Flaubert's Parrot

8 The Train-spotter’s Guide to Flaubert

1 The house at Croisset – a long, white, eighteenth-century property on the banks of the Seine – was perfect for Flaubert. It was isolated, yet close to Rouen and thence to Paris. It was large enough for him to have a grand study with five windows; yet small enough for him to discourage visitors without obvious discourtesy. It gave him, too, if he wanted it, an unthreatened view of passing life: from the terrace he could train his opera glasses on the pleasure-steamers taking Sunday lunchers to La Bouille. For their part, the lunchers grew accustomed to cet original de Monsieur Flaubert, and were disappointed if they didn’t spot him, in Nubian shirt and silk skullcap, gazing back at them, taking the novelist’s view.

Caroline has described the quiet evenings of her childhood at Croisset. It was a curious ménage: the girl, the uncle, the grandmother – a solitary representative of each generation, like one of those squeezed houses you sometimes see with a single room on each storey. (The French call such a house un bâton de perroquet, a parrot’s perch.) The three of them, she recalled, would often sit at the balcony of the little pavilion and watch the confident arrival of the night. On the far bank they might just discern the silhouette of a straining horse on the tow-path; from nearby they might just hear a discreet splosh as the eel-fishermen cast off and slipped out into the stream.

Why did Dr Flaubert sell his property at Déville to buy this house? Traditionally, as a refuge for his invalid son, who had just suffered his first attack of epilepsy. But the property at Déville would have been sold anyway. The Paris-to-Rouen railway was being extended to Le Havre, and the line cut straight through Dr Flaubert’s land; part of it was to be compulsorily purchased. You could say that Gustave was shepherded into creative retreat at Croisset by epilepsy. You could also say he was driven there by the railway.

2 Gustave belonged to the first railway generation in France; and he hated the invention. For a start, it was an odious means of transport. ‘I get so fed up on a train that after five minutes I’m howling with boredom. Passengers think it’s a neglected dog; not at all, it’s M. Flaubert, sighing.’ Secondly, it produced a new figure at the dinner table: the railway bore. Conversation on the topic gave Flaubert a colique des wagons; in June 1843 he pronounced the railways to be the third most boring subject imaginable after Mme Lafarge (an arsenic poisoner) and the death of the Duc d’Orléans (killed in his carriage the previous year). Louise Colet, striving for modernity in her poem ‘La Paysanne’, allowed Jean, her soldier returning from the wars in search of his Jeanneton, to notice the running smoke of a train. Flaubert cut the line. ‘Jean doesn’t give a damn about that sort of thing,’ he growled, ‘and nor do I.’

But he didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together. In one of his earliest letters, written when he was fifteen, he lists the misdeeds of modern civilisation: ‘Railways, poisons, enema pumps, cream tarts, royalty and the guillotine.’ Two years later, in his essay on Rabelais, the list of enemies has altered – all except the first item: ‘Railways, factories, chemists and mathematicians.’ He never changed.

3 ‘Superior to everything is – Art. A book of poetry is preferable to a railway.’

4 The function of the railway in Flaubert’s affair with Louise Colet has, to my mind, been rather underestimated. Consider the mechanics of their relationship. She lived in Paris, he at Croisset; he wouldn’t come to the capital, she wasn’t allowed to visit him in the country. So they would meet approximately half-way, at Mantes. Where the Hôtel du Grand Cerf would allow them a night or two of lurid rapture and false promises. Afterwards, the following cycle would take place: Louise would assume an early rendezvous; Gustave would put her off; Louise would plead, grow angry, threaten; Gustave would reluctantly give in and agree to another meeting. It would last just long enough to sate his desires and rekindle her expectations. And so this grumbling three-legged race was run. Did Gustave ever reflect on the fate of an earlier visitor to the town? It was at the capture of Mantes that William the Conqueror fell from his horse and received the injury from which he later died in Rouen.

The Paris-to-Rouen railway – built by the English – opened on May 9th, 1843, barely three years before Gustave and Louise met. The journey to Mantes, for each of them, was cut from a day to a couple of hours. Imagine what it would have been like without the railway. They would have travelled by diligence or river-steamer; they would have been tired and perhaps irritable on seeing one another again. Fatigue affects desire. But in view of the difficulties, more would have been expected of the occasion: more in time – an extra day perhaps – and more in emotional commitment. This is just my theory, of course. But if the telephone in our century has made adultery both simpler and harder (assignations are easier, but so is checking up), the railway in the last century had a similar effect. (Has anyone made a comparative study of the spread of railways and the spread of adultery? I can imagine village priests delivering sermons on the Devil’s invention and being mocked for it; but if they did, they were right.) The railway made it worth while for Gustave: he could get to Mantes and back without too much trouble; and Louise’s complaints perhaps seemed a reasonable price to pay for such accessible pleasure. The railway made it worthwhile for Louise: Gustave was never really far away, however severe he sounded in his letters; the next one would surely say that they could meet again, that only two hours separated them. And the railway made it worthwhile for us, who can now read the letters which resulted from that prolonged erotic oscillation.

5a) September 1846: the first meeting at Mantes. The only problem was Gustave’s mother. She had not as yet been officially informed of Louise’s existence. Indeed, Mme Colet was obliged to send all her love letters to Gustave via Maxime du Camp, who then readdressed them in fresh envelopes. How would Mme Flaubert react to Gustave’s sudden nocturnal absence? What could he tell her? A lie, of course: ‘une petite histoire que ma mère a crue,’ he boasted, like a proud six-year-old, and set off for Mantes.

But Mme Flaubert didn’t believe his petite histoire. She slept less that night than Gustave and Louise did. Something had made her uneasy; perhaps the recent cascade of letters from Maxime du Camp. So the next morning she went to Rouen station, and when her son, still wearing a fresh crust of pride and sex, got off the train, she was waiting for him on the platform. ‘She didn’t utter any reproach, but her face was the greatest reproach anyone could make.’

They talk about the sadness of departure; what about the guilt of arrival?

b) Louise, of course, could play the platform scene as well. Her habit of jealously bursting in on Gustave when he was dining with friends was notorious. She always expected to find a rival; but there was no rival, unless you count Emma Bovary. On one occasion, Du Camp records, ‘Flaubert was leaving Paris for Rouen when she entered the waiting-room of the station and went through such tragic scenes that the railway officials were obliged to interfere. Flaubert was distressed and begged for mercy, but she gave him no quarter.’

6 It is a little-known fact that Flaubert travelled on the London Underground. I quote items from his skeleton travel diary of 1867:

Monday 26 June (on the train from Newhaven). A few insignificant stations with posters, just as at stations on the outskirts of Paris. Arrival at Victoria.

Monday 3 July. Bought a railway timetable.

Friday 7 July. Underground railway – Hornsey. Mrs Farmer… To Charing Cross station for information.

He does not deign to compare the British and the French railways. This is perhaps a pity. Our friend the Reverend G. M. Musgrave, disembarking at Boulogne a dozen years earlier, was much impressed by the French system: ‘The contrivances for receiving, weighing, marking and paying for luggage were simple and excellent. Regularity, precision, and punctuality did the work well in every department. Much civility, much comfort (comfort in France!) made every arrangement pleasurable; and all this without more vociferation or commotion than prevails at Paddington; to say nothing of the second-class carriage being nearly equal to our first. Shame to England that it should be thus!’

7 ‘RAILWAYS: If Napoleon had had them at his disposition, he would have been invincible. Always go into ecstasies about their invention, and say: “I, Monsieur, I who am even now speaking to you, was only this morning at X…; I left by the X-o’clock train; I did the business I had to do there; and by X-o’clock I was back.”’

8 I took the train from Rouen (Rive Droite). There were blue plastic seats and a warning in four languages not to lean out of the window; English, I noticed, requires more words than French, German or Italian to convey this advice. I sat beneath a metal-framed photograph (black and white) of fishing-boats at the Île d’Oléron. Next to me an elderly couple were reading a story in Paris-Normandie about a charcutier, fou d’amour, who had killed a family of seven. On the window was a small sticker I hadn’t seen before: ‘Ne jetez pas l’énergie par les fenêtres en les ouvrant en période de chauffage.’ Do not throw energy out of the windows – How un-English the phrasing was; logical yet fanciful at the same time.

I was being observant, you see. A single ticket costs 35 francs. The journey takes a minute or so under the hour: half what it took in Flaubert’s day. Oissel is the first stop; then Le Vaudreuil — ville nouvelle; Gaillon (Aubevoye), with its Grand Marnier warehouse. Musgrave suggested the scenery along this stretch of the Seine reminded him of Norfolk: ‘More like English scenery than any district I had seen in Europe.’ The ticket-collector raps on the door-jamb with his punch: metal on metal, an order you obey. Vernon; then, on your left, the broad Seine conducts you into Mantes.

Six, place de la République was a building site. A square block of flats was almost finished; already it exhibited the confident innocence of the usurper. The Grand Cerf? Yes, indeed, they told me at the tabac, the old building had stood until a year or so ago. I went back and stared again. All that now remained of the hotel was a couple of tall stone gateposts some thirty feet apart. I gazed at them hopelessly. On the train, I had been unable to imagine Flaubert (howling like an impatient dog? grumbling? ardent?) making the same journey; now at this point of pilgrimage, the gateposts were no help in thinking my way back to the hot reunions of Gustave and Louise. Why should they be? We are too impertinent with the past, counting on it in this way for a reliable frisson. Why should it play our game?

Grumpily I circled the church (Michelin one star), bought a newspaper, drank a cup of coffee, read about the charcutier, fou d’amour, and decided to take the next train back. The road leading to the station is called avenue Franklin Roosevelt, though the reality is a little less grand than the name. Fifty yards from the end, on the left, I came across a café-restaurant. It was called Le Perroquet. Outside, on the pavement, a fretworked wooden parrot with garish green plumage was holding the lunch menu in its beak. The building had one of those brightly timbered exteriors which assert more age than they probably possess. I don’t know if it would have been there in Flaubert’s day. But I know this. Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest.

9 Trains play little part in Flaubert’s fiction. This shows accuracy, however, not prejudice: most of his work is set before the English navvies and engineers descended on Normandy. Bouvard et Pécuchet pokes over into the railway age, but neither of his opinionated copyists, perhaps surprisingly, has a published view on the new mode of transport.

Trains occur only in L’Education sentimentale. They are first mentioned as a not very arresting topic of conversation at a soirée given by the Dambreuses. The first real train, and the first real journey, occur in Part Two, Chapter Three, when Frédéric goes to Creil in the hope of seducing Mme Arnoux. Given the benign impatience of his traveller, Flaubert informs the excursion with an approving lyricism: green plains, stations slipping by like little stage sets, fleecy smoke from the engine dancing briefly on the grass before dispersing. There are several more railway journeys in the novel, and the passengers seem happy enough; at least, none of them howls with boredom like a neglected dog. And though Flaubert aggressively excised from ‘La Paysanne’ Mme Colet’s line about the running smoke on the horizon, this doesn’t debar from his own countryside (Part Three, Chapter Four) ‘the smoke of a railway engine stretching out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away.’

We may detect his private opinion only at one point. Pellerin, the artist among Frédéric’s companions, a man who specialises in complete theories and incomplete sketches, produces one of his rare finished paintings. Flaubert allows himself a private smile: It represented the Republic, or Progress, or Civilisation, in the figure of Jesus Christ, driving a locomotive through a virgin forest.’

10 The penultimate sentence of Gustave’s life, uttered as he stood feeling dizzy but not at all alarmed: ‘I think I’m going to have a kind of fainting fit. It’s lucky it should happen today; it would have been a great nuisance tomorrow, in the train.’

11 At the buffers. Croisset today. The vast paper factory was churning away on the site of Flaubert’s house. I wandered inside; they were happy to show me round. I gazed at the pistons, the steam, the vats and the slopping trays: so much wetness to produce something as dry as paper. I asked my guide if they made the sort of paper that was used for books; she said they made every sort of paper. The tour, I realised, would not prove sentimental. Above our heads a huge drum of paper, some twenty feet wide, was slowly tracking along on a conveyor. It seemed out of proportion to its surroundings, like a piece of pop sculpture on a deliberately provoking scale. I remarked that it resembled a gigantic roll of lavatory paper; my guide confirmed that this was exactly what it was.

Outside the thumping factory things were scarcely quieter. Lorries bullied past on the road that had once been a tow-path; pile-drivers banged on both sides of the river; no boat could pass without hooting. Flaubert used to claim that Pascal had once visited the house at Croisset; and a tenacious local legend maintained that Abbé Prévost wrote Manon Lescaut there. Nowadays there is no one left to repeat such fictions; and no one to believe them either.

A sullen Normandy rain was falling. I thought of the horse’s silhouette on the far bank, and the quiet splosh as the eel-fishermen cast off. Could even eels live in this cheerless commercial conduit? If they did, they would probably taste of diesel and detergent. My eye moved upriver, and suddenly I noticed it, squat and shuddering. A train. I’d seen the rails before, a set laid between the road and the water; the rain was now making them glisten and smirk. I’d assumed without thinking that they were for the straddling dock cranes to run on. But no: he hasn’t even been spared this. The swaddled goods train was drawn up about two hundred yards away, ready to make its run past Flaubert’s pavilion. It would doubtless hoot derisively as it drew level; perhaps it was carrying poisons, enema pumps and cream tarts, or supplies for chemists and mathematicians. I didn’t want to see the event (irony can be heavy-handed as well as ruthless). I climbed into my car and drove off.