Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

‘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.