Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (26 page)

Alphonse Karr in his garden at Saint-Raphaël

“An hour of full, frank chat,” wrote Turgenev to Flaubert in 1863, “is worth a hundred letters.” Maybe to them; but not to us. Sartre's description of Flaubert's Letters as pre-Freudian free association hints at their fluency, profligacy, range, and sexual frankness; to which we should add power, control, wit, emotion, and furious intelligence. The
Correspondance
—which Gide kept at his bedside for five years in place of the Bible—has always added up to Flaubert's best biography. This is partly because it has drawn extraordinarily committed and skilful editors (in France, Jean Bruneau and Alphonse Jacobs; in America, Francis Steegmuller); partly because of the inadequacy of Flaubert's biographers. One of their many problems is the very splendour and quotability of the letters: how do you use them without being manifestly outperformed by them? Sartre's tactic of declining to quote in
L'Idiot de la famille
increasingly works against him: watch the investigating magistrate gag his principal witness and answer for him. As Claude Chabrol put it, Sartre only has to start writing about Flaubert to turn into Homais. There are times, too, when the Letters even surpass biography and veer towards the novelistic. As we read beyond the charismatic hero and his vivid companions, beyond the victories and defeats, the running themes and phrases and gags, we start to watch equally for the crucial activities of the minor characters; we attend to the silences amid the noisy street-cries.

The third volume (out of five) of the Pléiade edition runs from January 1859 to December 1868. In this decade Flaubert publishes
Salammbô
and writes most of
L'Education sentimentale,
while continuing to be fêted as the author of
Madame Bovary.
His social success in Paris increases: the Magny dinners begin, Princesse Mathilde invites him, he receives the
Légion d'honneur.
Though George Sand judges him “one of those rare beings who remain open, sincere, in love with art, neither corrupted by ambition nor drunk with success,” his head is visibly turned. This is the period when his least will-you-dine-with-me? letter is carefully preserved; when the provincial novelist fancies himself master of the metropolis; when his mother is shocked by his glove bill.

The literary tone of the
Correspondance
in this decade alters too. Behind lie Louise Colet and the spectacular self-anatomization undertaken while writing
Madame Bovary.
Now he is the established writer, knowing better what he does, seeking to produce another masterpiece, and then another. His references to the composition of
Salammbô
and
L'Education sentimentale
are therefore of a different order, fascinating but generally brief: research notes and queries, complaints of difficulty, pre-emptive doubts. He constantly talks down
L'Education
for the “mediocrity” of its conception, and satirically anticipates the objections to
Salammbô:
“They're bound to slaughter me.
Salammbô
will i) annoy the bourgeoisie, that's to say everyone; 2) turn the stomach of sensitive folk; 3) irritate archaeologists; 4) seem unintelligible to women; 5) make me look like a pederast and a cannibal. Let's hope so!” In place of creative agonizing there are post-publication fisticuffs—notably with the reasonable Sainte-Beuve and the impudent Froehner over
Salammbô
(where the Flaubertian dictum
faire et se taire
—do your work and remain silent—goes rousingly disregarded).

It is in this decade that Flaubert makes opening epistolary contact with Turgenev and George Sand; but the correspondence with Turgenev does not take off until the 1870s; and while there is some preliminary skirmishing here with Sand, their grand though friendly battle about the purposes and practices of art still lies in the future. What is mainly happening in the course of Volume Three is that the aesthetic hammered out with Bouilhet and bawled at Louise Colet, the aesthetic to be tacitly agreed with Turgenev and argued for with Sand, is “merely” being implemented. Writing consists now of doing again what you've done before: “The poisoning of Emma Bovary made me throw up into my chamber-pot. The assault on Carthage makes my arms ache.” But this time round your pains are familiar, both to yourself and to your correspondents, and you are often reduced to burlesquing them: “I'm sweating blood, pissing boiling oil, shitting catapults and belching slingsmen's stones. Such is my condition.” Writing consists of laboriously taking out extraneous words (“I've used
faire
four times in a row—oh,
shit!”)
and not getting screwed by your publisher. Writing consists of complaining that there are more than the agreed number of lines per page on your proofs—“my style is dense enough without making things even harder for the reader”—and of making sure you get the correct Carthaginian circumflex: “The circumflex on Salammbô shouldn't have any sort of curve to it. Nothing could be less Punic. I insist on you making it more open.”

Indeed, Flaubert's dealings with his publisher Michel Lévy provide the most purely comic passages in the volume. When negotiations over
Salammbô
begin, the novelist is fully aware of his power and marketability. Even so, his first and main demand remains exceptional in the annals of authorial vanity and paranoia: it is that Lévy must on no account be permitted to read his manuscript. This had happened to the novelist once before, with
Madame Bovary,
when an editor at the Librairie Nouvelle to whom he had shown the book had had the impertinence to comment favourably on it. “A publisher may exploit you,” Flaubert explained to the Goncourts, “but he doesn't have the right to judge you.” Lévy's superiority as a publisher on that occasion was “never to have said a single word about my book.” Now Lévy has the audacity to expect the right to read
Salammbô.
Flaubert feels “a repugnance and extreme exasperation at being judged by M. Lévy” When Jules Duplan tries to change his mind, Flaubert repeats: “The idea of that blockhead Lévy getting his bloody paws on
my pages
revolts me more than the worst review could do. It's as if he was asking me to French-kiss him.” Bouilhet suggests that Flaubert merely read fragments of the book out loud to Lévy, Duplan that the publisher be allowed to contemplate the book only in the office of Flaubert's lawyer; but the novelist is adamant. Though he says he wants 20,000 francs for the novel, he insists on first finding out what Lévy will offer sight unseen. Lévy proposes 10,000 francs, which Flaubert accepts rather than suffer the humiliation of being appreciated. The squabble broadens. Lévy wants a two-book contract, the option being on Flaubert's next “roman moderne.” Flaubert tries for just having “volume” in the contract, but Lévy wins out, additionally specifying that by “roman mod-erne” the parties are to understand “not set before 1750.” Flaubert's other inflexible demand—for a fixed sum rather than a royalty (for who, he argues, can ever prove the number of copies sold?)—also works against him. By 1866, when
Salammbô
has been a success for four years, Flaubert is agitating for an
ex gratia
payment to make up for lost royalties.

This volume contains many of Flaubert's famous and echoing pronouncements: on fucking your inkwell, on the religion of despair, the royal chamber of the heart, the folly of wanting to come to conclusions, the invisibility of the writer within his creation, the submission of the writer to a particular subject (rather than his active choice of it), the belief that “a novel is … a particular way of living.” As always, Flaubert is wonderfully free, vigorous, and stern in his opinions. With his motto
Merde, merde et archimerde,
he dumps on the ineradicable imbecility of his time: on the medieval and despotic nature of socialism; on the chic modern rage to
parler sport;
on Béranger and the wider cult of golden mediocrity; on Musset (a sentimental hairdresser); on the inanities of Pre-Raphaelite theory; on the “infantile”
Les Misérables.
Praise is restricted: to Shakespeare
(le maître des maîtres),
Voltaire (but not Voltaireans), Montaigne, Dickens, Zola. He playfully attributes made-up quotes to those he admires: so
L'Esprit des lois
is given as the source for “that bitch was wanking at the sight of other people's pleasure,” and Voltaire rewarded with (the so far untraced and therefore presumably invented) “the history of the human mind is the history of human folly.” Flaubert is just as free with his predictions, whose wonkiness flatters posterity's hindsight. During this decade he foresees the death of Islam, the division of France into two like Belgium, and the impossibility of war with Prussia: “As for war, who with? With Prussia? Prussia wouldn't be so stupid.” This last is from 1868. An odder, longer-term prediction is that a time will come when mankind will abandon its quest for happiness—“which will not amount to progress, but at least mankind will be calmer.”

However, if we read this volume as a book rather than as an assemblage to be filleted for aesthetic dicta and handy tips on the fiction, then it becomes richer and stranger, gayer and grimmer. For a start, we notice the wide range of letter-writers who coexist within Flaubert: he has categories of address according to his categories of friendship. With Ernest Feydeau he is the laddish cocks-man, dreaming of depilated cunts beneath an eastern sky; with Amélie Bosquet and Aglaé Sabatier the mischievous gallant, going so far but not, in words anyway, farther (“a thousand kisses in places of your choosing”); with Princesse Mathilde the humble courtier and gift-bearer (one wonders what she did with a delivery of turnip seeds); with Jules Duplan, friend and general gofer, he is the impatient, seigneurial employer, occasionally dispensing robust consolation—“You poor old fellow, you look as if life has given you a right buggering”; with Bouilhet the profound friend, literary operator, and also obscenity recidivist, bursting into lubricity as a sign-off; with his niece Caroline mostly the loving Nuncle; with Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie the wise agony uncle, even though she is old enough to be his aunt; with George Sand the affectionate
confrère,
keen to play down any reputation for vice; with the Goncourts (“I grasp you by all four hands”) a slightly edgier
confrère,
keen to play up such a reputation. These constant changes of register sometimes lead to comical rephrasings. Summarizing his difficulties with
L'Education sentimentale
to Duplan in April 1863,he writes: “I'm wanking my brain to no purpose.” The next year, for Caroline's benefit, he softens the image: “I have never tugged my poor brain so much.” By 1866, still on the same book, he sanitizes the phrase completely for George Sand: “You don't know what it's like to spend a whole day with your hands pressed against your head, just to find a single word.”

Once the main lines of the decade are established, the correspondents who make the most impact in this volume are not, surprisingly, Flaubert's literary and social companions, but two of the quieter characters: Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie and Caroline. At first sight, Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, who wrote to him out of the blue in 1856, seems an unlikely long-term correspondent. Though she admires his work, she is not immune from fandom's twittering, and can be whoppingly wrong-headed (thus “The ending [of
Madame Bovary]
should keep women firmly on the path of duty”). She is a fifty-six-year-old spinster at the time of their first contact, living in Angers with up to eighteen hangers-on who exploit her generosity; she is religious but spiritually blocked, neurotic and repetitively complaining; in the emptiness of her life she ardently seeks Flaubert's advice; but when she gets it, she invariably doesn't take it, and then complains anew about her unchanged moral and spiritual condition. At first it seems that Flaubert is merely indulging himself as the wise author being consulted about life. But his concern is genuine, and the pair of them are less dissimilar than they appear to be. She tells him how she finds reality disappointing and can only live in
idéalité
(for her, religion, for him, literature); he observes that each of their lives is sombre and solitary, marked by a hidden wound. If she seems at times a hysterical old woman, then that is precisely how a doctor once described him—an observation he judged “profound.” And so, finding priests an insuperable obstacle between her and God, unable to confess in a church, she confesses with brutal wholeness to Flaubert. The kindliness of his replies and his sympathy for her suffering should temper any reflections on his generalized misanthropy. Her tone is frequently valetudinarian; she fears she will die without going to the opera,like the man in the Nadaud song who thought he would die without seeing Carcassonne. (Why is that city so emblematic, incidentally? The narrator of
The Good Soldier,
Ford's “French” novel, suddenly announces, “I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.”) They never met, despite mutual assurances that they would. Surprisingly, given that she is always about to expire, she outlived him, dying in 1888 at the age of eighty-seven. It is a touching relationship, a side-story having little to do with Flaubert's creativity. Although when, summarizing her life yet again for her illustrious, unglimpsed correspondent, she writes, “My life has been spent in acts of pointless devotion,” we might sense a pre-echo of Félicité in
Un Coeur simple.

Letters to and from Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie survive in equal numbers; the exchange with Caroline is completely one-sided. This is not a new problem; there are voluminous speaking absences elsewhere in the
Correspondance,
absences where the reader must act creatively, as with a novel. Most of Louise Colet's letters were destroyed, while in the case of Juliet Herbert not a single letter survives on either side (and yet, as Hermia Oliver has shown, the relationship can still be plausibly reconstructed). Flaubert's letters to his niece—tender, proud, hortatory, cajoling—exist in some quantity; only one of her replies has come down to us. There is nothing immediately sinister in this: most of the family letters have disappeared. Bruneau comments: “Flaubert's two nieces were responsible, but not blameworthy. That such letters might be published was unthinkable to the bourgeoisie at that time.” But there seems a little more to the destruction of Caroline's letters—and to the survival of the one that exists—than general family
pudeur;
and as we track her in and out of Bruneau's scrupulous annotations, her poignant and instructive story becomes the secret drama of this volume.