1880 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 to 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, La Tentation de saint Antoine, to 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 to 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 La Tentation de saint Antoine. ‘Torn to pieces,’ 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 son-in-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 vine
gar.
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 of my 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 gun-ports, 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.
1880 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 poi
nt 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 bibliophilie 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.