Flaubert's Parrot

Chronology

I

1821: Birth of Gustave Flaubert, second son of Achille-Cleophas Flaubert, head surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, Rouen, and of Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert, nee Fleuriot. The family belongs to the successful professional middle class, and owns several properties in the vicinity of Rouen. A stable, enlightened, encouraging and normally ambitious back-ground.

1825: Entry into service with the Flaubert family of Julie, Gustave’s nurse, who remains with them until the writer’s death fifty-five years later. Few servant problems will trouble his life.

c. 1830: Meets Ernest Chevalier, his first close friend. A succession of intense, loyal and fertile friendships will sustain Flaubert throughout his life: of particular note are those with Alfred Le Poittevin, Maxime du Camp, Louis Bouilhet and George Sand. Gustave inspires friendship easily, and fosters it with a teasing, affectionate manner.

1831–2: Enters the College de Rouen and proves an impressive student, strong in history and literature. His earliest piece of writing to come down to us, an essay on Corneille, dates from 1831. Throughout his adolescence he composes abundantly, both drama and fiction.

1836: Meets Elisa Schlesinger, wife of a German music publisher, in Trouville and conceives an ‘enormous’ passion for her. This passion illuminates the rest of his adolescence. She treats him with great kindness and affection; they remain in touch for the next forty years. Looking back, he is relieved she didn’t return his passion: ‘Happiness is like the pox. Catch it too soon, and it wrecks your constitution.’

c. 1836: Gustave’s sexual initiation with one of his mother’s maids. This is the start of an active and colourful erotic career, veering from brothel to salon, from Cairo bath-house boy to Parisian poetess. In early manhood he is extremely attractive to women and his speed of sexual recuperation is, by his own account, very impressive; but even in later life his courtly manner, intelligence and fame ensure that he is not unattended.

1837: His first published work appears in the Rouen magazine Le Colibri.

1840: Passes his baccalaureat. Travels to the Pyrenees with a family friend, Dr Jules Cloquet. Though often considered an unbudgeable hermit, Flaubert in fact travels extensively: to Italy and Switzerland (1845), Brittany (1847), Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece and Italy (1849–51), England (1851, 1865, 1866, 1871), Algeria and Tunisia (1858), Germany (1865), Belgium (1871) and Switzerland (1874). Compare the case of his alter ego Louis Bouilhet, who dreamed of China and never got to England.

1843: As a law student in Paris, he meets Victor Hugo.

1844: Gustave’s first epileptic attack puts an end to his legal studies in Paris and confines him to the new family house at Croisset. Abandoning the law, however, causes little pain, and since his confinement brings both the solitude and the stable base needed for a life of writing, the attack proves beneficial in the long run.

1846: Meets Louise Colet, ‘the Muse’, and begins his most celebrated affair: a prolonged, passionate, fighting two-parter (1846–8, 1851–4). Though ill-matched in temperament and incompatible in aesthetics, Gustave and Louise nevertheless last together far longer than most would have predicted. Should we regret the end of their affair? Only because it means the end of Gustave’s resplendent letters to her.

1851–7: The writing, publication, trial and triumphant acquittal of Madame Bovary. A succes de scandale, praised by authors as diverse as Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire. In 1846, doubting his ability ever to write anything worth publishing, Gustave had announced, ‘If I do make an appearance, one day, it will be in full armour.’ Now his breastplate dazzles and his lance is everywhere. The cure of Canteleu, the next village to Croisset, forbids his parishioners to read the novel. After 1857, literary success leads naturally to social success: Flaubert is seen more in Paris. He meets the Goncourts, Renan, Gautier, Baudelaire and Sainte-Beuve. In 1862 the series of literary dinners at Magny’s are instituted: Flaubert is a regular from December of that year.

1862: Publication of Salammbo. Succes fou. Sainte-Beuve writes to Matthew Arnold: ‘Salammbo is our great event!’ The novel provides the theme for several costume balls in Paris. It even provides the name for a new brand of petit four.

1863: Flaubert begins to frequent the salon of Princesse Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I. The bear of Croisset eases into the pelt of the social lion. He himself receives on Sunday afternoons. The year also contains his first exchange of letters with George Sand, and his meeting with Turgenev. His friendship with the Russian novelist marks the beginning of a wider European fame.

1864: Presentation to the Emperor Napoleon III at Compiegne. The peak of Gustave’s social success. He sends camellias to the Empress.

1866: Created chevalier de la Legion d’honneur.

1869: Publication of L’Education sentimentale: Flaubert always claims it as a chef-d’?uvre. Despite the legend of heroic struggle (which he himself initiates), writing comes easily to Flaubert. He complains a lot, but such complaints are always couched in letters of astonishing fluency. For a quarter of a century he produces one large, solid book, requiring considerable research, every five to seven years. He might agonise over the word, the phrase, the assonance, but he never endures a writer’s block.

1874: Publication of La Tentation de saint Antoine. Despite its strangeness, a gratifying commercial success.

1877: Publication of Trois Contes. A critical and popular success: for the first time Flaubert receives a favourable review from Le Figaro; the book goes through five editions in three years. Flaubert begins work on Bouvard et Pecuchet. During these final years, his pre-eminence among French novelists is admitted by the next generation. He is feted and revered. His Sunday afternoons become famous events in literary society; Henry James calls on the Master. In 1879 Gustave’s friends institute the annual Saint Polycarpe dinners in his honour. In 1880 the five co-authors of Les Soirees de Medan, including Zola and Maupassant, present him with an inscribed copy: the gift can be seen as a symbolic salute to Realism from Naturalism.

1880: Full of honour, widely loved, and still working hard to the end, Gustave Flaubert dies at Croisset.

II

1817: Death of Caroline Flaubert (aged twenty months), the second child of Achille-Cleophas Flaubert and Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert.

1819: Death of Emile-Cleophas Flaubert (aged eight months), their third child.

1821: Birth of Gustave Flaubert, their fifth child.

1822: Death of Jules Alfred Flaubert (aged three years and five months), their fourth child. His brother Gustave, born entre deux morts, is delicate and not expected to live long. Dr Flaubert buys a family plot at the Cimetiere Monumental and has a small grave dug in preparation for Gustave. Surprisingly, he survives. He proves a slow child, content to sit for hours with his finger in his mouth and an ‘almost stupid’ expression on his face. For Sartre, he is ‘the family idiot’.

1836: The start of a hopeless, obsessive passion for Elisa Schlesinger which cauterises his heart and renders him incapable of ever fully loving another woman. Looking back, he records: ‘Each of us possesses in his heart a royal chamber. I have bricked mine up.’

1839: Expelled from the College de Rouen for rowdyism and disobedience.

1843: The Faculty of Law at Paris announces its first-year examination results. The examiners declare their views by means of red or black balls. Gustave receives two red and two black, and is therefore failed.

1844: Shattering first attack of epilepsy; others are to follow. ‘Each attack’, Gustave writes later, ‘was like a haemorrhage of the nervous system… It was a snatching of the soul from the body, excruciating.’ He is bled, given pills and infusions, put on a special diet, forbidden alcohol and tobacco; a regime of strict confinement and maternal care is necessary if he is not to claim his place at the cemetery. Without having entered the world, Gustave now retires from it. ‘So, you are guarded like a young girl?’ Louise Colet later taunts, accurately. For all but the last eight years of his life, Mme Flaubert watches suffocatingly over his welfare and censors his travel plans. Gradually, over the decades, her frailty overtakes his: by the time he has almost ceased to be a worry to her, she has become a burden to him.