Charles Bovary, Country Doctor

by Jean Améry

  I kneel down now and clutch the waymark, because my stomach is turning from the heat and the countless realities that never became real. Just two miles more to Yonville, and another half to the church field where you await your three lovers: Charles, Rodolphe, Léon, in whom all contradictions are resolved, if they fetch your rotting cadaver and wait for the cry from the far distance. Perhaps it would be right for me to crawl on my knees to Yonville, to scrape away my skin, and to embrace your skeleton as a skeleton in turn. May God avert his eyes, for I loathe him far more than he loathes sin. Courage, my boy, there’s nothing more to be done. And chin up now! Don’t let filth in the village say the officier de santé came stumbling home, a drunk who did away with his wife’s two lovers, poisoning them after all three had committed necrophilia with his wife’s body.

  At times, the heat of a bonny day

  Makes girls dream in a loving way.

  The leprous, blind beggar. He sang in front of our window as Emma lay in her death throes. She shouted: l’aveugle! And a horrid, frenetic, despairing laughter erupted from her poisoned body, more savage still than the barely muffled moaning from the mahogany beds and from the hay.

  “Here’s some money, my friend, so you can bring her some cheer and earn your schnapps more honorably than Lheureux his little plot of land. Treat yourself and go on your way. It will lead to the churchyard, same as mine. But I may not rest until I reach my empty home with its overgrown garden, the child’s doll needs to be mended, and I will make a dinner of whipped eggs and wine, the likes of which you wouldn’t find in Paris. She should feel lust when swallowing the crème, in which I would never, by accident, sprinkle powdered arsenic. Why else would I study pharmacology and make my name as a doctor? Why else?”

  At times, the heat of a bonny day

  Makes girls dream in a loving way. . .

  Go on, I say. We’ll be in the village soon. Homais does not care for the sight of you and is ready to have you packed off to the asylum, for the sake of public welfare and humane progress against poverty and begging.

  “Your servant, Madame, things are comme ci, comme ça, the heat has taken it out of me, I am wandering by shank’s mare from Argueil homeward, movement, my colleagues the doctores medecinae say. Mens sana in corpore sano, which means: A healthy mind dwells in a healthy body.”

  “Sweat is a beneficial secretion of wicked humors, Binet, and exerts a cooling effect as a consequence of the loss of heat through evaporation. My pallor should upset no one, it is far healthier than the coppery red of our farmers, who are frequently inclined to apoplexy as a consequence of their intake of alcohol. Recommendations here and there. Soon I will get my medical practice back on its feet again. I just need to investigate how everything really was, and how everything came to this.”

  “After I have fed you, my child, on the finest delicacies, I will spend the day in the arbor, where it is cool. May my heart swell in pain and nostalgia for love. No one is to disturb me, not even you.”

  À sept heures, la petite Berthe, qui ne l’avait pas vu de toute l’après-midi, vint le chercher pour dîner.

  Il avait la tête renversée contre le mur, les yeux clos, la bouche ouverte, et tenait dans ses mains une longue mèche de cheveux noirs. [52]

  •

  He was dead. So it is written. His daughter, believing he was playing a game, the book says, gave him a gentle shove. He fell to the ground.

  Thirty-six hours later, at the request of the apothecary, Canivet hurried over. He opened the body and found nothing.

  And that is supposed to be all, I ask? A few meager phrases are the whole of my final destiny? This assurance that Canivet found nothing? Canivet, who understood not one thing about Emma’s death and had no idea how to help? Was I not worth more than this rapid end, this appendix, which could just as well have been left out? I suffered an appalling injustice, and I rise up against it in the name of the rights of man and the citizen. I accuse you, my bad schoolmate. If I may no longer address you as an equal, then I will pronounce my discourse as convention bids, in a civilized manner, but still, as a revolté against a reality falsely recorded.

  Je vous accuse, Monsieur Flaubert!

  I accuse you, because you made me into an idiot, incapable of uniting passion et vertu, passion and virtue.

  I accuse you, because you described my stupidity, or what you considered to be such, as a kind of guilt, no better than that of Lheureux, the usurer.

  I accuse you because you refused me my rights as a man and citizen and made me into a spineless slave, as though we still lived in the benighted days when master was master and the serf a serf, and the latter never dared to raise his hand against the former.

  I accuse you of violating the pact you sealed with reality, before you set out to write my story: for I was more than I was, like everyone who exists, who daily and hourly transcends himself, in resistance to others and the world, to negate what he has been and become what he will be.

  I lodge my accusation because you, in your stupid hermitage, served only your words and their euphony, and would not look at me with the eyes of a compassionate person.

  Liberté: You denied it to me.

  Égalité: You could not bear seeing me, the petit bourgeois, as an equal of the haut bourgeois Gustave Flaubert.

  Fraternité: You did not care to be my brother in suffering, you preferred to play the role of the indulgent judge. I lodge my complaint before the tribunal of the world against the contemptible indifference I was tossed aside with at the end, the same way Emma rashly threw out her clothes, which wound up on the dung heap or were handed down to her accomplice, the maid Félicité.

  Je vous accuse—and the High Court will issue its verdict:

  “Gustave Flaubert is guilty of offending public morals: he has committed intellectual sodomy, making Charles Bovary, officier de santé of Yonville, into a half-witted beast!”

  Je vous accuse, and I assert here before all who ever learned of me from your lips, my charge:

  The book that bears my honorable name—for it was not only I who was honorable on all my paths, [53] but my bitter, upright mother, too, and even my father, who lost his world with the Great Emperor, and finally got drunk and collapsed from an apoplectic stroke after a meal with a group of veterans—this book has made me into a nitwit forever. Even the virtue you conceded me was that of an imbécile. In your auctorial omniscience, you did not want to give me my due: the power, established by nature, inscribed in natural law, which elevates the lessons learned from the pathos of carnal passion higher and higher into the immeasurable beyond, out into the space where a new measure is established, even for the bourgeois. The truth is, you knew nothing about me at the beginning, and nothing when you brought me to an end. With the consummate pitilessness of your haut bourgeois compeers, you burned the brand of stupidity into me even back in school; as if, being lowly, one must also be dumb and blind.

  The story begins as though it were mine. But as it goes on, what it tells of me is meager and disdainful, because the once-poor must remain poor forever, and as such must be irrevocably stupid. You denied me the opportunities inscribed in the principles of 1789. You made me a pack animal, no better nor worse than the poor nag I rode out on in the harsh weather; before the man of rights—and I was one—you shut your bulging eyes, a secret accomplice of Abbé Bournisien—a bourgeois playing the nobleman, because he happened to be rich and well-read. The ways that we of the petty and pettiest bourgeoisie, with roots in the fields or in the laborers’ shanties, would later revolt in passion and virtue and change the face of the world—that was something you had no notion of, and that makes you the dumb one, the one who lived on idly as if Robespierre had not died your savior. You became a miserly Lheureux, hoarded your words, l’avare, made of them a blasphemous tower from which the people down below looked like creeping animals.

  I became a slave: not only to Emma, the beauty I gladly fell to my knees for until they were rubbed raw from lust, but also to your infe
rnal words, which made it plausible that I should not raise my hands against those above me, who for you must also be the stronger ones, without question. How was it then, Monsieur Flaubert, when my exalted Emma asked her lover Rodolphe whether he had his firearm to defend himself against me?

  “Do you have your pistols?” Fear, for she thought I was coming through the garden into the house.

  “Why?”

  “Why. . . to defend yourself.”

  “Against your husband? Ah, the poor devil . . . I’d crush him like a flea.”

  So you wrote, devoid of humane pity and against all probability, for you must have known that passion gives courage and with it strength. Was the Bastille never stormed? Did Monsieur Delacroix not bring freedom to the masses at the barricades? But no, the slave had to remain prisoner to his condition. The bourgeois revolution to you was nothing but deluded sound and fury, just as later, you saw the Commune de Paris as an uncouth annoyance. Compassion, but as pittance, that was all your storyteller’s omniscience had to spare for me, in the same way you sprinkled the poison of contempt into the chalice Emma drank from, though you loved her, like any man worth his salt; because in the end, she, too, was nothing more than the daughter of Père Rouault, and if she demanded what her beauty merited—the homage of fine gentlemen, a bit of silk and brocade, a little lace from nearby Brussels, airy diversions for her imagination, which roamed far from Tostes and Yonville—for you that was coarse romanticism mingled with hubris. Punishment followed on her heels. Thus another groveler before the upper class, Maître Marie-Antoine-Jules Senard, Membre du Barreau de Paris, Ex-Président de l’Assemblée Nationale et Ancien Ministre de l’Intérieur (you did not omit to include all the titles in your slavish dedication) could argue before the court that by telling our story you had written a book of bourgeois morals, the kind that even my mother would have found exemplary and highly edifying. And yet to this woman, now dead and decayed, you conceded the nobility of beauty, which is just as worthy as noblesse of birth and spirit. Because she was beautiful, as you acknowledged before this tribunal, irony, your instrument, worked toward the augmentation rather than the decrease of pathos.

  How did you treat me, though? You gave me a bodily fate that corresponded maliciously to my social one, as you, in your misunderstanding, understood it: I was ugly. Not that you ever described me thoroughly, as would have been appropriate! In passing you confided to posterity that I was chubby and unsightly, that my nails were dirty and my eyes vanished like pigs’ eyes into the surrounding fat. The petit bourgeois and the farmholders must be physically mediocre, that struck you as proper. As if there were no good-looking young men here and there on the nearby farms and in Rouen’s harbor; I have dealt with more than a few handsome youths; nature apportions her blessings according to her will and, indeed, you must let me say it: Once the first fleeting magic of youth had abandoned you, you were nothing but a crotchety fatso with a bald head that Père Rouault would have been ashamed of. Still, if one of the little people was ever to be beautiful, like Emma, who made even you fall to your knees, who was the envy of every man around, then vengeance was due—as if bourgeois beauty were an offense against the holy scriptures. Toutefois, elle a vécu, la belle, et elle a grandement vécu, comme elle mourait dans une grandeur lugubre. [54]

  Mais moi? For her, my life was that of an ugly and risible man, and you saw me only through her eyes, those deep blue, deep brown, black eyes that you made reflect the world to me; and when it came to my death, Monsieur Flaubert, suddenly you were in a rush; you, who tinkered around with us for some five years, bellowing out phrases in your workroom, so that the people outside shook their heads sensibly at the poor fool and scribbler. Five years, you buffoon, for a job Monsieur Balzac and your apprentice and heir Maupassant would have dashed off in a matter of months! And yet, no time for the poor man’s death. The story of Emma had been told: once it was over and done with, the other one was extraneous, unwanted, so insignificant he was left to croak from a dull, broken, petit bourgeois heart, like a horse it was high time to slaughter.

  Not once did you bother to acknowledge my thoroughness in fulfilling my duty, my fidelity to my hard-won office of country doctor.

  Strephopodia operation on Hippolyte, the ostler at the inn:

  “It doesn’t matter, mon cher Homais, how convincing your words may be. You must know yourself: by law, an officier de santé may only perform minor surgeries, for major interventions a docteur en médecine is required. Let Canivet try his hand at it. However much I may feel up to it, the authorities say otherwise.”

  “And you, my love and maiden, for whom I would happily lose a leg of my own, don’t pressure me. I am the doctor, I know what I’m doing, and better still what I must leave be. Or do you want to see me dragged before a court of law? Your ambition is overstepping the moderation that is proper to a country doctor. Take care of the house and the child, as order demands, and don’t con me into malpractice with your beautiful smile, searing gaze, and sweet lips.”

  You denied me the right, Flaubert, my wicked, taciturn schoolmate, master of a tale that became the icon of realism, and yet you intervened peremptorily in my own field of competence. Thereby, and with unprecedented insolence, you shattered the contrat social with everyday reality and replaced it with an arrogant poetic reality of your own. That may have worked for your account of the blood and grandeur of Carthage—who gives a damn about Salammbô?—but it was a punishable offense to write in this way of a certain occurrence in a Norman village by the name of Ry or Yonvillel’Abbaye. You birthed me out of dust, as the Lord is alleged to have done with the first man. You let me lapse into guilt, because I longed for a belle who knew how to shine at the ball at Château de la Vaubyessard. Then you abandoned me, without sending me a savior or even a friendly bit of advice, for Homais cared for nothing but progress and honorary crosses, the Abbé wanted only to force me to my knees, where I already was in any case, first before her, then later on the burning country road between Argueil and Yonville. I contend that you have inflicted, Monsieur Flaubert, unnatural, unrealistic perversions upon me—and upon many others who populate our tale. . . .”

  “Laisse, laisse, do not badger him, my dear. You were good in the end, he put these words into my mouth expressly, even as the white powder devoured me. Is that not enough for you? Does it not please you, are you not proud that he wanted to make me shine in the world, for more than a hundred years, and that men still long for me?”

  “This is between him and me. You have been saved, as even I long for you hopelessly in my shadow world, puisque les jeux sont faits. Ils sont faits, bien sûr, mais je me révolte quand même contre toute raison, car maintenant il s’agit de moi. [55] Who am I to all those who came to know me through him? Go on shining, as he wished, to the pleasure of my rivals, who now number in the millions. It is nothing against you, nothing against the desires harbored by your paramours, which are all my desires, too, and lead me, a pale shadow, to resort over and over to the sin of my youth—in vain, admittedly, for my flesh has failed me and nothing moves any longer. Only my honor may be redeemed, for it is the honor of all the little people, those who are not ugly just because they are not beautiful, who are not contemptible because of their modest means, who are not stupid because they attend to everyday common sense. He has offended against us all, even against you, whom he sniffed at in masturbatory passion, for in the end he let his defender Senard malign you as one whose passion was criminal, an offense against the laws of virtue. He betrayed you, too, you who have long rotted to nothing in your three coffins, which I had prepared despite the horrendous costs.—So let me have it out with him.”

  Long enough have I bided my timeless time, Flaubert! Now the tribunal is assembled: it will honor the great writer with a silent bow before it sets to work on its verdict, the definitive one, le dernier jugement sans appel! For I have learned, master. Passion was my teacher in the earthly realm, and here, in the world without flesh and lust, pure spirit has taught
the mediocre student Charles Bovary. It has long since made clear the offenses of your patrician arrogance against me, and these the high court cannot overlook. You granted me nothing save for that measure you considered the eternal lot of the bourgeois, but the truth is the bourgeois has the power to displace this measure eternally. Why did you refuse to let me murder her two lecherous admirers, whom I lusted after in an inadmissible way? Did you never stop to think that dueling was the crime passionnel of the poor, moneyless devil without a title? He shoots, stabs, mixes poison: his enemy, society, which is embodied in the stronger, the sharper shooters, the practiced fencers, takes its revenge when the keys of the trusty jingle or the angled blade descends.

  Why did you not grant me the right to authenticity: l’amant de l’amante, [56] whose passion alone could have driven the vermin away from his beauty, making the exultant, bourgeois marriage bed the site of a breach of the peace, and of peace itself? It would have been child’s play. No poetry was needed, just a few deft maneuvers, far less difficult than extracting a tooth. I could have done it if only you had allowed me—what am I saying: if you had only cared to behold the reality in which le désir educates mankind to plaisir. I was the lover of my beloved, I, not the landlord who preferred his horses to all the women in the world, nor the little coward who didn’t dare reach into the chancery cash box to help her out in her time of need. I was the man, who not only did what he could, but was capable of much more than the arbitrary laws imposed on his capacities allowed him.

  You didn’t let me duel like a poor sap, and you forbid me the acte suprême. Why, then, did I remember the odd bit of pharmacology? You didn’t see fit for me to write out the ingredients of a tranquilizer Homais would not have declined to prepare for me. You prohibited the just execution of the lusting, lusted-for pretenders, and the resort to suicide that is inscribed with sympathetic ink in the droits de l’homme. No duel, no murder, no suicide: all you offered me was a swift disappearance and a frigid account of the future of little Berthe, for whom you foresaw a life of work in the factories. Compassion? Oh, sure, you threw it to me, the way you’d throw a coin at the feet of a blind, leprous beggar when he caws out a ditty about lusty young girls in early summer to the amusement of bourgeois onlookers. I rise up against that, and also against the obscenity that discolors your common pity.