Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

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?

Let me tell you why I hate critics. Not for the normal reasons: that they’re failed creators (they usually aren’t; they may be failed critics, but that’s another matter); or that they’re by nature carping, jealous and vain (they usually aren’t; if anything, they might better be accused of over-generosity, of upgrading the second-rate so that their own fine discriminations thereby appear the rarer). No, the reason I hate critics – well, some of the time – is that they write sentences like this: