Flaubert's Parrot

1846: Death of Gustave’s father, quickly followed by that of his beloved sister Caroline (aged twenty-one), which thrusts on to him proxy fatherhood of his niece. Throughout his life, he is constantly bruised by the deaths of those close to him. And there are other ways for friends to die: in June Alfred Le Poittevin marries. Gustave feels it is his third bereavement of the year: ‘You are doing something abnormal,’ he complains. To Maxime du Camp that year he writes, ‘Tears are to the heart what water is to a fish.’ Is it a consolation that in the same year he meets Louise Colet? Pedantry and recalcitrance are mismatched with immoderation and possessiveness. A mere six days after she becomes his mistress, the pattern of their relationship is set: ‘Moderate your cries!’ he complains to her. ‘They are torturing me. What do you want me to do? Am I to leave everything and live in Paris? Impossible.’ This impossible relationship drags on nevertheless for eight years; Louise is puzzlingly unable to grasp that Gustave can love her without ever wanting to see her. ‘If I were a woman,’ he writes after six years, ‘I wouldn’t want myself for a lover. A one-night stand, yes; but an intimate relationship, no.’

1848: Death of Alfred Le Poittevin, aged thirty-two. ‘I see that I’ve never loved anyone – man or woman – as I loved him.’ Twenty-five years later: ‘Not a day passes that I don’t think of him.’

1849: Gustave reads his first full-length adult work, La Tentation de saint Antoine, to his two closest friends, Bouilhet and Du Camp. The reading takes four days, at the rate of eight hours per day. After embarrassed consultation, the listeners tell him to throw it on the fire.

1850: In Egypt, Gustave catches syphilis. Much of his hair falls out; he grows stout. Mme Flaubert, meeting him in Rome the following year, scarcely recognises her son, and finds that he has become very coarse. Middle age begins here. ‘Scarcely are you born before you begin rotting.’ Over the years all but one of his teeth will fall out; his saliva will be permanently blackened by mercury treatment.

1851–7: Madame Bovary. The composition is painful – ‘Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles’ – and the prosecution frightening. In later years Flaubert comes to resent the insistent fame of his masterpiece, which makes others see him as a one-book author. He tells Du Camp that if ever he had a stroke of good luck on the Bourse he would buy up ‘at any cost’ all copies of Madame Bovary in circulation: ‘I should throw them into the fire, and never hear of them again.’

1862: Elisa Schlesinger is interned in a mental hospital; she is diagnosed as suffering from ‘acute melancholia’. After the publication of Salammbo, Flaubert begins to run with rich friends. But he remains childlike in financial matters: his mother has to sell property to pay his debts. In 1867 he secretly hands over control of his financial affairs to his niece’s husband, Ernest Commanville. Over the next thirteen years, through extravagance, incompetent management and bad luck, Flaubert loses all his money.

1869: Death of Louis Bouilhet, whom he had once called ‘the seltzer water which helped me digest life’. ‘In losing my Bouilhet, I had lost my midwife, the man who saw more deeply into my thought than I did myself. Death also of Sainte-Beuve. ‘Another one gone! The little band is diminishing! Who is there to talk about literature with now?’ Publication of L’Education sentimentale; a critical and commercial flop. Of the hundred and fifty complimentary copies sent to friends and acquaintances, barely thirty are even acknowledged.

1870: Death of Jules de Goncourt: only three of the seven friends who started the Magny dinners in 1862 are now left. During the Franco-Prussian war, the enemy occupies Croisset. Ashamed of being French, Flaubert stops wearing his Legion d’honneur, and resolves to ask Turgenev what he has to do to take Russian citizenship.

1872: Death of Mme Flaubert: ‘I have realised during the last fortnight that my poor dear old mother was the person I loved the most. It’s as if part of my entrails had been torn out.’ Death also of Gautier. ‘With him, the last of my intimate friends is gone. The list is closed.’

1874: Flaubert makes his theatrical debut with Le Candidat. It is a complete flop; actors leave the stage with tears in their eyes. The play is taken off after four performances. Publication of La Tentation de saint Antoine. ‘Torn to pieces,’ Flaubert notes, ‘by everything from the Figaro to the Revue des deux mondes… What comes as a surprise is the hatred underlying much of this criticism – hatred for me, for my person – deliberate denigration… This avalanche of abuse does depress me.’

1875: The financial ruin of Ernest Commanville drags Flaubert down too. He sells his farm at Deauville; he has to plead with his niece not to turn him out of Croisset. She and Commanville nickname him ‘the consumer’. In 1879 he is reduced to accepting a state pension arranged for him by friends.

1876: Death of Louise Colet. Death of George Sand. ‘My heart is becoming a necropolis.’ Gustave’s last years are arid and solitary. He tells his niece he regrets not having married.

1880: Impoverished, lonely and exhausted, Gustave Flaubert dies. Zola, in his obituary notice, comments that he was unknown to four-fifths of Rouen, and detested by the other fifth. He leaves Bouvard et Pecuchet unfinished. Some say the labour of the novel killed him; Turgenev told him before he started that it would be better as a short story. After the funeral a group of mourners, including the poets Francois Coppee and Theodore de Banville, have dinner in Rouen to honour the departed writer. They discover, on sitting down to table, that they are thirteen. The superstitious Banville insists that another guest be found, and Gautier’s son-in-law Emile Bergerat is sent to scour the streets. After several rebuffs he returns with a private on leave. The soldier has never heard of Flaubert, but is longing to meet Coppee.

III

1842: Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

1846: When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

1846: I did with you what I have done before with those I loved best: I showed them the bottom of the bag, and the acrid dust that rose from it made them choke.

1846: My life is riveted to that of another [Mme Flaubert], and will be so as long as that other life endures. A piece of seaweed blowing in the wind, I am held to the rock by a single hardy thread. If it broke, where would this poor useless plant fly off to?

1846: You want to prune the tree. Its unruly branches, thick with leaves, push out in all directions to sniff the air and the sun. But you want to make me into a charming espalier, stretched against a wall, bearing fine fruit that a child could pick without even using a ladder.

1846: Don’t think that I belong to that vulgar race of men who feel disgust after pleasure, and for whom love exists only as lust. No: in me, what rises doesn’t subside so quickly. Moss grows on the castles of my heart as soon as they are built; but it takes some time for them to fall into ruin, if they ever completely do.

1846: I am like a cigar: you have to suck on the end to get me going.

1846: Amongst those who go to sea there are the navigators who discover new worlds, adding continents to the earth and stars to the heavens: they are the masters, the great, the eternally splendid. Then there are those who spit terror from their gun-ports, who pillage, who grow rich and fat. Others go off in search of gold and silk under foreign skies. Still others catch salmon for the gourmet or cod for the poor. I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

1846: I am only a literary lizard basking the day away beneath the great sun of Beauty. That’s all.

1846 Deep within me there is a radical, intimate, bitter and incessant boredom which prevents me from enjoying anything and which smothers my soul. It reappears at any excuse, just as the swollen corpses of drowned dogs pop to the surface despite the stones that have been tied round their necks.

1847: People are like food. There are lots of bourgeois who seem to me like boiled beef: all steam, no juice, and no taste (it fills you up straight away and is much eaten by bumpkins). Other people are like white meat, freshwater fish, slender eels from the muddy river-bed, oysters (of varying degrees of saltiness), calves’ heads, and sugared porridge. Me? I’m like a runny, stinking macaroni cheese, which you have to eat a lot of times before you develop a taste for it. You do finally get to like it, but only after it has made your stomach heave on countless occasions.

1847: Some people have a tender heart and a tough mind. I’m the opposite: I have a tender mind but a