Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

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?