Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  There is no need to follow in detail the tricks Emma practices to make her poor husband consent to her going to Rouen for her meetings with Léon in their favorite hotel bedroom that soon seems to them to be like home. At this point Emma reaches the highest degree of happiness with Léon: her sentimental lake dreams, her girlish mooning among the modulations of Lamartine, all this is fulfilled—there is water, a boat, a lover, and a boatman. A ribbon of silk turns up in the boat. The boatman mentions someone—Adolphe, Dodolphe—a gay dog who had recently been in that boat with companions and girls. Emma shivers.

  But gradually, like old pieces of scenery, her life begins to shake and fall apart. Beginning with chapter 4 of the third part, fate, abetted by Flaubert, proceeds to destroy her with beautiful precision. From the technical point of composition, this is the tapering point where art and science meet. Emma somehow manages to prop up the toppling falsehood of her piano lessons in Rouen; for a while, also, she props up Lheureux's tumbling bills with other bills. In what may be termed yet another counterpoint scene Homais butts in by insisting that Léon entertain him in Rouen at the exact time that Emma is waiting for Léon at the hotel, a grotesque and very amusing scene that recalls the cathedral episode, with Homais in the beadle's part. A rakish fancy-dress ball in Rouen is not a success for poor Emma, who realizes what sleazy company she is in. Finally, her own house starts to crumble down. One day on returning from town she finds a notice of the sale of her furniture unless her debt, now 8,000 francs, is paid within twenty-four hours. Here begins her last journey, from one person to another in search of money. All the characters join in this tragic climax.

  Her first attempt is to secure more time. " 'I implore you, Monsieur Lheureux, just a few days more!'

  "She was sobbing.

  " 'There! tears now!'

  " 'You are driving me to despair!'

  " 'I do not give a damn if I do,' said he, shutting the door."

  From Lheureux she goes to Rouen, but Léon by now is anxious to get rid of her. She even suggests that he steal the money from his office: "An infernal boldness looked out from her burning eyes, and their lids drew close together with a lascivious and encouraging look, so that the young man felt himself growing weak beneath the mute will of this woman who was urging him to a crime." His promises prove worthless and he does not keep their appointment that afternoon. "He pressed her hand, but it felt quite lifeless. Emma had no strength left for any sentiment.

  "Four o'clock struck, and she rose to return to Yonville, mechanically obeying the force of old habits."

  Leaving Rouen, she is forced to make way for the Viscount Vaubyessard—or was it someone else—driving a prancing black horse. She travels back in the same coach as Homais after a searing encounter with the loathsome blind beggar. In Yonville she approaches the notary Monsieur Guillaumin who tries to make love to her. "He dragged himself toward her on his knees, regardless of his dressing-gown.

  " 'For pity's sake, stay! I love you!'

  "He seized her by her waist. Madame Bovary's face flushed a bright red. She recoiled with a terrible look, crying—'You are taking a shameless advantage of my distress, sir! I am to be pitied—not to be sold.'

  "And she went out."

  Then she goes to Binet, and Flaubert shifts his angle of view: we and two women watch the scene through a window although nothing can be heard. "The tax-collector seemed to be listening with wide-open eyes, as if he did not understand. She went on in a tender, suppliant manner. She came nearer to him, her breast heaving; they no longer spoke.

  " 'Is she making him advances?' said Madame Tuvache.

  "Binet was scarlet to his very ears. She took hold of his hands.

  " 'Oh, it's too much!'

  "And no doubt she was suggesting something abominable to him; for the tax-collector—yet he was brave, had fought at Bautzen and at Lutzen, had been through the French campaign, and had even been recommended for the cross—suddenly, as at the sight of a serpent, recoiled as far as he could from her, crying—

  " 'Madame! what do you mean?'

  " 'Women like that ought to be whipped,' said Madame Tuvache."

  Next she goes to the old nurse Rollet for a few minutes' rest, and after a daydream that Léon had come with the money, "Suddenly she struck her brow and uttered a cry; for the thought of Rodolphe, like a flash of lightning in a dark night, had passed into her soul. He was so good, so delicate, so generous! And besides, should he hesitate to do her this service, she would know well enough how to constrain him to it by re-waking, in a single moment, their lost love. So she set out toward La Huchette, not seeing that she was hastening to offer herself to that which but a while ago had so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution." The false tale she tells vain and vulgar Rodolphe dovetails with the real episode at the beginning of the book where a real notary runs away and causes the death of the first Madame Bovary, Emma's predecessor. Rodolphe's caresses stop abruptly at her plea for 3,000 francs. " 'Ah!' thought Rodolphe, turning suddenly very pale, 'that was what she came for.' At last he said with a calm air—

  " 'Dear madame, I do not have them.'

  "He did not lie. If he had them, he would, no doubt, have given them, although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and most destructive.

  "First she looked at him for some moments.

  " 'You do not have them!' she repeated several times. 'You do not have them! I ought to have spared myself this last shame. You never loved me. You are no better than the others.' ...

  " 'I haven't got them,' replied Rodolphe, with that perfect calm with which resigned rage covers itself as with a shield.

  "She went out.... The earth beneath her feet was more yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed to her immense brown waves breaking into foam. Everything in her head, of memories, ideas, went off at once like a thousand pieces of fireworks. She saw her father, Lheureux's office, their room at home, another landscape. Madness was coming upon her; she grew afraid, and managed to recover herself, in a confused way, it is true, for she did not in the least remember the cause of her terrible condition, that is to say, the question of money. She suffered only in her love, and felt her soul passing from her in this memory, as wounded men, dying, feel their life ebb from their bleeding wounds."

  "Then in an ecstasy of heroism, that made her almost joyous, she ran down the hill, crossed the cow-plank, the footpath, the alley, the market, and reached the druggist's shop." There she wheedled the key to the lumber room from Justin. "The key turned in the lock, and she went straight to the third shelf, so well did her memory guide her, seized the blue jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand, and withdrawing it full of a white powder, she began eating it.

  " 'Stop!' [Justin] cried, rushing at her,

  " 'Hush! some one will come.'

  "He was in despair, was calling out.

  " 'Say nothing, or all the blame will fall on your master.'

  "Then she went home, suddenly calmed, and with something of the serenity of one that had performed a duty."

  The progressive agony of Emma's death is described in remorseless clinical detail until at the end: "Her chest soon began panting rapidly; the whole of her tongue protruded from her mouth; her eyes, as they rolled, grew paler, like the two globes of a lamp that is going out, so that one might have thought her already dead but for the fearful laboring of her ribs, shaken by violent breathing, as if the soul were leaping to free itself.... Bournisien had again begun to pray, his face bowed against the edge of the bed, his long black cassock trailing behind him on the floor. Charles was on the other side, on his knees, his arms outstretched towards Emma. He had taken her hands and pressed them, shuddering at every beat of her heart, as at the shaking of a falling ruin. As the death-rattle became stronger the priest prayed faster; his prayers mingled with the stifled sobs of Bovary, and sometimes all seemed lost in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that
rang like a tolling bell.

  "Suddenly there came a noise from the sidewalk, the loud sound of clogs and the tap of a stick; and a voice rose—a raucous voice—that sang—

  'When summer skies shine hot above

  A little maiden dreams of love.'

  "Emma raised herself like a galvanized corpse, her hair undone, her eyes fixed, staring.

  'To gather carefully

  The fallen ears of com.

  Nanette goes bending down

  To the earth where they were born.'

  " 'The blind man!' she cried. And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch standing out against the eternal night like a dreadful threat.

  'The wind was strong that summer day,

  Her skirt was short and flew away.'

  She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew near. She was no more."

  Notes

  STYLE

  Gogol called his Dead Souls a prose poem; Flaubert's novel is also a prose poem but one that is composed better, with a closer, finer texture. In order to plunge at once into the matter, I want to draw attention first of all to Flaubert's use of the word and preceded by a semicolon. (The semicolon is sometimes replaced by a lame comma in the English translations, but we will put the semicolon back.) This semicolon-and comes after an enumeration of actions or states or objects; then the semicolon creates a pause and the and proceeds to round up the paragraph, to introduce a culminating image, or a vivid detail, descriptive, poetic, melancholy, or amusing. This is a peculiar feature of Flaubert's style.

  At the beginning of the marriage: "[Charles] could not refrain from constantly touching her comb, her rings, her fichu; sometimes he gave her big smacking kisses on her cheeks, or else tiny kisses in Indian file all along her bare arm from the tips of her fingers up to her shoulder; and she would push him away, half-smiling, half-vexed, as you do a child who hangs about you."

  Emma bored with her marriage at the end of the first part: "She listened in a kind of dazed concentration to each cracked sound of the church bell. On some roof a cat would walk arching its back in the pale sun. The wind on the highway blew up strands of dust. Now and then a distant dog howled; and the bell, keeping time, continued its monotonous ringing over the fields."

  After Léon's departure for Paris Emma opens her window and watches the clouds: "They were accumulating in the west, on the side of Rouen, and swiftly rolled their black convolutions from behind which the long sun rays stretched out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy, while the rest of the empty sky was as white as porcelain. But a blast of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered against the green leaves. Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, sparrows beat their wings in the drenched bushes; and streams of rainwater on the gravel carried away the pink petals of an acacia."

  Emma lies dead: "Emma's head was turned towards her right shoulder, the comer of her mouth, which was open, seemed like a-black hole at the lower part of her face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her hands; a kind of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes were beginning to disappear in a viscous pallor that looked like a thin web, as if spiders had been at work there. The sheet sunk in from her breast to her knees, and then rose at the tips of the toes; and it seemed to Charles that an infinite mass, an enormous load, were weighing upon her."

  Another aspect of his style, rudiments of which may have been noticed in some examples of his use of and, is Flaubert's fondness for what may be termed the unfolding method, the successive development of visual details, one thing after another thing, with an accumulation of this or that emotion. A good example comes at the beginning of part two where a camera seems to be moving along and taking us to Yonville through a gradually revealed unfolded landscape: "We leave the highroad at La Boissiere and keep straight on to the top of the Leux hill, from which the valley is seen. The river that runs through it makes of it, as it were, two regions with distinct physiognomies,—all on the left is pasture land, all on the right arable. The meadow stretches under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its blond wheat fields. The white stripe of the river separates the tint of the meadows from that of the ploughed land, and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape fringed with silver.

  "Before us, on the verge of the horizon, stand the oaks of the forest of Argeuil, with the steeps of the Saint-Jean hills that bear from top to bottom red irregular scars; these are rain-tracks, and the brick-tones standing out in narrow streaks against the gray color of the mountainside are due to the quantity of iron springs that flow beyond in the adjoining country."

  A third feature—one pertaining more to poetry than to prose—is Flaubert's method of rendering emotions or states of mind through an exchange of meaningless words. Charles has just lost his wife, and Homais is keeping him company. "Homais, to do something, took a decanter on one of the shelves in order to water the geraniums.

  " 'Ah! thanks,' said Charles; 'you are so—'

  "He did not finish, choking as he was under the profusion of memories that Homais' action recalled to him. [Emma had used to water these flowers.]

  "Then to distract him, Homais thought fit to talk a little horticulture: plants, he said, needed humidity. Charles bowed his head in assent.

  " 'Besides,' Homais continued, 'the fine days will soon be here again.'

  " 'Oh,' said Bovary.

  "Homais having exhausted his supply of topics, gently draws the small window curtains aside.

  " 'Hm! There's Monsieur Tuvache passing.'

  "Charles repeated after him mechanically, '... Monsieur Tuvache passing.' "

  Meaningless words, but how suggestive.

  Another point in analyzing Flaubert's style concerns the use of the French imperfect form of the past tense, expressive of an action or state in continuance, something that has been happening in an habitual way. In English this is best rendered by would or used to: on rainy days she used to do this or that; then the church bells would sound; the rain would stop, etc. Proust says somewhere that Flaubert's mastery of time, of flowing time, is expressed by his use of the imperfect, of the imparfait. This imperfect, says Proust, enables Flaubert to express the continuity of time and its unity.

  Translators have not bothered about this matter at all. In numerous passages the sense of repetition, of dreariness in Emma's life, for instance in the chapter relating to her life at Tostes, is not adequately rendered in English because the translator did not trouble to insert here and there a would or a used to, or a sequence of woulds.

  In Tostes, Emma walks out with her whippet: "She would begin [not "began"] by looking around her to see if nothing had changed since last she had been there. She would find [not "found"] again in the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, would wander [not "wandered"] at random...."

  Flaubert does not use many metaphors, but when he does they render emotions in terms which are in keeping with the characters' personalities:

  Emma, after Léon's departure: "and sorrow rushed into her hollow soul with gentle ululations such as the winter wind makes in abandoned mansions." (Of course this is the way Emma would have described her own sorrow if she had had artistic genius.)

  Rodolphe tires of Emma's passionate protestations: "Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candor of hers; he thought that exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted;—as if the fulness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; for human speec
h is like a cracked kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to touch the stars to tears." (I hear Flaubert complaining about the difficulties of composition.)

  Rodolphe turns over old love letters before writing to Emma in farewell on the eve of their elopement: "At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to the cupboard, saying to himself, 'What a lot of rubbish!' Which summed up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school-yard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall." (I see Flaubert revisiting his old school in Rouen.)

  IMAGERY

  Here are a few descriptive passages that show Flaubert at his best in dealing with sense data selected, permeated, and grouped by an artist's eye.

  A wintry landscape through which Charles rides to set old Rouault's broken leg: "The flat country stretched as far as eye could see, and clumps of trees placed at long intervals around farms made purplish-black blotches on the vast gray surface that faded, at the horizon, into the dismal tint of the sky."