Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

1857: There is a Latin phrase which means roughly, ‘To pick up a farthing from the shit with your teeth.’ It was a rhetorical figure applied to the miserly. I am like them: I will stop at nothing to find gold.

1867: It’s true that many things infuriate me. The day I stop being indignant I shall fall flat on my face, like a doll when you take away its prop.

1872: My heart remains intact, but my feelings are sharpened on the one hand and dulled on the other, like an old knife that has been too often sharpened, which has notches, and breaks easily.

1872: Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for Beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.

1873: I still carry on turning out my sentences, like a bourgeois turning out napkin rings on a lathe in his attic. It gives me something to do, and it affords me some private pleasure.

1875: Despite your advice, I can’t manage to ‘harden myself’… My sensitivities are all aquiver – my nerves and my brain are sick, very sick; I feel them to be so. But there I go, complaining again, and I don’t want to distress you. I’ll confine myself to your mention of a ‘rock’. Know, then, that very old granite sometimes turns into layers of clay.

1875: I feel uprooted, like a mass of dead seaweed tossed here and there in the waves.

1880: When will the book be finished? That’s the question. If it is to appear next winter, I haven’t a minute to lose between now and then. But there are moments when I’m so tired that I feel I’m liquefying like an old Camembert.

You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

You can do the same with a biography. The trawling net fills, then the biographer hauls it in, sorts, throws back, stores, fillets and sells. Yet consider what he doesn’t catch: there is always far more of that. The biography stands, fat and worthy-burgherish on the shelf, boastful and sedate: a shilling life will give you all the facts, a ten-pound one all the hypotheses as well. But think of everything that got away, that fled with the last deathbed exhalation of the biographee. What chance would the craftiest biographer stand against the subject who saw him coming and decided to amuse himself?

I first met Ed Winterton when he put his hand on mine in the Europa Hotel. Just my little joke; though true as well. It was at a provincial booksellers’ fair and I had reached a little more quickly than he for the same copy of Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences . The conjunction induced immediate apologies, as embarrassed on his side as they were on mine. When we each realised that bibliophilie lust was the only emotion which had produced this laying on of hands, Ed murmured,

‘Step outside and let’s discuss it.’

Over an indifferent pot of tea we revealed our separate paths to the same book. I explained about Flaubert; he announced his interest in Gosse and in English literary society towards the end of the last century. I meet few American academics, and was pleasantly surprised that this one was bored by Bloomsbury, and happy to leave the modern movement to his younger and more ambitious colleagues. But then Ed Winterton liked to present himself as a failure. He was in his early forties, balding, with a pinky glabrous complexion and square rimless spectacles: the banker type of academic, circumspect and moral. He bought English clothes without looking at all English. He remained the sort of American who always wears a mackintosh in London because he knows that in this city rain falls out of a clear sky. He was even wearing his mackintosh in the lounge of the Europa Hotel.

His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in a correct and acceptable fashion. At one point, when discussing the improbability of his Gosse biography ever being finished, let alone published, he paused and dropped his voice:

‘But in any case I sometimes wonder if Mr Gosse would have approved of what I’m doing.’

‘You mean…’ I knew little of Gosse, and my widened eyes hinted perhaps too clearly at naked laundresses, illegitimate half-castes and dismembered bodies.

‘Oh no, no, no. Just the thought of writing about him. He might think it was a bit of a… low blow.’

I let him have the Turgenev, of course, if only to escape a discussion about the morality of possession. I didn’t see where ethics came into the ownership of a second-hand book; but Ed did. He promised to be in touch if ever he ran down another copy. Then we briefly discussed the rights and wrongs of my paying for his tea.

I didn’t expect to hear from him again, let alone on the subject which provoked his letter to me about a year later. ‘Are you interested at all in Juliet Herbert? It sounds a fascinating relationship, judging by the material. I’ll be in London in August, if you will. Ever, Ed (Winterton).’

What does the fiancée feel when she snaps open the box and sees the ring set in purple velvet? I never asked my wife; and it’s too late now. Or what did Flaubert feel as he waited for the dawn on top of the Great Pyramid and finally saw that crack of gold shine from the purple velvet of the night? Astonishment, awe and a fierce glee came into my heart as I read those two words in Ed’s letter. No, not ‘Juliet Herbert’, the other two: first ‘fascinating’ and then ‘material’. And beyond glee, beyond hard work as well, was there something else? A shameful thought of an honorary degree somewhere?

Juliet Herbert is a great hole tied together with string. She became governess to Flaubert’s niece Caroline at some time in the mid-1850s, and remained at Croisset for a few undetermined years; then she returned to London. Flaubert wrote to her, and she to him; they visited one another every so often. Beyond this, we know nothing. Not a single letter to or from her has survived. We know almost nothing about her family. We do not even know what she looked like. No description of her survives, and none of Flaubert’s friends thought to mention her after his death, when most other women of importance in his life were being memorialised.

Biographers disagree about Juliet Herbert. For some, the shortage of evidence indicates that she was of small significance in Flaubert’s life; others conclude from this absence precisely the opposite, and assert that the tantalising governess was certainly one of the writer’s mistresses, possibly the Great Unknown Passion of his life, and perhaps even his fiancée. Hypothesis is spun directly from the temperament of the biographer. Can we deduce love for Juliet Herbert from the fact that Gustave called his greyhound Julio? Some can. It seems a little tendentious to me. And if we do, what do we then deduce from the fact that in various letters Gustave addresses his niece as ‘Loulou’, the name he later transfers to Félicité’s parrot? Or from the fact that George Sand had a ram called Gustave?

Flaubert’s one overt reference to Juliet Herbert comes in a letter to Bouilhet, written after the latter had visited Croisset:

Since I saw you excited by the governess, I too have become excited. At table, my eyes willingly followed the gentle slope of her breast. I believe she notices this for, five or six times per meal, she looks as if she had caught the sun. What a pretty comparison one could make between the slope of the breast and the glacis of a fortress. The cupids tumble about on it, as they storm the citadel. (To be said in our Sheikh’s voice) ‘Well, I certainly know what piece of artillery I’d be pointing in that direction.’