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Times Online |
February 01, 2006 |
Lost fragments from the
life of Flaubert
Julian Barnes
Gustave Flaubert
VIE ET TRAVAUX DU R. P. CRUCHARD ET AUTRES INÉDITS
Edited by Matthieu Desportes and Yvan Leclerc
146pp. Universités de Rouen et du Havre. 15 euros.
2 87775 399 9
Flaubert is exemplary, indeed talismanic, for
the stern separation he made between his public and private writings. His
novels are objective constructions which unfold in authorial absence; his
letters are a place of riotous opinion-giving and frank emotional unbuttoning.
Yet the distance between the two was not empty but connective. It was part of
Flaubert’s literary strategy to treat his correspondence as a déversoir, an
overflow, an outlet which purged the intrusive self and helped liberate the
fiction into its desired impersonality. Three years before Madame Bovary
appeared, he bade farewell, in a letter to Louise Colet, to “the personal, the
intimate, to everything connected with me”. His “old project” of one day
writing his memoirs was now officially abandoned: “Nothing personal tempts me
any more”.
This makes such overflow as we
have the more fascinating: the incomparable letters, but also the travel notes
and the Cahiers intimes of 1840–41. This latter was Flaubert’s response to a
provocative if platitudinous remark by Dr Jules Cloquet, who was minding the twenty-year-old
Gustave on a tour of the Pyrenees and Corsica. Cloquet advised him to write
down, preferably in aphoristic form, “everything he knew”, seal it, and leave
the envelope for fifteen years. The doctor assured his charge that when, as a
thirty-five year old, he reopened it, he would discover “a different man” from
the one he had in the meanwhile become.
No one suspected that this sealed-envelope
technique had had more than a single outing until 1999, when Matthieu Desportes
published Heures d’autrefois, the memoirs of Flaubert’s niece Caroline, Mme
Franklin Grout. Tucked away in an appendix are transcriptions of five pages of
Caroline’s working notes (though whether they were for Heures d’autrefois or
the Souvenirs intimes she published herself is not evident). Here she records
that, at certain times of extreme emotion, her uncle felt the need to write
down his impressions on the spot and seal them away. She lists three occasions:
the deaths of Alfred Le Poittevin and Louis Bouilhet, “and also I think the
death of his sister”. This last item, if ever written, has not been found; but
to the astonishment and delight of Flaubertistes, the other two pieces,
intimate necrologies of Flaubert’s two closest and best-loved literary
companions – the first of his youth, the second of his maturity – have just
turned up, literally found in the back of a drawer. They formed part of a
dossier of six pieces prepared by Caroline Franklin Grout for a publication
that never happened; they exist in her handwriting, and her uncle’s originals
are still missing. Additions to Flaubert’s correspondence appear frequently
enough; but this is certainly the most important find since Jean Bruneau
published the Conte oriental in 1973.
The dossier, like much else, was dispersed after
the Franklin Grout sale of 1931, and two of its six original items have emerged
and been published in the interim. The remaining four are here immaculately
presented by Desportes and Yvan Leclerc (who is shortly to give us the final
volume of the Pléiade Correspondance). They are of different status and
literary intention. The most genial, and the most predictable, is the title
piece, “Vie et travaux du R. P. Cruchard”, which was sent to George Sand in
1873 and whose existence was already well attested. It is a mock biography of
one of Flaubert’s many comic alter egos, a piece of pseudo-scholarly jocosity
designed to entertain a friend, written in a tone more affectionate (indeed,
humorously doting) than anticlerical. It is, technically, not quite an inédit,
since a version from a different manuscript was published in 1943, though in
such an obscure Lyonnais source that no living Flaubertiste had ever been aware
of it.
“Bal donné au Czar”, by contrast, is not just
inédit but quite unsuspected. These are the notes Flaubert took, in June 1867,
after attending a ball at the Tuileries given by Napoleon III for Alexander II
of Russia and William I of Prussia. The mock self-importance with which
Flaubert reported his invitation in a letter to Caroline – “Their Majesties
wish to inspect me as one of France’s more splendid monuments” – indicates that
he was well aware of the artist’s status on such occasions: as a minor piece of
table-dressing. In any case, the high politics of the “Three Emperors Summit”
pass him by; here he is the professional writer hoovering up usable detail at a
grand society event. Thus he has an eye for the Tsar’s elastic-sided boots, of
which he disapproves, the food offered to below-the-salters like himself (cold
salmon and a glass of Saint-Péray), the jewellery, the flirting, and the
goody-bags one of the Emperor’s equerries distributes. Some of Flaubert’s more
extended jottings – a lyrical description of a night-time parade of bedizened
women in the gaslit garden – already have an embryonic fictional feel to them.
Their most plausible destination would have been the project known (in one of
its many vestigial manifestations) as Sous Napoléon III.
But the two key items in the dossier are,
inevitably, the private necrologies: compelling in themselves, but also when
set alongside Flaubert’s letters describing the same events to Maxime Du Camp
(his third important literary companion, and the only one to outlive him). By
themselves the letters to Du Camp are as unflinching as we might expect of
their author, down to the stink of putrefaction as he turns Le Poittevin’s
corpse before helping wrap it in a double shroud. Yet compared to the notes
Flaubert sealed (and the purpose of that sealing is enigmatic – for later
consultation? for posterity? as a symbolic gesture, a literary entombment to
match the actual one?), the letters amount almost to a performance; at any
rate, to something phrased, shaped, consciously written. He conveys to Du Camp
what has to be conveyed: who did and felt what, how events unfolded, what went
wrong, which grotesqueries marred the solemnity.
The notes, by contrast, convey what happened –
that’s to say, every passing thing that strikes the senses of the novelist, all
the trivial, necessary, distracting bits of infill that accompany the days of
death. In the case of Le Poittevin: the grog au kirsch Flaubert takes on his
way from Croisset to la Neuville-Champ-d’Oisel; the “purain” (working-class
Rouennais) speech of the woman watching the body; the sense of “well-being”
dinner provides, even though his friend lies dead upstairs; the cigar smoked in
the garden; the row with the body-watcher when he wants more light to read by;
his sense, at the graveside, that he might be posing, putting on his grief; the
champagne, cut with water, that he drinks on his return to Croisset. Nor is it
just the addition of new detail: there are minor yet significant discrepancies
between the parallel accounts. Thus, in the private necrology, Flaubert notes
that during his vigil he hears from deep in the surrounding woods “the sweet
and faraway call of a hunting horn”. Naturally he passes on this echoey detail
in his letter to Du Camp; but whereas privately he times the offstage horn-call
at “11”, he tells Du Camp that it occurred at “midnight”. This is unlikely to
be a mistranscription by Caroline – 11 for 12 – since he writes “minuit” in the
letter. “Midnight” can only be a literary – indeed a romantic – improvement.
The Bouilhet farewelling he seals just over
twenty years later similarly contains much extra detail: for example,
Flaubert’s shock, during his penultimate visit to his dying friend, at seeing
the untended state of Bouilhet’s beard. This dismayed Flaubert not just as a
sign of self-neglect, but because it reminded him of his own father’s last
days, and of the wider truth that a “poor man’s beard” was a sign of impending
death. He also writes up the routine irritations of travel (Flaubert was in
Paris when Bouilhet died in Rouen) at such length that it can only be – even in
such a short text – a way of staving off the necessity of writing about his
dead friend. So he reminds himself of the packing, the veal cutlet with stuffed
tomato he eats at the café, the shave he goes for, the prostitute he visits,
and then – always a reliable source of exasperation – his fellow-passengers on
the train to Rouen.
But there is a difference of tone here as well
as of material. The account he sent to Du Camp was clearly designed to console
its recipient: their friend had died a good, brave, religion-free death, and
had made the right decisions on the way to it. The obituary exhibits much more
the chaos and panic of Flaubert’s grief (the train journey becomes almost
hallucinatory at moments), while the consolation sought here is for himself. As
Leclerc points out, in burying Le Poittevin, Flaubert was burying his vie de
garçon; with Bouilhet he was anticipating his own death (and the physical
similarity between the two friends must have made for an eerie preview). And
whereas in both necrologies the emotions on show are rawer, less literary, than
in the letters, the notes on Bouilhet’s death reveal a new development – the
fear of emotion. In 1848, the young man took the stinking corpse of Le
Poittevin in his arms, as a clear-eyed (if unpublished) writer embracing and
examining the worst of life. But, by 1869, the fast-ageing Flaubert is unable
to face the sight of the dead Bouilhet, and waits until the coffin is closed:
“I didn’t dare set eyes on him. I feel less strong than twenty years ago . . .
. I have not internal toughness. I feel worn out”.
These sparse, swiftly written notes do not just
amplify Flaubert’s state of mind; they also contain new biographical data. It
is a familiar fact that Flaubert regarded Le Poittevin’s marriage, in June
1846, as a great act of betrayal, both of him personally, and of their agreed
artistic principles. In Leclerc’s happy phrase, it was a case (in Flaubert’s
view) of “suicide by marriage” – the literary man succumbing to convention and
bourgeois unthinkingness. What was not known until these pages came to light is
that Le Poittevin did not swagger into marriage in a state of blithe sentimental
delusion. On the contrary, a few days before the wedding (which Flaubert
appears not to have attended), his feet were so cold that he suggested to his
friend Boivin that they “f. le camp” together.
The pages about Bouilhet turn out to be even more
biographically surprising. Flaubert and Bouilhet first became close in August
1846, two months after Le Poittevin’s treacherous marriage. Bouilhet was
Flaubert’s inflexible literary support, his intellectual compass, his “left
testicle”; also, his partner in fun – it was with Bouilhet that he developed
the ecclesiastical fantasy world inhabited by the Révérend Père Cruchard.
Literary history has always placed them high on the list of artistic companions
separable only by death. Yet now it transpires that, three years before his
death, Bouilhet also abandoned (“lâché” – the same verb is used in both
instances) Flaubert. According to the sealed necrology, Bouilhet changed “in
mood, personality and ideas”, he became narrow, provincial, prim and miserly –
“un peu prud’homme”. The delight in lubricity, which Flaubert continued to
regard as healthy and comic, now struck Bouilhet as childish and disgusting. He
developed “all the moral symptoms of old age”. He refused to visit Croisset,
and began disapproving of Flaubert, especially of his friends’ worldly
activities: “He held it against me that I accepted society and Paris for what
they are”.
The two friends – each accusing the other of a
different form of embourgeoisement – were reconciled towards the end, and Flaubert
was able to write that he had “rediscovered my Bouilhet tout entier”; but the
suddenness and extent of their falling-out has never been hinted at before. Or
if hinted, misread: when Flaubert tells Du Camp, in his mourning letter, that
the Bouilhet who returned to die in Rouen had “completely changed from the man
you knew” – though his “literary intelligence” remained the same – most readers
would infer no more than a catastrophic medical decline. Now we can see the
phrase’s further meaning.
But there is worse – for Flaubertistes anyway:
Bouilhet’s sudden respectability, and distaste for lubricity, led him to burn
many of his friend’s letters. Nor was he the first incinerator: Flaubert
recalls here that two decades previously “Alfred also developed this mania for
the auto-da-fé”. This accounts for the saddening disproportionality in the
correspondence: we have forty letters from Le Poittevin to Flaubert, but only
fifteen in reply. The scale of Bouilhet’s anxious vandalism is much greater:
523 of his letters to Flaubert survive, against a mere eighty-six in the
opposite direction. Nor is it much comfort that Flaubert’s vexation at his
friend’s conduct has a proleptic tinge: a decade later, this particular “moral
symptom of old age” also caught up with him. He had two great bonfires: one in
1877, when he destroyed his youthful letters from Du Camp – who returned the
compliment, matching fire with fire – and another in 1879, which was witnessed
and later written up by Maupassant.
When the splendour and the incompleteness of
Flaubert’s correspondence were first fully revealed, it was assumed, and
repeated with increasing authority, if lack of evidence, that Caroline Franklin
Grout as literary executor must have been the chief destroyer. It fitted a biographical
paradigm: that of the embarrassed descendant protecting her family’s
reputation, the snobbish niece rebourgeoisifying her artist uncle. But there is
an equal paradigm, that of the ageing artist, often for what seem to be
high-minded reasons, cleaning up his own biography in advance. Caroline was
particularly suspected of having burnt Louise Colet’s letters; she always
denied it, but not until Hermia Oliver’s Flaubert and an English Governess
(1980) was she defended to the point of virtual exculpation. The destroyers of
letters turn out to have been the obvious suspects – their first recipients: Le
Poittevin, Bouilhet, Flaubert himself. Increasingly, Caroline’s stewardship of
her uncle’s literary estate can be seen as both industrious and honourable: witness
the survival of these four new texts. It is true that she cleaned up some of
the correspondence (changing an intimate tu to a formal vous, occasionally correcting
grammar, and suppressing lubricity), but her transcriptions here properly
include both the “f. le camp” and the prostitute (“La P.”), even if in
abbreviated form. “La Dame si bien”, as she was patronizingly termed, did not
disappear as far into respectability as has sometimes been supposed – less so,
perhaps, than either Le Poittevin or Bouilhet. Or even, at times, her very
uncle.
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