Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (33 page)

Among the “manuscripts” the
Carnets
were for many years virtually disregarded. This is partly because of their nature—they consist mainly of travel journals and detailed working notes rather than private diaries (the “private diaries” are his Letters). But they were also disregarded because they didn't really form part of the “work.” There was the book itself, as published and fit for study; before that there was the manuscript, of bibliophilic as much as bibliographical interest; and before that some hazy jottings bearing only curiosity value. So the
Carnets
were merely part of Caroline's minor literary estate; unnumbered and unidentified, they were included in a previously arranged legacy to the Musée Carnavalet along with the manuscripts of the first and second versions of
L'Education sentimentale.
However, when Caroline died in 1931, it was found that she had already sold the manuscript of the first
Education
—the consumer had played supplier once again. The curator of the Carnavalet, piqued by Caroline's behaviour, declined the legacy by refusing to pay the meagre transfer tax that accepting it would have involved. It took five years (in the course of which some of the
Carnets
disappeared) and a new curator at the Carnavalet before the legacy was accepted. This incident shows not only how undervalued the
Carnets
were at the mid-point between Flaubert's death and the present (less than undervalued— valued at precisely nothing, not worth having), but also the unpredictable effect of curators on literary legacies.

In 1942 René Dumesnil in his edition of
LEducation sentimentale
quoted a
calepin d'enquête
of (?)1865—one that has disappeared since he transcribed it. Marie-Jeanne Durry transcribed two and a half
Carnets
for her
Flaubert et ses projets inédits
of 1950. In 1973 the Club de L'Honnête Homme edition edited by Maurice Bardèche gave us the first “integral” transcription of the
Carnets.
It was a well-intentioned project, but ended up as a counter-productive botch. Bardèche managed to turn a patchwork of manuscript into a freely running text, as if the
Carnets
were some sort of continuous diary; he omitted part of one
carnet,
and made hundreds of errors of transcription. Flaubert's handwriting is difficult to read, but even so some of the mistakes are impressive.
“Fille dupec”
(abbreviation for
pêcheur)
comes out as
“Catholique”; “miracles”
comes out as
“morales”;
a piece of furniture “style Louis XVI” followed by two inverted commas is up- or downgraded into a piece of furniture of the invented style Louis XVIII;
“telegraphie”
becomes the not yet invented
“dactylographie”; “Liberté de penser: idem”
in the context of Voltaire turns out as
“Liberté de penser: indifférent”
—a creative misreading. At one point Bardèche even manages to insert the words
“foutu embêtement”
(bloody nuisance) into a sentence, drawing the words from thin air. Not for nothing does Pierre-Marc de Biasi, in his combative introduction, treat Bardèche as an “anti-model,” a “counter-text.” Perhaps the best that can be said for the CHH edition is that it has spurred Biasi to extra-human assiduousness. Flaubert has in recent decades attracted some extremely good editing (perhaps as a reaction to earlier slop-piness; perhaps also because he is the sort of writer whose presence is broodingly felt when you meddle with his texts). Biasi's edition is dauntingly thorough, meticulous in its transcription of every crossing-out, drawing, squiggle, or unreadable word, brilliantly annotated, and introduced with a mixture of bracing aggression and high common sense. It is a superb edition of what will be (until the unearthing of some surprise cache of letters) the last major piece of Flaubert to be published.
*

But what is it, exactly? Certainly not, as we might imagine or hope, some
ur
-collection of
pensées
and reflections precisely illuminating the sources, pulse, and articulation of his novels. The
Carnets de travail
are haphazard and chaotic, accessible only with the help of considerable critical apparatus; they are incomplete, and those parts which survive are numbered in a batty, non-sequential manner (by a “berserk librarian,” Biasi suggests). The most obviously readable sections of Caroline's legacy to the Musée Carnavalet, the travel journals, have long since been hived off and separately published. What we have left is the rump, the brute beginning thoughts, the stutterings and jottings, the false early certainties of writing. Biasi, without trying to force categorization on to the eighteen notebooks he here transcribes, divides them into
carnet
and
calepin,
into those containing research for particular novels and the more general
grand carnet d'idées
or
grand carnet de projets;
but subjects criss-cross from one notebook to another, and working problems raised on one page may suddenly be treated as if long solved on the next. Writers don't keep notebooks with a view to making things easy for their subsequent editors; they jot on the run, use shorthand, know what they mean when at their most cryptic, cross things out, have second, third, fourth thoughts. Flaubert, moreover, was a writer who never proceeded with bland orderliness from one project to another; his books were long pondered, and ideas relating to any one of several novels may occur side by side. For instance, the main body of notes for
Bouvard et Pécuchet
that have survived are to be found in
Carnets i%bis,
18, 11, and 6 (covering the period 1874–9: it's a sign of how chaotic the numbering system is that the lower numbers refer to later years). However, his preparatory reading-list for the novel (at least 1,500 books, and probably many more, according to Biasi) occurs back in
Carnet
15 (1869–74), while the first references to
Bouvard et Pécuchet
—originally
Les deux cloportes
—are found in
Carnet
19 (1862–3). The
Carnets de travail
are both a palimpsest and a cat's cradle.

Writing to George Sand in 1873, Flaubert describes how he is “ruining himself” with his book-purchases for the background reading to
Bouvard et Pécuchet,
and humorously complains about a journey he made in search of a particular piece of countryside for the novel. He goes from Paris to Rambouillet by
chemin de fer,
Rambouillet to Houdan by
calèche,
Houdan to Mantes by
cabriolet,
then
“re-chemin de fer”
to Rouen. Total expenditure 83 francs— “such is the cost of conscientious literature!” This whole volume is evidence of the cost—in the main not monetary, but measured in time, energy, travel, and lection—of making conscientious literature. It could be submitted to the tax authorities as an example of the hidden but undeductible disbursements of a writer's life.

Flaubert is celebrated as a writer dedicated to research. But what we mean by “research” varies greatly from novelist to novelist. At the simple level of the popular novel there are diligent writers who find out everything they can about a subject—banking, say, or airports or the motor industry—and put this into their work, often in barely assimilable chunks, as proof that they know what they're talking about. More sophisticated novelists pile up research like a compost heap, but then leave it alone, let it sink down, acquire heat, and degrade usefully into fertilizing elements. Thus at the moment of note-taking a novelist may often have no idea how useful his scribble might prove. A good example of this is found in
Carnet
19
, where Flaubert makes three successive notes concerning women of flexible virtue. The first is about Mlle X., former chambermaid of a young
lorette
(a
lorette
being a woman half-way between a
grisette
and
a femme entretenue
on the closely calibrated French sexual scale), who set up next door to her former mistress. Gentlemen leaving the
lorette
would routinely call on the
ex-femme-de-chambre
who, after performing her
exercices de fellation,
would enquire humbly, “Was that as good as Madame?” The second story is about an upwardly mobile bar girl in Algeria who celebrates her risen status by equipping herself with some “ancestors”; surrounded by secondhand pictures of fake relatives, she now plays salon hostess and receives officers she formerly pleasured for
10
francs a go. The third, and briefest note, is about a sixteen-year-old girl waiting in a
boudoir
to lose her virginity. She is served dinner, only eats the
confitures,
and then falls asleep on top of a pile of erotic engravings. Of the three, the first is a jolly story, complete in itself, but with something falsely neat about it— often the case in laddish anecdote; the second is a colourful social vignette; the third an unfinished moment (where is the man? did she lose her virginity? what happened to her afterwards?) which could be funny or sad or anything in between depending how it is told. The first two might be called “closed” stories, the third “open”; and it is a version of the third story (initially communicated to him by Suzanne Lagier) that Flaubert used in
L'Education sentimentale.

“Research,” therefore, isn't something finite and clear-cut which a writer does before “getting down to” the book. It's something wider and vaguer than that, a state of mind, a sort of dreaming which the writer goes in for even though to the outsider the research looks very little like dreaming and probably more like “real work” than anything the writer is subsequently seen to do. It comes in various forms. At its simplest, we see Flaubert posing himself straightforward questions for
L'Education sentimentale:
where in the environs of Paris is Wetnurse country? And what are the requirements for a funeral among the wealthy classes? The first question is answered quickly, a couple of pages later (Taverny, Saint-Leu, Pontoise, vallée de Montmorency); the second at more delighted length.

Research means jotting down possibly useful names (he likes the sound of Cahours as a place; Tardival and Vaudichon as surnames; relishes a prostitute who calls herself “Crucifix”). It means tramping the countryside until you find the right cliff for Bouvard and Pécuchet to be terrified by (he enlists Maupassant's help on this quest), and the correct
plateau stupide
on which to site their village. It means reading enormous quantities of books, and even—if we interpret correctly a couple of brief notes—relying on the loathed craft of photography (“which is never what one has actually seen”). It means doing whatever is necessary: when preparing himself to describe the beheading of Iaokanann in
Hérodias,
he writes to his niece, “I need to have a good look at a head that's recently been cut off.” There isn't any evidence that he did; but he might have recalled those childhood walks with Oncle Parain and the bloodied cobbles.

Research isn't just “finding something good you can use.” Flaubert is grandly dismissive of this approach: “Goncourt,” he writes to George Sand in 1875, “is very happy when he picks up in the street a word he can then shove into a book.” At the time Flaubert makes this complaint about light-fingered literalism he is himself researching
Saint Julien L'Hospitalier
and ploughing through medieval cynegetic treatises, finding out what animals you hunt with, how you hunt with them, where such beasts come from, and so on. In the course of listing the birds with which Julien might hunt, Flaubert notes the Tartaret or Barbary Falcon:
“ Le tartaret,
taller and plumper than the peregrine falcon, comes from Barbary.” This he knows, this he has established. But when he comes to write his story, he tries out various other provenances for the tartaret. The drafts show that he had it coming from Norway, from Iceland, from Scandinavia, before he decided on
un grand tartaret de Scythie.
In the end, euphony and association are allowed to win over documentary exactitude.

Realism versus Beauty? Realism or Beauty? Beauty attained through Realism? Flaubertians chase these formulae around their skulls. Flaubert, in his letter scorning Goncourt's skip-hunting type of research, states very clearly that “I regard technical and local details—the precise, historical side of things—as very much of secondary importance.” If Goncourt found satisfaction in picking up a tasty word, Flaubert found it, by contrast, “when I have written a page which avoids assonance and repetition.” This ought to be clear enough, and indeed Flaubert's denials of realistic intent are frequent: he sought only beauty. But writers' declarations of intent and writers' practices don't always match up. The novelist takes delivery of the researcher's
tartaret de Barbarie,
turns it around, tries out some Northern icy habitats for the bird, and comes down for
tartaret de Scythie.
But not
tartaret de Pont-l'Evêque,
after all. The researcher has given the novelist a body of information from which he can take off and glide and display his feathers; but there are limits to the range of manoeuvres possible. And when Flaubert was attacked for getting things wrong in
Salammbô,
first by Sainte-Beuve, and second, more famously, by Guillaume Froehner (assistant curator in the Department of Antiquities at the Louvre, who reviewed the novel in the
Revue Contemporaine),
he did not retreat behind the screen of Beauty. He didn't argue that he had changed things to avoid assonance or increase euphony. Quite the contrary: he defended himself stubbornly, systematically, violently, referring his assailants to all the sources and authorities he had consulted in the course of his researches.

Research for Flaubert is not preliminary but central; not a matter of “checking” but part of the writing process. On location for a bit of countryside he needs in
Bouvard et Pécuchet,
the novelist sometimes refers automatically to
ils:
his two protagonists are already wandering around in his research notes, as if preparing for their fictional life to come. And what of the Flaubert who can be found wandering around in these
Carnets de travail?
What do we learn about him? Biasi makes an audacious but finally convincing claim about the person we encounter here. In the novels, he suggests, we find the writer; in the letters we find the man; here in the
Carnets
we finally discover that famous hybrid, rare as a Scythian tartaret,
l'homme-plume
(the pen-man). It is a strange and reclusive bird, whose tail-feathers are ready-trimmed quills, and whose capacious gizzard grinds everything—life, books, whole countrysides—into literature.