Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot

Grumpily I circled the church (Michelin one star), bought a newspaper, drank a cup of coffee, read about the charcutier, fou d’amour , and decided to take the next train back. The road leading to the station is called avenue Franklin Roosevelt, though the reality is a little less grand than the name. Fifty yards from the end, on the left, I came across a café-restaurant. It was called Le Perroquet. Outside, on the pavement, a fretworked wooden parrot with garish green plumage was holding the lunch menu in its beak. The building had one of those brightly timbered exteriors which assert more age than they probably possess. I don’t know if it would have been there in Flaubert’s day. But I know this. Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest.

9 Trains play little part in Flaubert’s fiction. This shows accuracy, however, not prejudice: most of his work is set before the English navvies and engineers descended on Normandy. Bouvard et Pécuchet pokes over into the railway age, but neither of his opinionated copyists, perhaps surprisingly, has a published view on the new mode of transport.

Trains occur only in L’Education sentimentale . They are first mentioned as a not very arresting topic of conversation at a soirée given by the Dambreuses. The first real train, and the first real journey, occur in Part Two, Chapter Three, when Frédéric goes to Creil in the hope of seducing Mme Arnoux. Given the benign impatience of his traveller, Flaubert informs the excursion with an approving lyricism: green plains, stations slipping by like little stage sets, fleecy smoke from the engine dancing briefly on the grass before dispersing. There are several more railway journeys in the novel, and the passengers seem happy enough; at least, none of them howls with boredom like a neglected dog. And though Flaubert aggressively excised from ‘La Paysanne’ Mme Colet’s line about the running smoke on the horizon, this doesn’t debar from his own countryside (Part Three, Chapter Four) ‘the smoke of a railway engine stretching out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away.’

We may detect his private opinion only at one point. Pellerin, the artist among Frédéric’s companions, a man who specialises in complete theories and incomplete sketches, produces one of his rare finished paintings. Flaubert allows himself a private smile: It represented the Republic, or Progress, or Civilisation, in the figure of Jesus Christ, driving a locomotive through a virgin forest.’

10 The penultimate sentence of Gustave’s life, uttered as he stood feeling dizzy but not at all alarmed: ‘I think I’m going to have a kind of fainting fit. It’s lucky it should happen today; it would have been a great nuisance tomorrow, in the train.’

11 At the buffers. Croisset today. The vast paper factory was churning away on the site of Flaubert’s house. I wandered inside; they were happy to show me round. I gazed at the pistons, the steam, the vats and the slopping trays: so much wetness to produce something as dry as paper. I asked my guide if they made the sort of paper that was used for books; she said they made every sort of paper. The tour, I realised, would not prove sentimental. Above our heads a huge drum of paper, some twenty feet wide, was slowly tracking along on a conveyor. It seemed out of proportion to its surroundings, like a piece of pop sculpture on a deliberately provoking scale. I remarked that it resembled a gigantic roll of lavatory paper; my guide confirmed that this was exactly what it was.

Outside the thumping factory things were scarcely quieter. Lorries bullied past on the road that had once been a tow-path; pile-drivers banged on both sides of the river; no boat could pass without hooting. Flaubert used to claim that Pascal had once visited the house at Croisset; and a tenacious local legend maintained that Abbé Prévost wrote Manon Lescaut there. Nowadays there is no one left to repeat such fictions; and no one to believe them either.

A sullen Normandy rain was falling. I thought of the horse’s silhouette on the far bank, and the quiet splosh as the eel-fishermen cast off. Could even eels live in this cheerless commercial conduit? If they did, they would probably taste of diesel and detergent. My eye moved upriver, and suddenly I noticed it, squat and shuddering. A train. I’d seen the rails before, a set laid between the road and the water; the rain was now making them glisten and smirk. I’d assumed without thinking that they were for the straddling dock cranes to run on. But no: he hasn’t even been spared this. The swaddled goods train was drawn up about two hundred yards away, ready to make its run past Flaubert’s pavilion. It would doubtless hoot derisively as it drew level; perhaps it was carrying poisons, enema pumps and cream tarts, or supplies for chemists and mathematicians. I didn’t want to see the event (irony can be heavy-handed as well as ruthless). I climbed into my car and drove off.

But it’s also what they didn’t build. It’s the houses they dreamed and sketched. It’s the brusque boulevards of the imagination; it’s that untaken, sauntering path between toupeed cottages; it’s the trompe l’oeil cul-de-sac which bluffs you into the belief that you’re entering some smart avenue.

Do the books that writers don’t write matter? It’s easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn’t be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they’ve been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn’t always abandoned because it fails some quality-control test. The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

With Flaubert, the apocrypha cast a second shadow. If the sweetest moment in life is a visit to the brothel which doesn’t come off, perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

Of course, the published works themselves aren’t immutable: they might now look different had Flaubert been awarded time and money to put his literary estate in order. Bouvard et Pécuchet would have been finished; Madame Bovary might have been suppressed (how seriously do we take Gustave’s petulance against the overbearing fame of the book? a little seriously); and L’Education sentimentale might have had a different ending. Du Camp records his friend’s dismay at the book’s historical misfortune: a year after publication came the Franco-Prussian war, and it seemed to Gustave that the invasion and the débâcle at Sedan would have provided a grand, public and irrebuttable conclusion to a novel which set out to trace the moral failure of a generation.