Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (30 page)

Over the previous few years Sand has become increasingly prone to giving Flaubert increasingly basic advice. She has told him to get married (which causes him to complain to the Princesse Mathilde that his friend's “perpetual pious optimism … sometimes sets my teeth on edge”); she has told him not to be grumpy; told him to eat properly, take walks, and do some gym—“All your trouble comes from lack of exercise”; told him, after the humiliating failure of his play
Le Candidat,
to “ ‘Have another go and do better!' as the peasants say.” At times her consoling words resemble those of a syndicated astrologist: “Many a man has overcome adversity by his own efforts. Be sure that better days will come … So … brighten up, write us a good successful novel, and think of those who love you.”

Perhaps Sand's exasperating belief that life is a soluble problem gives an extra harsh verve to Flaubert's replies; in any case he now rises once more to a lordly and particular
“deffence et illustration”
of his art. And perhaps Flaubert's increasing crabbiness and gloom make Sand more trenchant in her criticism of his work than she has previously been. Withdrawing one's “soul” from one's books is a “morbid fancy”—“supreme impartiality is anti-human”; he should give up his obsession with form and concentrate on emotion. She wants a return to “true reality, which is made up of a mixture of good and evil, bright and dull”; but she is also afraid that the “unsophisticated reader” will be “saddened and frightened” unless good is shown—and, moreover, shown to triumph. Some of Sand's assault comes from mere aesthetic difference; some from misreading; and some—the part that has a friend's anguish in it— from a despairing sympathy allied to a Romantic view of art as the direct, unfiltered expression of the artist's personality.

What constantly puzzles her, what she can't understand about his books, is why she cannot find in them the good chap she has known for so many years: where is the “affection, protection of others, graceful and simple kindness” she has observed? In this respect Flaubert always escapes Sand. Though both assert their old-Romantic buddiness, she is a moralizing humanitarian, a product of Christian civilization; while he is something assembled from both before and after—pre-Christian in his lofty, austere contemplation of the world, yet modern in his artistic response to that contemplation. He loves to quote his friend Littré's terse summary of the human condition: “Man is an unstable compound and the Earth is a decidedly inferior planet.”

Sand is considerably exercised by
L'Education sentimentale,
thinking it would have been improved and made more popular— concepts not far apart for her—by the addition of some authorial statement of intent: “It needed either a short preface, or some expression of disapproval, if only a significant word here or there, to condemn evil, call weakness by its right name, and draw attention to endeavour.” (This recalls the suggestion that a “health warning” affixed to Rushdie's
The Satanic Verses
would solve that particular problem.) Flaubert doesn't reply to this, any more than when Sand applauds
Madame Bovary
obtusely, for being a moral book, “a severe and striking judgement on a woman faithless and without conscience; a rebuke to vanity, ambition and folly.” Furthermore, “It would have been plainer—plain to
all
—if you'd deigned to show what you thought, and what should be thought, about the woman, her husband and her lovers.”

He does, however, restate his aesthetic one final, forceful time. At Nohant they had playfully named a ram after him—the two M. Gustaves had been introduced to each other in 1869—and even in his last tormented years he can still put his head down and charge. Art is not a vomitorium where one relieves one's personal feelings; the artist must be hidden in the work as God is in Nature; a novel should imply, not state, its moral; form and content are interdependent; the truth of an observation or description is a good in itself; style is not a question of surface gloss—on the contrary, good writing implies good thinking. Of course, he does not convince Sand, any more than she does him: tulips are not going to flower in the potato fields at this late stage.

Is it merely that the two novelists are intellectually loyal to an aesthetic creed each developed early, or is it something more: that the aesthetic creed is itself an emanation of the personality, and that this argument over ideas is really just a clash of chromosomes? One of Sand's charges, for instance, is that Flaubert's celebrated refusal to allow his own personal attitudes to enter his work may not be part of some objective artistic credo but merely a subjective indicator that as a human being he lacks convictions. This may and should strike us as a trifle bizarre: his letters, after all, thunder with convictions, none more so than those George Sand has been receiving over the years.

But Sand could have made the point differently: for instance, Flaubert's insistence on the creator's invisibility in the work does fit with his extreme distaste for journalistic intrusion into his life (and with his distaste for being photographed), just as Sand's easygoing here-I-am moralism accords with her earlier life as a “fast,” high-profile public figure. And he is aware of this: he tells her that whereas she instinctively “leaps upward,” he remains “glued to the earth, as though the soles of my shoes were made of lead … If I tried to assume your way of looking at the world I'd become a mere laughing stock. For no matter what you preach to me, I can have no temperament other than my own. Nor any aesthetic other than the one that proceeds from it.”

So perhaps our sense of witnessing some gigantic Franco-Prussian war of ideas is both deeply true and slightly fallacious. A present-day reader will probably find Flaubert's view of the world more truthful than George Sand's because since their deaths the world has itself turned out more to confirm his vision than hers: the return of racial wars, millions of men killed in a single go, and a century which is utilitarian, militaristic, American, and a fair bit Catholic. We also nowadays prefer his art to hers. In her preface to
La Mare au diable
Sand laid down as opposing, irreconcilable forces in art the search for
“la vérité idéale”
and the study of
“la réalité positive”;
these polarities were exemplified for her by
The Vicar of Wakefield
on the one side and
Les Liaisons dangereuses
on the other. In our own century we prefer Laclos to Goldsmith, but what is that the result of? Intellectual argument, the proven nature of the world, changing literary taste? Perhaps the comparative victory of Flaubert's aesthetic over Sand's is mainly a matter of the reader's temperament, or the accumulated mass of readers' temperaments. In which case, Flaubert will have had an ironic triumph, attributable to the hated principle of the predominance of Number.

In his very last letter to his old troubadour, Flaubert's intransigence suddenly appears less granitic. He tells her that he is “not as obstinate as you think,” and predicts that she will recognize her “direct influence” on the story he is currently writing,
Un Coeur simple:
“I believe you will like the moral tendency, or rather the underlying humanity, of this little work.” After her death he wrote to Maurice Sand: “I began
Un Coeur simple
exclusively for her, solely to please her. She died when I was in the middle of my work. Thus it is with all our dreams.” It is a fine and famous literary compliment, though we should allow for Flaubert's innate gallantry: he once claimed that he wrote
L'Education sentimentale
“to please Sainte-Beuve.” Nor does the
Correspondance
provide any further corroboration of Sand's supposed influence.

We also need to check the author's amicable declarations against the work itself. It is true that a Sandian reading is loosely possible if you half-close your eyes: here is a tale of ordinary, near-contemporary life about a simple, good-hearted woman who serves others and believes in God. Remove this deliberate soft focus, however, and you see one of the grimmest and most relentless stories ever written, about a downtrodden, ignorant, exploited servant who is ruthlessly stripped of every single person, living thing, or object to which she becomes attached. Her existence is a Calvary of loss, and ends with a deathbed scene whose potential Sandian poignancy is weather-clouded by the Flaubertian grotesque—the monumental, cruel grotesque, as a stuffed parrot, reanimated and gigantized, does service for the Holy Ghost. Unless you believe (and the story does not invite you to) that Féli-cité's sufferings will be rewarded in Heaven, or that they are somehow a good in themselves, the “moral tendency” of
Un Coeur simple
is unsparingly bleak. The work it lies closest to, in its tone and its machine-like unrolling, is
Madame Bovary.
Truly, its author could not change his eyes.

Flaubert's and Sand's
Correspondance
begins with a small misunderstanding. Sand has received a pressed plant in an envelope with no name on the back, and wonders if the handwriting might be Flaubert's. No, he replies, though curiously enough at about the same time someone had sent him an equally anonymous leaf. (The identity of the horticultural donor or donors remains unsolved.) Three years later, when Sand visits Croisset for the first time, she intends to take away as a souvenir some leaves from a tulip tree— “I need them for arcane purposes”—but forgets them. He brings the leaves up to Paris a few days later, but fails to find her in. Later that year, when the Seine floods, she enquires after the health of the tree. She mentions it again in her diary in 1868, in a letter of 1869, and for the last time (“Tell me whether the tulip tree suffered from the frost this winter”) in April 1871.

The tree, like the house at Croisset, has long since disappeared, but arboreal antiquarians who visit George Sand's grave at Nohant can still stand under the yew tree which was growing there when Flaubert helped bury his old friend on 10 June 1876. A fine rain was falling and the mud was ankle-deep. Flaubert wrote to Turgenev, who was in Russia, that Sand's funeral “was like a chapter in one of her books.” He reported that he had wept like a calf (“twice,” he specified, with unnerving if characteristic precision). To Sand's son Maurice, Flaubert wrote, in the fraternity of grief, that he felt as if “I was burying my mother a second time.” The two women had, after all, offered him a similar rebuke. In one of her last letters Sand, defending the eighteenth-century comic dramatist Sedaine, complained to Flaubert that “you look only for the well-turned phrase.” Twenty-one years previously, when he was still struggling with
Madame Bovary,
his mother had told him that “your mania for sentences has dried up your heart.” Flaubert, good-naturedly, considered her remark “sublime.”

(14)
Tail-Flaying

A bad sight for Flaubert: Prussians in the studio of a Rouen photographer, 1871

In the late autumn of 1875, Flaubert spent six weeks at Concarneau with the naturalist Georges Pouchet. While his friend dissected fish and molluscs, Flaubert took daily sea-baths, gorged himself on lobster, eavesdropped on the table talk of a sardiners' club— confirming yet again the “bottomlessness of human stupidity”— and wrote to his friends. His morale is extremely low, his financial state parlous, his health poor, his brain worn out. He has put aside
Bouvard et Pécuchet
as being too difficult. “The good days are over,” he writes to Turgenev. “The end of my life is no joke,” he tells Edma Roger des Genettes. He likens himself, in a letter to his niece Caroline, to a piece of dead seaweed, torn from its moorings and blown aimlessly about. Caroline urges a more stoical seaside comparison upon him: he must be like a rock. It is unwise to bandy metaphors with Flaubert; she should know, he tells her in reply, that old granite often breaks down into layers of clay. Even more candidly, he tells Edmond de Goncourt that he awaits the first sign of some mortal illness with impatience. Goncourt knows him well enough, he adds, to realize that “This is not a pose!”

The fourth volume of the Pléiade
Correspondance
covers the period 1869–75, seven years that are the great wailing hinge of Flaubert's existence. There is a cruel structure and movement to this penultimate volume of the novel of his life. It opens with Flaubert, publicly and privately, the mature, successful, industrious, and social being he frequently proclaims he isn't. He is completing
L'Education sentimentale,
and just beginning, he thinks, to understand what a novel could be; he is assiduous at Princesse Mathilde's salon, rather preening himself on his insider status; he is also engaged on one of those pieces of socio-political scheming—to get Caroline's husband, Ernest Commanville, named Prussian vice-consul in Dieppe—which he has considerable taste for, and imagines himself good at. (The record is incomplete, but it somehow seems typical that if this was what Flaubert was manoeuvring for, Commanville ended up as vice-consul for Turkey instead.) Apart from the regular vast irritants to a man of his sensibility—critics, newspapers, politics, progressives, Parisians, provincials, Nature—the world is as satisfying a place as it might be. “1869,” he predicts to the Princesse in June of that year, “will have been a good year for me.”