Flaubert's Parrot

7 ‘RAILWAYS: If Napoleon had had them at his disposition, he would have been invincible. Always go into ecstasies about their invention, and say: “I, Monsieur, I who am even now speaking to you, was only this morning at X…; I left by the X-o’clock train; I did the business I had to do there; and by X-o’clock I was back.”’

Dictionnaire de idees recues

8 I took the train from Rouen (Rive Droite). There were blue plastic seats and a warning in four languages not to lean out of the window; English, I noticed, requires more words than French, German or Italian to convey this advice. I sat beneath a metal-framed photograph (black and white) of fishing-boats at the Ile d’Oleron. Next to me an elderly couple were reading a story in Paris-Normandie about a charcutier, fou d’amour, who had killed a family of seven. On the window was a small sticker I hadn’t seen before: ‘Ne jetez pas l’energie par les fenetres en les ouvrant en periode de chauffage.’ Do not throw energy out of the windows – How un-English the phrasing was; logical yet fanciful at the same time.

I was being observant, you see. A single ticket costs 35 francs. The journey takes a minute or so under the hour: half what it took in Flaubert’s day. Oissel is the first stop; then Le Vaudreuil — ville nouvelle; Gaillon (Aubevoye), with its Grand Marnier warehouse. Musgrave suggested the scenery along this stretch of the Seine reminded him of Norfolk: ‘More like English scenery than any district I had seen in Europe.’ The ticket-collector raps on the door-jamb with his punch: metal on metal, an order you obey. Vernon; then, on your left, the broad Seine conducts you into Mantes.

Six, place de la Republique was a building site. A square block of flats was almost finished; already it exhibited the confident innocence of the usurper. The Grand Cerf? Yes, indeed, they told me at the tabac, the old building had stood until a year or so ago. I went back and stared again. All that now remained of the hotel was a couple of tall stone gateposts some thirty feet apart. I gazed at them hopelessly. On the train, I had been unable to imagine Flaubert (howling like an impatient dog? grumbling? ardent?) making the same journey; now at this point of pilgrimage, the gateposts were no help in thinking my way back to the hot reunions of Gustave and Louise. Why should they be? We are too impertinent with the past, counting on it in this way for a reliable frisson. Why should it play our game?

Grumpily I circled the church (Michelin one star), bought a newspaper, drank a cup of coffee, read about the charcutier, fou d’amour, and decided to take the next train back. The road leading to the station is called avenue Franklin Roosevelt, though the reality is a little less grand than the name. Fifty yards from the end, on the left, I came across a cafe-restaurant. It was called Le Perroquet. Outside, on the pavement, a fretworked wooden parrot with garish green plumage was holding the lunch menu in its beak. The building had one of those brightly timbered exteriors which assert more age than they probably possess. I don’t know if it would have been there in Flaubert’s day. But I know this. Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest.

9 Trains play little part in Flaubert’s fiction. This shows accuracy, however, not prejudice: most of his work is set before the English navvies and engineers descended on Normandy. Bouvard et Pecuchet pokes over into the railway age, but neither of his opinionated copyists, perhaps surprisingly, has a published view on the new mode of transport.

Trains occur only in L’Education sentimentale. They are first mentioned as a not very arresting topic of conversation at a soiree given by the Dambreuses. The first real train, and the first real journey, occur in Part Two, Chapter Three, when Frederic goes to Creil in the hope of seducing Mme Arnoux. Given the benign impatience of his traveller, Flaubert informs the excursion with an approving lyricism: green plains, stations slipping by like little stage sets, fleecy smoke from the engine dancing briefly on the grass before dispersing. There are several more railway journeys in the novel, and the passengers seem happy enough; at least, none of them howls with boredom like a neglected dog. And though Flaubert aggressively excised from ‘La Paysanne’ Mme Colet’s line about the running smoke on the horizon, this doesn’t debar from his own countryside (Part Three, Chapter Four) ‘the smoke of a railway engine stretching out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away.’

We may detect his private opinion only at one point. Pellerin, the artist among Frederic’s companions, a man who specialises in complete theories and incomplete sketches, produces one of his rare finished paintings. Flaubert allows himself a private smile: It represented the Republic, or Progress, or Civilisation, in the figure of Jesus Christ, driving a locomotive through a virgin forest.’

10 The penultimate sentence of Gustave’s life, uttered as he stood feeling dizzy but not at all alarmed: ‘I think I’m going to have a kind of fainting fit. It’s lucky it should happen today; it would have been a great nuisance tomorrow, in the train.’

11 At the buffers. Croisset today. The vast paper factory was churning away on the site of Flaubert’s house. I wandered inside; they were happy to show me round. I gazed at the pistons, the steam, the vats and the slopping trays: so much wetness to produce something as dry as paper. I asked my guide if they made the sort of paper that was used for books; she said they made every sort of paper. The tour, I realised, would not prove sentimental. Above our heads a huge drum of paper, some twenty feet wide, was slowly tracking along on a conveyor. It seemed out of proportion to its surroundings, like a piece of pop sculpture on a deliberately provoking scale. I remarked that it resembled a gigantic roll of lavatory paper; my guide confirmed that this was exactly what it was.

Outside the thumping factory things were scarcely quieter. Lorries bullied past on the road that had once been a tow-path; pile-drivers banged on both sides of the river; no boat could pass without hooting. Flaubert used to claim that Pascal had once visited the house at Croisset; and a tenacious local legend maintained that Abbe Prevost wrote Manon Lescaut there. Nowadays there is no one left to repeat such fictions; and no one to believe them either.

A sullen Normandy rain was falling. I thought of the horse’s silhouette on the far bank, and the quiet splosh as the eel-fishermen cast off. Could even eels live in this cheerless commercial conduit? If they did, they would probably taste of diesel and detergent. My eye moved upriver, and suddenly I noticed it, squat and shuddering. A train. I’d seen the rails before, a set laid between the road and the water; the rain was now making them glisten and smirk. I’d assumed without thinking that they were for the straddling dock cranes to run on. But no: he hasn’t even been spared this. The swaddled goods train was drawn up about two hundred yards away, ready to make its run past Flaubert’s pavilion. It would doubtless hoot derisively as it drew level; perhaps it was carrying poisons, enema pumps and cream tarts, or supplies for chemists and mathematicians. I didn’t want to see the event (irony can be heavy-handed as well as ruthless). I climbed into my car and drove off.

9 The Flaubert Apocrypha

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets
                                   that no longer exist.

But it’s also what they didn’t build. It’s the houses they dreamed and sketched. It’s the brusque boulevards of the imagination; it’s that untaken, sauntering path between toupeed cottages; it’s the trompe