Flaubert's Parrot

2 Chronology

1821: Birth of Gustave Flaubert, second son of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, head surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu, Rouen, and of Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert, née Fleuriot. The family belongs to the successful professional middle class, and owns several properties in the vicinity of Rouen. A stable, enlightened, encouraging and normally ambitious back-ground.

1825: Entry into service with the Flaubert family of Julie, Gustave’s nurse, who remains with them until the writer’s death fifty-five years later. Few servant problems will trouble his life.

c. 1830: Meets Ernest Chevalier, his first close friend. A succession of intense, loyal and fertile friendships will sustain Flaubert throughout his life: of particular note are those with Alfred Le Poittevin, Maxime du Camp, Louis Bouilhet and George Sand. Gustave inspires friendship easily, and fosters it with a teasing, affectionate manner.

1831–2: Enters the Collège de Rouen and proves an impressive student, strong in history and literature. His earliest piece of writing to come down to us, an essay on Corneille, dates from 1831. Throughout his adolescence he composes abundantly, both drama and fiction.

1836: Meets Elisa Schlesinger, wife of a German music publisher, in Trouville and conceives an ‘enormous’ passion for her. This passion illuminates the rest of his adolescence. She treats him with great kindness and affection; they remain in touch for the next forty years. Looking back, he is relieved she didn’t return his passion: ‘Happiness is like the pox. Catch it too soon, and it wrecks your constitution.’

c. 1836: Gustave’s sexual initiation with one of his mother’s maids. This is the start of an active and colourful erotic career, veering from brothel to salon, from Cairo bath-house boy to Parisian poetess. In early manhood he is extremely attractive to women and his speed of sexual recuperation is, by his own account, very impressive; but even in later life his courtly manner, intelligence and fame ensure that he is not unattended.

1837: His first published work appears in the Rouen magazine Le Colibri.

1840: Passes his baccalauréat. Travels to the Pyrenees with a family friend, Dr Jules Cloquet. Though often considered an unbudgeable hermit, Flaubert in fact travels extensively: to Italy and Switzerland (1845), Brittany (1847), Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece and Italy (1849–51), England (1851, 1865, 1866, 1871), Algeria and Tunisia (1858), Germany (1865), Belgium (1871) and Switzerland (1874). Compare the case of his alter ego Louis Bouilhet, who dreamed of China and never got to England.

1843: As a law student in Paris, he meets Victor Hugo.

1844: Gustave’s first epileptic attack puts an end to his legal studies in Paris and confines him to the new family house at Croisset. Abandoning the law, however, causes little pain, and since his confinement brings both the solitude and the stable base needed for a life of writing, the attack proves beneficial in the long run.

1846: Meets Louise Colet, ‘the Muse’, and begins his most celebrated affair: a prolonged, passionate, fighting two-parter (1846–8, 1851–4). Though ill-matched in temperament and incompatible in aesthetics, Gustave and Louise nevertheless last together far longer than most would have predicted. Should we regret the end of their affair? Only because it means the end of Gustave’s resplendent letters to her.

1851–7: The writing, publication, trial and triumphant acquittal of Madame Bovary. A succès de scandale, praised by authors as diverse as Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire. In 1846, doubting his ability ever to write anything worth publishing, Gustave had announced, ‘If I do make an appearance, one day, it will be in full armour.’ Now his breastplate dazzles and his lance is everywhere. The curé of Canteleu, the next village to Croisset, forbids his parishioners to read the novel. After 1857, literary success leads naturally to social success: Flaubert is seen more in Paris. He meets the Goncourts, Renan, Gautier, Baudelaire and Sainte-Beuve. In 1862 the series of literary dinners at Magny’s are instituted: Flaubert is a regular from December of that year.

1862: Publication of Salammbô. Succès fou. Sainte-Beuve writes to Matthew Arnold: ‘Salammbô is our great event!’ The novel provides the theme for several costume balls in Paris. It even provides the name for a new brand of petit four.

1863: Flaubert begins to frequent the salon of Princesse Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I. The bear of Croisset eases into the pelt of the social lion. He himself receives on Sunday afternoons. The year also contains his first exchange of letters with George Sand, and his meeting with Turgenev. His friendship with the Russian novelist marks the beginning of a wider European fame.

1864: Presentation to the Emperor Napoleon III at Compiègne. The peak of Gustave’s social success. He sends camellias to the Empress.

1866: Created chevalier de la Légion d’honneur.

1869: Publication of L’Education sentimentale: Flaubert always claims it as a chef-d’œuvre. Despite the legend of heroic struggle (which he himself initiates), writing comes easily to Flaubert. He complains a lot, but such complaints are always couched in letters of astonishing fluency. For a quarter of a century he produces one large, solid book, requiring considerable research, every five to seven years. He might agonise over the word, the phrase, the assonance, but he never endures a writer’s block.

1874: Publication of La Tentation de saint Antoine. Despite its strangeness, a gratifying commercial success.

1877: Publication of Trois Contes. A critical and popular success: for the first time Flaubert receives a favourable review from Le Figaro; the book goes through five editions in three years. Flaubert begins work on Bouvard et Pécuchet. During these final years, his pre-eminence among French novelists is admitted by the next generation. He is fêted and revered. His Sunday afternoons become famous events in literary society; Henry James calls on the Master. In 1879 Gustave’s friends institute the annual Saint Polycarpe dinners in his honour. In 1880 the five co-authors of Les Soirées de Médan, including Zola and Maupassant, present him with an inscribed copy: the gift can be seen as a symbolic salute to Realism from Naturalism.

1880: Full of honour, widely loved, and still working hard to the end, Gustave Flaubert dies at Croisset.

1817: Death of Caroline Flaubert (aged twenty months), the second child of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert and Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert.

1819: Death of Emile-Cléophas Flaubert (aged eight months), their third child.

1821: Birth of Gustave Flaubert, their fifth child.

1822: Death of Jules Alfred Flaubert (aged three years and five months), their fourth child. His brother Gustave, born entre deux morts, is delicate and not expected to live long. Dr Flaubert buys a family plot at the Cimetière Monumental and has a small grave dug in preparation for Gustave. Surprisingly, he survives. He proves a slow child, content to sit for hours with his finger in his mouth and an ‘almost stupid’ expression on his face. For Sartre, he is ‘the family idiot’.

1836: The start of a hopeless, obsessive passion for Elisa Schlesinger which cauterises his heart and renders him incapable of ever fully loving another woman. Looking back, he records: ‘Each of us possesses in his heart a royal chamber. I have bricked mine up.’

1839: Expelled from the Collège de Rouen for rowdyism and disobedience.

1843: The Faculty of Law at Paris announces its first-year examination results. The examiners declare their views by means of red or black balls. Gustave receives two red and two black, and is therefore failed.

1844: Shattering first attack of epilepsy; others are to follow. ‘Each attack’, Gustave writes later, ‘was like a haemorrhage of the nervous system… It was a snatching of the soul from the body, excruciating.’ He is bled, given pills and infusions, put on a special diet, forbidden alcohol and tobacco; a regime of strict confinement and maternal care is necessary if he is not to claim his place at the cemetery. Without having entered the world, Gustave now retires from it. ‘So, you are guarded like a young girl?’ Louise Colet later taunts, accurately. For all but the last eight years of his life, Mme Flaubert watches suffocatingly over his welfare and censors his travel plans. Gradually, over the decades, her frailty overtakes his: by the time he has almost ceased to be a worry to her, she has become a burden to him.

1846: Death of Gustave’s father, quickly followed by that of his beloved sister Caroline (aged twenty-one), which thrusts on to him proxy fatherhood of his niece. Throughout his life, he is constantly bruised by the deaths of those close to him. And there are other ways for friends to die: in June Alfred Le Poittevin marries. Gustave feels it is his third bereavement of the year: ‘You are doing something abnormal,’ he complains. To Maxime du Camp that year he writes, ‘Tears are to the heart what water is to a fish.’ Is it a consolation that in the same year he meets Louise Colet? Pedantry and recalcitrance are mismatched with immoderation and possessiveness. A mere six days after she becomes his mistress, the pattern of their relationship is set: ‘Moderate your cries!’ he complains to her. ‘They are torturing me. What do you want me to do? Am I to leave everything and live in Paris? Impossible.’ This impossible relationship drags on nevertheless for eight years; Louise is puzzlingly unable to grasp that Gustave can love her without ever wanting to see her. ‘If I were a woman,’ he writes after six years, ‘I wouldn’t want myself for a lover. A one-night stand, yes; but an intimate relationship, no.’

1848: Death of Alfred Le Poittevin, aged thirty-two. ‘I see that I’ve never loved anyone – man or woman – as I loved him.’ Twenty-five years later: ‘Not a day passes that I don’t think of him.’

1849: Gustave reads his first full-length adult work, La Tentation de saint Antoine, to his two closest friends, Bouilhet and Du Camp. The reading takes four days, at the rate of eight hours per day. After embarrassed consultation, the listeners tell him to throw it on the fire.

1850: In Egypt, Gustave catches syphilis. Much of his hair falls out; he grows stout. Mme Flaubert, meeting him in Rome the following year, scarcely recognises her son, and finds that he has become very coarse. Middle age begins here. ‘Scarcely are you born before you begin rotting.’ Over the years all but one of his teeth will fall out; his saliva will be permanently blackened by mercury treatment.

1851–7: Madame Bovary. The composition is painful – ‘Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles’ – and the prosecution frightening. In later years Flaubert comes to resent the insistent fame of his masterpiece, which makes others see him as a one-book author. He tells Du Camp that if ever he had a stroke of good luck on the Bourse he would buy up ‘at any cost’ all copies of Madame Bovary in circulation: ‘I should throw them into the fire, and never hear of them again.’

1862: Elisa Schlesinger is interned in a mental hospital; she is diagnosed as suffering from ‘acute melancholia’. After the publication of Salammbô, Flaubert begins to run with rich friends. But he remains childlike in financial matters: his mother has to sell property to pay his debts. In 1867 he secretly hands over control of his financial affairs to his niece’s husband, Ernest Commanville. Over the next thirteen years, through extravagance, incompetent management and bad luck, Flaubert loses all his money.

1869: Death of Louis Bouilhet, whom he had once called ‘the seltzer water which helped me digest life’. ‘In losing my Bouilhet, I had lost my midwife, the man who saw more deeply into my thought than I did myself. Death also of Sainte-Beuve. ‘Another one gone! The little band is diminishing! Who is there to talk about literature with now?’ Publication of L’Education sentimentale; a critical and commercial flop. Of the hundred and fifty complimentary copies sent to friends and acquaintances, barely thirty are even acknowledged.

1870: Death of Jules de Goncourt: only three of the seven friends who started the Magny dinners in 1862 are now left. During the Franco-Prussian war, the enemy occupies Croisset. Ashamed of being French, Flaubert stops wearing his Légion d’honneur, and resolves to ask Turgenev what he has to do to take Russian citizenship.

1872: Death of Mme Flaubert: ‘I have realised during the last fortnight that my poor dear old mother was the person I loved the most. It’s as if part of my entrails had been torn out.’ Death also of Gautier. ‘With him, the last of my intimate friends is gone. The list is closed.’

1874: Flaubert makes his theatrical début with Le Candidat. It is a complete flop; actors leave the stage with tears in their eyes. The play is taken off after four performances. Publication of La Tentation de saint Antoine. ‘Torn to pieces,’ Flaubert notes, ‘by everything from the Figaro to the Revue des deux mondes… What comes as a surprise is the hatred underlying much of this criticism – hatred for me, for my person – deliberate denigration… This avalanche of abuse does depress me.’

1875: The financial ruin of Ernest Commanville drags Flaubert down too. He sells his farm at Deauville; he has to plead with his niece not to turn him out of Croisset. She and Commanville nickname him ‘the consumer’. In 1879 he is reduced to accepting a state pension arranged for him by friends.

1876: Death of Louise Colet. Death of George Sand. ‘My heart is becoming a necropolis.’ Gustave’s last years are arid and solitary. He tells his niece he regrets not having married.

1880: Impoverished, lonely and exhausted, Gustave Flaubert dies. Zola, in his obituary notice, comments that he was unknown to four-fifths of Rouen, and detested by the other fifth. He leaves Bouvard et Pécuchet unfinished. Some say the labour of the novel killed him; Turgenev told him before he started that it would be better as a short story. After the funeral a group of mourners, including the poets François Coppée and Théodore de Banville, have dinner in Rouen to honour the departed writer. They discover, on sitting down to table, that they are thirteen. The superstitious Banville insists that another guest be found, and Gautier’s son-in-law Emile Bergerat is sent to scour the streets. After several rebuffs he returns with a private on leave. The soldier has never heard of Flaubert, but is longing to meet Coppée.

1842: Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

1846: When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

1846: I did with you what I have done before with those I loved best: I showed them the bottom of the bag, and the acrid dust that rose from it made them choke.

1846: My life is riveted to that of another [Mme Flaubert], and will be so as long as that other life endures. A piece of seaweed blowing in the wind, I am held to the rock by a single hardy thread. If it broke, where would this poor useless plant fly off to?

1846: You want to prune the tree. Its unruly branches, thick with leaves, push out in all directions to sniff the air and the sun. But you want to make me into a charming espalier, stretched against a wall, bearing fine fruit that a child could pick without even using a ladder.

1846: Don’t think that I belong to that vulgar race of men who feel disgust after pleasure, and for whom love exists only as lust. No: in me, what rises doesn’t subside so quickly. Moss grows on the castles of my heart as soon as they are built; but it takes some time for them to fall into ruin, if they ever completely do.

1846: I am like a cigar: you have to suck on the end to get me going.

1846: Amongst those who go to sea there are the navigators who discover new worlds, adding continents to the earth and stars to the heavens: they are the masters, the great, the eternally splendid. Then there are those who spit terror from their gun-ports, who pillage, who grow rich and fat. Others go off in search of gold and silk under foreign skies. Still others catch salmon for the gourmet or cod for the poor. I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

1846: I am only a literary lizard basking the day away beneath the great sun of Beauty. That’s all.

1846 Deep within me there is a radical, intimate, bitter and incessant boredom which prevents me from enjoying anything and which smothers my soul. It reappears at any excuse, just as the swollen corpses of drowned dogs pop to the surface despite the stones that have been tied round their necks.

1847: People are like food. There are lots of bourgeois who seem to me like boiled beef: all steam, no juice, and no taste (it fills you up straight away and is much eaten by bumpkins). Other people are like white meat, freshwater fish, slender eels from the muddy river-bed, oysters (of varying degrees of saltiness), calves’ heads, and sugared porridge. Me? I’m like a runny, stinking macaroni cheese, which you have to eat a lot of times before you develop a taste for it. You do finally get to like it, but only after it has made your stomach heave on countless occasions.

1847: Some people have a tender heart and a tough mind. I’m the opposite: I have a tender mind but a rough heart. I’m like a coconut which keeps its milk locked away beneath several layers of wood. You need an axe to open it, and then what do you find as often as not? A sort of sour cream.

1847: You had hoped to find in me a fire which scorched and blazed and illuminated everything; which shed a cheerful light, dried out damp wainscoting, made the air healthier and rekindled life. Alas! I’m only a poor nightlight, whose red wick splutters in a lake of bad oil full of water and bits of dust.

1851: With me, friendship is like the camel: once started, there is no way of stopping it.

1852: As you get older, the heart sheds its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms which break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

1852: What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

1852: I laugh at everything, even at that which I love the most. There is no fact, thing, feeling or person over which I have not blithely run my clownishness, like an iron roller imparting sheen to cloth.

1852: I love my work with a frantic and perverted love, as an ascetic loves the hair-shirt which scratches his belly.

1852: All of us Normans have a little cider in our veins: it’s a bitter, fermented drink which sometimes bursts the bung.

1853: As for this business of my moving at once to Paris, we’ll have to put it off, or rather settle it here and now. This is impossible for me now… I know myself well enough, and it would mean losing a whole winter, and perhaps the whole book. Bouilhet can talk: he’s happy writing anywhere; he’s been working away for a dozen years despite continual disturbances… But I am like a row of milk-pans: if you want the cream to form, you have to leave them exactly where they are.

1853: I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish clogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

1854: I pigeon-hole my life, and keep everything in its place; I’m as full of drawers and compartments as an old travelling trunk, all roped up and fastened with three big leather straps.

1854: You ask for love, you complain that I don’t send you flowers? Flowers, indeed! If that’s what you want, find yourself some wet-eared boy stuffed with fine manners and all the right ideas. I’m like the tiger, which has bristles of hair at the end of its cock, with which it lacerates the female.

1857: Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

1857: There is a Latin phrase which means roughly, ‘To pick up a farthing from the shit with your teeth.’ It was a rhetorical figure applied to the miserly. I am like them: I will stop at nothing to find gold.

1867: It’s true that many things infuriate me. The day I stop being indignant I shall fall flat on my face, like a doll when you take away its prop.

1872: My heart remains intact, but my feelings are sharpened on the one hand and dulled on the other, like an old knife that has been too often sharpened, which has notches, and breaks easily.

1872: Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for Beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.

1873: I still carry on turning out my sentences, like a bourgeois turning out napkin rings on a lathe in his attic. It gives me something to do, and it affords me some private pleasure.

1875: Despite your advice, I can’t manage to ‘harden myself’… My sensitivities are all aquiver – my nerves and my brain are sick, very sick; I feel them to be so. But there I go, complaining again, and I don’t want to distress you. I’ll confine myself to your mention of a ‘rock’. Know, then, that very old granite sometimes turns into layers of clay.

1875: I feel uprooted, like a mass of dead seaweed tossed here and there in the waves.

1880: When will the book be finished? That’s the question. If it is to appear next winter, I haven’t a minute to lose between now and then. But there are moments when I’m so tired that I feel I’m liquefying like an old Camembert.