Flaubert's Parrot

In 1861: ‘I’ve long been meditating a novel on insanity, or rather on how one becomes insane.’ From about this time, or a little later, he was also meditating, according to Du Camp, a novel about the theatre; he would sit in the green room jotting down the confidences of over-candid actresses. ‘Only Le Sage in Gil Blas has touched upon the truth. I will reveal it in all its nakedness, for it is impossible to imagine how comic it is.’

From this point on, Flaubert must have known that any full-length novel would probably take him five to seven years; and therefore that most of his back-burner projects would inevitably boil themselves dry in the pot. From the last dozen years of his life we find four main ideas, plus an intriguing fifth, a sort of roman trouve.

a) ‘Harel-Bey’, an Eastern story. ‘If I were younger and had the money, I’d go back to the Orient – to study the modern Orient, the Orient of the Isthmus of Suez. A big book about that is one of my old dreams. I’d like to show a civilised man who turns barbarian, and a barbarian who becomes a civilised man – to develop that contrast between two worlds that end up merging… But it’s too late.’

b) A book about the Battle of Thermopylae, which he planned to write after finishing Bouvard et Pecuchet.

c) A novel featuring several generations of a Rouen family.

d) If you cut a flatworm in half, the head will grow a new tail; more surprisingly, the tail will grow a new head. This is what happened with the regretted ending to L’Education sentimentale: it generated an entire novel of its own, called first ‘Under Napoleon III’, and later ‘A Parisian Household’. ‘I will write a novel about the Empire [Du Camp reports him saying] and bring in the evening receptions at Compiegne, with all the ambassadors, marshals and senators rattling their decorations as they bend to the ground to kiss the hand of the Prince Imperial. Yes indeed! The period will furnish material for some capital books.’

e) The roman trouve was found by Charles Lapierre, editor of Le Nouvelliste de Rouen. Dining at Croisset one evening, Lapierre told Flaubert the scandalous history of Mademoiselle de P—. She had been born into the Normandy nobility, had connections at Court, and was appointed reader to the Empress Eugenie. Her beauty, they said, was enough to damn a saint. It was certainly enough to damn her: an open liaison with an officer of the Imperial Guard caused her dismissal. Subsequently she became one of the queens of the Parisian demi-monde, ruling in the late 1860s over a loucher version of the Court from which she had been excluded. During the Franco-Prussian War, she disappeared from sight (along with the rest of her profession), and afterwards her star waned. She descended, by all accounts, to the lowest levels of harlotry. And yet, encouragingly (for fiction as well as for herself), she proved able to rise again: she became the established mistress of a cavalry officer, and by the time she died was the legal wife of an admiral.

Flaubert was delighted with the story: ‘Do you know, Lapierre, you’ve just given me the subject of a novel, the counterpart of my Bovary, a Bovary of high society. What an attractive figure!’ He copied down the story at once, and began to make notes on it. But the novel was never written, and the notes have never been found.

All these unwritten books tantalise. Yet they can, to an extent, be filled out, ordered, reimagined. They can be studied in academies. A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel. The same is true with these stubs of books.

But what of the unled lives? These, perhaps, are more truly tantalising; these are the real apocrypha. Thermopylae instead of Bouvard et Pecuchet? Well, it’s still a book. But if Gustave himself had changed course? It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers, and very little harm comes to them. A phrenologist – that careers master of the nineteenth century – once examined Flaubert and told him he was cut out to be a tamer of wild beasts. Not so inaccurate either. That quote again: ‘I attract mad people and animals.’

It is not just the life that we know. It is not just the life that has been successfully hidden. It is not just the lies about the life, some of which cannot now be disbelieved. It is also the life that was not led.

‘Am I to be a king, or just a pig?’ Gustave writes in his Intimate Notebook. At nineteen, it always looks as simple as this. There is the life, and then there is the not-life; the life of ambition served, or the life of porcine failure. Others try and tell you about your future, but you never really believe them. ‘Many things’, Gustave writes at this time, ‘have been predicted to me: 1) that I’ll learn to dance; 2) that I’ll marry. We’ll see – I don’t believe it.’

He never married, and he never learned to dance. He was so resistant to dancing that most of the principal male characters in his novels take sympathetic action and refuse to dance as well.

What did he learn instead? Instead he learned that life is not a choice between murdering your way to the throne or slopping back in a sty; that there are swinish kings and regal hogs; that the king may envy the pig; and that the possibilities of the not-life will always change tormentingly to fit the particular embarrassments of the lived life.

At seventeen, he announces that he wants to spend his whole life in a ruined castle by the sea.

At eighteen, he decides that some freakish wind must have mistakenly transplanted him to France: he was born, he declares, to be Emperor of Cochin-China, to smoke 36-fathom pipes, to have 6,000 wives and 1,400 catamites; but instead, displaced by this meteorological hazard, he is left with immense, insatiable desires, fierce boredom, and an attack of the yawns.

At nineteen, he thinks that after he’s finished his legal studies he’ll go off and become a Turk in Turkey, or a muleteer in Spain, or a cameleer in Egypt.

At twenty, he still wants to become a muleteer, though by now the Spanish location has been narrowed to that of Andalusia. Other career possibilities include the life of a lazzarone in Naples; though he’d settle for being the driver of the coach which plies between Nimes and Marseilles. Yet is any of this rare enough? The ease with which even the bourgeois travel nowadays comes as an agony to one who has ‘the Bosphorus in the soul’.

At twenty-four, with his father and sister newly dead, he plans what to do with his life should his mother die as well: he would sell up everything and live in Rome, Syracuse or Naples.

Still twenty-four, and presenting himself to Louise Colet as a fellow of infinite whim, he claims that he has thought long and very seriously about the idea of becoming a bandit in Smyrna. But at the very least ‘some day I shall go and live far away from here and never be heard of again’. Perhaps Louise is little amused by Ottoman banditry; for now a more domestic fantasy appears. If only he were free, he would leave Croisset and come to live with her in Paris. He imagines their life together, their marriage, a sweet existence of mutual love and mutual companionship. He imagines their having a child together; he imagines Louise’s death and his own subsequent tenderness in caring for the motherless infant (we do not, alas, have Louise’s response to this particular flight). The exotic appeal of the domestic does not, however, last. Within a month the tense of the verb curdles: ‘It seems to me that if I had been your husband, we would have been happy together. After we’d been happy, then we would have hated one another. This is normal.’ Louise is expected to be grateful that Gustave’s far-sightedness has spared her such an unsatisfactory life.

So instead, and still twenty-four, Gustave sits over a map with Du Camp and plans a monster journey to Asia. It would last six years and would cost, at their own rough estimate, three million six hundred thousand and a few odd francs.

At twenty-five he wants to be a Brahmin: the mystic dance, the long hair, the face dripping with holy butter. He officially renounces wanting to be a Camaldolese, a brigand or a Turk. ‘Now it’s a Brahmin, or nothing at all – which would be simpler.’ Go on, be nothing at all, life urges. Being a pig is simple.

At twenty-nine, inspired by Humboldt, he wants to go off and live in South America, among the savannahs, and never be heard of again.

At thirty he muses – as he did throughout his life – on his own previous incarnations, on his apocryphal or metempsychotic lives in the more interesting times of Louis XIV, Nero and Pericles. Of one preincarnation he is certain: he was, at some point during the Roman Empire, the director of a troupe of travelling comedians, the sort of plausible rogue who bought women in Sicily and turned them into actresses, a rowdy mixture of teacher, pimp and artist. (Reading Plautus has reminded Gustave of this previous life: it gives him le frisson historique.) Here we should also note Gustave’s apocryphal ancestry: he liked to claim that he had Red Indian blood in his veins. This seems to have been not quite the case; though one of his ancestors did emigrate to Canada in the seventeenth century and become a beaver-trapper.