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 heavy-chested and depressed. I awoke that morning to the twin sounds of time and shit: the Gros Horloge and my corner soil-pipe. 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 phot
ocopied 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 cœur 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, ça?’ 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 set up 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 cœur 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 cœur 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 th
at 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 side-stripes 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.