Flaubert's Parrot

cannot ask you of all people to lie, just tell them what it is you think they want to hear.’

I felt like Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: someone had lent me a fur overcoat and a repeating watch for a few days, then cruelly snatched them back. It was lucky that the waiter returned at that point. Besides, Winterton was not as stupid as all that: he had pushed his chair well back from the table and was playing with his fingernails. ‘The pity of it is,’ he said, as I tucked away my credit card, ‘that I probably now won’t be able to finance Mr Gosse. But I’m sure you’ll agree it’s been an interesting moral decision.’

I think the remark I then made was deeply unfair to Mr Gosse both as a writer and as a sexual being; but I do not see how I could have avoided it.

4 The Flaubert Bestiary

I attract mad people and animals.

Letter to Alfred Le Poittevin, 26 May 1845

THE BEAR

Gustave was the Bear. His sister Caroline was the Rat – ‘your dear rat’, ‘your faithful rat’ she signs herself; ‘little rat’, ‘Ah, rat, good rat, old rat’, ‘old rat, naughty old rat, good rat, poor old rat’ he addresses her – but Gustave was the Bear. When he was only twenty, people found him ‘an odd fellow, a bear, a young man out of the ordinary’; and even before his epileptic seizure and confinement at Croisset, the image had established itself: ‘I am a bear and I want to stay a bear in my den, in my lair, in my skin, in my old bear’s skin; I want to live quietly, far away from the bourgeois and the bourgeoises.’ After his attack, the beast confirmed itself: ‘I live alone, like a bear.’ (The word ‘alone’ in this sentence is best glossed as: ‘alone except for my parents, my sister, the servants, our dog, Caroline’s goat, and my regular visits from Alfred Le Poittevin’.)

He recovered, he was allowed to travel; in December 1850 he wrote to his mother from Constantinople, expanding the image of the Bear. It now explained not just his character, but also his literary strategy:

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubbornness in denying that maxim… So (and this is my conclusion) I am resigned to living as I have lived: alone, with my throng of great men as my only cronies – a bear, with my bear-rug for company.

The ‘throng of cronies’, needless to say, aren’t house-guests but companions picked from his library shelves. As for the bear-rug, he was always concerned about it: he wrote twice from the East (Constantinople, April 1850; Benisouef, June 1850) asking his mother to take care of it. His niece Caroline also remembered this central feature of his study. She would be taken there for her lessons at one o’clock: the shutters would be closed to keep out the heat, and the darkened room filled with the smell of joss-sticks and tobacco. ‘With one bound I would throw myself on the large white bearskin, which I adored, and cover its great head with kisses.’

Once you catch your bear, says the Macedonian proverb, it will dance for you. Gustave didn’t dance; Flaubear was nobody’s bear. (How would you fiddle that into French? Gourstave, perhaps.)

BEAR: Generally called Martin. Quote the story of the old soldier who saw that a watch had fallen into a bear-pit, climbed down into it, and was eaten.

Dictionnaire des idees recues

Gustave is other animals as well. In his youth he is clusters of beasts: hungry to see Ernest Chevalier, he is ‘a lion, a tiger – a tiger from India, a boa constrictor’ (1841); feeling a rare plenitude of strength, he is ‘an ox, sphinx, bittern, elephant, whale’ (1841). Subsequently, he takes them one at a time. He is an oyster in its shell (1845); a snail in its shell (1851); a hedgehog rolling up to protect itself (1853, 1857). He is a literary lizard basking in the sun of Beauty (1846), and a warbler with a shrill cry which hides in the depths of the woods and is heard only by itself (also 1846). He becomes as soft and nervous as a cow (1867); he feels as worn out as a donkey (1867); yet still he splashes in the Seine like a porpoise (1870). He works like a mule (1852); he lives a life which would kill three rhinos (1872); he works ‘like XV oxen’ (1878); though he advises Louise Colet to burrow away at her work like a mole (1853). To Louise he resembles ‘a wild buffalo of the American prairie’ (1846). To George Sand, however, he seems ‘gentle as a lamb’ (1866) – which he denies (1869) – and the pair of them chatter away like magpies (1866); ten years later, at her funeral, he weeps like a calf (1876). Alone in his study, he finishes the story he wrote especially for her, the story about the parrot; he bellows it out ‘like a gorilla’ (1876).

He flirts occasionally with the rhinoceros and the camel as self-images, but mainly, secretly, essentially, he is the Bear: a stubborn bear (1852), a bear thrust deeper into bearishness by the stupidity of his age (1853), a mangy bear (1854), even a stuffed bear (1869); and so on down to the very last year of his life, when he is still ‘roaring as loudly as any bear in its cave’ (1880). Note that in Herodias, Flaubert’s last completed work, the imprisoned prophet Iaokanann, when ordered to stop howling his denunciations against a corrupt world, replies that he too will continue crying out ‘like a bear’.

Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Madame Bovary

There were still bears around in Gourstave’s time: brown bears in the Alps, reddish bears in Savoy. Bear hams were available from superior dealers in salted provisions. Alexandre Dumas ate bear steak at the Hotel de la Poste, Marigny, in 1832; later, in his Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1870), he noted that ‘bear meat is now eaten by all the peoples of Europe’. From the chef to Their Majesties of Prussia Dumas obtained a recipe for bear’s paws, Moscow style. Buy the paws skinned. Wash, salt, and marinade for three days. Casserole with bacon and vegetables for seven or eight hours; drain, wipe, sprinkle with pepper, and turn in melted lard. Roll in breadcrumbs and grill for half an hour. Serve with a piquant sauce and two spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly.

It is not known whether Flaubear ever ate his namesake. He ate dromedary in Damascus in 1850. It seems a reasonable guess that if he had eaten bear he would have commented on such ipsophagy.

Exactly what species of bear was Flaubear? We can track his spoor through the Letters. At first he is just an unspecified ours, a bear (1841). He’s still unspecified – though owner of a den – in 1843, in January 1845, and in May 1845 (by now he boasts a triple layer of fur). In June 1845 he wants to buy a painting of a bear for his room and entitle it ‘Portrait of Gustave Flaubert’ – ‘to indicate my moral disposition and my social temperament’. So far we (and he too, perhaps) have been imagining a dark animal: an American brown bear, a Russian black bear, a reddish bear from Savoy. But in September 1845 Gustave firmly announces himself to be ‘a white bear’.

Why? Is it because he’s a bear who is also a white European? Is it perhaps an identity taken from the white bearskin rug on his study floor (which he first mentions in a letter to Louise Colet of August 1846, telling her that he likes to stretch out on it during the day. Maybe he chose his species so that he could lie on his rug, punning and camouflaged)? Or is this coloration indicative of a further shift away from humanity, a progression to the extremes of ursinity? The brown, the black, the reddish bear are not that far from man, from man’s cities, man’s friendship even. The coloured bears can mostly be tamed. But the white, the polar bear? It doesn’t dance for man’s pleasure; it doesn’t eat berries; it can’t be trapped by a weakness for honey.

Other bears are used. The Romans imported bears from Britain for their games. The Kamchatkans, a people of eastern Siberia, used to employ the intestines of bears as face-masks to protect them from the glare of