Flaubert's Parrot

4 The Flaubert Bestiary

Gustave was the Bear. His sister Caroline was the Rat – ‘your dear rat’, ‘your faithful rat’ she signs herself; ‘little rat’, ‘Ah, rat, good rat, old rat’, ‘old rat, naughty old rat, good rat, poor old rat’ he addresses her – but Gustave was the Bear. When he was only twenty, people found him ‘an odd fellow, a bear, a young man out of the ordinary’; and even before his epileptic seizure and confinement at Croisset, the image had established itself: ‘I am a bear and I want to stay a bear in my den, in my lair, in my skin, in my old bear’s skin; I want to live quietly, far away from the bourgeois and the bourgeoises.’ After his attack, the beast confirmed itself: ‘I live alone, like a bear.’ (The word ‘alone’ in this sentence is best glossed as: ‘alone except for my parents, my sister, the servants, our dog, Caroline’s goat, and my regular visits from Alfred Le Poittevin’.)

He recovered, he was allowed to travel; in December 1850 he wrote to his mother from Constantinople, expanding the image of the Bear. It now explained not just his character, but also his literary strategy:

The ‘throng of cronies’, needless to say, aren’t house-guests but companions picked from his library shelves. As for the bear-rug, he was always concerned about it: he wrote twice from the East (Constantinople, April 1850; Benisouëf, June 1850) asking his mother to take care of it. His niece Caroline also remembered this central feature of his study. She would be taken there for her lessons at one o’clock: the shutters would be closed to keep out the heat, and the darkened room filled with the smell of joss-sticks and tobacco. ‘With one bound I would throw myself on the large white bearskin, which I adored, and cover its great head with kisses.’

Once you catch your bear, says the Macedonian proverb, it will dance for you. Gustave didn’t dance; Flaubear was nobody’s bear. (How would you fiddle that into French? Gourstave, perhaps.)

Gustave is other animals as well. In his youth he is clusters of beasts: hungry to see Ernest Chevalier, he is ‘a lion, a tiger – a tiger from India, a boa constrictor’ (1841); feeling a rare plenitude of strength, he is ‘an ox, sphinx, bittern, elephant, whale’ (1841). Subsequently, he takes them one at a time. He is an oyster in its shell (1845); a snail in its shell (1851); a hedgehog rolling up to protect itself (1853, 1857). He is a literary lizard basking in the sun of Beauty (1846), and a warbler with a shrill cry which hides in the depths of the woods and is heard only by itself (also 1846). He becomes as soft and nervous as a cow (1867); he feels as worn out as a donkey (1867); yet still he splashes in the Seine like a porpoise (1870). He works like a mule (1852); he lives a life which would kill three rhinos (1872); he works ‘like XV oxen’ (1878); though he advises Louise Colet to burrow away at her work like a mole (1853). To Louise he resembles ‘a wild buffalo of the American prairie’ (1846). To George Sand, however, he seems ‘gentle as a lamb’ (1866) – which he denies (1869) – and the pair of them chatter away like magpies (1866); ten years later, at her funeral, he weeps like a calf (1876). Alone in his study, he finishes the story he wrote especially for her, the story about the parrot; he bellows it out ‘like a gorilla’ (1876).

He flirts occasionally with the rhinoceros and the camel as self-images, but mainly, secretly, essentially, he is the Bear: a stubborn bear (1852), a bear thrust deeper into bearishness by the stupidity of his age (1853), a mangy bear (1854), even a stuffed bear (1869); and so on down to the very last year of his life, when he is still ‘roaring as loudly as any bear in its cave’ (1880). Note that in Hérodias, Flaubert’s last completed work, the imprisoned prophet Iaokanann, when ordered to stop howling his denunciations against a corrupt world, replies that he too will continue crying out ‘like a bear’.

There were still bears around in Gourstave’s time: brown bears in the Alps, reddish bears in Savoy. Bear hams were available from superior dealers in salted provisions. Alexandre Dumas ate bear steak at the Hôtel de la Poste, Marigny, in 1832; later, in his Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1870), he noted that ‘bear meat is now eaten by all the peoples of Europe’. From the chef to Their Majesties of Prussia Dumas obtained a recipe for bear’s paws, Moscow style. Buy the paws skinned. Wash, salt, and marinade for three days. Casserole with bacon and vegetables for seven or eight hours; drain, wipe, sprinkle with pepper, and turn in melted lard. Roll in breadcrumbs and grill for half an hour. Serve with a piquant sauce and two spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly.

It is not known whether Flaubear ever ate his namesake. He ate dromedary in Damascus in 1850. It seems a reasonable guess that if he had eaten bear he would have commented on such ipsophagy.

Exactly what species of bear was Flaubear? We can track his spoor through the Letters. At first he is just an unspecified ours, a bear (1841). He’s still unspecified – though owner of a den – in 1843, in January 1845, and in May 1845 (by now he boasts a triple layer of fur). In June 1845 he wants to buy a painting of a bear for his room and entitle it ‘Portrait of Gustave Flaubert’ – ‘to indicate my moral disposition and my social temperament’. So far we (and he too, perhaps) have been imagining a dark animal: an American brown bear, a Russian black bear, a reddish bear from Savoy. But in September 1845 Gustave firmly announces himself to be ‘a white bear’.

Why? Is it because he’s a bear who is also a white European? Is it perhaps an identity taken from the white bearskin rug on his study floor (which he first mentions in a letter to Louise Colet of August 1846, telling her that he likes to stretch out on it during the day. Maybe he chose his species so that he could lie on his rug, punning and camouflaged)? Or is this coloration indicative of a further shift away from humanity, a progression to the extremes of ursinity? The brown, the black, the reddish bear are not that far from man, from man’s cities, man’s friendship even. The coloured bears can mostly be tamed. But the white, the polar bear? It doesn’t dance for man’s pleasure; it doesn’t eat berries; it can’t be trapped by a weakness for honey.

Other bears are used. The Romans imported bears from Britain for their games. The Kamchatkans, a people of eastern Siberia, used to employ the intestines of bears as face-masks to protect them from the glare of the sun; and they used the sharpened shoulder-blade for cutting grass. But the white bear, Thalarctos maritimus, is the aristocrat of bears. Aloof, distant, stylishly diving for fish, roughly ambushing seals when they come up for air. The maritime bear. They travel great distances, carried along on floating pack-ice. One winter in the last century twelve great white bears got as far south as Iceland by this method; imagine them riding down on their melting thrones to make a terrifying, godlike landfall. William Scoresby, the Arctic explorer, noted that the liver of the bear is poisonous – the only part of any quadruped known to be so. Among zoo-keepers there is no known test for pregnancy in the polar bear. Strange facts that Flaubert might not have found strange.

Were there other reasons why he chose to be a bear? The figurative sense of ours is much the same as in English: a rough, wild fellow. Ours is slang for a police cell. Avoir ses ours, to have one’s bears, means ‘to have the curse’ (presumably because at such times a woman is supposed to behave like a bear with a sore head). Etymologists trace this colloquialism to the turn of the century (Flaubert doesn’t use it; he prefers the redcoats have landed, and other humorous variations thereon. On one occasion, having worried over Louise Colet’s irregularity, he finally notes with relief that Lord Palmerston has arrived). Un ours mal léché, a badly licked bear, is someone uncouth and misanthropic. More apt for Flaubert, un ours was nineteenth-century slang for a play which had been frequently submitted and turned down, but eventually accepted.

No doubt Flaubert knew La Fontaine’s fable of the Bear and the Man Who Delighted in Gardens. There once was a bear, an ugly and deformed creature, who hid from the world and lived all alone in a wood. After a while he became melancholy and frantic – ‘for indeed, Reason seldom resides long among Anchorites’. So he set off and met a gardener, who had also lived a hermetic life, and also longed for company. The bear moved into the gardener’s hovel. The gardener had become a hermit because he could not abide fools; but since the bear spoke scarcely three words in the course of the day, he was able to get on with his work without disturbance. The bear used to go hunting, and bring home game for both of them. When the gardener went to sleep, the bear would sit beside him devotedly and chase away the flies that tried to settle on his face. One day, a fly landed on the tip of the man’s nose, and declined to be driven away. The bear became extremely angry with the fly, and eventually seized a huge stone and succeeded in killing it. Unfortunately, in the process he beat the gardener’s brains out.

Perhaps Louise Colet knew the story too.

If Gustave hadn’t been the Bear, he might have been the Camel. In January 1852 he writes to Louise and explains, yet again, his incorrigibility: he is as he is, he cannot change, he does not have a say in the matter, he is subject to the gravity of things, that gravity ‘which makes the polar bear inhabit the icy regions and the camel walk upon the sand’. Why the camel? Perhaps because it is a fine example of the Flaubertian grotesque: it cannot help being serious and comic at the same time. He reports from Cairo: ‘One of the finest things is the camel. I never tire of watching this strange beast that lurches like a turkey and sways its neck like a swan. Its cry is something I wear myself out trying to imitate – I hope to bring it back with me – but it’s hard to reproduce – a rattle with a kind of tremendous gargling as an accompaniment.’

The species also exhibited a character trait which was familiar to Gustave: ‘I am, in both my physical and my mental activity, like the dromedary, which it is very hard to get going and very hard, once it is going, to stop; continuity is what I need, whether of rest or of motion.’ This 1853 analogy, once it has got going, also proves hard to stop: it is still running in a letter to George Sand of 1868.

Chameau, camel, was slang for an old courtesan. I do not think this association would have put Flaubert off.

Flaubert loved fairs: the tumblers, the giantesses, the freaks, the dancing bears. In Marseilles he visited a quayside booth advertising ‘sheep-women’, who ran around while sailors tugged at their fleeces to see if they were real. This was not a high-class show: ‘nothing could be stupider or filthier’, he reported. He was far more impressed at the fair in Guérande, an old fortified town north-west of St Nazaire, which he visited during his walking tour of Brittany with Du Camp in 1847. A booth run by a sly peasant with a Picardy accent advertised ‘a young phenomenon’: it turned out to be a five-legged sheep with a tail in the shape of a trumpet. Flaubert was delighted, both with the freak and with its owner. He admired the beast rapturously; he took the owner out to dinner, assured him he would make a fortune, and advised him to write to King Louis Philippe on the matter. By the end of the evening, to Du Camp’s clear disapproval, they were calling one another tu.

‘The young phenomenon’ fascinated Flaubert, and became part of his teasing vocabulary. As he and Du Camp tramped along, he would introduce his friend to the trees and the bushes with mock gravity: ‘May I present the young phenomenon?’ At Brest, Gustave fell in with the sly Picard and his freak once again, dined and got drunk with him, and further praised the magnificence of his animal. He was often thus overcome by frivolous manias; Du Camp waited for this one to run its course like a fever.

The following year, in Paris, Du Camp was ill, and confined to bed in his apartment. At four o’clock one afternoon he heard a commotion on the landing outside, and his door was flung open. Gustave strode in, followed by the five-legged sheep and the showman in the blue blouse. Some fair at the Invalides or the Champs-Elysées had disgorged them, and Flaubert was eager to share their rediscovery with his friend. Du Camp drily notes that the sheep ‘did not conduct itself well’. Nor did Gustave – shouting for wine, leading the animal round the room and bellowing its virtues: ‘The young phenomenon is three years old, has passed the Académie de Médecine, and has been honoured by visits from several crowned heads, etc.’ After a quarter of an hour the sick Du Camp had had enough. ‘I dismissed the sheep and its proprietor, and had my room swept.’

But the sheep had left its droppings in Flaubert’s memory as well. A year before his death he was still reminding Du Camp about his surprise arrival with the young phenomenon, and still laughing as much as the day it had happened.

Parrots are human to begin with; etymologically, that is. Perroquet is a diminutive of Pierrot; parrot comes from Pierre; Spanish perico derives from Pedro. For the Greeks, their ability to speak was an item in the philosophical debate over the differences between man and the animals. Aelian reports that ‘the Brahmins honour them above all other birds. And they add that it is only reasonable to do so; for the parrot alone can give a good imitation of the human voice.’ Aristotle and Pliny note that the bird is extremely lecherous when drunk. More pertinently, Buffon observes that it is prone to epilepsy. Flaubert knew of this fraternal weakness: the notes he took on parrots when researching Un cœur simple include a list of their maladies – gout, epilepsy, aphtha and throat ulcers.

To recapitulate. First there is Loulou, Félicité’s parrot. Then there are the two contending stuffed parrots, one at the Hôtel-Dieu and one at Croisset. Then there are the three live parrots, two at Trouville and one at Venice; plus the sick parakeet at Antibes. As a possible source for Loulou we can, I think, eliminate the mother of a ‘hideous’ English family encountered by Gustave on the boat from Alexandria to Cairo: with a green eyeshade attached to her bonnet, she looked ‘like a sick old parrot’.

Caroline, in her Souvenirs intimes, remarks that ‘Félicité and her parrot really lived’ and directs us towards the first Trouville parrot, that of Captain Barbey, as the true ancestor of Loulou. But this doesn’t answer the more important question: how, and when, did a simple (if magnificent) living bird of the 1830s get turned into a complicated, transcendent parrot of the 1870s? We probably shan’t ever find out; but we can suggest a point at which the transformation might have begun.

The second, uncompleted part of Bouvard et Pécuchet was to consist mainly of ‘La Copie’, an enormous dossier of oddities, idiocies and self-condemning quotations, which the two clerks were solemnly to copy out for their own edification, and which Flaubert would reproduce with a more sardonic intent. Among the thousands of press cuttings he collected for possible inclusion in the dossier is the following story, clipped from L’Opinion nationale of June 20th, 1863:

‘In Gérouville, near Arlon, there lived a man who owned a magnificent parrot. It was his sole love. As a young man, he had been the victim of an ill-starred passion; the experience had made him misanthropic, and now he lived alone with his parrot. He had taught the bird to pronounce the name of his lost love, and this name was repeated a hundred times a day. This was the bird’s only talent, but in the eyes of its owner, the unfortunate Henri K—, it was a talent worth all the others. Every time he heard the sacred name pronounced by this strange voice, Henri thrilled with joy; it seemed to him like a voice from beyond the grave, something mysterious and superhuman.

‘Solitude enflamed the imagination of Henri K—, and gradually the parrot began to take on a rare significance in his mind. For him it became a kind of holy bird: he would handle it with deep respect, and spend hours in rapt contemplation of it. Then the parrot, returning its master’s gaze with an unflinching eye, would murmur the cabbalistic word, and Henri’s soul would be filled with the memory of his lost happiness. This strange life lasted several years. One day, however, people noticed that Henri K— was looking gloomier than usual; and there was a strange, wild light in his eye. The parrot had died.

‘Henri K— continued to live alone, now completely so. He had no link with the outside world. He became more and more wrapped up in himself. Sometimes he would not leave his room for days on end. He would eat whatever food was brought him, but took no notice of anyone. Gradually he began to believe that he himself had turned into a parrot. As if in imitation of the dead bird, he would squawk out the name he loved to hear; he would try walking like a parrot, perching on things, and extending his arms as if he had wings to beat.

‘Sometimes, he would lose his temper and start breaking the furniture; and his family decided to send him to the maison de santé at Gheel. On the journey there, however, he escaped during the night. The next morning they found him perched in a tree. Persuading him to come down proved very difficult, until someone had the idea of placing at the foot of his tree an enormous parrot-cage. On seeing this, the unfortunate monomaniac climbed down and was recaptured. He is now in the maison de santé at Gheel.’

We know that Flaubert was struck by this newspaper story. After the line, ‘gradually the parrot began to take on a rare significance in his mind’, he made the following annotation: ‘Change the animal: make it a dog instead of a parrot.’ Some brief plan for a future work, no doubt. But when, finally, the story of Loulou and Félicité came to be written, it was the parrot which stayed in place, and the owner who was changed.

Before Un cœur simple, parrots flit briefly through Flaubert’s work, and through his letters. Explaining to Louise the pull of foreign lands (December 11th, 1846), Gustave writes: ‘When we are children, we all want to live in the country of parrots and candied dates.’ Comforting a sad and discouraged Louise (March 27th, 1853), he reminds her that we are all caged birds, and that life weighs the heaviest on those with the largest wings: ‘We are all to a greater or lesser degree eagles or canaries, parrots or vultures.’ Denying to Louise that he is vain (December 9th, 1852), he distinguishes between Pride and Vanity: ‘Pride is 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.’ Describing to Louise the heroic quest for style that Madame Bovary represents (April 19th, 1852), he explains: ‘How many times have I fallen flat on my face, just when I thought I had it within my grasp. Still, I feel that I mustn’t die without making sure that the style I can hear inside my head comes roaring out and drowns the cries of parrots and cicadas.’

In Salammbô, as I have already mentioned, the Carthaginian translators have parrots tattooed on their chests (a detail perhaps more apt than authentic?); in the same novel, some of the Barbarians have ‘sunshades in their hands or parrots on their shoulders’; while the furnishings of Salammbô’s terrace include a small ivory bed whose cushions are stuffed with parrot feathers – ‘for this was a prophetic bird, consecrated to the gods’.

There are no parrots in Madame Bovary or Bouvard et Pécuchet; no entry for PERROQUET in the Dictionnaire des idées reçues; and only a couple of brief mentions in La Tentation de saint Antoine. In Saint Julien l’hospitalier few animal species avoid slaughter during Julien’s first hunt – roosting grouse have their legs cut off, and low-flying cranes are snapped out of the sky by the huntsman’s whip – but the parrot remains unmentioned and unharmed. In the second hunt, however, when Julien’s ability to kill evaporates, when the animals become elusive, threatening observers of their stumbling pursuer, the parrot makes an appearance. Flashes of light in the forest, which Julien assumed to be stars low in the sky, prove to be the eyes of watching beasts: wild cats, squirrels, owls, parrots and monkeys.

And let’s not forget the parrot that wasn’t there. In L’Education sentimentale Frédéric wanders through an area of Paris wrecked by the 1848 uprising. He walks past barricades which have been torn down; he sees black pools that must be blood; houses have their blinds hanging like rags from a single nail. Here and there amid the chaos, delicate things have survived by chance. Frédéric peers in at a window. He sees a clock, some prints – and a parrot’s perch.

It isn’t so different, the way we wander through the past. Lost, disordered, fearful, we follow what signs there remain; we read the street names, but cannot be confident where we are. All around is wreckage. These people never stopped fighting. Then we see a house; a writer’s house, perhaps. There is a plaque on the front wall. ‘Gustave Flaubert, French writer, 1821–1880, lived here while—’ but then the letters shrink impossibly, as if on some optician’s chart. We walk closer. We look in at a window. Yes, it’s true; despite the carnage some delicate things have survived. A clock still ticks. Prints on the wall remind us that art was once appreciated here. A parrot’s perch catches the eye. We look for the parrot. Where is the parrot? We still hear its voice; but all we can see is a bare wooden perch. The bird has flown.

1 The Dog Romantic. This was a large Newfoundland, the property of Elisa Schlesinger. If we believe Du Camp, he was called Nero; if we believe Goncourt, he was called Thabor. Gustave met Mme Schlesinger at Trouville: he was fourteen and a half, she twenty-six. She was beautiful, her husband was rich; she wore an immense straw hat, and her well-modelled shoulders could be glimpsed through her muslin dress. Nero, or Thabor, went everywhere with her. Gustave often followed at a discreet distance. Once, on the dunes, she opened her dress and suckled her baby. He was lost, helpless, tortured, fallen. Ever afterwards he would maintain that the brief summer of 1836 had cauterised his heart. (We are at liberty, of course, to disbelieve him. What did the Goncourts say? ‘Though perfectly frank by nature, he is never wholly sincere in what he says he feels and suffers and loves.’) And whom did he first tell of this passion? His schoolfriends? His mother? Mme Schlesinger herself? No: he told Nero (or Thabor). He would take the Newfoundland for walks across the Trouville sands, and in the soft secrecy of a dune he would drop down on his knees and wrap his arms around the dog. Then he would kiss it where he knew its mistress’s lips had been not long before (the location of the kiss remains a matter of debate: some say on the muzzle, some say on the top of the head); he would whisper in the shaggy ear of Nero (or Thabor) the secrets he longed to whisper in the ear that lay between the muslin dress and the straw hat; and he would burst into tears.

The memory of Mme Schlesinger, and her presence too, pursued Flaubert for the rest of his life. What happened to the dog is not recorded.

2 The Dog Practical. Not sufficient study, to my mind, has been made of the pets which were kept at Croisset. They flicker into brief existence, sometimes with a name attached, sometimes not; we rarely know when or how they were acquired, and when or how they died. Let us assemble them:

In 1840 Gustave’s sister Caroline has a goat called Souvit.

In 1840 the family has a black Newfoundland bitch called Néo (perhaps this name influenced Du Camp’s memory of Mme Schlesinger’s Newfoundland).

In 1853 Gustave dines alone at Croisset with an unnamed dog.

In 1854 Gustave dines with a dog named Dakno; probably the same animal as above.

In 1856–7 his niece Caroline has a pet rabbit.

In 1856 he exhibits on his lawn a stuffed crocodile he has brought back from the East: enabling it to bask in the sun again for the first time in 3,000 years.

In 1858 a wild rabbit takes up residence in the garden; Gustave forbids its slaughter.

In 1866 Gustave dines alone with a bowl of goldfish.

In 1867 the pet dog (no name, no breed) is killed by poison which has been laid down for rats.

In 1872 Gustave acquires Julio, a greyhound.

Note: If we are to complete the list of known domestic creatures to which Gustave played host, we must record that in October 1842 he suffered an infestation of crab-lice.

Of the pets listed above, the only one about which we have proper information is Julio. In April 1872 Mme Flaubert died; Gustave was left alone in the big house, having meals at a large table ‘tête-à-tête with myself’. In September his friend Edmond Laporte offered him a greyhound. Flaubert hesitated, being frightened of rabies, but eventually accepted it. He named the dog Julio (in honour of Juliet Herbert? – if you wish) and quickly grew fond of it. By the end of the month he was writing to his niece that his sole distraction (thirty-six years after casting his arms round Mme Schlesinger’s Newfoundland) was to embrace his ‘pauvre chien’. ‘His calm and his beauty make one jealous.’

The greyhound became his final companion at Croisset. An unlikely couple: the stout, sedentary novelist and the sleek racing dog. Julio’s own private life began to feature in Flaubert’s correspondence: he announced that the dog had become ‘morganatically united’ with ‘a young person’ of the neighbourhood. Owner and pet even got ill together: in the spring of 1879 Flaubert had rheumatism and a swollen foot, while Julio had an unspecified canine disease. ‘He is exactly like a person,’ Gustave wrote. ‘He makes little gestures that are profoundly human.’ Both of them recovered, and staggered on through the year. The winter of 1879–80 was exceptionally cold. Flaubert’s housekeeper made Julio a coat out of an old pair of trousers. They got through the winter together. Flaubert died in the spring.

What happened to the dog is not recorded.

3 The Dog Figurative. Madame Bovary has a dog, given to her by a game-keeper whose chest infection has been cured by her husband. It is une petite levrette d’Italie: a small Italian greyhound bitch. Nabokov, who is exceedingly peremptory with all translators of Flaubert, renders this as whippet. Whether he is zoologically correct or not, he certainly loses the sex of the animal, which seems to me important. This dog is given a passing significance as… less than a symbol, not exactly a metaphor; call it a figure. Emma acquires the greyhound while she and Charles are still living at Tostes: the time of early, inchoate stirrings of dissatisfaction within her; the time of boredom and discontent, but not yet of corruption. She takes her greyhound for walks, and the animal becomes, tactfully, briefly, for half a paragraph or so, something more than just a dog. ‘At first her thoughts would wander aimlessly, like her greyhound, which ran in circles, yapping after yellow butterflies, chasing field-mice and nibbling at poppies on the edge of a cornfield. Then, gradually, her ideas would come together until, sitting on a stretch of grass and stabbing at it with the end of her parasol, she would repeat to herself, “Oh God, why did I get married?”’

That is the first appearance of the dog, a delicate insertion; afterwards, Emma holds its head and kisses it (as Gustave had done to Nero/Thabor): the dog has a melancholy expression, and she talks to it as if to someone in need of consolation. She is talking, in other words (and in both senses), to herself. The dog’s second appearance is also its last. Charles and Emma move from Tostes to Yonville – a journey which marks Emma’s shift from dreams and fantasies to reality and corruption. Note also the traveller who shares the coach with them: the ironically named Monsieur Lheureux, the fancy-goods dealer and part-time usurer who finally ensnares Emma (financial corruption marks her fall as much as sexual corruption). On the journey, Emma’s greyhound escapes. They spend a good quarter of an hour whistling for it, and then give up. M. Lheureux plies Emma with a foretaste of false comfort: he tells her consoling stories of lost dogs which have returned to their masters despite great distances; why, there was even one that made it all the way back to Paris from Constantinople. Emma’s reaction to these stories is not recorded.

What happened to the dog is also not recorded.

4 The Dog Drowned and the Dog Fantastical. In January 1851 Flaubert and Du Camp were in Greece. They visited Marathón, Eleusis and Salamís. They met General Morandi, a soldier of fortune who had fought at Missolonghi, and who indignantly denied to them the calumny put about by the British aristocracy that Byron had deteriorated morally while in Greece: ‘He was magnificent,’ the General told them. ‘He looked like Achilles.’ Du Camp records how they visited Thermopylae and re-read their Plutarch on the battlefield. On January 12th they were heading towards Eleuthera – the two friends, a dragoman, and an armed policeman they employed as a guard – when the weather worsened. Rain fell heavily; the plain they were crossing became inundated; the policeman’s Scotch terrier was suddenly carried away and drowned in a swollen torrent. The rain turned to snow, and darkness closed in. Clouds shut out the stars; their solitude was complete.

An hour passed, then another; snow gathered thickly in the folds of their clothes; they missed their road. The policeman fired some pistol shots in the air, but there was no answer. Saturated, and very cold, they faced the prospect of a night in the saddle amid inhospitable terrain. The policeman was grieving for his Scotch terrier, while the dragoman – a fellow with big, prominent eyes like a lobster’s – had proved singularly incompetent throughout the trip; even his cooking had been a failure. They were riding cautiously, straining their eyes for a distant light, when the policeman shouted, ‘Halt!’ A dog was barking somewhere in the far distance. It was then that the dragoman displayed his sole talent: the ability to bark like a dog. He began to do so with a desperate vigour. When he stopped, they listened, and heard answering barks. The dragoman howled again. Slowly they advanced, stopping every so often to bark and be barked back at, then reorienting themselves. After half an hour of marching towards the ever-loudening village dog, they eventually found shelter for the night.

What happened to the dragoman is not recorded.

Note: Is it fair to add that Gustave’s journal offers a different version of the story? He agrees about the weather; he agrees about the date; he agrees that the dragoman couldn’t cook (a constant offering of lamb and hard-boiled eggs drove him to lunch on dry bread). Strangely, though, he doesn’t mention reading Plutarch on the battlefield. The policeman’s dog (breed unidentified in Flaubert’s version) wasn’t carried away by a torrent; it just drowned in deep water. As for the barking dragoman, Gustave merely records that when they heard the village dog in the distance, he ordered the policeman to fire his pistol in the air. The dog barked its reply; the policeman fired again; and by this more ordinary means they progressed towards shelter.

What happened to the truth is not recorded.