Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (31 page)

The novelist should have known about dramatic irony: 1869 was precisely the starting-point of a catastrophic decade filled with deaths, illness, financial ruin, precipitate old age, and thunderously intrusive History. Less than five weeks after his blithe prediction, he was writing again to Princesse Mathilde to report the death of Louis Bouilhet, the friend he variously described as half his brain, his literary compass, and his left testicle. The mixed reception given to
L'Education sentimentale
later that year hinted that Flaubert would never again repeat the success of
Madame Bovary
or
Salammbô.
The Franco-Prussian War tore at his view of France (and Prussia). Jules Duplan, his closest friend after Bouilhet, died in 1870, followed by Sainte-Beuve (his most important critical supporter), Jules de Goncourt (whose death reduced to three the original seven Magny diners), Gautier, and Ernest Feydeau. His mother died in 1872. Finally, the collapse of European timber prices ruined Commanville and with him, effectively, Flaubert.

After such battering, his health, always fragile, cracks; in these pages he suffers from rheumatism, angina, eczema, swollen glands, dysentery, gout, and the continuing effects of syphilis. Looking back, he judges that he was always afraid of life; he envies other professions, other ways of living; he suffers child-regret. His existence has been arid, “laborious and austere.” But a man is not master of his destiny: life just pushes you along, until one day you find yourself in a hole, with nothing to be done about it, and you stay there, all alone, waiting for “the definitive hole.”

“Since happiness is impossible in this world,” he tells Elisa Schlesinger in 1872, “we must strive for serenity.” This is one of the insistent themes of the years 1869–75. But striving for serenity has the same internal contradiction as practising spontaneity. Nevertheless, Flaubert does his best—that best naturally consisting largely of words, of assurances to himself and to others. “I must be philosophical,” he repeatedly declares; yet he never had the temperament of a philosopher. “I pass from exasperation to prostration, then I rise from annihilation to rage, so that my mean emotional temperature is a state of annoyance.”

George Sand was surely right in suspecting that his irritation was, increasingly, “necessary to his organization.” (Flaubert himself tells Goncourt that indignation is the stick which holds up the doll: “If I weren't indignant, I would fall down flat.”) But its tonality is not unmitigatedly splenetic or valetudinary. Flaubert's trip to Switzerland in 1874, for instance, is one long, exhilarating display of comic rage. It's serious, too, which makes it the more comic. Like his stay at Concarneau—and one with Caroline at Bagnères-de-Luchon—this had both a medical and a morale-boosting aim. “The theory,” he writes sceptically, “is that the lower barometric pressure will relieve my congestion by driving the blood into the lower organs.”

His three weeks on Mount Righi make up probably the least calming rest cure any human being has ever taken. For a start, he can't understand a country which doesn't have any real history. Then there is the omnipresence of Nature, which crushes him without inspiring thought. Then there is the problem of boredom, which he assaults by eating, drinking, and smoking a lot. But these activities depend upon the presence of waiters, who here are dressed in black even from early morning, so that they look like guests at your own funeral. “Eight days here,” he cries, “are like three centuries.” Then there are the other people, the dreadful Germans and the dreadful English, who make him want to hug a cow for some human contact. His unimpressable eye falls on jaunty tourists wielding sticks branded with the names of sites they have visited; a woman who plays Chopin on the hotel piano “in such a way as to make all the cows of Switzerland flee”; and the cretin installed at the telescope on the hotel balcony, with his arse pushed out and his hat on the back of his head, uttering imbecilities about the view. Switzerland, he concludes, is only any good for “botanists, geologists and honeymooners”—into none of which categories he falls. Sand rebukes him for his disobliging observations: “You're not a man of nature. So much the worse for you … We are nature, we're in nature, made by nature, made for nature.” But Turgenev can be relied upon for support in most things, and agrees about the Swiss. Despite living among such sublimities, they are “the most deeply boring and the least gifted people I have ever met. Whence cometh such an anomaly, as the philosopher might ask? Or is it perhaps not an anomaly at all? What would Bouvard and Pécuchet say about the matter?”

Flaubert's signatorial nicknames during this period give evidence of his mood. He still remains
“Ton Géant”
(though on one occasion
“GEANT Aplati”
—“Flattened GIANT”), but is increasingly
“Ton Vieux.”
When between these moods he is
“Ton Excessif.”
One characteristic way of being Excessive was in a competitiveness about sensibility and experience, a trait which becomes more apparent in these painful years. He has, he tells Caroline, “an exasperated sensibility and a deplorable imagination.” “What merely scratches others,” he tells Sand, “rips my flesh.” Hence his constitution is more adapted for pain than for pleasure. And hence his pain is greater than that of others. Throughout the events of 1870–i, he constantly assures correspondents that he is suffering more than anyone else in France. “Others are more to be pitied,” he writes, “but no one suffers as much.” It seems plodding to point out that a person of lesser sensitivity might suffer more if the damage inflicted upon them were greater. Neither Flaubert nor any of his family saw action or had anyone close to them killed. Nor did the writer suffer significantly from the invasion; the Prussians, he admits, “respected my study,” when they occupied Croisset, even if they did commit the Teutonic solecism of leaving their helmets on his bed.

It is the same when his mother dies; he tells Léonie Brainne that since he has the nerves of a flayed man, the loss has caused him more suffering than it would anybody else. He even tells George Sand—of all people—that he has “loved more than anyone” (though he does immediately add that the phrase is pretentious). It is hard to know what to make of this trait. Genuine conviction, raw competitiveness, poetic fallacy (when it comes to taking the suffering of France upon himself), or failure of imaginative sympathy? All four at the same time? Goncourt in his Journal noted Flaubert's “craziness” in imagining that he had done and suffered more than others, and characteristically recorded two of its more risible manifestations. The first has Flaubert getting into a fight with the sculptor Jacquemart over which of them had been host to more lice in Egypt—which of them, as Goncourt cattily put it, was “superior in vermin.” On another occasion, laddish talk in the smoking-room at Princesse Mathilde's turned to the lectoral sex-aids of their youth. Many cited
Amours du chevalier de Faublas,
an erotic tale of the late 1780s, as the text which invariably did the trick. Flaubert declared that he personally had never been able to finish it; for him, the key volume had been Meursius's
Aloysiae
(that is to say,
Aloysiae Sygeai satira sotadica de arcanis Amoris et Veneris
of 1658). “How superior, how special,” an irritated Goncourt comments. “Only something in Latin could make
him
hard.” In Flaubert's defence, he was not always so scholarly. While he was staying in Concarneau, Léonie Brainne sent him her portrait; he told her in reply that, lying in bed one morning and contemplating her image, he had become aware that he was still a man.

Solitary, melancholic, hypersensitive, high-minded, competitive, exasperated, impractical: how should such a temperament best be managed? The forty-seven-year-old bachelor of the start of this volume, living at home with his mother and servants, and lacking most financial restraints, can exist with as much contentment as such a personality might allow; the fifty-year-old whose mother has just died, precariously inhabiting a house now belonging to his niece, and with his finances tied to those of the Commanvilles, finds yet another form of suffering thrust upon him: domestication. Even Flaubert was not competitive about his home-making skills. The solution was self-evident, especially to women, especially to George Sand: Flaubert should marry. The recalcitrant bachelor regards this as not just a hopeful, but a fantastical misreading of his character. Flaubert has long observed the state of matrimony: his married (male) friends, he writes, do nothing but work, hunt, and play whist; none will read poetry with him. A quarter of a century previously, Flaubert had regarded the marriage of his childhood friend Alfred Le Poittevin as a personal and artistic betrayal; over the years his opinion has scarcely changed. Besides, he is too old now; besides, he can't afford it; besides, he is “too scrupulous to inflict myself upon another in perpetuity.”

This last is also the argument of Larkin's “Love” (“My life is for me. / As well ignore gravity”). Marriage? Flaubert's friend Edmond Laporte has the better suggestion: get a dog. Enter Julio, a greyhound on whom Flaubert dotes, even when the dog's unstriven-for serenity makes him envious. Julio lies on Flaubert's famous bearskin rug, sleeps in his bed, gives him fleas. “Send me immediately by the
Union
[the Rouen–La Bouille steamer, which stopped at Croisset] some of that magic
saponaire.”
This is one of the unlikeliest sentences to find in Flaubert's handwriting. The soap (is it a plant or a commercial product?) arrives; he washes his dog. The artist as reluctant homemaker: he also, in the course of these pages, finds himself dealing with locksmith, tinsmith, roofer, and builder; he considers wallpaper and the rival virtues of carpet versus plaster on the floor; he asks Caroline to buy curtains in Paris because they're cheaper than in Rouen; he shops for a meat safe; he buys dusters and socks; he loses and finds the sugar-bowl; he worries about the size of the jam bill; he buys a pair of iron fire-dogs. “Household duties bore me to death,” he complains. His stance is one of theatrical ruefulness. “I bought a hat. That's all the news.”

Writing to Caroline, he begins with a high-toned quotation— “Macbeth hath murdered sleep”—before getting down to his pressing, underlined concern: “My cider bill appals me.” Lacking an income of his own, he is constantly applying to the Commanvilles for money, in tones which are variously baffled, peremptory, and piteous. Since Caroline subsequently destroyed all but one of her letters to her uncle, along with most of those from his women friends, we can only guess at her replies. But his constant reminders and demands make it more understandable that she and her husband gave Flaubert the one nickname with which he never signed himself: The Consumer.

There is an element of household duty about many of Flaubert's literary activities at this time: especially in his theatrical ventures and the exploitation of Bouilhet's estate. He displays a dogged, at times fanatical, devotion to projects which mostly fail. There is the posthumous staging of Bouilhet's
Mademoiselle Aïsse
(which, after a successful première, played to empty houses); Flaubert's own
Le Candidat
(taken off after four performances when the male lead came off stage with tears in his eyes);
Le Sexe faible
(Bouilhet's prose comedy, finished by Flaubert), which after interminable negotiations, and talismanic repetition by Flaubert of a producer's careless phrase (“un grand succès d'argent”), was withdrawn at the last minute; the planned publication of Bouilhet's
Dernières chansons
(a commercial disaster, provoking Flaubert's acrimonious break with Lévy) and of a collected Bouilhet (which finally appeared in 1880, the year of Flaubert's death). There is also Flaubert's long campaign to have a memorial statue to his dead friend erected on the streets of Rouen, which provokes him to counter-productive pamphleteering against the municipal authorities.
*

Flaubert's failure as a dramatist, understandable enough from reading the actual plays (which are either too literal and novelistic, or else too whimsical), becomes more so, given the condescending attitude to the theatre revealed here. He doesn't enjoy the medium in itself (calling himself “heroic” for seeing two plays in a single week); it is, he decides, a “false” art, in which it is impossible to say anything “complete.” He seems not to understand that “completeness” is different in the theatre—just as the novel, for its part, has its own necessary “falseness.” His way of dealing with theatrical managers was probably misconceived (Sand was characteristically more phlegmatic about the overheated optimism and frequent reversals of this world), although there's no denying his assiduity. In countless letters, he badgers and cajoles, bullies and flatters, while fine-tuning the production of plays we now see as of only moderate merit. This all ought to be fairly boring, except to the theatrical historian; and on the surface it is. But each letter he writes about Bouilhet's plays, crammed with forgettable instructions and proposals, can also be read and felt as an act of love and mourning for his dead friend; also, an act of duty and responsibility towards Bouilhet's adopted son, Philippe Leparfait (who doesn't seem especially appreciative).

This is the advantage of letters over biography: letters exist in real time. We read them at about the speed at which they were written. Biography gives us the crane-shot, the time-elision, the astute selectivity. A biographer might tell you that on the night Flaubert's mother died, 6 April 1872, her son immediately wrote five letters (or five which have survived), two timed “the night of,” one timed at 12:30 a.m. and two timed at 1 a.m. Since they inevitably contain similar information and sentiments, the biographer might reasonably name the recipients and briefly quote. To read them all, however, one after the other, five in a row (plus a sixth dated the following day, and then replies from friends which imply others sent) is to feel more fully the dull repetitiousness of grief and its expression; also, to experience the very time that passes as Flaubert writes.