Flaubert's Parrot

always had to declare your cheese at customs. Say cheese.

I hope you don’t think I’m being enigmatic, by the way. If I’m irritating, it’s probably because I’m embarrassed; I told you I don’t like the full face. But I really am trying to make things easier for you. Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all. Not writing a tune is easier than writing one. Not rhyming is easier than rhyming. I don’t mean art should be as clear as the instructions on a packet of seeds; I’m saying that you trust the mystifier more if you know he’s deliberately choosing not to be lucid. You trust Picasso all the way because he could draw like Ingres.

But what helps? What do we need to know? Not everything. Everything confuses. Directness also confuses. The full-face portrait staring back at you hypnotises. Flaubert is usually looking away in his portraits and photographs. He’s looking away so that you can’t catch his eye; he’s also looking away because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder.

Directness confuses. I told you my name: Geoffrey Braithwaite. Has that helped? A little; at least it’s better than ‘B’ or ‘G’ or ‘the man’ or ‘the amateur of cheeses’. And if you hadn’t seen me, what would you have deduced from the name? Middle-class professional man; solicitor perhaps; denizen of pine-and-heather country; pepper- and-salt tweeds; a moustache hinting – perhaps fraudulently – at a military past; a sensible wife; perhaps a little boating at weekends; more of a gin than a whisky man; and so on?

I am – was – a doctor, first-generation professional class; as you see, there’s no moustache, though I have the military past which men of my age couldn’t avoid; I live in Essex, most characterless and therefore most acceptable of the Home Counties; whisky, not gin; no tweed at all; and no boating. Near enough, and yet not near enough, you see. As for my wife, she was not sensible. That was one of the last words anyone would apply to her. They inject soft cheeses, as I said, to stop them ripening too quickly. But they always do ripen; it’s in their nature. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.

I was going to put my photograph in the front of the book. Not vanity; just trying to be helpful. But I’m afraid it was rather an old photograph, taken about ten years ago. I haven’t got a more recent one. That’s something you find: after a certain age, people stop photographing you. Or rather, they photograph you only on formal occasions: birthdays, weddings, Christmas. A flushed and jolly character raises his glass among friends and family – how real, how reliable is that evidence? What would the photos of my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary have revealed? Certainly not the truth; so perhaps it’s as well they were never taken.

Flaubert’s niece Caroline says that towards the end of his life he regretted not having had a wife and family. Her account is, however, rather spare. The two of them were walking by the Seine after a visit to some friends. ‘“They got it right,” he said to me, alluding to that household with its charming and honest children. “Yes,” he repeated to himself gravely, “they got it right.” I did not trouble his thoughts, but remained silent at his side. This walk was one of our last.’

I rather wish she had troubled his thoughts. Did he really mean it? Should we take the remark as more than the reflex perversity of a man who dreamed of Egypt while in Normandy, and of Normandy while in Egypt? Was he doing more than praise the particular talents of the family they had just visited? After all, had he wanted to praise the institution of marriage itself, he could have turned to his niece and regretted his solitary life by admitting, ‘You got it right.’ But he didn’t, of course; because she got it wrong. She married a weakling who turned into a bankrupt, and in helping save her husband she bankrupted her uncle. The case of Caroline is instructive – gloomily so to Flaubert.

Her own father had been as much of a weakling as her husband subsequently became; Gustave supplanted him. In her Souvenirs intimes Caroline recalls her uncle’s return from Egypt when she was a small girl: he arrives home unexpectedly one evening, wakes her, picks her up out of bed, bursts out laughing because her nightdress extends far below her feet, and plants great kisses on her cheeks. He has just come from outdoors: his moustache is cold, and damp with dew. She is frightened, and much relieved when he puts her down. What is this but a textbook account of the absent father’s alarming return to the household – the return from the war, from business, from abroad, from philandering, from danger?

He adored her. In London he carried her round the Great Exhibition; this time she was happy to be in his arms, safe from the frightening crowds. He taught her history: the story of Pelopidas and Epaminondas; he taught her geography, taking a shovel and pail of water into the garden, where he would build for her instructive peninsulas, islands, gulfs and promontories. She loved her childhood with him, and the memory of it survived the misfortunes of her adult life. In 1930, when she was eighty-four, Caroline met Willa Cather in Aix-les-Bains, and recalled the hours spent eighty years earlier on a rug in the corner of Gustave’s study: he working, she reading, in strict but proudly observed silence. ‘She liked to think, as she lay in her corner, that she was shut in a cage with some powerful wild animal, a tiger or a lion or a bear, who had devoured his keeper and would spring upon anyone else who opened his door, but with whom she was “quite safe and conceited”, as she said with a chuckle.’

But then the necessities of adulthood arrived. He advised her badly, and she married a weakling. She became a snob; she thought only of smart society; and finally she tried to turn her uncle out of the very house in which the most useful things she knew had been inserted into her brain.

Epaminondas was a Theban general, held to be living proof of all the virtues; he led a career of principled carnage, and founded the city of Megalopolis. As he lay dying, one of those present lamented his lack of issue. He replied, ‘I leave two children, Leuctra and Mantinea’ – the sites of his two most famous victories. Flaubert might have made a similar avowal — ‘I leave two children, Bouvard and Pecuchet’ – because his only child, the niece who became a daughter, had departed into disapproving adulthood. To her, and to her husband, he had become ‘the consumer’.

Gustave taught Caroline about literature. I quote her: ‘He considered no book dangerous that was well written.’ Move forward seventy years or so to a different household in another part of France. This time there is a bookish boy, a mother, and a friend of the mother’s called Mme Picard. The boy later wrote his memoirs; again, I quote: ‘Mme Picard’s opinion was that a child should be allowed to read everything. “No book can be dangerous if it is well written.” ’ The boy, aware of Mme Picard’s frequently expressed view, deliberately exploits her presence and asks his mother’s permission to read a particular and notorious novel. ‘But if my little darling reads books like that at his age,’ says the mother, ‘what will he do when he grows up?’ ‘I shall live them out!’ he replies. It was one of the cleverest retorts of his childhood; it went down in family history, and it won him – or so we are left to assume – readership of the novel. The boy was Jean-Paul Sartre. The book was Madame Bovary.

Does the world progress? Or does it merely shuttle back and forth like a ferry? An hour from the English coast and the clear sky disappears. Cloud and rain escort you back to where you belong. As the weather changes, the boat begins to roll a little, and the tables in the bar resume their metallic conversation. Rattarattarattaratta, fattafattafattafatta. Call and response, call and response. Now it sounds to me like the final stages of a marriage: two separated parties, screwed to their own particular pieces of floor, uttering routine chatter while the rain begins to fall. My wife… Not now, not now.

Pecuchet, during his geological investigations, speculates on what would happen if there were an earthquake beneath the English Channel. The water, he concludes, would rush out into the Atlantic; the coasts of England and France would totter, shift and reunite; the Channel would cease to exist. On hearing his friend’s predictions, Bouvard runs away in terror. For myself, I do not think we need to be quite so pessimistic.

You won’t forget about the cheese, will you? Don’t grow a chemical plant in your fridge. I didn’t ask if you were married. My compliments, or not, as the case may be.

I think I shall go through the Red Channel this time. I feel the need for some company. The Reverend Musgrave’s opinion was that French douaniers behaved like gentlemen, while English customs officers were ruffians. But I find them all quite sympathetic, if you treat them properly.

8 The Train-spotter’s Guide to Flaubert

1 The house at Croisset – a long, white, eighteenth-century property on the banks of the Seine – was perfect for Flaubert. It was isolated, yet close to Rouen and thence to Paris. It was large enough for him to have a