Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

We should perhaps note at this point the four principal encounters between the novelist and a member of the parrot family. In the 1830s, during their annual holiday at Trouville, the Flaubert household regularly used to visit a retired sea-captain called Pierre Barbey; his ménage, we are told, included a magnificent parrot. In 1845 Gustave was travelling through Antibes, on his way to Italy, when he came across a sick parakeet which merited an entry in his diary; the bird used to perch carefully on the mudguard of its owner’s light cart, and at dinnertime would be brought in and placed on the mantelpiece. The diarist notes the ‘strange love’ clearly evident between man and pet. In 1851, returning from the Orient via Venice, Flaubert heard a parrot in a gilt cage calling out over the Grand Canal its imitation of a gondolier: ‘ Fà eh, capo die .’ In 1853 he was again in Trouville; lodging with a pharmacien , he found himself constantly irritated by a parrot which screamed, ‘As-tu déjeuné, Jako?’ and ‘ Cocu, mon petit coco .’ It also whistled ‘J’ai du bon tabac .’ Was any of these four birds, in whole or in part, the inspiration behind Loulou? And did Flaubert see another living parrot between 1853 and 1876, when he borrowed a stuffed one from the Museum of Rouen? I leave such matters to the professionals.

I sat on my hotel bed; from a neighbouring room a telephone imitated the cry of other telephones. I thought about the parrot in its alcove barely half a mile away. A cheeky bird, inducing affection, even reverence. What had Flaubert done with it after finishing Un cœur simple? Did he put it away in a cupboard and forget about its irritating existence until he was searching for an extra blanket? And what happened, four years later, when an apoplectic stroke left him dying on his sofa? Did he perhaps imagine, hovering above him, a gigantic parrot – this time not a welcome from the Holy Ghost but a farewell from the Word?

‘I am bothered by my tendency to metaphor, decidedly excessive. I am devoured by comparisons as one is by lice, and I spend my time doing nothing but squashing them.’ Words came easily to Flaubert; but he also saw the underlying inadequacy of the Word. Remember his sad definition from Madame Bovary : ‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’ So you can take the novelist either way: as a pertinacious and finished stylist; or as one who considered language tragically insufficient. Sartreans prefer the second option: for them Loulou’s inability to do more than repeat at second hand the phrases he hears is an indirect confession of the novelist’s own failure. The parrot/writer feebly accepts language as something received, imitative and inert. Sartre himself rebuked Flaubert for passivity, for belief (or collusion in the belief) that on est parlé – one is spoken.

Did that burst of bubbles announce the gurgling death of another submerged reference? The point at which you suspect too much is being read into a story is when you feel most vulnerable, isolated, and perhaps stupid. Is a critic wrong to read Loulou as a symbol of the Word? Is a reader wrong – worse, sentimental – to think of that parrot at the Hôtel-Dieu as an emblem of the writer’s voice? That’s what I did. Perhaps this makes me as simple-minded as Félicité.

But whether you call it a tale or a text, Un cœur simple echoes on in the brain. Allow me to cite David Hockney, benign if unspecific, in his autobiography: ‘The story really affected me, and I felt it was a subject I could get into and really use.’ In 1974 Mr Hockney produced a pair of etchings: a burlesque version of Félicité’s view of Abroad (a monkey stealing away with a woman over its shoulder), and a tranquil scene of Félicité asleep with Loulou. Perhaps he will do some more in due course.

On my last day in Rouen I drove out to Croisset. Normandy rain was falling, soft and dense. What was formerly a remote village on the banks of the Seine, backdropped by green hills, has now become engulfed by thumping dockland. Pile-drivers echo, gantries hang over you, and the river is thickly commercial. Passing lorries rattle the windows of the inevitable Bar Le Flaubert.

Gustave noted and approved the oriental habit of knocking down the houses of the dead; so perhaps he would have been less hurt than his readers, his pursuers, by the destruction of his own house. The factory for extracting alcohol from damaged wheat was pulled down in its turn; and on the site there now stands, more appropriately, a large paper-mill. All that remains of Flaubert’s residence is a small one-storey pavilion a few hundred yards down the road: a summer house to which the writer would retire when needing even more solitude than usual. It now looks shabby and pointless, but at least it’s something. On the terrace outside, a stump of fluted column, dug up at Carthage, has been erected to commemorate the author of Salammbô . I pushed the gate; an Alsatian began barking, and a white-haired gardienne approached. No white coat for her, but a well-cut blue uniform. As I cranked up my French I remembered the trademark of the Carthaginian interpreters in Salammbô : each, as a symbol of his profession, has a parrot tattooed on his chest. Today the brown wrist of the African boules-phyer wears a Mao transfer.

The pavilion contains a single room, square with a tented ceiling. I was reminded of Félicité’s room: ‘It had the simultaneous air of a chapel and a bazaar.’ Here too were the ironic conjunctions – trivial knick-knack beside solemn relic – of the Flaubertian grotesque. The items on display were so poorly arranged that I frequently had to get down on my knees to squint into the cabinets: the posture of the devout, but also of the junk-shop treasure-hunter.

Félicité found consolation in her assembly of stray objects, united only by their owner’s affection. Flaubert did the same, preserving trivia fragrant with memories. Years after his mother’s death he would still sometimes ask for her old shawl and hat, then sit down with them to dream a little. The visitor to the Croisset pavilion can almost do the same: the exhibits, carelessly laid out, catch your heart at random. Portraits, photographs, a clay bust; pipes, a tobacco jar, a letter opener; a toad-inkwell with a gaping mouth; the gold Buddha which stood on the writer’s desk and never irritated him; a lock of hair, blonder, naturally, than in the photographs.

Two exhibits in a side cabinet are easy to miss: a small tumbler from which Flaubert took his last drink of water a few moments before he died; and a crumpled pad of white handkerchief with which he mopped his brow in perhaps the last gesture of his life. Such ordinary props, which seemed to forbid wailing and melodrama, made me feel I had been present at the death of a friend. I was almost embarrassed: three days before I had stood unmoved on a beach where close companions had been killed. Perhaps this is the advantage of making friends with those already dead: your feelings towards them never cool.

Then I saw it. Crouched on top of a high cupboard was another parrot. Also bright green. Also, according to both the gardienne and the label on its perch, the very parrot which Flaubert had borrowed from the Museum of Rouen for the writing of Un cœur simple . I asked permission to take the second Loulou down, set him carefully on the corner of a display cabinet, and removed his glass dome.

How do you compare two parrots, one already idealised by memory and metaphor, the other a squawking intruder? My initial response was that the second seemed less authentic than the first, mainly because it had a more benign air. The head was set straighter on the body, and its expression was less irritating than that of the bird at the Hôtel-Dieu. Then I realised the fallacy in this: Flaubert, after all, hadn’t been given a choice of parrots; and even this second one, which looked the calmer company, might well get on your nerves after a couple of weeks.