Flaubert's Parrot

5 Snap!

In the more bookish areas of English middle-class society, whenever a coincidence occurs there is usually someone at hand to comment, ‘It’s just like Anthony Powell.’ Often the coincidence turns out, on the shortest examination, to be unremarkable: typically, it might consist of two acquaintances from school or university running into one another after a gap of several years. But the name of Powell is invoked to give legitimacy to the event; it’s rather like getting the priest to bless your car.

I don’t much care for coincidences. There’s something spooky about them: you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan. I prefer to feel that things are chaotic, free-wheeling, permanently as well as temporarily crazy – to feel the certainty of human ignorance, brutality and folly. ‘Whatever else happens,’ Flaubert wrote when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, ‘we shall remain stupid.’ Mere boastful pessimism? Or a necessary razing of expectation before anything can be properly thought, or done, or written?

I don’t even care for harmless, comic coincidences. I once went out to dinner and discovered that the seven other people present had all just finished reading A Dance to the Music of Time. I didn’t relish this: not least because it meant that I didn’t break my silence until the cheese course.

And as for coincidences in books – there’s something cheap and sentimental about the device; it can’t help always seeming aesthetically gimcrack. That troubadour who passes by just in time to rescue the girl from a hedgerow scuffle; the sudden but convenient Dickensian benefactors; the neat shipwreck on a foreign shore which reunites siblings and lovers. I once disparaged this lazy stratagem to a poet I met, a man presumably skilled in the coincidences of rhyme. ‘Perhaps,’ he replied with a genial loftiness, ‘you have too prosaic a mind?’

‘But surely,’ I came back, rather pleased with myself, ‘a prosaic mind is the best judge of prose?’

I’d ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that’s where they belong. Go on, take them: let the pilot whose parachute has failed to open land in the haystack, let the virtuous pauper with the gangrenous foot discover the buried treasure – it’s all right, it doesn’t really matter…

One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That’s what smart people do. Irony is, after all, the modern mode, a drinking companion for resonance and wit. Who could be against it? And yet sometimes I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn’t just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence.

I don’t know what Flaubert thought about coincidence. I had hoped for some characteristic entry in his unflaggingly ironic Dictionnaire des idées reçues; but it jumps pointedly from cognac to coitus. Still, his love of irony is plain; it’s one of the most modern things about him. In Egypt he was delighted to discover that almeh, the word for ‘bluestocking’, had gradually lost this original meaning and come to signify ‘whore’.

Do ironies accrete around the ironist? Flaubert certainly thought so. The celebrations for the centenary of Voltaire’s death in 1878 were stage-managed by the chocolate firm of Ménier. ‘That poor old genius,’ Gustave commented, ‘how irony never quits him.’ It badgered Gustave too. When he wrote of himself, ‘I attract mad people and animals’, perhaps he should have added ‘and ironies’.

Take Madame Bovary. It was prosecuted for obscenity by Ernest Pinard, the advocate who also enjoys the shabby fame of leading the case against Les Fleurs du mal Some years after Bovary had been cleared, Pinard was discovered to be the anonymous author of a collection of priapic verses. The novelist was much amused.

And then, take the book itself. Two of the best-remembered things in it are Emma’s adulterous drive in the curtained cab (a passage found especially scandalous by right-thinkers), and the very last line of the novel – ‘He has just received the Legion of Honour’ – which confirms the bourgeois apotheosis of the pharmacist Homais. Now, the idea for the curtained cab appears to have come to Flaubert as a result of his own eccentric conduct in Paris when anxious to avoid running into Louise Colet. To avoid being recognised, he took to driving everywhere in a closed cab. Thus, he maintained his chastity by using a device he would later employ to facilitate his heroine’s sexual indulgence.

With Homais’s Légion d’honneur, it’s the other way round: life imitates and ironises art. Barely ten years after that final line of Madame Bovary was written, Flaubert, arch anti-bourgeois and virile hater of governments, allowed himself to be created a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. Consequently, the last line of his life parroted the last line of his masterpiece: at his funeral a picket of soldiers turned up to fire a volley over the coffin, and thus bid the state’s traditional farewell to one of its most improbable and sardonic chevaliers.

And if you don’t like these ironies, I have others.

In December 1849 Flaubert and Du Camp climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops. They had slept beside it the previous night, and rose at five to make sure of reaching the top by sunrise. Gustave washed his face in a canvas pail; a jackal howled; he smoked a pipe. Then, with two Arabs pushing him and two pulling, he was bundled slowly up the high stones of the Pyramid to the summit. Du Camp – the first man to photograph the Sphinx – was there already. Ahead of them lay the Nile, bathed in mist, like a white sea; behind them lay the dark desert, like a petrified purple ocean. At last, a streak of orange light appeared to the east; and gradually the white sea in front of them became an immense expanse of fertile green, while the purple ocean behind turned shimmering white. The rising sun lit up the topmost stones of the Pyramid, and Flaubert, looking down at his feet, noticed a small business-card pinned in place. ‘Humbert, Frotteur’, it read, and gave a Rouen address.

What a moment of perfectly targeted irony. A modernist moment, too: this is the sort of exchange, in which the everyday tampers with the sublime, that we like to think of proprietorially as typical of our own wry and unfoolable age. We thank Flaubert for picking it up; in a sense, the irony wasn’t there until he observed it. Other visitors might have seen the business-card as merely a piece of litter – it could have stayed there, its drawing-pins slowly rusting, for years; but Flaubert gave it function.

And if we are feeling interpretative, we can look further into this brief event. Isn’t it, perhaps, a notable historical coincidence that the greatest European novelist of the nineteenth century should be introduced at the Pyramids to one of the twentieth century’s most notorious fictional characters? That Flaubert, still damp from skewering boys in Cairo bath-houses, should fall on the name of Nabokov’s seducer of underage American girlhood? And further, what is the profession of this single-barrelled version of Humbert Humbert? He is a frotteur. Literally, a French polisher; but also, the sort of sexual deviant who loves the rub of the crowd.

And that’s not all. Now for the irony about the irony. It turns out, from Flaubert’s travel notes, that the business-card wasn’t pinned in place by Monsieur Frotteur himself; it was put there by the lithe and thoughtful Maxime du Camp, who had scampered ahead in the purple night and laid out this little mousetrap for his friend’s sensibility. The balance of our response shifts with this knowledge: Flaubert becomes plodding and predictable; Du Camp becomes the wit, the dandy, the teaser of modernism before modernism has declared itself.

But then we read on again. If we turn to Flaubert’s letters, we discover him, some days after the incident, writing to his mother about the sublime surprise of the discovery. ‘And to think that I had specially brought that card all the way from Croisset and didn’t even get to put it in place! The villain took advantage of my forgetfulness and discovered the wonderfully apposite business-card in the bottom of my folding hat.’ So, ever stranger: Flaubert, when he left home, was already preparing the special effects which would later appear entirely characteristic of how he perceived the world. Ironies breed; realities recede. And why, just out of interest, did he take his folding hat to the Pyramids?

Gustave used to look back on his summer holidays at Trouville – spent between Captain Barbey’s parrot and Mme Schlesinger’s dog – as among the few tranquil times of his life. Reminiscing from the autumn of his mid-twenties, he told Louise Colet that ‘the greatest events of my life have been a few thoughts, reading, certain sunsets by the sea at Trouville, and conversations of five or six hours on the trot with a friend [Alfred Le Poittevin] who is now married and lost to me.’

In Trouville he met Gertrude and Harriet Collier, daughters of a British naval attaché. Both, it seems, became enamoured of him. Harriet gave him her portrait, which hung over the chimney-piece at Croisset; but it was of Gertrude that he was fonder. Her feelings for him may be guessed at from a text she wrote decades later, after Gustave’s death. Adopting the style of romantic fiction, and using disguised names, she boasts that ‘I loved him passionately, adoringly. Years have passed over my head but I have never felt the worship, the love and yet the fear that took possession of my soul then. Something told me I should never be his… But I knew, in the deepest recesses of my heart, how truly I could love him, honour him and obey him.’

Gertrude’s lush memoir might well be fanciful: what, after all, is more sentimentally alluring than a dead genius and an adolescent beach holiday? But perhaps it wasn’t. Gustave and Gertrude kept in distant touch along the decades. He sent her a copy of Madame Bovary (she thanked him, pronounced the novel ‘hideous’, and quoted at him Philip James Bailey, author of Festus, on the writer’s duty to give moral instruction to the reader); and forty years after that first meeting in Trouville she came to visit him at Croisset. The handsome, blond cavalier of her youth was now bald and red-faced, with only a couple of teeth left in his head. But his gallantry remained in good health. ‘My old friend, my youth,’ he wrote to her afterwards, ‘during the long years I have lived without knowing your whereabouts, there was perhaps not a single day when I did not think of you.’

During the course of those long years (in 1847, to be precise, the year after Flaubert was recalling his Trouville sunsets to Louise) Gertrude had promised to love, honour and obey someone else: an English economist called Charles Tennant. While Flaubert slowly attained European fame as a novelist, Gertrude was herself to publish a book: an edition of her grandfather’s journal, called France on the Eve of the Great Revolution. She died in 1918 at the age of ninety-nine; and she had a daughter, Dorothy, who married the explorer Henry Morton Stanley.

On one of Stanley’s trips to Africa, his party got into difficulties. The explorer was obliged gradually to discard all his unnecessary belongings. It was, in a way, a reverse, real-life version of ‘Desert Island Discs’: instead of being equipped with things to make life in the tropics more bearable, Stanley was having to get rid of things to survive there. Books were obviously supernumerary, and he began jettisoning them until he got down to those two which every guest on ‘Desert Island Discs’ is furnished with as a bare, civilised minimum: the Bible and Shakespeare. Stanley’s third book, the one he threw out before reducing himself to this final minimum, was Salammbô.

The weary, valetudinarian tone of Flaubert’s letter to Louise Colet about the sunsets was not a pose. 1846, after all, was the year when first his father and then his sister Caroline had died. ‘What a house!’ he wrote. ‘What a hell!’ All night Gustave watched beside his sister’s corpse: she lying in her white wedding-dress, he sitting and reading Montaigne.

On the morning of the funeral, he gave her a last farewell kiss as she lay in her coffin. For the second time in three months he heard the battering sound of hobnailed boots climbing the wooden stairs to fetch a body. Mourning was scarcely possible that day: practicalities supervened. There was a lock of Caroline’s hair to be cut, and plaster casts of her face and hands to be taken: ‘I saw the great paws of those louts touching her and covering her face with plaster.’ Great louts are necessary for funerals.

The trail to the cemetery was familiar from the time before. At the graveside Caroline’s husband broke down. Gustave watched as the coffin was lowered. Suddenly, it got stuck: the hole had been dug too narrow. The gravediggers got hold of the coffin and shook it; they pulled it this way and that, twisted it, hacked at it with a spade, levered at it with crowbars; but still it wouldn’t move. Finally, one of them placed his foot flat on the box, right over Caroline’s face, and forced it down into the grave.

Gustave had a bust made of that face; it presided over his study all his working life, until his own death, in the same house, in 1880. Maupassant helped lay out the body. Flaubert’s niece asked for the traditional cast of the writer’s hand to be taken. This proved impossible: the fist was too tightly clenched in its terminal seizure.

The procession set off, first to the church at Canteleu, then to the Cimetière Monumental, where the picket of soldiers fired its ludicrous gloss on the last line of Madame Bovary. A few words were spoken, then the coffin was lowered. It got stuck. The width had been correctly judged on this occasion; but the gravediggers had skimped on the length. Sons of louts grappled with the coffin in vain; they could neither cram it in nor twist it out. After a few embarrassed minutes the mourners slowly departed, leaving Flaubert jammed into the ground at an oblique angle.

The Normans are a famously stingy race, and doubtless their gravediggers are no exception; perhaps they resent every superfluous sod they cut, and maintained this resentment as a professional tradition from 1846 to 1880. Perhaps Nabokov had read Flaubert’s letters before writing Lolita. Perhaps H.M. Stanley’s admiration for Flaubert’s African novel isn’t entirely surprising. Perhaps what we read as brute coincidence, silky irony, or brave, far-sighted modernism, looked quite different at the time. Flaubert took Monsieur Humbert’s business-card all the way from Rouen to the Pyramids. Was it meant to be a chuckling advertisement for his own sensibility; a tease about the gritty, unpolishable surface of the desert; or might it just have been a joke on us?