Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (28 page)

Goncourt makes no mention of Flaubert's presence or reaction to Turgenev that evening, but we may deduce their immediate attraction for one another: the next day Turgenev sent Flaubert two of his books and asked him to dinner. Thus began a friendship which lasted until Flaubert's death in 1880. When they met, Flaubert was forty-one and Turgenev forty-three; each had written the novel—
Madame Bovary, Fathers and Sons
—for which they are still best known. Though there were many books and years ahead, they already presented themselves as elderly men: Turgenev asserted that after the age of forty, the basis of life is renunciation. Each had settled into a rather neutered existence: Flaubert as the solitary prisoner-son of a dominant mother in the backwoods of Normandy, Turgenev as the tame lodger in the Viardot household. Each believed more in the hope of tranquillity than in the possibility of happiness.

In many ways their natures diverged radically: Turgenev was gregarious, cosmopolitan, footloose, mild, and charming; Flaubert was eremitic, provincial, site-specific, rowdy, and coarse. But they had both arrived, through their separate experiences of life, at similar conclusions about the individual, society, and art. Both believed that mankind was a rather hopeless species, that moral progress was a large illusion and scientific progress an even larger one; each was made cheerful by his pessimism. Most importantly, they were in general accord on aesthetic matters. “We are a pair of moles burrowing away in the same direction,” the Russian famously writes.

In the same direction, but not at the same speed, or with the same digging power. Turgenev chides himself for being lazy, while also finding that writing comes rather easily to him; Flaubert is famous for his vast labour, his fervent rewriting, his groaning search for perfection. Turgenev is happy to cultivate a broad social life alongside his writing; Flaubert is someone who, as Anita Brookner has put it, “asserts with terrifying intensity that nothing but writing exists for him, and his case is undoubtedly a morbid one.” Despite these differences of method and artistic temperament, their aesthetic principles are close. Whereas Flaubert's exchanges with other writers tend to be combative, that with Turgenev is full of shared assumptions. It is the most peaceful, chummy, and uncontentious stretch of his entire correspondence.

Moles: Turgenev starts the simile in 1868, and runs it again in 1871: “We shall live for a while like moles hiding in their holes.” Later, he compares Flaubert's tireless labours to those of the ant. Flaubert replies, variously, that he is “like an old toad in his old damp hole”; that he is “an old post-horse, worn out but courageous”; that he works like an ox; that he lives like an oyster. Turgenev raises the bidding stakes in sentimental melancholia by enlarging this last comparison:
he
is “an old oyster that doesn't even open in the sun.” Flaubert wishes that the two of them could, like snakes, slough off their skins and start all over again. This gloomy psychic zoo only acquires a cheerful inhabitant in the very last letter Turgenev sent to his French comrade, when he suddenly and uncharacteristically declares, “I am well and darting about like a squirrel in a cage.” Ironically, this is the one animal Flaubert doesn't get to hear about: by the time the letter arrives, he is a dead bear in a wooden box.

From the very beginning this is a correspondence between old friends. They admire one another's work, without smugness, but also without the extensive comment later readers might hope for; they agree about younger chaps like Zola and Tolstoy; they agree about the lamentable condition of old age which can only be relieved by work—poetry, writes Turgenev, is “the bodkin in our backs.” Flaubert makes gifts of cider and cheese, Turgenev replies with salmon and caviare (which Flaubert eats “almost without bread, like jam”). Both lament the decline of France, and share a loud chuckle when the Comte de Germiny, son of a former governor of the Bank of France, is arrested for buggery in a public lavatory on the Champs-Elysées.

Flaubert is more inclined to rage and complaint, Turgenev to calming good sense and practical help; though each at times sounds like the other. “As for the state of my
soul
—you can get a very accurate idea by lifting up the lid of a cesspool and looking in”: this sounds like Flaubert but isn't. Turgenev offers occasional advice about writing: for instance, that
L'Education sentimentale
is a bad, or rather, inappropriate title (correct), or that
Bouvard et Pécuchet
should be treated
presto,
in the manner of Swift or Voltaire (incorrect—or rather, possible for them, but not for Flaubert). The Frenchman doesn't take offence, but neither does he take most of the advice. One of the few things they constantly disagree upon is where, when, and whether they shall meet. Flaubert is constantly pining and whining, almost childish in his attempts to manipulate or bully “my Muscovite” into visiting him at Croisset. His requests are countered by elaborate yet doubtless genuine letters of prevarication and regret from Turgenev: gout is the main plea, but also business, the demands of the Viardot family, trouble in Russia, and partridge-shooting in England. There is some quiet irony here,given Flaubert's letters to Louise Colet: he spent gallons of ink trying to stop her coming down to Croisset; now he begs, and is often disappointed.

Dr. Johnson thought that “the reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.” This is probably as true today as it was then. Authors frequently conceal their natural (and cultivated) envy, spite, and malice behind public displays of affability and mutual praise. But in the case of Flaubert and Turgenev, the “reciprocal civility” was genuine, and their correspondence represents rare proof of two great writers taking each other to their hearts.

(13)
Consolation v. Desolation

George Sand, by Nadar

Flaubert's exchanges with Turgenev are full of equality—not to say crusty back-patting—but largely empty of difference. His exchanges with Louise Colet, vivid with difference, lack any useful equality: not just because most of her letters were destroyed, but because of his flamboyant and bullying assertiveness. Only in his great correspondence with George Sand does Flaubert manage to attain both equality and difference.

“Your letters fall upon me,” Sand writes with lyrical gratitude, “like a good shower of rain, making all the seeds in the ground start to sprout.” But rain cannot alter the nature of the crop; she warns him not to expect her roots “to produce tulips when all they can give you is potatoes.” So this is not a correspondence that changes its participants' minds. By the time it starts, with Sand fifty-eight and Flaubert an antiquated forty-one, they are too wise, or set in their ways, for that. Early on, she urges him to criticize one of her novels: “People ought to do this service for one another, as Balzac and I used to do. It doesn't mean you change one another— on the contrary, it usually makes one cling more firmly to one's point of view.” Their thirteen-year correspondence exhibits much passionate and at times desperate clinging. On the other hand, this is a correspondence whose two sides make up a whole argument, the argument every writer and reader has with him- or herself, the argument art never ceases to have with itself: Beauty v. Utility, Truthfulness v. Moral Uplift, Happy Few v. Mass Audience, Contemporary Relevance v. Future Durability, Primacy of Form v. Urgency of Message, Style v. Content, The Artist as Controlling Creator v. The Artist as Played-Upon Instrument, and so on. Flaubert, lordly and inflexible, always takes the high aesthetic line: the making of art necessarily entails the partial renunciation of life; the artist can only know humanity, but cannot change it; truth is a sufficient good in itself. Sand's position, to which she is just as committed, is pragmatic and involving: life, and especially love, are more important than art; artists cannot negotiate a detachment from the rest of the human species, since art springs precisely from their intimate, messy commingling with it; art must be useful and moral.

Flaubert told Sand that her work “often set me dreaming in my youth”; and there is corroboration of this in a letter from the seventeen-year-old Flaubert to his school-friend Ernest Chevalier. But most of his references to her before they meet are disparaging. He calls her “that latter-day Dorothée” (after the hormonally confused Mme d'Esterval in Sade's
La Nouvelle Justine);
when her
Histoire de ma vie
comes out, he reports that “Every day I read G. Sand and regularly work myself up into a state of indignation for a good quarter of an hour”; while in 1852, in one of his least gallant similes, he compares her work to leucorrhoea, or vaginal discharge: “everything oozes, and ideas trickle between words as though between slack thighs.” Her books put him off; so did her public image as “Mother St. Sand.” The two of them were set far apart by age, sex, geography, temperament, politics, aesthetics, and metaphysics.

But Flaubert could be as warm and undogmatic in person as he was stern in matters of art. In 1856, for instance, he had begun his long, touching, and unexpected correspondence with Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, undeterred by the fact that she was a thoroughgoing Sandian. Shortly afterwards he met Sand herself and was enchanted. This is not surprising. She was by the 1860s a sort of literary monument whom many came to mock but stayed to admire. Her chief characteristics are held to be placidity, dignity, “elephantine gravity” (the Goncourts), stolidity, calm, serenity, plati-tudinousness, kindness, sweetness, and charm. Male
littérateurs
were reluctantly, even ruefully, won round by her goodness, her honesty, her efficiency, the “frank, cordial simplicity” noted by the young Matthew Arnold back in 1846. Théophile Gautier goes to Nohant, reports it “as amusing as a Moravian monastery,” complains of the personnel that “all their fun comes from farting” (not especially monastic, you'd have thought), but ends by admitting that “All in all, she does you very well.” Maxime Du Camp writes that she “had the serenity of those ruminants whose peaceful eyes seem to reflect immensity”; but in rather a confused account he is clearly impressed by her honourable nature and awed by her industry. The Goncourts are predictably cattier, but though satirical and prurient, they cannot deny her charm. They record her at her first Magny dinner glancing timidly round the table and murmuring to Flaubert, “You're the only one here with whom I feel at ease”; on another occasion they mock her clothes as being chosen to seduce him. Later, they report an overhearing from Princesse Mathilde's conservatory: amid the habitual
vous
of Flaubert and Sand, a
tu
suddenly escapes Sand's lips, and the Princesse looks meaningfully across at the Goncourts. Was this a theatrical
tu
or a lover's
tu?
In fact, neither: throughout their correspondence Sand regularly addressed Flaubert as
tu,
just as, out of respect for her age and sex, he always addressed her as
vous.
He also called her
chère maître,
the feminizing of the adjective marking a double homage to his friend.

Both were provincials still drawn to Paris; both were established as major writers; both lived in large, comfortable, well-run households making visits agreeable. Nohant is the better documented and mythologized: decades later, Henry James was queasily awed at visiting “the very scene where they pigged so thrillingly together. What a crew, what moeurs, what habits … and what an altogether mighty and marvellous George!—not diminished by all the greasiness and smelliness in which she made herself (and
so
many other persons!) at home.” Croisset, by contrast, had fewer visitors. Sand found the bearish retreat “comfortable, pretty and well arranged. Good servants; clean; plenty of water; every need thoughtfully
provided for.”
Beyond this, their very difference drew them together, and perhaps made them less rivalrous. As Sand wrote to him: “I don't think there can be two workers in the world more different from one another than we are … We complete ourselves by identifying every so often with what is not ourselves.”

Mutual praise helps friendship; so does sucking-up. Flaubert's behind-the-hand disparagement of Sand did not stop him sending her a dedicated copy of
Madame Bovary (“hommage d'un inconnu”)
when the novel appeared in volume form in 1857. She wrote admiringly and defendingly of it in the
Courrier de Paris;
and she was later to praise
Salammbô
in
La Presse
(while privately thinking it “really of interest only to artists and scholars”). In return, Flaubert seems to have tried hard and often succeeded in liking Sand's work. In 1872 Flaubert called on
le père Hugo
and found him “charming! I say it again:
charming”
because “I love to love what I admire.” A variant of this is also true: we love to admire what we love. And so Flaubert, won over by Sand's goodness, sympathy, and intelligence, seeks and finds virtue in her writing for the first time since he was seventeen. While remaining intractable in matters of literary principle, he is generous in acknowledging the vivid scene, the plausible character, the flow of plot. He continues occasionally to make an intemperate aside about her work to other correspondents; but this is unexceptional literary behaviour.