His parents often spent their holidays at the seaside, and in 1836, on vacation with them at the fishing village of Trouville when he was still not quite fifteen, he developed an infatuation with the twenty-five-year-old Élise Schlésinger, the wife of a successful entrepreneur and publisher. This was the first of many such turbulent passions in his life. Many years later, as a student of law in Paris, Flaubert reacquainted himself with the Schlésingers, enjoying a close friendship with them. This early erotic fascination, as well as his later pursuit of an intimacy with both husband and wife, would much later form the basis for the novel Sentimental Education, with Élise herself providing the model for the alluring Madame Arnoux.
He was by now churning out essays and short stories, two of which appeared in a Rouen literary magazine – the only work of his to be published before Madame Bovary. Many of these stories, and the theatrical melodramas he was also composing in large numbers, were at first staple Romantic fare, full of ghosts and mad monks and generally set in the Middle Ages, but gradually, under his reading of Balzac, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Homer, this exaggerated Romantic element was weeded out, to be replaced by more reflective and realist subject matter, and a style which became progressively less prolix and more limpid and precise.
In 1839, the year which was meant to lead up to his taking the baccalauréat, the series of exams which would have provided him with entrance to higher education, Flaubert was thrown out of the school, along with several of his friends. The reasons are obscure, but it seems that during this final year the very popular philosophy teacher began to miss more and more lessons as a result of ill health (Flaubert had always received excellent marks in philosophy due to this man’s excellent teaching); an incompetent and tyrannical teacher was appointed in his place, who constantly doled out unreasonable punishments with which the class refused to cooperate. The headmaster singled out the pupils he considered to be ringleaders, including Flaubert, and expelled them. Flaubert was just two days past his eighteenth birthday. However, he continued to study privately, and passed the baccalauréat in August 1840.
As a reward his parents sent him on a tour of southern France and Corsica for a couple of months, along with a family friend, a medical doctor. Flaubert was fascinated by the classical remains in southern France, and he now developed an urge to travel further on at some stage, perhaps to Africa and the Orient.
Flaubert had made it quite clear to his parents that he had no desire to become a doctor, but they insisted that he follow some profession. However, he still remained interested only in art and writing. Finally, he enrolled in the law department of Paris University in November 1841, and began studies there the following autumn. However, he attended very few lectures, and told his parents categorically that, even if he did graduate in this subject, he had no intention of earning a living by it.
Despite these assertions he does seem to have worked extremely hard cramming for exams; in addition, he was still trying intensively to pursue his literary vocation by writing stories and plays and carrying out research for various plans he had for future works. He also attempted simultaneously to live a full social life. As a result of all this he was exhausted when he went home to Rouen for the Christmas holidays in December 1843. In January 1844, on a return to his parents’ residence from a visit in the locality with his brother Achille, he suddenly fell writhing to the floor of the carriage with what was probably a form of epilepsy. He continued to suffer these fits throughout his life, as well as other mysterious ailments, including regular outbreaks of virulent boils, which would cover his entire body.
Just a week or so later, he managed to return to Paris in an attempt to continue his studies, but immediately had another seizure and so came home. His father promptly imposed on him a strict diet and prolonged rest, and bought a large house to the west of Rouen, on the river at Croisset, where his son could live peacefully and be attended to by doctors and servants. The family was wealthy enough to support him without his having to earn a living, and so he gave up permanently any idea of the law, or indeed of any other profession, and spent almost the rest of his life at Croisset devoting himself to thought, observation and writing – at least, when his epileptic seizures and generally poor health would allow. Over the years he built high walls all around the house and extensive gardens, so that he would be cut off from noise and disturbances and be able to think and write in almost monastic seclusion.
Two further disasters followed in swift succession. In March 1845 Gustave’s beloved sister Caroline had married Émile Hamard – a man whom the whole family regarded as below her in intelligence and social standing, and whom Gustave detested and considered an idiot. His sister’s health, like Gustave’s, was also deteriorating. On 15th January 1846, their father died after a short illness, and just six days later Caroline gave birth to a daughter, also to be named Caroline. But the mother immediately fell ill with puerperal fever and eight weeks later she too died. The family managed to gain legal custody of the baby, and Gustave, his widowed mother and the child all commenced living together at Croisset.
It was around this time, in 1846, that Flaubert first encountered the poet Louise Colet, who was posing for a sculptor he had become acquainted with in Paris. Colet was married to the musician Hippolyte Colet, but nevertheless she and Flaubert embarked on a passionate affair, during which they corresponded frequently, before parting company for ever in October 1854. Colet later described her tempestuous relationship with Flaubert in her novel Lui, which appeared in 1859.
Flaubert had no time for politics and, although he held authority in contempt, he also regarded those he considered the common people with a kind of patrician disdain. When in February 1848 the July Monarchy was brought down by an alliance of the middle classes and the radicals, Flaubert, although pleased to see the authoritarian monarch Louis Philippe go, had no sympathy for those who replaced him – a combination of, as he saw it, the philistine bourgeoisie, fanatical revolutionaries and the uncouth working masses.
Following Caroline’s marriage, the entire family, including Gustave, had accompanied the married couple on their honeymoon to Italy, where, in the Palazzo Balbi in Genoa, he had been overwhelmed by The Temptation of St Anthony, a painting ascribed to Pieter Breugel the Elder. Flaubert – possibly inspired by Goethe’s Faust – had immediately conceived the idea of a play on the subject. He took some eighteen months to compile material and write the work, which grew to mammoth proportions. The cast of characters was enormous, and some speeches were ten pages long. On completion he read it to two friends, Maxine Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet. Du Camp claimed later that the entire reading had taken in total some thirty-two hours spread over four days. They were both profoundly discouraging, even contemptuous, and told him to throw the whole thing on the fire and stick to subjects he was familiar with.
Despite this blow to his confidence as a writer, Flaubert bore no ill will to Du Camp, and the pair set off in October 1849 to explore the Middle East; this had been one of Flaubert’s dreams since his teenage years, and he hoped to gain fresh material from this journey for his writing. They spent time in Cairo, sailed up the Nile, visited the Holy Land, Beirut, Rhodes and Constantinople, and, on the way back, paused in Greece to see the ancient remains. Flaubert came back prematurely ageing: he was losing his hair and putting on weight. He had also contracted syphilis from a visit to a Beirut brothel.
They returned to France in June 1851, and almost immediately Flaubert took up a new project: a novel based on the down-to-earth subject of an ordinary medical official and his wife’s adultery and eventual suicide.
He completed the novel, Madame Bovary, in April 1856. It was serialized, albeit in bowdlerized form, from October to December that year, something that resulted in accusations of obscenity and a failed attempt to prosecute the author for offending public morals and blasphemy. The controversy had the perverse effect of guaranteeing the two-volume edition, which appeared in April 1857, best-seller status.
Fla
ubert now attempted a wholesale revision of The Temptation of St Anthony, but delayed any publication of this work because he knew that its subject matter, the sexual temptation of a holy figure, might make it, like Madame Bovary, liable for prosecution. He then turned to a new project, one whose subject was equally far-removed from the provincial realism of Madame Bovary: a novel set in third-century Carthage to be entitled Salammbô.
During his writing of this volume, he began once again to suffer from serious seizures. These episodes occasionally involved severe injury, as he would collapse writhing on the pavement, hitting his head and limbs.
He completed Salammbô on 20th April 1862, and promptly suffered a virulent outbreak of boils all over his body. The novel was generally successful among the public and intellectuals: Victor Hugo, Hector Berlioz, George Sand and Théophile Gautier sent him adulatory letters. Some critics and historians, however, attacked the story for what they saw as its prolixity and inaccuracy of historical detail. But Flaubert now found himself an honoured guest at literary salons, and he formed friendships with such literary luminaries as the Goncourt brothers and the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who was resident in France at the time. He also became acquainted with the younger set of French writers, including Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant. Indeed, the intensity of his friendship with Maupassant was so strong that it has been seriously speculated that Maupassant was Flaubert’s illegitimate son.
On 15th August 1866 Flaubert received the Légion d’Honneur – an award reserved for France’s most eminent individuals in all fields.
Flaubert began to consider in earnest what he described as his “Parisian novel” on his forty-first birthday, 12th December 1862, two weeks after the publication of Salammbô. Over six years later, in May 1869, Sentimental Education, about a young man living through the revolution of 1848 and the foundation of the Second Empire, was finished. Although the novel sold reasonably well, it was vilified by the critics for its perceived shapelessness. Furthermore, it was criticized by the conservative sections of the press for its theme of political radicalism; at the same time the radicals attacked the novel for what they considered its unsympathetic portrayal of them.
In July 1870, war broke out between France and Prussia. On 1st September, the French army was crushed at the Battle of Sedan, something that resulted in the capture of Emperor Napoleon III, the collapse of the Second Empire and the formation of a new republican government. The fastidious Flaubert, with his contempt for politics, found himself appointed to the rank of lieutenant in the local Rouen Home Guard, which had been formed to defend the region against the Prussian invasion.
Paris withstood the Prussian siege that followed the defeat at Sedan, but the lands to the north capitulated almost immediately. Prussian soldiers were billeted in Flaubert’s house at Croisset from December 1870 to April 1871, and Flaubert, despising what he saw as the barbarous and uncouth German soldiers, fled for the period to the house in Dieppe of his niece Caroline, who in 1864 had married an incompetent timber merchant named Ernest Commanville. Flaubert called the period of the Prussian invasion the worst of his life.
In April 1872, a year after Flaubert’s return to Croisset, his mother died, leaving Croisset not to Gustave but to her grandchild Caroline; it was only after lengthy negotiations that Caroline allowed her uncle to continue living there. Over the next couple of years he yet again extensively revised and abridged The Temptation of St Anthony, and it was at last published in this final version in April 1874. It sold well, but was nevertheless lambasted by the drama critics as being unperformable – it still had a huge cast, was extremely static and, like the first version written so many years before, still contained many speeches that continued unbroken over several pages.
In April 1875, the timber company of his niece’s husband collapsed, leaving the couple with enormous debts, and, to help them, Flaubert immediately sold some of the family property that had provided him and his relations with a secure rental income for so long; he estimated that he had bailed the young couple out to the tune of a million francs, and there was even a possibility at one time that Croisset would have to be sold too, though this was averted.
However, because Croisset was expensive to keep, and to light and heat during winter, and his income was now severely curtailed, Flaubert moved to cheap lodgings in Paris. This also enabled him to be near Caroline and her husband, who had also moved to the capital. Gustave constantly feared that Croisset, his lifelong retreat, would have to be sold, and this worry, and his attempts to keep up his writing in his cramped and noisy lodgings, caused his health to worsen alarmingly.
He had begun a new novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, in August 1872, but owing to his family problems and ill health, he abandoned it in the summer of 1875 and turned to writing short stories. However, these too went very slowly, and over the next eighteen months he managed to produce only three that he considered worthy; these were issued in one volume, under the title Three Tales, in April 1877. At this point he resumed work on Bouvard and Pécuchet, but it was never completed.
In 1879 he was awarded a small state pension for his literary work, which alleviated his comparative penury somewhat, but still did not allow him to resume residence permanently at Croisset. Nevertheless, he did manage to visit his old house occasionally, especially when the weather was warmer, in order to inspect it and make sure it was not falling into total disrepair. It was on one of these brief visits to Croisset, on 8th May 1880, that he suffered what seems to have been an apoplectic stroke – although there has been speculation that he committed suicide in a state of depression. The servants summoned a doctor, but Flaubert, who was in a coma, died soon afterwards.
Zola, Daudet, Maupassant and other major French writers and cultural figures attended the funeral service and procession, and Flaubert was interred at the Cimetière Monumental in Rouen.
Gustave Flaubert’s Works
Although Flaubert pondered a great deal over aesthetics and the significance and aims of literature, he wrote very little about his ideas on these subjects. His views are therefore to be gleaned from chance remarks in his letters, and from the style of his works themselves.
Although seeming to like people individually, and to have many friends, he possessed a pessimistic, even contemptuous view of the human race overall, and in particular of its preoccupation with what he saw as mediocrity and trivia. He told some of his correspondents that he found life boring, ugly and even hideous.
As for metaphysics, religion and politics, he thought that we can know nothing for certain, and therefore that one ought not to take sides, put forward any viewpoint in one’s writing or pass judgement on any of the characters’ behaviours in one’s stories, however reprehensible their conduct might seem.
Much of the art of the time dealt with social and political themes, but Flaubert stood aloof from these currents: he wrote in his letters that a work has importance only by virtue of its eternity, and that the more it represented humanity as it is and has always been, the more beautiful it would be. Furthermore, he believed, it is of paramount importance that this Olympian impersonality and detachment should be represented through beauty and clarity of style, to emphasize that life could be lived in a different way from what he saw as the ugliness of reality.
Therefore, his chosen subject matter in his mature works is predominantly that of ordinary human beings who, although mediocre in intelligence and understanding, have aspirations that are constantly thwarted by the circumstances and people they are surrounded by. Instances of such sad individuals in Flaubert’s writings are Emma Bovary, Frédéric Moreau and the two old clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet. As Flaubert’s style matured, the narrator more or less vanished altogether from his works; everything is merely “shown”, and the reader is left to make up his or her own mind. Of Madame Bovary, Flaubert wrote that he hoped that the reader would not notice all the psychological effort that he’d put into representing the characters, but would still be deeply affe
cted by their portrayal.
Flaubert revered science for its objective means of analysis of the world, and its progressive accumulation of details of the make-up of reality. This may explain too the vast amount of research he did for all his projects, sometimes amounting to reading over one hundred volumes for a planned work, and taking painfully long periods to write it. However, in this striving for total objectivity and a transparent style that made exclusive use of what he termed “le mot juste” (the most apt or appropriate word for any context), he stressed that the perfection of the writing always had to take precedence over mere documentation and detail.
Flaubert sat down to write Madame Bovary, his most famous novel and first large-scale work to be published, in 1851, after the savaging by two friends of his manuscript for The Temptation of St Anthony, as mentioned above.
He may have obtained the original germ of the idea for the novel on his return to France, when he heard the tale of Eugène Delamere, a mediocre former student of his father’s who had failed to pass all his medical exams and therefore had to be satisfied with a post not as a doctor, but as a public-health officer. Delamere’s wife Delphine committed numerous infidelities, ruined him financially, and then committed suicide by taking poison, leaving him with their child. Devastated, Delamere had in his turn taken his own life.
Whether or not this was the inspiration, Flaubert’s idea is first mentioned on 21st July 1851, in a letter to Flaubert from Du Camp – although it should be noted that this might imply that the topic had been discussed between them previously, possibly on their travels in the Middle East. He began writing in earnest on 16th September that year.
Memoirs of a Madman and November Page 20
