I sat on my hotel bed; from a neighbouring room a telephone imitated the cry of other telephones. I thought about the parrot in its alcove barely half a mile away. A cheeky bird, inducing affection, even reverence. What had Flaubert done with it after finishing
‘I am bothered by my tendency to metaphor, decidedly excessive. I am devoured by comparisons as one is by lice, and I spend my time doing nothing but squashing them.’ Words came easily to Flaubert; but he also saw the underlying inadequacy of the Word. Remember his sad definition from
Did that burst of bubbles announce the gurgling death of another submerged reference? The point at which you suspect too much is being read into a story is when you feel most vulnerable, isolated, and perhaps stupid. Is a critic wrong to read Loulou as a symbol of the Word? Is a reader wrong – worse, sentimental – to think of that parrot at the Hotel-Dieu as an emblem of the writer’s voice? That’s what I did. Perhaps this makes me as simple- minded as Felicite.
But whether you call it a tale or a text,
On my last day in Rouen I drove out to Croisset. Normandy rain was falling, soft and dense. What was formerly a remote village on the banks of the Seine, backdropped by green hills, has now become engulfed by thumping dockland. Pile-drivers echo, gantries hang over you, and the river is thickly commercial. Passing lorries rattle the windows of the inevitable Bar Le Flaubert.
Gustave noted and approved the oriental habit of knocking down the houses of the dead; so perhaps he would have been less hurt than his readers, his pursuers, by the destruction of his own house. The factory for extracting alcohol from damaged wheat was pulled down in its turn; and on the site there now stands, more appropriately, a large paper-mill. All that remains of Flaubert’s residence is a small one-storey pavilion a few hundred yards down the road: a summer house to which the writer would retire when needing even more solitude than usual. It now looks shabby and pointless, but at least it’s something. On the terrace outside, a stump of fluted column, dug up at Carthage, has been erected to commemorate the author of
The pavilion contains a single room, square with a tented ceiling. I was reminded of Felicite’s room: ‘It had the simultaneous air of a chapel and a bazaar.’ Here too were the ironic conjunctions – trivial knick-knack beside solemn relic – of the Flaubertian grotesque. The items on display were so poorly arranged that I frequently had to get down on my knees to squint into the cabinets: the posture of the devout, but also of the junk-shop treasure- hunter.
Felicite found consolation in her assembly of stray objects, united only by their owner’s affection. Flaubert did the same, preserving trivia fragrant with memories. Years after his mother’s death he would still sometimes ask for her old shawl and hat, then sit down with them to dream a little. The visitor to the Croisset pavilion can almost do the same: the exhibits, carelessly laid out, catch your heart at random. Portraits, photographs, a clay bust; pipes, a tobacco jar, a letter opener; a toad-inkwell with a gaping mouth; the gold Buddha which stood on the writer’s desk and never irritated him; a lock of hair, blonder, naturally, than in the photographs.
Two exhibits in a side cabinet are easy to miss: a small tumbler from which Flaubert took his last drink of water a few moments before he died; and a crumpled pad of white handkerchief with which he mopped his brow in perhaps the last gesture of his life. Such ordinary props, which seemed to forbid wailing and melodrama, made me feel I had been present at the death of a friend. I was almost embarrassed: three days before I had stood unmoved on a beach where close companions had been killed. Perhaps this is the advantage of making friends with those already dead: your feelings towards them never cool.
Then I saw it. Crouched on top of a high cupboard was another parrot. Also bright green. Also, according to both the
How do you compare two parrots, one already idealised by memory and metaphor, the other a squawking intruder? My initial response was that the second seemed less authentic than the first, mainly because it had a more benign air. The head was set straighter on the body, and its expression was less irritating than that of the bird at the Hotel-Dieu. Then I realised the fallacy in this: Flaubert, after all, hadn’t been given a choice of parrots; and even this second one, which looked the calmer company, might well get on your nerves after a couple of weeks.
I mentioned the question of authenticity to the
Is it ever the right time to die? It wasn’t for Flaubert; or for George Sand, who didn’t live to read
After I got home the duplicate parrots continued to flutter in my mind: one of them amiable and straightforward, the other cocky and interrogatory. I wrote letters to various academics who might know if either of the parrots had been properly authenticated. I wrote to the French Embassy and to the editor of the Michelin guide-books. I also wrote to Mr Hockney. I told him about my trip and asked if he’d ever been to Rouen; I wondered if he’d had one or other of the parrots in mind when etching his portrait of the sleeping Felicite. If not, then perhaps he in his turn had borrowed a parrot from a museum and used it as a model. I warned him of the dangerous tendency in this species to posthumous parthenogenesis.
I hoped to get my replies quite soon.
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