Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (23 page)

Not much, is it? Yet Sartre immediately applies the magnifying glass and expands the child to “pathologically credulous”; while his parents, we are assured, “searched his features and feared he was an idiot.” Is Gustave's instant departure towards the kitchen
that
credulous? How many parents would back their own six-year-olds not to fall for a similar straight-faced wheeze? As for the idiocy: Gustave was, it is true, slower at learning to read than his sister, but the memoir continues with an incident which might well be held to confirm precocious intelligence. Before he was taught his letters, Gustave was often read to by an old family friend called Papa Mignot. Caroline Commanville reports that when there were scenes over Gustave's slowness in learning to read, the child's final argument, “to his mind irrefutable,” was “What's the use of learning when Papa Mignot reads to me?” Not quite as good, perhaps, as Jean-Paul's
“Je les vivrai,”but
hardly the sort of response to have parents scanning the infant face for signs of idiocy. Sartre ignores this part of the memoir, and supports his thesis more by bullying repetition than anything else. The twentieth-century Freudian orthodoxy is that of the artist as neurotic; Sartre expands this into a wider orthodoxy of the genius as idiot. In fact, it's rather a Hollywood notion, a literary version of Log Cabin to White House, sentimental, and a bit vulgar. “I see it all … the small boy, his thumb in his mouth … the great writer having difficulty with his letters … and a little wood-burning stove in the background …”

Sartre is much stronger on the less contentious subject of Flaubert as neurotic, on the big, strapping youth mysteriously laid low by spiritual scurvy. The passivity, the pessimism, the malice, the “option of hysteria,” and the “precocious senility” are fictionalized together into a convincing flow. I'm not sure the lengthy result is more vivid than Flaubert's own deliberations on the subject: he once described his adolescent self as “a mushroom swollen with boredom.” But then Sartre seems unwilling—too jealous, even—to give Flaubert his head in quotation.

“Critic.
Always eminent. Held to know everything, to have seen and read everything. If you disagree with one, call him Aristarchus, or eunuch.” Flaubert's definition from the
Dictionnaire des idées reçus
doesn't exactly come home to roost. Eunuch? Hardly. Aristarchus? Well, Sartre didn't really cut or change bits of Flaubert— rather the opposite, in fact. But his zeal to transform an instance of life into an instance of dogma, a proof of theory, brings to mind the words of the American artist Stuart Davis: “It has been scientifically established that the acoustics of Idealism give off the Human Sound of Snoring, whereas Reality always says ‘Ouch!' ” Sartre could also be accused of not having learnt one lesson taught by the object of his study. Flaubert died in 1880; Sartre in 1980. Flaubert left unfinished
Bouvard et Pécuchet,
in which he sought to enclose the whole of knowledge, the whole of the world, the whole of idiocy; Sartre left unfinished
L'Idiot de la famille,
in which he sought to enclose and subdue Flaubert, master writer, master bourgeois, the sage, and the enemy. Sartre condemns
Bouvard et Pécuchet,
first as “colossal and grotesque,” later as “vast and monotonous.” All four adjectives can safely be transferred to his own work. It is a vast folly, erected with “admirable but mad” single-mindedness. There it stands, and surely, you think, the view from the top must be splendid. But no: Climb up and you only see a little more than you do from the road.

(10)
Not Drowning But Waving:
The Case of Louise Colet

Louise Colet in riding costume, by Courbet

Who burned Louise Colet's letters to Flaubert? For a century it was taken for granted that the destroyer was Flaubert's niece Caroline, the inheritor of his literary estate. Caroline, the stiff, correct, high-bourgeois protector,
“la dame si bien,”
who in publishing her uncle's correspondence cut out any passages she deemed intimate or indecent, suppressed uncomplimentary opinions, changed his punctuation, and tidied up his phrasing; who wouldn't allow the expression
“tenir le bec hors de l'eau”
(“keep your snout above water”) in a letter to Turgenev, gentrifying it into
“tenir la tête hors de l'eau”
(head). Such editorial interventionism was of the period: when negotiating with Louise Colet's equally proper daughter, Mme Bissieu, Caroline received permission to publish 138 of Flaubert's letters to Louise (and none of the more unbuttoned ones) on the condition that she changed
tu
to
vous
throughout. What could be likelier, in this suppressive, censoring, cleaning-up ambience, than that Caroline, while adjusting her uncle's image into something more Pantheonic and less fun, should dispose of the no doubt licentious outpourings of the notoriously pesky Louise?

Hermia Oliver's
Flaubert and an English Governess
quietly but pertinaciously queried this assumption. Caroline may have offered the public a pasteurized version of her uncle, but her tampering had an innate probity to it. She deleted and rewrote, but never touched the manuscripts themselves: everything was done in the transcription. Further, Caroline's own niece testified that her aunt's attitude towards the literary estate—manuscripts, notebooks, dossiers, even her uncle's library—was that “it was absolutely nec essary to preserve all of them.” And finally, while there is no specific evidence to finger Caroline as vandal, there is already one documented destroyer of the novelist's correspondence: Flaubert himself. In 1877, warned about what might happen after a writer's death by the publication of Mérimée 's
Lettres à un inconnu,
Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp burned most of their youthful letters to each other. The correspondences with Ernest Chevalier, Louis Bouil-het, and Georges Pouchet were drastically thinned for similar reasons. Another burning session took place in May 1879. Flaubert wrote to his friend Edmond Laporte: “Yesterday I spent
eight hours
sorting and burning letters, a long delayed job, and my hands are shaking from tying up packets.” Hermia Oliver adduces as corroboration a hitherto ignored account by Maupassant in
L'Echo de Paris
of 24 November 1890, in which he recalls a bonfire night at Crois-set “a year before” Flaubert's death—i.e., in 1879. Maupassant describes “a little silk dancing shoe,” containing a faded rose and a yellowing lace-edged handkerchief, being cast into the flames. This was almost certainly Louise Colet's slipper, as hymned by Flaubert in a love letter to her of August 1846. “It can surely hardly be doubted,” Hermia Oliver concludes, that among the letters destroyed that night were those of Laporte, Caroline's English governess Juliet Herbert—and Louise Colet. This conclusion is the point of departure for Francine du Plessix Gray's biography and rescue-act:

I believe that those last missives … were the many hundreds of letters written to Flaubert by Louise Colet. That is why I have written this book. To reinstate a colleague into the annals of her time. To do her justice. To resurrect yet another woman whose memory has been erased by the caprices of men.

Louise Colet was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1810 and came to Paris with her music-professor husband Hippolyte in 1835. She swiftly established herself as a poet, a beauty, and a salon-goer. She won the Académie Française 's prize for a poem on a set theme four times, and was awarded a government pension. She found a long-term protector in Victor Cousin, supporters in Béranger and Victor Hugo, lovers in Musset, Vigny, Flaubert, and Champfleury. She posed as Sappho for the sculptor Pradier, and frequented the salon of the ageing Mme de Récamier. She had, as Gray generously puts it, “a reverence for glory.” This word, which features much in Louise's life and musings, was the cause of her key disagreement with Flaubert over “the glory of Corneille.” He also rebuked her sternly for having “the love of art” but not “the religion of art.”

Still, a reverence for glory and a love of art are certainly enough to get a literary career started. Colet was also a sharp exploiter of opportunity. When she approached Chateaubriand for a puff for her first collection of poetry (which just happened to include two poems in praise of the “Homer of Melancholy” himself), he replied rather cannily that his endorsement would not count for much, since “only poets can announce a poet.” Undeterred, she simply reprinted his letter as a preface (Chateaubriand, to his credit, does not seem to have taken offence). Sainte-Beuve largely resisted her literary charm, though applauding her novel
Lui
(in which he is given a cameo role as the wise “Sainte-Rive”). A more conspicuous failure was with George Sand, who always kept the younger writer at a distance; if we are to believe an anecdote in
Lui,
Sand once heard Colet recite her work at a salon and afterwards offered the following literary compliment—“Madame, you have the arms and shoulders of a Greek statue.” Still, Louise certainly had supporters enough at the start of her career, and knew how to play the Paris game. Victor Cousin, lover, protector, and high government official, used his influence to have Louise's pension tripled and Hippolyte 's salary doubled.

Louise was bold and melodramatic, impulsive and self-advertising, admirable yet faintly ridiculous. All these characteristics emerged in her celebrated attack on the satirical journalist Alphonse Karr. In 1840, when Louise was almost nine months pregnant, Karr wrote an article clearly insinuating that Cousin—a regular target of his—had used his official position to get Colet's pension raised (true), and was also the father of her child (which, if not necessarily true, certainly seems to have been believed by both parties at the time). The piece was indubitably caddish, and Louise straightforwardly decided that the journalist must die for it. What's more, it seemed to her self-evident that Hippolyte Colet should be charged with rectifying this insult to her honour.

Hippolyte was a slight and prematurely stooped professor of composition at the Conservatoire; Karr a bulky expert swordsman and one of the best shots in Paris. When Hippolyte “backed off,” as Gray puts it (and who can blame him?), Louise went round to Karr's lodgings with a kitchen knife: “To arm myself with a more elegant weapon,” she later wrote, “would have been theatrical. I only wished to act with simplicity, as is suitable to any great sorrow.” Heavily pregnant as she was, she stabbed Karr in the back, drawing a little blood. The journalist turned round, disarmed her, and (in his version) offered her his arm before calling her a cab.

Through the intervention of Sainte-Beuve, Karr promised not to sue Louise, and in the next issue of his magazine even applauded her “energy” and “courage bordering on nobility.” But the occasion was too lushly tempting for any journalist to resist. “I certainly would have been gravely harmed,” Karr went on, “if my attacker had struck me with a direct horizontal blow instead of lifting her arm high over her head in a tragedienne's gesture, surely in anticipation of some forthcoming lithograph of the incident.” Both come out of the drama well and badly; though Louise probably had more to lose, and did so. Karr kept the knife, and exhibited it in a glass case with the label: “Given to me by Mme Colet … in the back.”
*

Louise Colet was a prolific writer: of fiction, poetry, biography, history, and travel. What still has life? Francine du Plessix Gray recounts a visit to the Provençal house—now a golf hotel—in which Colet was brought up. The estate's present owner, Paul Révoil, Louise's great-great-grand-nephew, sounds grumpily baffled at being badgered about his scandalous forebear: “You're the third person who's come around this year. Never read a word of hers—was she that good?” To which Gray revealingly replies that she is “awfully interesting.” Though her biography is heartfelt and impassioned about the woman, Gray makes no extravagant claims for the work. She seems keener to establish Colet as a pioneer feminist, a “nineteenth-century Erica Jong who splashed her life and loves across her poetry and prose,” than as a writer
tout court;
and when it comes to literary assessment, is inclined to quantify the percentage of feminism present and leave it at that.

Colet's novel
Lui
is probably her most enduring work (as well as her only one currently available in English). It was part of that small library of kiss-and-tell fiction set off by Musset's death in 1857. The poet had started it himself with
Confession d'un enfant du siècle
(1836), in which he described his Italian affair with George Sand. Two decades later she replied with
Elle et Lui,
Musset's brother Paul retaliated
with Lui et Elle,
the waggish Gaston Laval-ley joined in
with Eux,
and Colet completed the job
with Lui.
This transparent
roman à clef
stars Louise as the glamorous Stéphanie de Rostan, romantically beset by a pair of unsatisfactory suitors: Léonce, the obscure, cold-hearted novelist toiling away at his supposed masterpiece in Normandy; and Albert, the passionate, impulsive, tippling poet-aristocrat whose heart has been crushed by a painful affair with the famous writer Antonia, and who now seeks consolation and amatory rebirth with Stéphanie.