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 he began 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 of us? 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. Final
ly, 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.