Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

He adored her. In London he carried her round the Great Exhibition; this time she was happy to be in his arms, safe from the frightening crowds. He taught her history: the story of Pelopidas and Epaminondas; he taught her geography, taking a shovel and pail of water into the garden, where he would build for her instructive peninsulas, islands, gulfs and promontories. She loved her childhood with him, and the memory of it survived the misfortunes of her adult life. In 1930, when she was eighty-four, Caroline met Willa Cather in Aix-les-Bains, and recalled the hours spent eighty years earlier on a rug in the corner of Gustave’s study: he working, she reading, in strict but proudly observed silence. ‘She liked to think, as she lay in her corner, that she was shut in a cage with some powerful wild animal, a tiger or a lion or a bear, who had devoured his keeper and would spring upon anyone else who opened his door, but with whom she was “quite safe and conceited”, as she said with a chuckle.’

But then the necessities of adulthood arrived. He advised her badly, and she married a weakling. She became a snob; she thought only of smart society; and finally she tried to turn her uncle out of the very house in which the most useful things she knew had been inserted into her brain.

Epaminondas was a Theban general, held to be living proof of all the virtues; he led a career of principled carnage, and founded the city of Megalopolis. As he lay dying, one of those present lamented his lack of issue. He replied, ‘I leave two children, Leuctra and Mantinea’ – the sites of his two most famous victories. Flaubert might have made a similar avowal — ‘I leave two children, Bouvard and Pécuchet’ – because his only child, the niece who became a daughter, had departed into disapproving adulthood. To her, and to her husband, he had become ‘the consumer’.

Gustave taught Caroline about literature. I quote her: ‘He considered no book dangerous that was well written.’ Move forward seventy years or so to a different household in another part of France. This time there is a bookish boy, a mother, and a friend of the mother’s called Mme Picard. The boy later wrote his memoirs; again, I quote: ‘Mme Picard’s opinion was that a child should be allowed to read everything. “No book can be dangerous if it is well written.” ’ The boy, aware of Mme Picard’s frequently expressed view, deliberately exploits her presence and asks his mother’s permission to read a particular and notorious novel. ‘But if my little darling reads books like that at his age,’ says the mother, ‘what will he do when he grows up?’ ‘I shall live them out!’ he replies. It was one of the cleverest retorts of his childhood; it went down in family history, and it won him – or so we are left to assume – readership of the novel. The boy was Jean-Paul Sartre. The book was Madame Bovary .

Does the world progress? Or does it merely shuttle back and forth like a ferry? An hour from the English coast and the clear sky disappears. Cloud and rain escort you back to where you belong. As the weather changes, the boat begins to roll a little, and the tables in the bar resume their metallic conversation. Rattarattarattaratta, fattafattafattafatta . Call and response, call and response. Now it sounds to me like the final stages of a marriage: two separated parties, screwed to their own particular pieces of floor, uttering routine chatter while the rain begins to fall. My wife… Not now, not now.

Pécuchet, during his geological investigations, speculates on what would happen if there were an earthquake beneath the English Channel. The water, he concludes, would rush out into the Atlantic; the coasts of England and France would totter, shift and reunite; the Channel would cease to exist. On hearing his friend’s predictions, Bouvard runs away in terror. For myself, I do not think we need to be quite so pessimistic.

You won’t forget about the cheese, will you? Don’t grow a chemical plant in your fridge. I didn’t ask if you were married. My compliments, or not, as the case may be.

I think I shall go through the Red Channel this time. I feel the need for some company. The Reverend Musgrave’s opinion was that French douaniers behaved like gentlemen, while English customs officers were ruffians. But I find them all quite sympathetic, if you treat them properly.

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.