Memoirs of a Madman and November

by Gustave Flaubert

  He spent some five years over this project, developing the meticulousness, precision and objectivity for which his prose is known. In a letter to the poet Louise Colet, his lover at the time, dated January 1852, Flaubert explains his intention to write a book in which style is predominant and the subject irrelevant. In another letter to Colet from April of the same year, he described his ambition of creating a form of prose as precise as scientific language and as musical as poetry, later telling her that he thought that a well-turned prose sentence ought to be as immutable as a line of verse.

  However, this commitment to le mot juste came at a price. According to friends such as Louis Bouilhet, Flaubert found progress on the novel desperately slow, and he would frequently fly into rages, bellow and swear while working on it. Over the course of a week he would perhaps agonize over just one page of his fiction, and yet over the same period he would churn out dozens of affable and informative letters to friends – occasionally containing some quite coarse language. For instance, in a letter to Colet of January 1852, Flaubert confessed to being “depressed” and “harried” by the novel, as well as occasionally wishing for death. In April of the same year he described the ascetic, austere life he was leading while writing, telling Colet that he had written twenty-five pages in six weeks, and that he felt that his arms could drop off and his brain disintegrate with the fatigue.

  The prosaic theme – a story of everyday provincial life – enabled Flaubert to develop his gift for clinical observation of human beings and move away from the youthful melodramatic excesses and verbosity of The Temptation of St Anthony. Over five years he wrote and rewrote Madame Bovary, progressively honing his style and constantly paring the text to remove both superfluities of language and authorial judgements and subjectivity.

  We are introduced first to Charles Bovary at school; he is a misfit: clumsy, awkward and shy. He grows up to be a mediocre country doctor earning a modest income. A first, unhappy marriage to a local widow ends with the death of his wife.

  Meanwhile, Emma Rouault, the pretty farmer’s daughter whose mind is filled with aspirations beyond her reach – caused perhaps by reading popular romantic literature – longs to escape. She meets Charles and he falls in love with her. She, perhaps to escape her stifling background, marries him, but soon begins to feel that her marriage to her hard-working and unromantic husband has not matched her visions, derived from her reading, of luxurious aristocratic mansions and travel to exotic foreign locations, and she grows restless and unsatisfied. She builds up enormous debts, and begins to commit adultery – first with the law student and aesthete Léon Dupuis and then with the wealthy and caddish Rodolphe Boulanger. Charles, however, never suspects any of this, and is almost pathetically happy in her presence.

  With mounting debts, and following the failure of an attempt to run off with Boulanger – who does not have the courage or interest to go through with it – Emma undergoes a long period of mental illness, during which she is nursed devotedly by her loving husband – who, however, still has no idea that he himself, and her life with him, might be part of the underlying problem.

  Finally, Emma commits suicide by poisoning herself with arsenic she has stolen from the local chemist. At her death, Charles is devastated to discover letters from her secret lovers and loses all interest in life. He abandons his medical practice, neglects his personal appearance and well-being, and finally dies suddenly, apparently from natural causes.

  After the novel’s completion in April 1856, it was published in serial form in the weekly periodical La Revue de Paris between October and December that year. However, due to the climate of moral censoriousness at the time, the editorial board made extensive cuts – both with and without the author’s permission – and so, after several instalments had been published, Flaubert insisted on inserting a note in the journal denying responsibility for the confused and mutilated state of his story.

  Despite all these precautions by the editorial board, both they and Flaubert were prosecuted for immorality and insulting religion. However, although the work was castigated in court by the judge, the charges were thrown out and, inevitably, when the novel was finally published in two volumes in April 1857, it enjoyed enormous sales – although Flaubert made little money from it, since he’d sold the entire publishing rights for the book format for a few hundred francs. It generally received excellent reviews, although the more conservative sections of the press did indeed lambaste what they perceived as its immorality.

  When asked once whether Emma Bovary was modelled on any real person, Flaubert is alleged to have responded: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” However, it is very difficult to pin down precisely where this story came from and, besides, Flaubert told a number of correspondents that there had been no model for either the story of the novel or any of its characters. Therefore, many commentators have cast doubt on the authenticity of this quotation. Furthermore, it is difficult to see exactly what it refers to, even if true: does it mean that this character is based on Flaubert himself? Or was Flaubert in fact referring to Madame Bovary the novel, and therefore trying to imply that he had put the best of himself into it?

  For his next work, Flaubert settled on a totally different subject: ancient Carthage. He researched the background intensively, claiming to have read over one hundred volumes on the theme, and spent three weeks from April to May 1858 visiting the supposed sites of the ancient city in North Africa. Like his previous novel, it took more than five years to write: he began work on 1st September 1857, and completed it on 20th April 1862. It was published in late November that year.

  The novel is set over the period 241–238 BC, when Carthage had just suffered a crushing defeat in a war against Rome. Following this rout, the city could not pay off its enormous mercenary army, and as a result these hired soldiers launched a mutiny against the Carthaginian government to try to obtain payment. The human interest in the foreground is provided by the fictional love of Matho, the general of this insurgent army, for Salammbô, the daughter of the city’s military leader, Hamilcar.

  Salammbô flees the violence in the city, but Matho manages to find his way to her quarters. However, she is torn between her love for him and her revulsion at his enmity for her father and the Carthaginian people. She utters a triple curse against him, declaring that she wishes him to be asphyxiated and then rent asunder, and finally for his body to be burnt. He runs away. She seems to develop some kind of mental illness – akin to Emma Bovary – as a result of the ambivalence of her feelings towards Matho.

  When Matho is eventually caught and executed, Salammbô is taken to see his body, and to watch his heart being ceremonially removed by her father. He has indeed been asphyxiated and torn apart, and his corpse is to be burnt. Perhaps stricken by the belief that he has died in this way as a result of her malediction, Salammbô collapses and dies.

  Although differing considerably from the preceding novel in that it is set in a major capital of antiquity, during events of extraordinary importance for the Western world of the time, the novel utilizes the same precision of style and objectivity of observation as Madame Bovary.

  Despite being disparaged by some critics for its incoherence, and by a number of historians for its inaccuracy, Salammbô sold well, and attracted admiring letters from, among other cultural figures, Victor Hugo and Hector Berlioz.

  On his forty-first birthday, 12th December 1862, two weeks after the publication of Salammbô, Flaubert jotted in a notebook that he had begun to address himself seriously to his “Parisian novel” – what was to become Sentimental Education. This work, to be concerned with the politically radical generation of young Parisians of the 1840s and 1850s, would incorporate extensive reminiscences from Flaubert’s own youth. In particular, the novel would make use of Flaubert’s relationship with Élise Schlésinger, the beautiful, married woman whom the author had encountered at the age of fourteen on a holiday with his parents in the fishing village of Trouville, and whom he had deliberately sought ou
t later in his life while studying law in Paris.

  Once again, the novel took far longer to research and write than he thought, and Flaubert’s health was declining rapidly. He completed the last page on 16th May 1869 – over six years after first referring to the project.

  The reader is introduced to Frédéric Moreau, a young man whose family is distantly related to aristocracy and consequently highly respected in Nogent-sur-Seine, the town in Normandy where they live. He is full of the romantic clichés of the literature of his day, and is inflamed with the drive for social and political reforms current among his own generation. On a journey by boat from Paris to Nogent-sur-Seine, his provincial home town, he sees and falls in love with Madame Arnoux, the beautiful wife of a businessman. Returning to Paris, where he enrols at the university to study law, Frédéric penetrates the social circle of M. Arnoux, eventually succeeding in making contact with his wife.

  When his mother’s financial situation deteriorates sharply and she is forced to halt his allowance, Frédéric is compelled to interrupt his studies and go home. He embarks on various mundane tutoring jobs in Nogent-sur-Seine, and it is only after several years that the death of a wealthy uncle leaves him at last financially independent. He immediately returns to Paris, only to discover that Madame Arnoux has moved. However, he finds her again, and his intermittent infatuation with her resumes. Along the way, Frédéric becomes involved with Rosanette, the mistress of M. Arnoux; eventually she becomes his own lover and becomes pregnant. He also contemplates with marriage with Louise, the daughter of a friend of his mother’s.

  All this takes place during the 1848 revolution and the foundation of the Second Empire, a time of increasing violence. Frédéric ends up having made one woman pregnant, and with both her and another woman wanting to marry him; to make things worse, he has increasing financial problems. He marries one of these ladies more for her wealth and social position than from any love towards her, then shortly afterwards leaves her, since they are mutually incompatible. He is now completely alone, having lived an aimless and rootless life and failed to commit himself in any way in the political turmoil taking place around him. He is at this point in his late forties, and the title of the novel, Sentimental Education, is now shown to be heavily ironical – neither he nor his friends have learnt anything from life, but have become sad, pathetic and lonely middle-aged people, living meaningless existences.

  Sentimental Education was published in November 1869. It met with a hostile reception, firstly from the literary critics for its perceived shapelessness and incoherence, then from the right-wing press for having dared to mention radicalism at all, and finally from the radicals for its unsympathetic portrait of them – for, although contemptuous of the political right and of authoritarianism, Flaubert viewed militant republicans and socialists with disdain too.

  Although the finished work was not published until 1874, Flaubert had first had the idea of writing The Temptation of St Anthony upon seeing Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s representation of the subject, as mentioned above. The story of St Anthony of Egypt (c.251–356), a religious hermit who was, according to his biographer, Athanasius, plagued by supernatural visions sent by the Devil during his self-imposed solitude on a mountain near the Nile called Pispir, had proved popular with writers and artists over the centuries, and, immediately on his return to France, Flaubert began to carry out intense and wide-ranging research, intending to create his own theatrical version.

  In Flaubert’s treatment, Anthony has vowed to save his soul by a life of prayer in a remote cave, but is constantly suffering enticements to break his vows of dedication to God with a succession of alluring maidens sent by the Devil to seduce him. He resists successfully. But the huge canvas of the drama is populated with a vast number of ancient pagan divinities, Christian heretics, figures from classical and heathen legend, and, in a device reminiscent of medieval mystery plays, personified representations of the vices, all of whom struggle to wrest the soul of the hermit away from God.

  The Devil himself appears and tries to persuade Anthony that his view of the divine being as a personal god who loves humanity is false. Anthony appears to have resisted all these allurements, but the Devil promises at the end of the play to return again and again, implying either that Anthony will ultimately fall, or that he will remain subject to temptations throughout his life and that the struggle to escape them is futile.

  Having abandoned work on the play after the unwieldy 1848–49 draft, Flaubert undertook a drastic revision of the The Temptation of St Anthony before starting work on Salammbô, cutting it down by more than half and trying to make the language less febrile. However, it was still far too long to perform, or even to publish in full, although a few very brief extracts from it appeared in the magazine L’Artiste in late 1856 and early 1857.

  He took up the manuscript of this work once again as late as July 1870, some six months after the publication of Sentimental Education, and subjected it to yet another radical revision. He continually read out extracts from this greatly pared-down third version to his friends, but they still found it appallingly prolix and unoriginal – though they didn’t tell him so to his face.

  He managed to complete the project once and for all on 20th June 1872. This final version, published at last in April 1874, had not only been drastically abridged but also revised from a philosophical point of view: for instance, instead of the former conclusion, with the Devil threatening to return repeatedly in the attempt to tear Anthony from God, this third and final rewriting ends with the saint experiencing a vision of Christ; now at the end of the play, he can settle down uninterrupted to his devotions, presumably never to be subject to diabolical temptation again.

  Although the project may overall be said to be a failure, it is instructive that Flaubert returned to the theme again and again through a period of some twenty-five years, signifying how much this motif of a hermit subjected to continual temptations fascinated Flaubert, and how much perhaps he identified with St Anthony.

  In 1872 Flaubert began his next major work, a novel to be called Bouvard et Pécuchet, which he had planned as far back as 1863. However, bored and frustrated by the tedious progress he was making, and perhaps thwarted by deteriorating health, he suspended work on this project for eighteen months from September 1875 to February 1877, and instead turned to short stories set in different periods and with very different themes; he did this to experiment with different styles, extend his range and further hone his style into that necessary for the short-story form.

  He published three of these tales in one volume, in April 1877, under the title Three Tales. These stories, in the order in which they appear in the book, are ‘A Simple Heart’, ‘The Legend of St Julian the Hospitaller’ and ‘Herodias’. They take place, respectively, in modern times, the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Christian era.

  The first story, ‘A Simple Heart’, is set in Flaubert’s own time. Critics consider this tale a masterpiece on a par with Madame Bovary. Like that novel, the story is not concerned with distant times or vast historical canvases, but rather with what he knew. It employs Flaubert’s memories of the region in which he was brought up, and the central figure is based partly on that of a very aged family servant who was still alive when he wrote the tale.

  Félicité is a young, reliable, hard-working servant girl; as she spends year after year in the job she seems to become dry and drained of feeling. But this is not true: she has her own feelings, her own inner world, largely unknown to her bourgeois employers. For instance, in her early life, she loves a young man to distraction, but when he abandons her for another woman, she transfers her affections to her employer’s children and a worthless nephew who turns up out of nowhere. They all take her love for granted, and the nephew dies in the West Indies. Finally, she becomes fixated on a pet parrot, which almost takes on a religious significance to her: it is, significantly, the only thing ever to talk to her in her later years – albeit with a fixed repertoire of three
phrases. It too finally dies.

  Félicité has had little communication with the outside world and has bestowed her love on subjects who either do not notice it, are unworthy of it, or simply die, like the parrot. She becomes deaf and progressively aged and frail, finally dying of pneumonia. She remains content to the last in her simple, devout religious belief. As she reaches the point of death, she sees heaven opening and what is possibly an angel or the Holy Spirit coming to receive her soul – in the form of a gigantic parrot. The old servant’s life has apparently been pointless, but she herself dies in bliss and convinced that her vision is real.

  The second tale, ‘The Legend of St Julian the Hospitaller’, is derived from a medieval religious tale. The young Julian inherits from his army-general father aggressive, militaristic tendencies, and from his mother a gentle, religious outlook on life. His father intends him to have a military career, and trains him when still very young to hunt wild animals in a bloodthirsty and cruel manner. Julian accordingly slaughters vast numbers of animals quite senselessly until finally, on one such hunting expedition, a stag, just before being killed by him, utters a prophecy that he will murder his own parents. Julian feels he can tell nobody about this, and falls seriously ill as a result of this repression of his anxiety.

  When recovered from his sickness, Julian hurls a javelin at what he thinks is a bird, only almost to kill his mother. Horrified by the possibility that the prophecy may come true, he flees from his parents’ castle and enlists as a common soldier, hoping to avoid the curse by dying in battle. He rescues an Eastern emperor from death and marries his daughter. Finding himself at peace mentally at last, he longs to see his parents again. One day he goes out hunting, but fails to kill any animals; inflamed with rage and frustrated bloodlust, he returns home. However, in the mean time his parents have come at last to visit him, and his wife has put them into a bed to recover from their journey. Julian, seeing a male and a female head on the pillows, and thinking the female is his wife and the male is a lover, kills them both, thereby fulfilling the prophecy.