2 Burials from Barnes' Flaubert

The weary, valetudinarian tone of Flaubert’s letter to

Louise Colet about the sunsets was not a pose. 1846,

after all, was the year when first his father and then his

sister Caroline had died. ‘What a house!’ he wrote. ‘What

a hell!’ All night Gustave watched beside his sister’s

corpse: she lying in her white wedding-dress, he sitting

and reading Montaigne. ,

On the morning of the funeral, he gave her a last fare-

well kiss as she lay in her coffin. For the second time in

three months he heard the battering sound of hobnailed

boots climbing the wooden stairs to fetch a body. Mourn-

ing was scarcely possible that day: practicalities super-

vened. There was a lock of Caroline’s hair to be cut, and

plaster casts of her face and hands to be taken: ‘I saw the

great paws of those‘ louts touching her and covering her

face with plaster. ' Great louts are necessary for funerals. ,

The trail to the cemetery was familiar from the time

before. At the graveside Caroline’s husband broke down.

Gustave watched as the coffin was lowered. Suddenly,

it got stuck: the hole, had been dug too narrow. The

gravediggers got hold of the coffin and shook it; they

pulled it this way and that, twisted it, hacked at it with

a spade, levered at it with crowbars; but still it wouldn’t

m°"°- Finally. One Of them placed his foot flat on the

box, right over Caroline-’s face, and forced it down into

the grave. e

Snap! ' 73

Gustave had a bust made of that face; it presided over

his study all his working life, until his own death, in the

same house, in 1880-. Maupassant helped lay out the

body. Flaubert’s niece asked for the traditional cast of

the writer’s hand to be taken. This proved impossible:

the fist was too tightly- clenched in its terminal seizure.

The procession set off, first to the church at Canteleu,

thento the Cimetiere Monumental, where the picket of

soldiers fired its ludicrous gloss on the last line of Mad-

ame Bovary. A few words were spoken, then the coffin

was lowered. It got stuck. The width had been correctly

judged on this occasion but the gravediggers had skimped

on the length. Sons of louts grappled with the coffin in

vain; they could neither cram it in nor twist it out. After

a few embarrassed minutes the mourners slowly de-

parted, leaving Flaubert jammed into the -ground at an

oblique angle.

The Normans are a famously stingy race, and doubtless

their gravediggers are no exception; perhaps they resent

every superfluous sod they cut, and maintained this re-

sentment as a professional tradition from 1846 to 1880.

Perhaps Nabokov had read Flaubert’s letters before writ-

ing Lolita. Perhaps H.M. Stanley’s admiration for Flau-

belt’s African novel~isn’t entirely surprising. Perhaps

what we read as brute coincidence, silky irony, or brave,

far-sighted modernism, looked quite different at the time.

Flaubert took Monsieur Humbert’s business-card all die

way from Rouen to the Pyramids. Was it meant to be a

chuckling advertisement for his own sensibility; a tease

about the gritty, unpolishable surface of the desert; or

might it just have been a joke on us?