Flaubert's Parrot

11 Louise Colet’s Version

Now hear my story. I insist. Look, take my arm, like that, and let’s just walk. I have tales to tell; you will like them. We’ll follow the quai, and cross that bridge – no, the second one – and perhaps we could take a cognac somewhere, and wait until the gas-lamps dim, and then walk back. Come, you’re surely not frightened of me? So why that look? You think I am a dangerous woman? Well, that’s a form of flattery – I accept the compliment. Or perhaps… perhaps it’s what I might have to say that you’re frightened of? Aha… well, it’s too late now. You have taken my arm; you cannot drop it. After all, I am older than you. It is your job to protect me.

I have no interest in slander. Slip your fingers down my forearm, if you want to; yes, there, now feel the pulse. I am not vengeful tonight. Some friends say, Louise, you must answer fire with fire, lie with he. But I do not wish to. Of course I have lied in my time; I have – what is that word your sex favours? – I have schemed. But women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance. You don’t agree? I only speak from observation; yours may be different, I grant. But you see how calm I am? I am calm because I feel strong. And – what’s that? Perhaps, if I am strong, then I am scheming like a man? Come, let’s not be complicated.

I did not need Gustave to come into my life. Look at the facts. I was thirty-five, I was beautiful, I was… renowned. I had conquered first Aix, then Paris. I had won the Académie’s poetry prize twice. I had translated Shakespeare. Victor Hugo called me sister; Béranger called me Muse. As for my private life: my husband was respected in his profession; my… protector was the most brilliant philosopher of his age. You haven’t read Victor Cousin? Then you should. A fascinating mind. The only man who truly understood Plato. A friend of your philosopher Mr Mill. And then, there was – or there was soon to be – Musset, Vigny, Champfleury. I do not boast of my conquests; I do not need to. But you see my point. I was the candle; he was the moth. The mistress of Socrates deigned to cast her smile on this unknown poet. I was his catch; he wasn’t mine.

We met at Pradier’s. I could see the banality of that; though of course he couldn’t. The sculptor’s studio, the free talk, the unclothed model, the mixture of demi-monde and three-quarter-monde. To me it was all familiar (why, only a few years before I’d danced there with a stiff-backed medical student by the name of Achille Flaubert). And, of course, I wasn’t present as a spectator; I was there to sit for Pradier. Whereas Gustave? I do not want to be harsh, but when I first set eyes on him I knew the type at once: the big, gangling provincial, so eager and relieved to find himself at last in artistic circles. I know how they talk, out in the provinces, with that mixture of fake self-confidence and real fear: ‘Go to Pradier’s, my boy, you’ll always find some little actress there to be your mistress, and grateful she’ll be too.’ And the boy in Toulouse or Poitiers or Bordeaux or Rouen, still secretly anxious about the long journey to the capital, feels his head filling up with snobbery and lust. I understood, you see, because I had been a provincial myself. I had made the journey from Aix a dozen years earlier. I had come a long way; and I could recognise the signs of travel in others.

Gustave was twenty-four. To my mind, age does not matter; love is what matters. I did not need to have Gustave in my life. If I had been looking for a lover – I admit my husband’s fortunes were not at their brightest, and my friendship with the Philosopher was a little turbulent at that time – then I should not have chosen Gustave. But I have no stomach for fat bankers. And besides, you do not look, you do not choose, do you? You are chosen; you are elected into love by a secret ballot against which there is no appeal.

I do not blush at the difference between our ages? Why should I? You men are so conformist in love, so provincial in imagination; that is why we have to flatter you, to prop you up with little lies. So: I was thirty-five, Gustave was twenty-four. I state it and pass on. Perhaps you do not want to pass on; in which case I shall answer your unspoken question. If you wish to examine the mental condition of the couple entering into such a liaison, then you do not need to look at mine. Examine Gustave’s. Why? I will give you a pair of dates. I was born in 1810, in September, the 15th day of the month. You remember Gustave’s Madame Schlesinger, the woman who first cicatrised his adolescent heart, the woman with whom everything was doomed and hopeless, the woman of whom he used to boast furtively, the woman for whose sake he had bricked up his heart (and you accuse our sex of vain romance?). Well, this Mme Schlesinger, I happen to know, was also born in 1810, and also in September. Eight days after me, to be precise, on the 23rd. You see?

You look at me in a way that is familiar. I surmise that you want me to tell you how Gustave was as a lover. Men, I know, talk of such things with eagerness, with a little contempt; it is as if they were describing the last meal they had, course by course. So much detachment. Women are not like that; or at least the details, the weaknesses they dwell on in narration, are only rarely the physical ones that men delight in. We look for signs that speak to us of character – good or bad. Men look only for signs which flatter them. They are so vain in bed, much more vain than women. Outside, the sexes are more evenly matched, I admit.

I will reply a little more freely, because you are who you are; and because it is Gustave of whom I speak. He always used to lecture people, tell them about the honesty of the artist, the necessity not to speak like a bourgeois. Well, if I lift the sheets a little, he has only himself to blame.

He was eager, my Gustave. It was – God knows – never easy to persuade him to meet me; but once he was there… Whatever the battles that occurred between us, none of them was fought in the province of the night. There, we embraced by lightning; there, violent wonder lay entwined with soft playfulness. He carried a bottle of water from the River Mississippi with which, he said, he planned to baptise my breast as a sign of love. He was a strong young man, and I delighted in that strength: he once signed a letter to me ‘Your wild boy of Aveyron’.

He had, of course, the eternal delusion of strong young men, that women gauge passion by counting the number of times that the assault is renewed in the course of a single night. Well, to some extent we do: who would deny that? It is flattering, is it not? But it is not what counts finally. And after a while, there seems something almost military about it. Gustave had a way of talking about the women he had enjoyed. He would recall some prostitute he had frequented in the rue de la Cigogne: ‘I fired five shots into her,’ he would boast to me. It was his habitual turn of phrase. I found it coarse, but I did not mind: we were artists together, you see. However, I noted the metaphor. The more shots you fire into somebody, the more likely they are to be dead at the end of it. Is that what men want? Do they need a corpse as proof of their virility? I suspect they do, and women, with the logic of flattery, remember to exclaim at the transporting moment, ‘Oh, I die! I die!’ or some such phrase. After a bout of love, I often find that my brain is at its sharpest; I see things clearly; I feel poetry coming to me. But I know better than to interrupt the hero with my babblings; instead I ape the satisfied cadaver.

In the province of the night there was harmony between us. Gustave was not shy. Nor was he narrow in his tastes. I was – why should I be modest – undoubtedly the most beautiful, the most renowned, the most desirable woman with whom he ever slept (if I had any rival, it was only a strange beast I shall tell you of later). He was, naturally, sometimes nervous in the face of my beauty; and at other times needlessly pleased with himself. I understood. Before me there had been prostitutes, of course, grisettes, and friends. Ernest, Alfred, Louis, Max: the band of students, that was how I thought of them. Sodality confirmed by sodomy. No, perhaps that’s unfair; I do not know precisely who, precisely when, precisely what; though I do know that Gustave was never tired of doubles ententes about la pipe. I also know he was never tired of gazing at me as I lay on my front.

I was different, you see. Prostitutes were uncomplicated; grisettes could be paid off too; men were different – friendship, however deep, had its known limits. But love? And losing yourself? And some partnership, some equality? He didn’t dare risk it. I was the only woman to whom he was sufficiently drawn; and he chose, out of fear, to humiliate me. I think we should feel sorry for Gustave.

He used to send me flowers. Special flowers; the convention of an unconventional lover. He sent me a rose once. He gathered it one Sunday morning at Croisset, from a hedge in his garden. ‘I kiss it,’ he wrote. ‘Put it quickly to your mouth, and then – you know where… Adieu! A thousand kisses. I am yours from night to day, from day to night.’ Who could resist such sentiments? I kissed the rose, and that night, in bed, I placed it where he desired me to. In the morning, when I awoke, the rose had by the motions of the night been reduced to its fragrant parts. The sheets smelt of Croisset – that place which I did not yet know would be forbidden to me; there was a petal between two of my toes, and a thin scratch down the inside of my right thigh. Gustave, eager and clumsy as he was, had forgotten to smooth the stem of the rose.

The next flower was not such a happy one. Gustave went off on his tour of Brittany. Was I wrong to make a fuss? Three months! We had known one another less than a year, all Paris knew of our passion, and he chose three months in the company of Du Camp! We could have been like George Sand and Chopin; greater than them! And Gustave insists on disappearing for three months with that ambitious catamite of his. Was I wrong to make a fuss? Was it not a direct insult, an attempt to humiliate me? And yet he said, when I expressed my feelings to him in public (I am not ashamed of love – why should I be? I would declare myself in the waiting-room of a railway station if it were necessary), he said that I was humiliating him. Imagine! He cast me off. Ultima, I wrote on the last letter he sent me before his departure.

It wasn’t, of course, his last letter. No sooner was he striding across that tedious countryside, pretending to be interested in disused châteaux and drab churches (three months!), than he began to miss me. The letters started to arrive, the apologies, the confessions, the pleas that I should reply to him. He was always like that. When he was at Croisset, he dreamed of the hot sand and the shimmering Nile; when he was on the Nile, he dreamed of damp fogs and shimmering Croisset. He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself. For once I agree with Du Camp, who used to say that Gustave’s preferred form of travel was to lie on a divan and have the scenery carried past him. As for that famous oriental trip of theirs, Du Camp (yes, the odious Du Camp, the unreliable Du Camp) maintained that Gustave spent most of the journey in a state of torpor.

But anyway: while he was tramping through that dull and backward province with his malign companion, Gustave sent me another flower, plucked from beside the tomb of Châteaubriand. He wrote of the calm sea at St Malo, the pink sky, the sweet air. It makes a fine scene, does it not? The romantic grave on that rocky promontory; the great man lying there, his head pointing out to sea, listening for all eternity to the comings and goings of the tide; the young writer, with stirrings of genius inside him, kneels by the tomb, watches the pink drain slowly from the evening sky, reflects – in the way young men are wont to do – on eternity, the fugitive nature of life and the consolations of greatness, then gathers a flower which has rooted itself in Châteaubriand’s dust, and sends it to his beautiful mistress in Paris… Could I be unmoved by such a gesture? Of course not. But I could not help observing that a flower plucked from a grave brings with it certain reverberations when sent to one who has written Ultima on a letter received not long before. And I also could not help observing that Gustave’s letter was posted from Pontorson, which is forty kilometres from St Malo. Did Gustave pick the flower for himself and then, after forty kilometres, grow weary of it? Or perhaps – such a suggestion arises in me only because I have lain next to the contagious soul of Gustave himself – did he gather it elsewhere? Did he think of the gesture a little too late? Who can resist l’esprit de l’escalier, even in love?

My flower – the one that I remember best out of many – was gathered where I said it had been. In Windsor Park. It was after my tragic visit to Croisset and the humiliation of not being received, after the brutality, the pain and the horror of it all. You have heard different versions, no doubt? The truth is simple.

I had to see him. We had to talk. You do not dismiss love in the way you dismiss your hairdresser. He would not come to me in Paris; so I went to him. I took the train (beyond Mantes, this time) to Rouen. I was rowed downstream to Croisset; in my soul, hope struggled with fear, while the ancient oarsman struggled with the current. We came in sight of a charming, low white house in the English style; a laughing house, as it seemed to me. I disembarked; I pushed the iron grille; I was allowed no further. Gustave refused me entrance. Some barnyard crone turned me away. He would not see me there; he condescended to see me at my hotel. My Charon rowed me back. Gustave travelled separately by steamer. He overtook us on the river and arrived ahead of me. It was farce, it was tragedy. We went to my hotel. I talked, but he could not hear. I spoke of possible happiness. The secret of happiness, he told me, is to be happy already. He did not understand my anguish. He embraced me with a self-restraint that was humiliating. He told me to marry Victor Cousin.

I fled to England. I could not bear to be in France a moment longer: my friends confirmed my impulse. I went to London. I was received there with kindness. I was introduced to many distinguished spirits. I met Mazzini; I met the Countess Guiccioli. My meeting with the Countess was an uplifting occasion – we became firm friends at once – but also, privately, a saddening one. George Sand and Chopin, the Countess Guiccioli and Byron… would they ever say Louise Colet and Flaubert? It gave me, I confess to you frankly, many hours of quiet grief, which I tried to bear with philosophy. What would become of us? What would become of me? Is it wrong, I kept asking myself, to be ambitious in love? Is that wrong? Answer me.

I went to Windsor. I remember a fine round tower covered in ivy. I wandered in the park and picked a convolvulus for Gustave. I must tell you that he was always vulgarly ignorant about flowers. Not their botanical aspect – he probably learned all about that at some stage, as he learned about most other things (except the heart of woman) – but their symbolic aspect. It is such an elegant tongue, the language of flowers: supple, courtly and precise. When the beauty of the flower resounds with the beauty of the sentiment which it is hired to communicate… well, there is a happiness which the gift of rubies can rarely surpass. The happiness is made the more poignant by the fact that the flower fades. But perhaps, by the time the flower fades, he will have sent another one…

Gustave understood nothing of this. He was the sort of person who might, after much hard study, have finally learnt two phrases from the language of flowers: the gladiolus, which when placed at the centre of a bouquet indicates by the number of its blooms the hour for which the rendezvous is set; and the petunia, which announces that a letter has been intercepted. He would understand such rough and practical uses. Here, take this rose (no matter what colour, though there are five different meanings for five different roses in the language of flowers): put it first to your lips, and then place it between your thighs. Such was the fierce gallantry of which Gustave was capable. He would not, I am sure, have understood the significance of the convolvulus; or, if he had made any effort, he would still have got it wrong. There are three messages which can be sent by means of the convolvulus. A white one signifies Why are you fleeing me? A pink one signifies I shall bind myself to you. A blue one signifies I shall wait for better days. You must guess the colour of the flower I chose in Windsor Park.

Did he understand women at all? I often doubted it. We quarrelled, I remember, over that Nilotic whore of his, Kuchuk Hanem. Gustave kept notes during his travels. I asked if I could read them. He refused; I asked again; and so on. Finally, he let me. They are not… pleasant, those pages. What Gustave found enchanting about the East I found degrading. A courtesan, an expensive courtesan, who drenches herself in sandalwood oil to cover the nauseating stench of the bedbugs with which she is infested. Is that uplifting, I ask, is it beautiful? Is it rare, is it splendid? Or is it sordid and disgustingly ordinary?

But the matter is not really one of aesthetics; not here. When I expressed my distaste, Gustave interpreted it as mere jealousy. (I was a little jealous – who would not be, when reading the private journal of a man you love and finding in it no mention of yourself, but instead only lush apostrophes to verminous whores?) Perhaps it was understandable that Gustave thought I was only jealous. But listen now to his argument, listen now to his understanding of the female heart. Do not be jealous of Kuchuk Hanem, he told me. She is an Oriental woman; the Oriental woman is a machine; one man is the same as the next to her. She felt nothing for me; she has already forgotten me; she lives in a drowsy round of smoking, going to the baths, painting her eyelids and drinking coffee. As for her physical pleasure, it must be very slight, because at an early age that famous button, the seat of all enjoyment, has been excised.

Such comfort! Such consolation! I need not be jealous because she did not feel anything! And this man claimed to understand the human heart! She was a mutilated machine, and besides she has already forgotten him: I am meant to be comforted by that? Such belligerent consolation made me think more, not less, about that strange woman he had coupled with on the Nile. Could we have been more different from one another? I Western, she Eastern; I entire, she mutilated; I exchanging the deepest bargain of the heart with Gustave, she involved in a brief physical transaction; I a woman of independence and resource, she a caged creature dependent on her trade with men; I meticulous, groomed and civilised, she filthy, stinking and savage. It may sound strange, but I became interested in her. No doubt the coin is always fascinated by its obverse. Years later, when I travelled to Egypt, I tried to seek her out. I went to Esneh. I found the squalid hovel where she lived, but she herself was not there. Perhaps she had fled at the news of my coming. Perhaps it was better that we did not meet; the coin shouldn’t be allowed to see its other side.

Gustave used to humiliate me, of course, even from the beginning. I wasn’t allowed to write to him directly; I had to send my letters via Du Camp. I wasn’t allowed to visit him at Croisset. I wasn’t allowed to meet his mother, even though I had in fact once been introduced to her on a street corner in Paris. I happen to know that Mme Flaubert thought her son treated me abominably.

He humiliated me in other ways too. He lied to me. He spoke ill of me to his friends. He ridiculed, in the sacred name of truth, most of what I wrote. He affected not to know that I was terribly poor. He boasted of the fact that in Egypt he had caught a disease of love from some five-sou courtesan. He took vulgar public revenge on me by mocking in the pages of Madame Bovary a seal I had once given him as a token of love. He who claimed that art should be impersonal!

Let me tell you how Gustave would humiliate me. When our love was young, we would exchange presents – small tokens, often meaningless in themselves, but which seemed to enclose the very essence of their donor. He feasted for months, for years, on a small pair of my slippers that I gave him; I expect he has burnt them by now. Once he sent me a paperweight, the very paperweight which had sat on his desk. I was greatly touched; it seemed the perfect gift from one writer to another: what had formerly held down his prose would now hold down my verses. Perhaps I commented on this once too often; perhaps I expressed my gratitude too sincerely. This is what Gustave told me: that it was no sadness for him to get rid of the paperweight, because he had another which did the work just as efficiently. Did I want to know what it was? If you wish, I replied. His new paperweight, he informed me, was a section of mizzenmast – he made a gesture of extravagant size – which his father had extracted with delivery forceps from the posterior of an old seaman. The seaman – Gustave continued as if this were the best story he had heard for many years – apparently claimed that he had no notion of how the section of mast had reached the position in which it was found. Gustave threw back his head and laughed. What intrigued him most was how, in that case, they knew from which mast the piece of wood had come.

Why did he humiliate me so? It was not, I believe, as is frequently the case in love, that those qualities which initially charmed him – my vivacity, my freedom, my sense of equality with men – eventually came to irritate him. It was not so, because he behaved in this strange and bearish fashion from the very beginning, even when he was most in love with me. In his second letter he wrote, ‘I have never seen a cradle without thinking of a grave; the sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton.’ These were not the sentiments of a conventional lover.

Posterity, perhaps, will take the easy answer: that he contemned me because I was contemptible, and that since he was a great genius his judgment must have been correct. It was not so; it never is so. He feared me: that is why he was cruel to me. He feared me in both familiar and unfamiliar ways. In the first case, he feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.

In the second case – the more important one – he feared me because he feared himself. He feared that he might love me completely. It was not simply terror that I might invade his study and his solitude; it was terror that I might invade his heart. He was cruel because he wanted to drive me away; but he wanted to drive me away because he feared that he might love me completely. I will tell you my secret belief: that for Gustave, in a way he only half-apprehended, I represented life, and that his rejection of me was the more violent because it provoked in him the deepest shame. And is any of this my fault? I loved him; what more natural than that I should want to give him the chance to love me back? I was fighting not just for my own sake, but for his too: I did not see why he should not permit himself to love. He said that there were three preconditions for happiness – stupidity, selfishness and good health – and that he was only sure of possessing the second of these. I argued, I fought, but he wanted to believe that happiness was impossible; it gave him some strange consolation.

He was a difficult man to love, that is certain. The heart was distant and withdrawn; he was ashamed of it, wary of it. True love can survive absence, death and infidelity, he once told me; true lovers can go ten years without meeting. (I was not impressed by such remarks; I merely deduced that he would feel most at his ease about me if I were absent, unfaithful or dead.) He liked to flatter himself that he was in love with me; but I never knew a less impatient love. ‘Life is like riding,’ he wrote to me once. ‘I used to like the gallop; now I like the walk.’ He wasn’t yet thirty when he wrote that; he had already decided to be old before his time. Whereas for me… the gallop! the gallop! the wind in the hair, the laughter forced from the lungs!

It flattered his vanity to think himself in love with me; it also gave him, I believe, some unadmitted pleasure constantly to long for my flesh and yet always to forbid himself the attaining of it: to deny himself was just as exciting as to indulge himself. He used to tell me I was less of a woman than most women; that I was a woman in flesh but a man in spirit; that I was an hermaphrodite nouveau, a third sex. He told me this foolish theory many times, but really he was just telling it to himself: the less of a woman he made me out to be, the less of a lover he would need to be.

What he wanted most of me, I finally came to believe, was an intellectual partnership, an affair of the mind. In those years he was working hard on his Bovary (though not, perhaps, as hard as he liked to maintain) and at the end of the day, since a physical release was too complicated for him and would contain too many things he couldn’t entirely command, he sought an intellectual release. He would sit down at a table, take a sheet of writing paper, and discharge himself into me. You do not find the image flattering? I did not intend it to be. The days of loyally believing false things about Gustave are over. Incidentally, he never did baptise my breast with Mississippi water; the only time a bottle passed between us was when I sent him some Taburel water to stop his hair falling out.

But this affair of the mind was no easier, I can tell you, than our affair of the heart. He was rough, awkward, bullying and haughty; then he was tender, sentimental, enthusiastic and devoted. He didn’t know the rules. He declined to acknowledge my ideas sufficiently, just as he declined to acknowledge my feelings sufficiently. He did, of course, know everything. He informed me that mentally he was aged sixty and I was a mere twenty. He informed me that if I drank water all the time, and never wine, I should get cancer of the stomach. He informed me that I should marry Victor Cousin. (Victor Cousin, for that matter, was of the opinion that I should marry Gustave Flaubert.)

He sent me his work. He sent me ‘Novembre’. It was weak and mediocre; I did not comment, except to myself. He sent me the first Education sentimentale; I was not greatly impressed, but how could I not praise it? He rebuked me for liking it. He sent me his Tentation de saint Antoine; I genuinely admired it, and told him so. He rebuked me again. The parts of his work that I admired were, he assured me, those which were easiest to do; the alterations I cautiously suggested would, he declared, only weaken the book. He was ‘astonished’ by the ‘excessive enthusiasm’ I had shown for the Education! So that is how an unknown, unpublished provincial chooses to thank a celebrated Parisian poet (with whom he claims to be in love) for her words of praise. My comments on his work were valuable only as an irritating pretext which permitted him to lecture me on Art.

Of course I knew he was a genius. I always considered him a magnificent writer of prose. He undervalued my talents, but that is no reason why I should undervalue his. I am not like the odious Du Camp, who would proudly claim many years of friendship with Gustave, but would always deny him genius. I have been at those dinners where the merits of our contemporaries are discussed, and where Du Camp, as each new name was suggested, would with infinite urbanity correct the general view. ‘Well then, Du Camp,’ someone finally suggested with a little impatience, ‘what about our dear Gustave?’ Du Camp smiled approvingly and patted five little fingertips against five others in a prissily judicial manner. ‘Flaubert is a writer of rare merit,’ he replied, using Gustave’s family name in a manner that shocked me, ‘but he is held back from being a genius by ill health.’ You would have thought he was practising for his memoirs.

As for my own work! Naturally, I used to send it to Gustave. He told me that my style was soft, slack and banal. He complained that my titles were vague and pretentious, and smelt of the blue-stocking. He lectured me like a schoolmaster on the difference between saisir and s’en saisir. His way of praising me was to say that I wrote as naturally as a hen laying eggs, or to remark, after he had destroyed a work with his criticisms, ‘Everything I have not marked seems to me either good or excellent.’ He told me to write with the head, and not with the heart. He told me that hair only shone after much combing, and that the same could be said of style. He told me not to put myself into my work, and not to poeticise things (I am a poet!). He told me I had the love of Art, but not the religion of Art.

What he wanted, of course, was for me to write as much like he did as I possibly could. This is a vanity I have often noted in writers; the more eminent the writer, the more pronounced this vanity is likely to be. They believe that everyone should write as they do: not as well as they do, of course, but in the same fashion. In such a way do mountains long for foothills.

Du Camp used to say that Gustave did not have an ounce of feeling for poetry in him. It gives me little pleasure to agree with him, but I do so. Gustave lectured us all on poetry – though they were usually Bouilhet’s lectures rather than his own – but he did not understand it. He wrote no poetry himself. He used to say that he wanted to give prose the strength and stature of poetry; but part of this project seemed to include first cutting poetry down to size. He wanted his prose to be objective, scientific, devoid of personal presence, devoid of opinions; so he decided that poetry ought to be written according to the same principles. Tell me how you write love poetry which is objective, scientific, and devoid of any personal presence. Tell me that. Gustave mistrusted feelings; he feared love; and he elevated this neurosis into an artistic creed.

Gustave’s vanity was more than just literary. He believed not merely that others should write as he did, but that others should live as he did. He loved to quote Epictetus to me: Abstain, and Hide your Life. To me! A woman, a poet, and a poet of love! He wanted all writers to live obscurely in the provinces, ignore the natural affections of the heart, disdain reputation, and spend solitary, back-breaking hours reading obscure texts by the light of a tiring candle. Well, that may be the proper way to nurse genius; but it is also the way to suffocate talent. Gustave didn’t understand this, couldn’t see that my talent depended on the swift moment, the sudden feeling, the unexpected meeting: on life, that’s what I’m saying.

Gustave would have made me into a hermit had he been able: the hermit of Paris. Always he would advise me not to see people; not to answer so-and-so’s letter; not to take this admirer too seriously; not to take Count X – as a lover. He claimed he was defending my work, and that every hour spent in society was an hour subtracted from my desk. But that is not how I worked. You cannot yoke the dragonfly and make it drive the corn-mill.

Of course, Gustave denied there was any vanity in him. Du Camp in one of his books – I forget which, there were always so many – made a reference to the malign effect on man of too much solitude: he called it a false counsellor who nurses at her breasts the twin infants of Egotism and Vanity. Gustave naturally took this as a personal attack. ‘Egotism?’ he wrote to me. ‘So be it. But Vanity? No. Pride is one thing: a wild beast which lives in caves and roams the desert; Vanity, on the other hand, is a parrot which hops from branch to branch and chatters away in full view.’ Gustave imagined he was a wild beast – he loved to think of himself as a polar bear, distant, savage and solitary. I went along with this, I even called him a wild buffalo of the American prairie; but perhaps he was really just a parrot.

You think me too harsh? I loved him; that is why I am allowed to be harsh. Listen. Gustave despised Du Camp for wanting the Légion d’honneur. A few years later he accepted it himself. Gustave despised salon society. Until he was taken up by the Princesse Mathilde. Did you hear about Gustave’s glove bill in the days when he was prancing by candlelight? He owed two thousand francs to his tailor, and five hundred francs for gloves. Five hundred francs! He received only eight hundred for the rights of his Bovary. His mother had to sell land to bail him out. Five hundred francs for gloves! The white bear in white gloves? No, no: the parrot, the parrot in gloves.

I know what they say about me; what his friends have said. They say I had the vanity to suppose that I might marry him. But Gustave used to write me letters describing what it would have been like if we had been married. Was I therefore wrong to hope? They say I had the vanity to go down to Croisset and make an embarrassing scene on his doorstep. But when I first knew him Gustave used to write frequently about my forthcoming visits to his house. Was I therefore wrong to hope? They say I had the vanity to suppose that he and I might one day share the authorship of some literary work. But he told me that one of my stories was a masterpiece, and that one of my poems would move a stone. Was I therefore wrong to hope?

I know too what will become of us when we are both dead. Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature. People will take Gustave’s side. They will understand me too quickly; they will turn my own generosity against me and despise me for the lovers I took; and they will cast me as the woman who briefly threatened to interfere with the writing of the books which they have enjoyed reading. Someone – perhaps even Gustave himself – will burn my letters; his own (which I have carefully preserved, so much against my own best interests) will survive to confirm the prejudices of those too lazy to understand. I am a woman, and also a writer who has used up her allotment of renown during her own lifetime; and on those two grounds I do not expect much pity, or much understanding, from posterity. Do I mind? Naturally I mind. But I am not vengeful tonight; I am resigned. I promise you. Slip your fingers down my wrist once more. There; I told you so.