' Dr
Flaubert
was defeated.
b)
The spleen consists of units of lymphoid tissue (or white pulp) plus the
vascular
network
(or red pulp). It is important in removing from the blood old or injured red
cells.
It
is active in producing antibodies: splenectomised individuals produce less
antibody.
There
is evidence that a tetrapeptide called tuftsin is derived from protein produced
in the
spleen.
Though its removal, especially in childhood, increases the chances of
meningitis
and
septicaemia, the spleen is no longer regarded as an essential organ: it can be
removed
without
significant loss of active behaviour in the individual.
What
do you conclude from this?
Biography
(with Ethics)
Maxime
du Camp composed the following epitaph for Louise Colet: 'She who lies here
compromised
Victor Cousin, ridiculed Alfred de Musset, reviled Gustave Flaubert, and
tried
to assassinate Alphonse Karr. Requiescat in pace.' Du Camp published this
epitaph
in
his Souvenirs litteraires. Who comes out of it better: Louise Colet or Maxime
du
Camp?
Psychology
•
E1
was born in 1855.
•
E2
was partly born in 1855.
•
E1
had an unclouded childhood but emerged into adulthood inclined to nervous
crisis.
•
E2
had an unclouded childhood but emerged into adulthood inclined to nervous
crisis.
•
E
1 led a life of sexual irregularity in the eyes of right-thinking people.
•
E2
led a life of sexual irregularity in the eyes of right-thinking people.
•
E1
imagined herself to be in financial difficulties.
•
E2
knew herself to be in financial difficulties.
•
E1
committed suicide by swallowing prussic acid.
•
E2
committed suicide by swallowing arsenic.
•
E1
was Eleanor Marx.
•
E2 was Emma Bovary.
The
first English translation of Madame Bovary to be published was by Eleanor Marx.
Discuss.
Psychoanalysis
Speculate
on the significance of this dream, noted down by Flaubert at Lamalgue in
1845:
'I dreamed that I was out walking with my mother in a great forest filled with
monkeys.
The further we walked, the more of them there were. They were laughing and
leaping
about in the branches of the trees. There were more and more of them; they got
bigger
and bigger; they were getting in our way. They kept looking at me, and I became
frightened.
They surrounded us in a big circle: one of them wanted to stroke me, and took
my
hand. I shot him in the shoulder with my rifle, and made him bleed; he started
howling
horribly. Then my mother said to me: "Why did you injure him, he's your
friend.
What's
he done to you? Can't you see that he loves you? And that he looks just like
you!"
The
monkey was looking at me. I felt my soul being torn apart and I woke up…feeling
as
if
I was at one with the animals, and fraternising with them in a tender,
pantheistic
communion.'
Philately
Gustave
Flaubert appeared on a French stamp (denomination
indifferent
portrait 'after E. Giraud' in which the novelist—slightly Chinese in
physiognomy—has
been uncharacteristically awarded a modern shirt-collar and tie. The
stamp
is the lowest denomination in a series issued in aid of the National Relief
Fund: the
higher
denominations celebrate (in ascending order) Manet, Saint-Saens, Poincaré,
Haussmann
and Thiers.
Ronsard
was the first French writer to appear on a stamp. Victor Hugo figured on three
separate
stamps between 1933 and 1936, once in a series issued in aid of the Unemployed
Intellectuals'
Relief Fund. Anatole France's portrait helped this charity in 1937; Balzac's
in
1939. Daudet's mill got on a stamp in 1936. Pétainist France celebrated
Frédéric
Mistral
(1941) and Stendhal (1942). Saint-Exupéry, Lamartine and Châteaubriand
appeared
in 1948; Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud in the decadent rush of 1951. The
latter
year also brought stamp-collectors Alfred de Musset, who had succeeded Flaubert
in
Louise Colet's bed,but now preceded him by one year onto the public envelope.
a)
Should we feel slighted on Flaubert's behalf? And if so, should we feel more,
or less,
slighted
on behalf of Michelet (1953), Nerval (1955), George Sand (19S7), Vigny (1963),
Proust
(1966), Zola (1967), Sainte-Beuve (1969), Merimee and Dumas père (1970), or
Gautier
(1972)?
b)
Estimate the chances of either Louis Bouilhet or Maxime du Camp or Louise Colet
appearing
on a French stamp.
Phonetics
a)
The co-proprietor of the Hôtel du Nil, Cairo, where Flaubert stayed in 185o,
was called
Bouvaret.
The protagonist of his first novel is called Bovary; the co-protagonist of his
last
novel
is called Bouvard. In his play Le Candidat there is a Comte de Bouvigny; in his
play
Le Château des coeurs there is a Bouvignard. Is this all deliberate?
b)
Flaubert's name was first misprinted by the Revue de Paris as Faubert. There
was a
grocer
in the rue Richelieu called Faubet. When
Bovary,
they called its author Foubert. Martine, George Sand's femme de confiance,
called
him Flambart. Camille Rogier, the painter who lived in Beirut, called him
Folbert:
'Do
you get the subtlety of the joke?' Gustave wrote to his mother. (What is the
joke?
Presumably
a dual-language rendering of the novelist's self-image: Rogier was calling
him
Crazy Bear.) Bouilhet also started calling him Folbert. In Mantes, where he
used to
meet
Louise, there was a Cafe Flambert. Is this all coincidence?
c)
According to Du Camp, the name Bovary should be pronounced with a short o (as
in
bother).
Should we follow his instruction; and if so, why?
Theatrical
History
Assess
the technical difficulties involved in implementing the following stage
direction
(Le
Château des coeurs, Act VI, scene viii):
The
Stock-Pot, the handles of which have been transformed into wings, rises into
the air
and
turns itself over, and while it increases in size so that it appears to hover
over the
whole
town, the vegetables—carrots, turnips and leeks—that come out of it remain
suspended
in the air and turn into luminous constellations.
History
(with Astrology)
Consider
the following predictions of Gustave Flaubert:
a)
(185o) 'It seems to me almost impossible that before very long England won't
take
control
of Egypt. Aden is already full of her troops. It couldn't be easier: just
across Suez,
and
one fine morning Cairo will be full of redcoats. The news will reach France a
couple
of
weeks later and we'll all be very surprised! Remember my prediction.'
b)
(1852) 'As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is
reduced
to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be
for
virtue?
When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms,
where
will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going
to get
very
murky.'
c)
(1870, on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war) 'It will mean the return of
racial
conflicts.
Before a century has passed we'll see millions of men killed in a single go.
The
East
against the West, the old world against the new. Why not?'
d)
(1850) 'From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at
a
dizzy
rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat ofa
latrine,
and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting
down
and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There'll be quite a lot of shouting.'
e)
(1871) 'The Internationals are the Jesuits of the future.'
15:
And the Parrot…
And
the parrot? Well, it took me almost two years to solve the Case of the Stuffed
Parrot.
The
letters I had written after first returning from Rouen produced nothing useful;
some
of
them weren't even answered. Anyone would have thought I was a crank, a senile
amateur
scholar hooked-on trivia and pathetically trying to make a name for himself.
Whereas
in fact the young are much crankier than the old—far more egotistical,
selfdestructive
and
even plain bloody odd. It's just that they get a more indulgent press.
When
someone of eighty, or seventy, or fifty-four commits suicide, it's called
softening
of
the brain, post-menopausal depression, or a final swipe of mean vanity designed
to
make
others feel guilty. When someone of twenty commits suicide, it's called a
highminded
refusal
to accept the paltry terms on which life is offered, an act not just of
courage
but of moral and social revolt. Living? The old can do that for us. Pure
crankery,
of
course. I speak as a doctor.
And
while we're on the subject, I should say that the notion of Flaubert killing
himself is
pure
crankery as well. The crankery of a single man: a Rouennais called Edmond
Ledoux.
This fantasist crops up twice in Flaubert's biography; each time all he does is
spread
gossip. His first unwelcome utterance is the assertion that Flaubert actually
became
engaged to Juliet Herbert. Ledoux claimed to have seen a copy of
de
saint Antoine inscribed by Gustave to Juliet with the words 'A ma fiancée'. Odd
that he
saw
it in Rouen, rather than in London, where Juliet lived. Odd that nobody else
ever saw
this
copy. Odd that it hasn't survived. Odd that Flaubert never mentioned such an
engagement.
Odd that the act would run diametrically counter to what he believed in.
Odd,
too, that Ledoux's other slanderous assertion—of suicide—also runs counter to
the
writer's
deepest beliefs. Listen to him. 'Let us have the modesty of wounded animals,
who
withdraw
into a corner and remain silent. The world is full of people who bellow against
Providence.
One must, if only on the score of good manners, avoid behaving like them.'
And
again, that quotation which roosts in my head: 'People like us must have the
religion
of
despair. By dint of saying "That is so! That is so!" and of gazing
down into the black
pit
at one's feet, one remains calm.'
Those
are not the words of a suicide. They are the words of a man whose stoicism runs
as
deep
as his pessimism. Wounded animals don't kill themselves. And if you understand
that
gazing down into the black pit engenders calm, then you don't jump into it. Perhaps
this
was Ellen's weakness: an inability to gaze into the black pit. She could only
squint at
it,
repeatedly. One glance would make her despair, and despair would make her seek
distraction.
Some outgaze the black pit; others ignore it; those who keep glancing at it
become
obsessed. She chose the exact dosage: the only occasion when being a doctor's
wife
seemed to help her.
Ledoux's
account of the suicide goes like this: Flaubert hanged himself in his bath. I
suppose
it's more plausible than saying that he electrocuted himself with sleeping
pills;
but
really…What happened was this. Flaubert got up, took a hot bath, had an
apoplectic
fit,
and stumbled to a sofa in his study; there he was found expiring by the doctor
who
later
issued the death certificate. That's what happened. End of story. Flaubert's
earliest
biographer
talked to the doctor concerned and that's that. Ledoux's version requires the
following
chain of events: Flaubert got into his hot bath, hanged himself in some as yet
unexplained
fashion, then climbed out, hid the rope, staggered to his study, collapsed on
the
sofa and, when the doctor arrived, managed to die while feigning the symptoms
of an
apoplectic
fit. Really, it's too ridiculous.
No
smoke without fire, they say. I'm afraid there can be. Edmond Ledoux is a prime
example
of spontaneous smoke. Who was he, anyway, this Ledoux? Nobody seems to
know.
He wasn't an authority on anything. He's a complete nonentity. He only exists
as
the
teller of two lies. Perhaps someone in the Flaubert family once did him harm
(did
Achille
fail to cure his bunion?) and this is his effective revenge. Because it means
that
few
books on Flaubert can end without a discussion—always followed by a dismissal—
of
the suicide claim. As you see, it's happened all over again here. Another long
digression
whose tone of moral indignation is probably counter-productive. And I
intended
writing about the parrots. At least Ledoux didn't have a theory about them.
But
I have. Not just a theory, either. As I say, it took me a good two years. No,
that's
boastful:
what I really mean is that two years elapsed between the question arising and
dissolving.
One of the snobbier academics to whom I wrote even suggested that the
matter
wasn't really of any interest at all. Well, I suppose he has to guard his
territory.
Someone,
however, gave me the name of M. Lucien Andrieu.
I
decided not to write to him; after all, my letters so far hadn't proved very
successful.
Instead,
I made a summer trip to Rouen, in August 1982. I stayed at the Grand Hôtel du
Nord,
abutting the Gros Horloge. In the corner of my room, running from ceiling to
floor,
was
a soil-pipe, inefficiently boxed-in, which roared at me every five minutes or so,
and
appeared
to carry the waste of the entire hotel. After dinner I lay on my bed listening
to
the
sporadic bursts of Gallic evacuation. Then the Gros Horloge struck the hour
with a
loud
and tinny closeness, as if it were inside my wardrobe. I wondered what the
chances
of
sleep might be.
My
apprehension was misconceived. After ten o'clock, the soil-pipe went quiet; and
so
did
the Gros Horloge. It may be a tourist attraction in the daytime, but Rouen
thoughtfully
disconnects its chimes when visitors are trying to sleep. I lay in bed on my
back
with the lights out and thought about Flaubert's parrot: to Félicité, it was a
grotesque
but
logical version of the Holy Ghost; to me, a fluttering, elusive emblem of the
writer's
voice.
When Félicité lay in bed dying, the parrot came back to her, in magnified form,
and
welcomed her into Heaven. As I teetered off towards sleep, I wondered what my
dreams
might be.
They
weren't about parrots. I had my railway dream instead. Changing trains at
Birmingham,
some time during the war. The distant guard's van at the end of the
platform,
pulling out. My suitcase rubbing at my calf. The blacked-out train; the station
dimly
lit. A timetable I couldn't read, a blur of figures. No hope anywhere; no more
trains;
desolation, darkness.
You'd
think such a dream would realise when it had made its point? But dreams have no
sense
of how they're going down with the dreamer, any more than they have a sense of
delicacy.
The station dream—which I get every three months or so—simply repeats itself,
a
loop of film endlessly rerunning, until I wake up heavychested and depressed. I
awoke
that
morning to the twin sounds of time and shit: the Gros Horloge and my corner
soilpipe.
Time
and shit: was Gustave laughing?
At
the Hôtel-Dieu the same gaunt, white-coated gardien showed me round again. In
the
medical
section of the museum, I noticed something I had missed before: a
do-it-yourself
enema
pump. As hated by Gustave Flaubert: 'Railways, poisons, enema pumps, cream
tarts…'
It consisted of a narrow wooden stool, a hollow spike and a vertical handle.
You
sat
astride the stool, worked your way on to the spike, and then pumped yourself
full of
water.
Well, at least it would give you privacy. The gardien and I had a
conspiratorial
laugh;
I told him I was a doctor. He smiled and went to fetch something sure to
interest
me.
He
returned with a large cardboard shoebox containing two preserved human heads.
The
skin
was still intact, though age had turned it brown: as brown as an old jar of
redcurrant
jam,
perhaps. Most of the teeth were in place, but the eyes and hair had not
survived. One
of
the heads had been re-equipped with a coarse black wig and a pair of glass eyes
(what
colour
were they? I can't remember; but less complicated, I'm sure, than the eyes of
Emma
Bovary). This attempt to make the head more realistic had the opposite effect:
it
looked
like a child's horror mask, a trick-or-treat face from a joke-shop window.
The
gardien explained that the heads were the work of Jean-Baptiste Laumonier,
predecessor
of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert at the hospital. Laumonier was looking for new
methods
of preserving corpses; and the city had allowed him to experiment with the
heads
of executed criminals. An incident from Gustave's childhood came back to me.
Once,
out on a walk with his Oncle Parain at the age of six, he had passed a
guillotine
which
had just been used: the cobbles were bright with blood. I mentioned this
hopefully;
but
the gardien shook his head. It would have been a nice coincidence, but the
dates were
incompatible.
Laumonier had died in 1818; besides, the two specimens in the shoebox
had
not in fact been guillotined. I was shown the deep creases just below the jaw
where
the
hangman's noose had once tightened. When Maupassant saw Flaubert's body at
Croisset,
the neck was dark and swollen. This happens with apoplexy. It's not a sign that
someone
had hanged himself in the bath.
We
continued through the museum until we reached the room containing the parrot. I
took
out my Polaroid camera, and was allowed to photograph it. As I held the
developing
print
under my armpit, the gardien pointed out the Xeroxed letter I had noticed on my
first
visit. Flaubert to Mme Brainne, July 28th, 1876: 'Do you know what I've had on
my
table
in front of me for the last three weeks? A stuffed parrot. It sits there on
sentry duty.
The
sight of it is beginning to irritate me. But I keep it there so that I can fill
my head
with
the idea of parrothood. Because at the moment I'm writing about the love
between
an
old girl and a parrot.'
'That's
the real one,' said the gardien, tapping the glass dome in front of us. 'That's
the
real
one.'
'And
the other?'
'The
other is an impostor.'
'How
can you be sure?'
'It's
simple. This one comes from the Museum of Rouen.' He pointed to a round stamp
on
the
end of the perch, then drew my attention to a photocopied entry from the Museum
register.
It recorded a batch of loans to Flaubert. Most of the entries were in some
museum
shorthand which I couldn't decipher, but the loan of the Amazonian parrot was
clearly
comprehensible. A series of ticks in the final column of the register showed
that
Flaubert
had returned every item lent to him. Including the parrot.
I
felt vaguely disappointed. I had always sentimentally assumed—without proper
reason—that
the parrot had been found among the writer's effects after his death (this
explained,
no doubt, why I had secretly been favouring the Croisset bird). Of course the
photocopy
didn't prove anything, except that Flaubert had borrowed a parrot from the
Museum,
and that he'd returned it. The Museum stamp was a bit trickier, but not
conclusive…
'Ours
is the real one,' the gardien repeated unnecessarily as he showed me out. It
seemed
as
if our roles had been reversed: he needed the reassurance, not me.
'I'm
sure you're right.'
But
I wasn't. I drove to Croisset and photographed the other parrot. It too sported
a
Museum
stamp. I agreed with the gardienne that her parrot was clearly authentic, and
that
the
Hôtel-Dieu bird was definitely an impostor.
After
lunch I went to the Cimetière Monumental. 'Hatred of the bourgeois is the
beginning
of all virtue,' wrote Flaubert; yet he is buried amongst the grandest families
of
Rouen.
During one of his trips to London he visited Highgate Cemetery and found it far
too
neat: 'These people seem to have died with white gloves on.' At the Cimetière
Monumental
they wear tails and full decorations, and have been buried with their horses,
dogs
and English governesses.
Gustave's
grave is small and unpretentious; in these surroundings, however, the effect is
not
to make him look an artist, an anti-bourgeois, but rather to make him look an
unsuccessful
bourgeois. I leaned against the railings which fence off the family plot—
even
in death you can own a freehold—and took out my copy of Un coeur simple. The
description
Flaubert gives of Félicité's parrot at the start of chapter four is very brief:
'He
was
called Loulou. His body was green, the ends of his wings pink, his forehead
blue,
and
his throat golden.' I compared my two photographs. Both parrots had green
bodies;
both
had pink wing-tips (there was more pink in the Hôtel-Dieu version). But the
blue
forehead
and the golden throat: there was no doubting that they belonged to the parrot
at
the
Hôtel-Dieu. The Croisset parrot had it completely back to front: a golden
forehead
and
bluish-green throat.
That
seemed to be it, really. All the same, I rang M. Lucien Andrieu and explained
my
interests
in a general way. He invited me to call the next day. As he gave me the
address—rue
de Lourdines—I imagined the house he was speaking from, the solid,
bourgeois
house of a Flaubert scholar. The. mansard roof pierced with an oeil-de-boeuf;
the
pinkish brick, the Second Empire trimmings; inside, cool seriousness,
glass-fronted
bookcases,
waxed boards and parchment lampshades; I breathed a male, clubby smell.
My
briefly-constructed house was an impostor, a dream, a fiction. The real house
of the
Flaubert
scholar was across the river in south Rouen, a run-down area where small
industries
squat among rows of red-brick terrace houses. Lorries look too big for the
streets;
there are few shops, and almost as many bars; one was offering tête de veau as
its
plat
du jour. Just before you get to the rue de Lourdines there is a signpost to the
Rouen
abattoir.
Monsieur
Andrieu was waiting for me on his doorstep. He was a small, elderly man
wearing
a tweed jacket, tweed carpet slippers and a tweed trilby. There were three
ranks
of
coloured silk in his lapel. He took off his hat to shake hands, then replaced
it; his head,
he
explained, was rather fragile in the summer. He was to keep his tweed hat on
all the
time
we were in the house. Some people might have thought this a little cranky, but
I
didn't.
I speak as a doctor.
He
was seventy-seven, he informed me, the secretary and oldest surviving member of
the
Société
des Amis de Flaubert. We sat on either side of a table in a front room whose
walls
were crowded with bric-à-brac: commemorative plates, Flaubert medallions, a
painting
of the Gros Horloge which M. Andrieu had done himself. It was small and
crowded,
curious and personal: like a neater version of Félicité's room, or of
Flaubert's
pavilion.
He pointed out a cartoon portrait of himself, drawn by a friend; it showed him
as
a gunslinger with a large bottle of calvados protruding from his hip pocket. I
should
have
asked the reason for such a ferocious characterisation of my mild and genial
host;
but
I didn't. Instead, I took out my copy of Enid Starkie's Flaubert: The Making of
a
Master
and showed him the frontispiece.
'C'est
Flaubert, &ccdeil;a?' I asked, just for a final confirmation.
He
chuckled.
'C'est
Louis Bouilhet. Oui, oui, c'est Bouilhet.' It was clearly not the first time he
had
been
asked. I checked one or two more details with him, and then mentioned the
parrots.
'Ah,
the parrots. There are two of them.'
'Yes.
Do you know which is the true one and which is the impostor?'
He
chuckled again.
'They
setup the museum at Croisset in 1905,' he replied. 'The year of my birth.
Naturally,
I
was not there. They gathered together what material they could find—well,
you've seen
it
for yourself.' I nodded. 'There wasn't much. Many things had been dispersed.
But the
curator
decided that there was one thing they could have, and that was Flaubert's
parrot.
Loulou.
So they went to the Museum of Natural History and said, Can we please have
Flaubert's
parrot back. We want it for the pavilion. And the Museum said, Of course,
come
with us.'
Monsieur
Andrieu had told this story before; he knew its pauses.
'So,
they took the curator to where they kept the reserve collection. You want a
parrot?
they
said. Then we go to the section of the birds. They opened the door, and they
saw in
front
of them…fifty parrots. Une cinquantaine de perroquets!
'What
did they do? They did the logical thing, the intelligent thing. They came back
with
a
copy of Un coeur simple, and they read to themselves Flaubert's description of
Loulou.'
Just
as I had done the day before. 'And then they chose the parrot which looked most
like
his
description.
'Forty
years later, after the last war, they started making the collection at the
Hôtel-Dieu.
They
in their turn went back to the Museum and said, Please can we have Flaubert's
parrot.
Of course, said the Museum, take your pick, but make sure you get the right
one.
So
they too consulted Un coeur simple, and chose the parrot which most resembled
Flaubert's
description. And that's how there are two parrots.'
'So
the pavilion at Croisset, which had the first choice, must have the true
parrot?'
M.
Andrieu looked non-committal. He pushed his tweed trilby slightly further back
on
his
head. I took out my photographs. 'But if so, what about this?' I quoted the familiar
description
of the parrot, and pointed to the non-conforming forehead and breast of the
Croisset
version. Why should the parrot chosen second look more like the one in the book
than
the parrot chosen first?
'Well.
You have to remember two things. One, Flaubert was an artist. He was a writer
of
the
imagination. And he would alter a fact for the sake of a cadence; he was like
that. Just
because
he borrowed a parrot, why should he describe it as it was? Why shouldn't he
change
the colours round if it sounded better?
'Secondly,
Flaubert returned his parrot to the Museum after he'd finished writing the
story.
That was in 1876. The pavilion was not set up until thirty years later. Stuffed
animals
get the moth, you know. They fall apart. Félicité's did, after all, didn't it?
The
stuffing
came out of it.'
'Yes.'
'And
perhaps they change colour with time. Of course, I am not an expert in the
stuffing
of
animals.'
'So
you mean either of them could be the real one? Or, quite possibly, neither?'
He
spread his hands slowly on the table, in a conjuror's calming gesture. I had a
final
question.
'Are
there still all those parrots left at the Museum? All fifty of them?'
'I
don't know. I don't think so. You have to know that in the Twenties and
Thirties, when
I
was young, there was a great fashion for stuffed animals and birds. People had
them in
their
sitting-rooms. They thought they were pretty. So, a lot of museums sold off
parts of
their
collections which they didn't need. Why should they hold on to fifty Amazonian
parrots?
They would only decay. I don't know how many they have now. I should think
the
Museum got rid of most of them.'
We
shook hands. On the doorstep M. Andrieu raised his hat to me, briefly
uncovering his
fragile
head to the August sun. I felt pleased and disappointed at the same time. It
was an
answer
and not an answer; it was an ending and not an ending. As with Félicité's final
heartbeats,
the story was dying away 'like a fountain running dry, like an echo
disappearing'.
Well, perhaps that's as it should be.
It
was time to pay farewell. Like a conscientious doctor, I made the rounds of
Flaubert's
three
statues. What shape was he in? At Trouville his moustache still needs repair;
though
the
patching on his thigh now looks less conspicuous. At Barentin, his left leg is
beginning
to split, there is a hole in the corner of his jacket, and a mossy
discoloration
spots
his upper body; I stared at the greenish marks on his chest, half-closed my
eyes, and
tried
to turn him into a Carthaginian interpreter. At Rouen, in the place des Carmes,
he is
structurally
sound, confident in his alloy of 93 per cent copper and 7 per cent tin; but he
still
continues to streak. Each year he seems to cry a couple more cupreous tears,
which
brightly
vein his neck. This isn't inappropriate: Flaubert was always a great weeper.
The
tears
continue on down his body, giving him a fancy waistcoat and putting thin
sidestripes
on
his legs, as if he were wearing dress-trousers. This too isn't inappropriate:
it's a
reminder
that he enjoyed salon life as well as his Croisset retreat.
A
few hundred yards north, at the Museum of Natural History, they took me
upstairs.
This
was a surprise: I'd assumed that reserve collections were always held in
cellars.
Nowadays
they probably have leisure centres down there instead: cafeterias and
wallcharts
and
video-games and everything to make learning easy. Why are they so keen to
turn
learning into a game? They love to make it childish, even for adults.
Especially for
adults.
It
was a small room, perhaps eight feet by ten, with windows on the right and
shelves
running
away to the left. Despite a few ceiling lights, it remained quite dark, this
burial
vault
on the top floor. Though it wasn't, I suppose, altogether a tomb: some of these
creatures
would be taken out again into the daylight, and allowed to replace moth-eaten
or
unfashionable colleagues. So it was an ambivalent room, half-morgue and
halfpurgatory.
It
had an uncertain smell, too: somewhere between a surgery and a hardware
shop.
Everywhere
I looked there were birds. Shelf after shelf of birds, each one covered in a
sprinkling
of white pesticide. I was directed to the third aisle. I pushed carefully
between
the
shelves and then looked up at a slight angle. There, standing in a line, were
the
Amazonian
parrots. Of the original fifty only three remained. Any gaudiness in their
colouring
had been dimmed by the dusting of pesticide which lay over them. They gazed
at
me like three quizzical, sharp-eyed, dandruff-ridden, dishonourable old men.
They did
look—I
had to admit it—a little cranky. I stared at them for a minute or so, and then
dodged
away.
Perhaps
it was one of them.
Julian
Barnes was born in Leicester, England, in 1946, was educated at Oxford
University,
and now lives in London. He is the author of two previous novels, Metroland
(winner
of the 1981 Somerset Maugham Award) and Before She Met Me. Mr. Barnes's
television
criticism appears regularly in The Observer.