Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (34 page)

Biasi admits that his edition is a risk (though it sounds more respectable and Pascalian in French:
“Cette édition est un pari”).
The
Carnets
aren't a novel, nor can they be read like an intimate journal; what they amount to is a catalogue of the writer's thought in its roughest, most nascent form. There is no doubt that it makes difficult reading, as we dodge in and out of text and commentary and try to remember the various editorial signs for such categories as “words added but subsequently crossed out.” It does present us with a “third” Flaubert alongside the writer of the novels and the man of the letters, but this Number Three is only approachable after a thorough acquaintance with Numbers One and Two. Thus there are many points at which Flaubert is roughing out ideas and phrases not just for his novels but also for his
Correspondance.
For instance, his epigram “Honours dishonour, titles degrade, office-holding ossifies” (which he was clearly proud of, sending it to three different correspondents in the winter of 1878–9) is found here in its earliest form:

[Le grade dégrade]

La Fonction [abbêtit] bêtifie-

Le Titre déshonore.

Those familar with Flauberts One and Two will not find the
Carnets
full of new ideas, though there are some unfamiliar formulations. Flaubert is always savage and sound on the fallacy of Progress, but I hadn't before come across this theory from
Carnet
15: “The dogma of Progress is a reaction to the dogma of the Fall.” Also new was his epigram on Paris, which he tries out in two formulations: “No longer being able to love Paris is a sign of decadence; no longer being able to do without it is a sign of stupidity.” Was Flaubert reworking Dr. Johnson?

But despite the occasional in-character surprises—appreciation for Joseph Wright of Derby, a paragraph on gloves, an account of a busy forty-first birthday, some treasured lubricities—the
Carnets de travail are
almost entirely what they sound like: working notes, often of the smallest and most circumstantial detail. (It comes, for instance, as a severe shock when in the middle of notes on the marital state in
L'Education sentimentale,
Flaubert suddenly jots down a Whole Theme: “Show how, since 1830, Sentimentalism has followed Politics and reproduced all its phases.”) If this is the case, is the book of the narrowest interest, best left to close-text scholars needing to demonstrate the genesis of some particular phrase or incident in the novels; or is there any wider appeal? What of Biasi's wager?

It is a very long shot, but it does, surprisingly, come off. One of the many examples of ridiculous, patronizing, and pretentious observations that Flaubert gleefully collected for the “Copie” of
Bouvard et Pécuchet
comes from “Marcellus,” or Louis-Marie-Auguste de Martin du Tyrac, a deputy under the Restoration, who in 1825 published
Conseils d'un ami à un jeune homme studieux.
This work includes the following advice: “As for the arts, it's a good idea to be familiar with them, to like them, even to cultivate them up to a certain point.” How ironically that quote reads in among these
Carnets de travail,
whose page-by-page credo is that you do not cultivate art up to a certain point but way above and beyond that point; you live it, breathe it, inhabit it—the man and the pen become one, superglued together by a hyphen. And the process of research and writing, that back-to-back activity, comes to its closest fraternity, its most intense pitch, in
Bouvard et Pécuchet,
the ultimate work of
l'homme-plume,
his “indescribable posthumous novel,” as Henry James termed it.

In
Carnet
2 (1859–78) Flaubert makes a note about Jean Magnon, a friend of Molière, who proposed to write a work in ten volumes—each consisting of 20,000 lines of verse—which would sum up human knowledge, and be so well devised and wrought that libraries would thereafter become mere useless ornaments. Biasi gives no suggested date for this entry, no indication of its possible use, and no annotation; but it seems plausible to suggest that Flaubert's interest in Magnon's project (which came to nothing, the writer being murdered on the Pont-Neuf in 1662) lay not far away in cerebral circuitry from the idea that turned into
Bouvard et Pécuchet.

He describes this final project of his life in a letter to Mme Brainne in 1872, when he is deep in the study of medical and educational theory, and reckons he has two or three more years of research to go: “All this for the sole purpose of spitting out on my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me. I shall finally proclaim my way of thinking, exhale my resentment, vomit my hatred, expectorate my bile, ejaculate my anger, sluice out my indignation …”

As a motive for a book, this doesn't sound good enough (though simply from the way Flaubert gets carried away with “exhale … vomit … expectorate …” we can imagine him laying it on for effect—just as in his letters about
Madame Bovary
he is contemptuous of Emma to a degree which, if let into the novel, would have been severely destructive). But it does indicate the curious fusion of rage and research, of driven encyclopaedianism, which fuels the novel. The two copyists would seek enlightenment and understanding in everything from gardening to history, and would everywhere be fooled and disappointed. Then they would return to their old trade of copying, but even here would be deceived, for their “Copie” (the never-completed Part Two of the book) would be a transcription of what they took to be the wisdom of the world, but which would appear to the reader as further proof of its folly.

It is a great idea for a novel: but could it ever have been a great novel? It sounds like something by Borges—and indeed, Turgenev told Flaubert to keep it swift and funny (“If you make it too heavy, if you make it too scholarly …”). His advice was disregarded; the monstrous project was already under way. There are 4,000 pages of notes and drafts for the book; the background reading-list is immense and immensely various—Comte 's
Principes de la philoso-phie positive
on the same three-monthly roster as Visca's
Du vagi-nisme
and
Histoire d'un atome de carbone.
Notes originally taken for
Salammbô, L'Education sentimentale,
and
La Tentation de Saint-Antoine
are annexed and redeployed. Flaubert scours the countryside; he visits a model farm; he asks Maurice Sand for
souvenirs agronomiques,
especially of mistakes Sand might have made, and the reasons for those mistakes. He is out to prove something— again and again, chapter by chapter.

Nor, with
Bouvard et Pécuchet,
does he stop researching when he starts writing; the book becomes a rhythmic
va-et-vient
as each digested subject is processed into a chapter. What becomes clear in a quite unexpected and poignant way as you read the
Carnets de travail is
how Flaubert in his final novel created an enormous, weighty, complicated machine, which could be operated solely by pedal power. The cockpit only has room for one, the seat is moulded to his rotund form, and there he sits pedalling furiously, sweating profusely, knowing that only he can get the damn thing off the ground. When we read a writer's letters complaining about the tyranny of his work we may sometimes be sceptical (Flaubert often pleads commitment to Emma Bovary as a means of keeping Louise Colet away); but there is something transparently undeceptive and oddly moving as we follow self-inflicted agonies of composition: page after page of seemingly arid notes, lists of books read, idiocies identified and work still to do. By the end of the
Carnets
the daily reality of
l'homme-plume
has become thunderously present, and M. Biasi has won his wager.

Flaubert told Mme Roger des Genettes that he must be mad
(“fou et triplement phrénétique”)
to take on
Bouvard et Pécuchet.
He also said that his secret plan with Part Two of the novel, the “Copie,” was to stun the reader into madness:
“ahurir tellement le lecteur qu'il en devienne fou.”
The crazy doggedness of the novelist invites, and demands, an answering crazy doggedness in the reader (sometimes the dupes Bouvard and Pécuchet seem the only sane people around). In 1876, writing his
Trois contes
at the rate of fifteen or sixteen hours a day, he told Caroline that he feared one day he would simply explode like a shell and the bits of him would be found scattered over his desk. Four years later, strapped into the fearsome machine of
Bouvard et Pécuchet,
pedalling frantically away, he exploded. Conscientious literature costs money; and sometimes the price is higher still. It cost Flaubert his life.

*
There may be more to come. Jean Bruneau, editor of the Pléiade
Correspondance,
still has serious hopes that Flaubert's letters to Juliet Herbert will turn up.

(16)
Faithful Betrayal

Isabelle Huppert as Emma Bovary, “a victim who does not behave as a victim”

Claude Chabrol lives in Gennes (twinned with Wincanton), a small town on the southern bank of the Loire, upstream from Angers. The river here is sluggish, and shallow enough for high-summer fishermen merely to punt their boats. A basic box-girder bridge, crossing the flow in two leaps, was the site of a famous rearguard action by cadets of the nearby Saumur military academy against the advancing Germans in 1940. On the other side of the Loire lies La Rosette, whose traditional small-town rivalry with Gennes can take strange forms. A few days before I met Chabrol, a woman from La Rosette decided to drown herself by jumping off the bridge. An emergency call came through to the
sapeurs pompiers
of La Rosette. “None of our business,” they replied. “There isn't enough water on our side for her to drown herself.” So the caller was obliged to hang up and dial the
pompiers
of Gennes. By the time they arrived the woman was dead.

Provincial France, now trundled through by British caravans rather than German tanks, has always specialized in tragedies of the comic grotesque, their private misery magnified by casual, uncaring public circumstances. Such was the case of Delphine Delamare, second wife of a health officer in the Normandy village of Ry A pretty woman, by all accounts, with a taste for reading and interior decoration: her double curtains of yellow and black were much remarked upon. Bored and fanciful, she took first lovers and then poison. This down-page
fait divers
from the Véxin is such a natural Chabrol story that it's surprising he has taken so long to film
Madame Bovary;
the more so since the novel forms a key element in his own psychobiography. When his film project was announced to the press, he stated (without reflection) that he must have first encountered Flaubert at the age of fifteen or sixteen. But after shooting began, the fragrantly French truth came back to him. He had been thirteen at the time, growing up in the Creuse:

I started reading
Madame Bovary
the day before I lost my virginity. It made a very strong impression. I was fascinated. I didn't understand everything, but I was under its spell. And then the next day, I had a rendezvous with the girl I was in love with. We went for a walk in the woods. We were wearing
sabots.
We had our walk, we kissed a lot, and then what had to happen happened … By the time I walked her home it was getting dark. We were holding hands, I was kissing her, but at the same time I was in a hurry to get home and carry on with my book. So I walked her back a little more quickly than was necessary, and as soon as I was alone I ran home as fast as I could. I had to go back through the wood, it was dark, and as I ran I lost one of my
sabots.
It was too dark to find it, and I had to hop my way home, with only one thing on my mind: getting back to my book.

This (distinctly filmic) reminiscence suggests a replacement for the dinner-table question of “Where were you when Kennedy / John Lennon / the Pope was shot?” Ask instead, “What were you reading when you lost your virginity?”

Chabrol is now in his early sixties, married to Aurore, script-girl on
Madame Bovary
as she had been
on Les Biches
in 1967, when they first met. The star of that film was Chabrol's second wife, Stéphane Audran, whom Aurore with steely persistence refers to simply as
“l'Autre.”
“Three wives,” she comments with a mocking shake of the head, “and always the same wedding-ring.” Her husband lifts his hand and gazes at the gold band with fake mournfulness, as if it were the only reliable chum in the whole puzzling business. He is a humorous and affable man, palissaded behind an oversize pipe and tinted glasses. Stocky and sedentary, he dislikes travel and revels in junk TV. When I arrive at the house in Gennes at four o'clock on a hot afternoon, I am unable to rouse anyone; so I enter by the open kitchen door and prowl the cool and elegant interior like a Chabrol murderer. Finally, I hear conversation, knock, enter, and see two heads swivel from the sofa in a darkened room. “What are you watching?”
“Oh, des âneries,”
replies Aurore happily—“rubbish.” Chabrol is addicted to
Family Feud,
and a great fan of
Le Juste prix,
the French version of
The Price Is Right.
This is broadcast late on Sunday mornings, which means, Aurore uncomplainingly explains, that they can only accept lunch invitations within a radius of fifteen or twenty kilometres. The site-specific Chabrol seems benignly content with this arrangement. Between him and the television, on a large and beautiful oak-parquet table, is his smoking equipment, laid out like the kit of a military surgeon on campaign: a dozen or so very fat pipes, all the requisite tobacco, matches, lighters, plus a bottle of
Antésite,
a patent medicine he swigs to counter drying-out of the tubes.