3 (At a candlelit ball) ‘Her black eyes appeared even blacker.’
4 (On first meeting Leon) ‘Fixing him with her large, wide-open black eyes’.
5 (Indoors, as she appears to Rodolphe when he first examines her) ‘Her black eyes’.
6 (Emma looking in a mirror, indoors, in the evening; she has just been seduced by Rodolphe) ‘Her eyes had never been so large, so black, nor contained such depth.’
How did the critic put it? ‘Flaubert does not build up characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that…’ It would be interesting to compare the time spent by Flaubert making sure that his heroine had the rare and difficult eyes of a tragic adulteress with the time spent by Dr Starkie in carelessly selling him short.
And one final thing, just to make absolutely sure. Our earliest substantial source of knowledge about Flaubert is Maxime du Camp’s Souvenirs litteraires (Hachette, Paris, 1882–3, 2 vols): gossipy, vain, self-justifying and unreliable, yet historically essential. On page 306 of the first volume (Remington… Co., London, 1893, no translator credited) Du Camp describes in great detail the woman on whom Emma Bovary was based. She was, he tells us, the second wife of a medical officer from Bon-Lecours, near Rouen:
This second wife was not beautiful; she was small, had dull yellow hair, and a face covered with freckles. She was full of pretension, and despised her husband, whom she considered a fool. Round and fair in person, her small bones were well-covered, and in her carriage and her general bearing there were flexible, undulating movements, like those of an eel. Her voice, vulgarised by its Lower Normandy accent, was full of caressing tones, and her eyes, of uncertain colour, green, grey, or blue, according to the light, had a pleading expression, which never left them.
Dr Starkie appears to have been serenely unaware of this enlightening passage. All in all, it seems a magisterial negligence towards a writer who must, one way and another, have paid a lot of her gas bills. Quite simply, it makes me furious. Now do you understand why I hate critics? I could try and describe to you the expression in my eyes at this moment; but they are far too discoloured with rage.
Listen. Rattarattarattaratta. And then – shhh – over there. Fattafattafattafatta. And again. Rattarattarattaratta – fattafattafattafatta. A soft November swell has set the tables rattling metallically at one another across the bar. An insistent approach from a table close at hand; a pause while some unheard throb shifts across the boat; and then a softer reply from the other side. Call and response, call and response; like a pair of mechanical birds in a cage. Listen to the pattern: rattarattarattaratta fattafattafattafatta rattarattarattaratta fattafattafattafatta. Continuity, stability, mutual reliance, it says; yet a change of wind or tide could end it all.
The curving windows at the stern are freckled with spray; through one of them you can make out a set of fat capstans and a listless macaroni of sodden rope. The seagulls have long since given up on this ferry. They cawed us out of Newhaven, had a look at the weather, noted the lack of sandwich packs on the rear promenade, and turned back. Who can blame them? They could have followed us the four hours to Dieppe in the hope of picking up trade on the way back; but that makes for a ten-hour day. By now they will be digging worms on some damp football pitch in Rottingdean.
Beneath the window is a bilingual rubbish bin with a spelling mistake. The top line says PAPIERS (how official the French sounds: ‘Driving licence! Identity card!’ it seems to command). The English translation underneath reads LITTERS. What a difference a single consonant makes. The first time Flaubert saw his name advertised – as the author of Madame Bovary, shortly to be serialised in the Revue de Paris – it was spelt Faubert. ‘If I make an appearance one day, it will be in full armour,’ had been his boast; but even in full armour the armpit and the groin are never completely protected. As he pointed out to Bouilhet, the Revue’s version of his name was only a letter away from an unwanted commercial pun: Faubet being the name of a grocer in the rue Richelieu, just opposite the Comedie-Francaise. ‘Even before I’ve appeared, they skin me alive.’
I like these out-of-season crossings. When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again. Or perhaps it’s just a way of admitting a preference for empty ferries.
There can’t be more than half a dozen people in the bar. One of them is stretched out on a banquette; the lulling rattle of the tables is coaxing its first snore from him. At this time of the year there are no school parties; the video games, disco and cinema are silent; even the barman chats.
This is the third time I’ve made the trip in a year. November, March, November. Just for a couple of nights in Dieppe: though I sometimes take the car and get down to Rouen. It’s not long, but it’s enough to make the change. It is a change. The light over the Channel, for instance, looks quite different from the French side: clearer, yet more volatile. The sky is a theatre of possibilities. I’m not romanticising. Go into the art galleries along the Normandy coast and you’ll see what the local painters liked to paint, over and over again: the view north. A strip of beach, the sea, and the eventful sky. English painters never did the same, clustering at Hastings or Margate or Eastbourne to gaze out at a grumpy, monotonous Channel.
I don’t just go for the light. I go for those things you forget about until you see them again. The way they butcher meat. The seriousness of their pharmacies. The behaviour of their children in restaurants. The road signs (France is the only country I know where drivers are warned about beetroot on the road: BETTERAVES, I once saw in a red warning triangle, with a picture of a car slipping out of control). Beaux-arts town halls. Wine-tasting in smelly chalk-caves by the side of the road. I could go on, but that’s enough, or I’ll soon be babbling about lime trees and petanque and eating bread dipped in rough red wine – what they call la soupe a perroquet, parrot soup. Everyone has a private list, and those of other people quickly appear vain and sentimental. I read a list the other day headed ‘What I Like’. It went: ‘Salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay [would you read on?]… roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould…’ The list, which is by Roland Barthes, continues, as lists do. One item you approve, the next stirs irritation. After ‘Medoc wine’ and ‘having change’, Barthes approves of ‘Bouvard et Pecuchet’. Good; fine; we’ll read on. What’s next? ‘Walking in sandals on the lanes of south-west France.’ It’s enough to make you drive all the way to south-west France and strew some beetroot on the lanes.
My list mentions pharmacies. They always seem more single-minded in France. They don’t stock beachballs or colour film or snorkelling equipment or burglar alarms. The assistants know what they are doing, and never try to sell you barley sugar on the way out. I find myself deferring to them as if they were consultants.
My wife and I once went into a pharmacie in Montauban and requested a packet of bandages. What was it for, they asked. Ellen tapped her heel, where the strap of a new pair of sandals had rubbed up a blister. The pharmacien came out from behind his counter, sat her down, removed her sandal with the tenderness of a foot-fetishist, examined her heel, cleaned it with a piece of gauze, stood up, turned to me gravely, as if there were something which really ought to be kept from my wife, and quietly explained, ‘That, Monsieur, is a blister.’ The spirit of Homais still reigns, I thought, as he sold us a packet of bandages.
The spirit of Homais: progress, rationalism, science, fraud. ‘We must march with the century’ are almost his first words; and he marches all the way to the Legion d’honneur. When Emma Bovary dies, her body is watched over by two people: the priest, and Homais the pharmacien. Representing the old orthodoxy and the new. It’s like some piece of nineteenth-century allegorical sculpture: Religion and Science Watching Together over the Body of Sin. From a painting by G. F. Watts. Except that both the
