Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

The Reverend George M. Musgrave was a digressive but observant fellow. He was more than a little inclined to pomposity (‘I am bound to speak in terms of high eulogium on the subject of Rouen’s literary reputation’), but his fussiness over detail makes him a useful informant. He notes the French love of leeks and the French abhorrence of rain. He interrogates everyone: a Rouen merchant who amazes him by not having heard of mint sauce, and a canon of Evreux who informs him that in France the men read too much, while the women read next to nothing (O rarer still Emma Bovary!). While in Rouen he visits the Cimetière Monumental the year after Gustave’s father and sister were buried there, and approves its innovative policy of allowing families to buy freehold plots. Elsewhere, he investigates a fertiliser factory, the Bayeux tapestry, and the lunatic asylum at Caen where Beau Brummell died in 1840 (was Brummell mad? The attendants remembered him well: un bon enfant , they said, drank only barley water mixed with a very little wine).

Musgrave also went to the fair at Guibray, and there among the freak shows was The Largest Fat Boy in France: Aimable Jouvin, born at Herblay in 1840, now aged fourteen, admission a penny farthing. How fat was the fat boy? Our rambling sketcher didn’t, alas, go in himself and record the young phenomenon with his pencil; but he waited while a French cavalryman paid his penny farthing, entered the caravan, and emerged mouthing ‘some very choice Norman phraseology’. Though Musgrave did not bring himself to ask the soldier what he had seen, his impression was ‘that Aimable had not been fattened up to the mark of the visitor’s large expectations’.

At Caen Musgrave went to a regatta, where seven thousand spectators lined the dockside. Most of them were men, and most of these were peasants wearing their best blue blouses. The mass effect was of a light but most brilliant ultramarine. It was a particular, exact colour; Musgrave had seen it only once before, in a special department of the Bank of England where they incinerated notes which had been taken out of circulation. Banknote paper was then prepared with a colouring agent made from cobalt, silex, salt and potash: if you set light to a bundle of money, the cinder would take on the extraordinary tint that Musgrave saw on the Caen dockside. The colour of France.

As he travelled on, this colour and its cruder associates became more apparent. The men’s blouses and hose were blue; three-quarters of the women’s gowns were blue. The horses’ housings and collar-decorations were blue; so were the carts, the name-boards of the villages, the agricultural implements, wheelbarrows and water-butts. In many of the towns the houses displayed the cerulean hue, both inside and out. Musgrave found himself compelled to remark to a Frenchman he met that ‘there was more blue in his country than in any region of the world with which I was acquainted.’

We look at the sun through smoked glass; we must look at the past through coloured glass.

Thank you. Santé . You got your cheese, I hope? You won’t mind a word of advice? Eat it. Don’t put it in a plastic bag in the fridge and save it for visitors; before you know where you are it’ll have swollen to three times its size and smell like a chemical factory. You’ll open the bag and be putting your face into a bad marriage.

‘Giving the public details about oneself is a bourgeois temptation that I have always resisted’ (1879). But here goes. You know my name of course: Geoffrey Braithwaite. Don’t miss out the l or you’ll start turning me into a Parisian grocer. No; just my joke. Look. You know those personal advertisements in magazines like the New Statesman? I thought I might do it like that.

60+ widowed doctor, children grown up, active, cheerful if inclined to melancholy, kindly, non-smoker, amateur Flaubert scholar, likes reading, food, travel to familiar places, old films, has friends, but seeks…

You see the problem. But seeks … Do I? What do I seek? A tender fortyish div or wid for companionship stroke marriage? No. Mature lady for country walks, occasional dining? No. Bisexual couple for gleesome threesomes? Certainly not. I always read those pining paragraphs in the back of magazines, though I never feel like replying; and I’ve just realised why. Because I don’t believe any of them. They aren’t lying – indeed, they’re all trying to be utterly sincere – but they aren’t telling the truth. The column distorts the way the advertisers describe themselves. No one would think of himself as an active non-smoker inclined to melancholy if that wasn’t encouraged, even demanded, by the form. Two conclusions: first, that you can’t define yourself directly, just by looking face-on into the mirror; and second, that Flaubert was, as always, right. Style does arise from subject-matter. Try as they might, those advertisers are always beaten down by the form; they are forced – even at the one time they need to be candidly personal – into an unwished impersonality.

You can see, at least, the colour of my eyes. Not as complicated as Emma Bovary’s, are they? But do they help you? They might mislead. I’m not being coy; I’m trying to be useful . Do you know the colour of Flaubert’s eyes? No, you don’t: for the simple reason that I suppressed it a few pages ago. I didn’t want you to be tempted by cheap conclusions. See how carefully I look after you. You don’t like it? I know you don’t like it. All right. Well, according to Du Camp, Gustave the Gallic chieftain, the six-foot giant with a voice like a trumpet, had ‘large eyes as grey as the sea’.

I was reading Mauriac the other day: the Mémoires intérieurs , written at the very end of his life. It’s the time when the final pellets of vanity accumulate into a cyst, when the self starts up its last pathetic murmur of ‘Remember me, remember me…’; it’s the time when the autobiographies get written, the last boasts are made, and the memories which no one else’s brain still holds are written down with a false idea of value.

But that’s just what Mauriac declines to do. He writes his ‘Mémoires’ , but they aren’t his memoirs. We are spared the counting-games and spelling-bees of childhood, that first servant-girl in the humid attic, the canny uncle with metal teeth and a headful of stories – or whatever. Instead, Mauriac tells us about the books he’s read, the painters he’s liked, the plays he’s seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his ‘memoirs’ is like meeting a man on a train who says, ‘Don’t look at me, that’s misleading. If you want to know what I’m like, wait until we’re in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.’ You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever.

Well, you know I’ve got brown eyes; make of that what you will. Six foot one; grey hair; good health. But what matters about me? Only what I know, what I believe, what I can tell you. Nothing much about my character matters. No, that’s not true. I’m honest, I’d better tell you that. I’m aiming to tell the truth; though mistakes are, I suppose, inevitable. And if I make them, at least I’m in good company. The Times , in its obituary column, May 10th, 1880, claims that Flaubert wrote a book called Bouvard et Peluchet , and that he ‘at first adopted his father’s profession – that of surgeon’. My Encyclopaedia Britannica , eleventh edition (the best, they say), suggests that Charles Bovary is a portrait of the novelist’s father. The author of this article, a certain ‘E.G.’, turns out to have been Edmund Gosse. I snorted a bit when I read that. I have a little less time for ‘Mr’ Gosse since my encounter with Ed Winterton.