Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

1874: Publication of La Tentation de saint Antoine . Despite its strangeness, a gratifying commercial success.

1877: Publication of Trois Contes . A critical and popular success: for the first time Flaubert receives a favourable review from Le Figaro ; the book goes through five editions in three years. Flaubert begins work on Bouvard et Pécuchet . During these final years, his pre-eminence among French novelists is admitted by the next generation. He is fêted and revered. His Sunday afternoons become famous events in literary society; Henry James calls on the Master. In 1879 Gustave’s friends institute the annual Saint Polycarpe dinners in his honour. In 1880 the five co-authors of Les Soirées de Médan , including Zola and Maupassant, present him with an inscribed copy: the gift can be seen as a symbolic salute to Realism from Naturalism.

1880: Full of honour, widely loved, and still working hard to the end, Gustave Flaubert dies at Croisset.

1817: Death of Caroline Flaubert (aged twenty months), the second child of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert and Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert.

1819: Death of Emile-Cléophas Flaubert (aged eight months), their third child.

1821: Birth of Gustave Flaubert, their fifth child.

1822: Death of Jules Alfred Flaubert (aged three years and five months), their fourth child. His brother Gustave, born entre deux morts , is delicate and not expected to live long. Dr Flaubert buys a family plot at the Cimetière Monumental and has a small grave dug in preparation for Gustave. Surprisingly, he survives. He proves a slow child, content to sit for hours with his finger in his mouth and an ‘almost stupid’ expression on his face. For Sartre, he is ‘the family idiot’.

1836: The start of a hopeless, obsessive passion for Elisa Schlesinger which cauterises his heart and renders him incapable of ever fully loving another woman. Looking back, he records: ‘Each of us possesses in his heart a royal chamber. I have bricked mine up.’

1839: Expelled from the Collège de Rouen for rowdyism and disobedience.

1843: The Faculty of Law at Paris announces its first-year examination results. The examiners declare their views by means of red or black balls. Gustave receives two red and two black, and is therefore failed.

1844: Shattering first attack of epilepsy; others are to follow. ‘Each attack’, Gustave writes later, ‘was like a haemorrhage of the nervous system… It was a snatching of the soul from the body, excruciating.’ He is bled, given pills and infusions, put on a special diet, forbidden alcohol and tobacco; a regime of strict confinement and maternal care is necessary if he is not to claim his place at the cemetery. Without having entered the world, Gustave now retires from it. ‘So, you are guarded like a young girl?’ Louise Colet later taunts, accurately. For all but the last eight years of his life, Mme Flaubert watches suffocatingly over his welfare and censors his travel plans. Gradually, over the decades, her frailty overtakes his: by the time he has almost ceased to be a worry to her, she has become a burden to him.

1846: Death of Gustave’s father, quickly followed by that of his beloved sister Caroline (aged twenty-one), which thrusts on to him proxy fatherhood of his niece. Throughout his life, he is constantly bruised by the deaths of those close to him. And there are other ways for friends to die: in June Alfred Le Poittevin marries. Gustave feels it is his third bereavement of the year: ‘You are doing something abnormal,’ he complains. To Maxime du Camp that year he writes, ‘Tears are to the heart what water is to a fish.’ Is it a consolation that in the same year he meets Louise Colet? Pedantry and recalcitrance are mismatched with immoderation and possessiveness. A mere six days after she becomes his mistress, the pattern of their relationship is set: ‘Moderate your cries!’ he complains to her. ‘They are torturing me. What do you want me to do? Am I to leave everything and live in Paris? Impossible.’ This impossible relationship drags on nevertheless for eight years; Louise is puzzlingly unable to grasp that Gustave can love her without ever wanting to see her. ‘If I were a woman,’ he writes after six years, ‘I wouldn’t want myself for a lover. A one-night stand, yes; but an intimate relationship, no.’

1848: Death of Alfred Le Poittevin, aged thirty-two. ‘I see that I’ve never loved anyone – man or woman – as I loved him.’ Twenty-five years later: ‘Not a day passes that I don’t think of him.’

1849: Gustave reads his first full-length adult work, La Tentation de saint Antoine , to his two closest friends, Bouilhet and Du Camp. The reading takes four days, at the rate of eight hours per day. After embarrassed consultation, the listeners tell him to throw it on the fire.

1850: In Egypt, Gustave catches syphilis. Much of his hair falls out; he grows stout. Mme Flaubert, meeting him in Rome the following year, scarcely recognises her son, and finds that he has become very coarse. Middle age begins here. ‘Scarcely are you born before you begin rotting.’ Over the years all but one of his teeth will fall out; his saliva will be permanently blackened by mercury treatment.

1851–7: Madame Bovary . The composition is painful – ‘Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles’ – and the prosecution frightening. In later years Flaubert comes to resent the insistent fame of his masterpiece, which makes others see him as a one-book author. He tells Du Camp that if ever he had a stroke of good luck on the Bourse he would buy up ‘at any cost’ all copies of Madame Bovary in circulation: ‘I should throw them into the fire, and never hear of them again.’

1862: Elisa Schlesinger is interned in a mental hospital; she is diagnosed as suffering from ‘acute melancholia’. After the publication of Salammbô , Flaubert begins to run with rich friends. But he remains childlike in financial matters: his mother has to sell property to pay his debts. In 1867 he secretly hands over control of his financial affairs to his niece’s husband, Ernest Commanville. Over the next thirteen years, through extravagance, incompetent management and bad luck, Flaubert loses all his money.

1869: Death of Louis Bouilhet, whom he had once called ‘the seltzer water which helped me digest life’. ‘In losing my Bouilhet, I had lost my midwife, the man who saw more deeply into my thought than I did myself. Death also of Sainte-Beuve. ‘Another one gone! The little band is diminishing! Who is there to talk about literature with now?’ Publication of L’Education sentimentale ; a critical and commercial flop. Of the hundred and fifty complimentary copies sent to friends and acquaintances, barely thirty are even acknowledged.

1870: Death of Jules de Goncourt: only three of the seven friends who started the Magny dinners in 1862 are now left. During the Franco-Prussian war, the enemy occupies Croisset. Ashamed of being French, Flaubert stops wearing his Légion d’honneur , and resolves to ask Turgenev what he has to do to take Russian citizenship.

1872: Death of Mme Flaubert: ‘I have realised during the last fortnight that my poor dear old mother was the person I loved the most. It’s as if part of my entrails had been torn out.’ Death also of Gautier. ‘With him, the last of my intimate friends is gone. The list is closed.’

1874: Flaubert makes his theatrical début with Le Candidat . It is a complete flop; actors leave the stage with tears in their eyes. The play is taken off after four performances. Publication of La Tentation de saint Antoine . ‘Torn to pieces,’ Flaubert notes, ‘by everything from the Figaro to the Revue des deux mondes… What comes as a surprise is the hatred underlying much of this criticism – hatred for me, for my person – deliberate denigration… This avalanche of abuse does depress me.’