Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

a) Should we feel slighted on Flaubert’s behalf? And if so, should we feel more, or less, slighted on behalf of Michelet (1953), Nerval (1955), George Sand (1957), Vigny (1963), Proust (1966), Zola (1967), Sainte-Beuve (1969), Mérimée and Dumas père (1970), or Gautier (1972)?

b) Estimate the chances of either Louis Bouilhet or Maxime du Camp or Louise Colet appearing on a French stamp.

a) The co-proprietor of the Hôtel du Nil, Cairo, where Flaubert stayed in 1850, was called Bouvaret. The protagonist of his first novel is called Bovary; the co-protagonist of his last novel is called Bouvard. In his play Le Candidat there is a Comte de Bouvigny; in his play Le Château des cœurs there is a Bouvignard. Is this all deliberate?

b) Flaubert’s name was first misprinted by the Revue de Paris as Faubert. There was a grocer in the rue Richelieu called Faubet. When La Presse reported the trial of Madame Bovary , they called its author Foubert. Martine, George Sand’s femme de confiance , called him Flambart. Camille Rogier, the painter who lived in Beirut, called him Folbert: ‘Do you get the subtlety of the joke?’ Gustave wrote to his mother. (What is the joke? Presumably a dual-language rendering of the novelist’s self-image: Rogier was calling him Crazy Bear.) Bouilhet also started calling him Folbert. In Mantes, where he used to meet Louise, there was a Café Flambert. Is this all coincidence?

c) According to Du Camp, the name Bovary should be pronounced with a short o (as in bother). Should we follow his instruction; and if so, why?

Assess the technical difficulties involved in implementing the following stage direction ( Le Château des cœurs , Act VI, scene viii):

The Stock-Pot, the handles of which have been transformed into wings, rises into the air and turns itself over, and while it increases in size so that it appears to hover over the whole town, the vegetables – carrots, turnips and leeks – that come out of it remain suspended in the air and turn into luminous constellations .

Consider the following predictions of Gustave Flaubert:

a) (1850) ‘It seems to me almost impossible that before very long England won’t take control of Egypt. Aden is already full of her troops. It couldn’t be easier: just across Suez, and one fine morning Cairo will be full of redcoats. The news will reach France a couple of weeks later and we’ll all be very surprised! Remember my prediction.’

b) (1852) ‘As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.’

c) (1870, on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war) ‘It will mean the return of racial conflicts. Before a century has passed we’ll see millions of men killed in a single go. The East against the West, the old world against the new. Why not?’

d) (1850) ‘From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting.’

e) (1871) ‘The Internationals are the Jesuits of the future.’

And the parrot? Well, it took me almost two years to solve the Case of the Stuffed Parrot. The letters I had written after first returning from Rouen produced nothing useful; some of them weren’t even answered. Anyone would have thought I was a crank, a senile amateur scholar hooked on trivia and pathetically trying to make a name for himself. Whereas in fact the young are much crankier than the old – far more egotistical, self-destructive and even plain bloody odd. It’s just that they get a more indulgent press. When someone of eighty, or seventy, or fifty-four commits suicide, it’s called softening of the brain, post-menopausal depression, or a final swipe of mean vanity designed to make others feel guilty. When someone of twenty commits suicide, it’s called a high-minded refusal to accept the paltry terms on which life is offered, an act not just of courage but of moral and social revolt. Living? The old can do that for us. Pure crankery, of course. I speak as a doctor.

And while we’re on the subject, I should say that the notion of Flaubert killing himself is pure crankery as well. The crankery of a single man: a Rouennais called Edmond Ledoux. This fantasist crops up twice in Flaubert’s biography; each time all he does is spread gossip. His first unwelcome utterance is the assertion that Flaubert actually became engaged to Juliet Herbert. Ledoux claimed to have seen a copy of La Tentation de saint Antoine inscribed by Gustave to Juliet with the words ‘ A ma fiancée ’. Odd that he saw it in Rouen, rather than in London, where Juliet lived. Odd that nobody else ever saw this copy. Odd that it hasn’t survived. Odd that Flaubert never mentioned such an engagement. Odd that the act would run diametrically counter to what he believed in.

Odd, too, that Ledoux’s other slanderous assertion – of suicide – also runs counter to the writer’s deepest beliefs. Listen to him. ‘Let us have the modesty of wounded animals, who withdraw into a corner and remain silent. The world is full of people who bellow against Providence. One must, if only on the score of good manners, avoid behaving like them.’ And again, that quotation which roosts in my head: ‘People like us must have the religion of despair. By dint of saying “That is so! That is so!” and of gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm.’

Those are not the words of a suicide. They are the words of a man whose stoicism runs as deep as his pessimism. Wounded animals don’t kill themselves. And if you understand that gazing down into the black pit engenders calm, then you don’t jump into it. Perhaps this was Ellen’s weakness: an inability to gaze into the black pit. She could only squint at it, repeatedly. One glance would make her despair, and despair would make her seek distraction. Some outgaze the black pit; others ignore it; those who keep glancing at it become obsessed. She chose the exact dosage: the only occasion when being a doctor’s wife seemed to help her.

Ledoux’s account of the suicide goes like this: Flaubert hanged himself in his bath . I suppose it’s more plausible than saying that he electrocuted himself with sleeping pills; but really… What happened was this. Flaubert got up, took a hot bath, had an apoplectic fit, and stumbled to a sofa in his study; there he was found expiring by the doctor who later issued the death certificate. That’s what happened. End of story. Flaubert’s earliest biographer talked to the doctor concerned and that’s that. Ledoux’s version requires the following chain of events: Flaubert got into his hot bath, hanged himself in some as yet unexplained fashion, then climbed out, hid the rope, staggered to his study, collapsed on the sofa and, when the doctor arrived, managed to die while feigning the symptoms of an apoplectic fit. Really, it’s too ridiculous.

No smoke without fire, they say. I’m afraid there can be. Edmond Ledoux is a prime example of spontaneous smoke. Who was he, anyway, this Ledoux? Nobody seems to know. He wasn’t an authority on anything. He’s a complete nonentity. He only exists as the teller of two lies. Perhaps someone in the Flaubert family once did him harm (did Achille fail to cure his bunion?) and this is his effective revenge. Because it means that few books on Flaubert can end without a discussion – always followed by a dismissal – of the suicide claim. As you see, it’s happened all over again here. Another long digression whose tone of moral indignation is probably counter-productive. And I intended writing about the parrots. At least Ledoux didn’t have a theory about them.