To this day in Spring Green one hears stories not of Wright’s greatness but of his purported fiscal skuldug-
gery. lf the Wrights’ attitude toward money was a notable aberration in
the Oak Park of the nineties, so was their profligacy in respect to childbear-
ing, Few of the ambitious young couples in that community were hurling
child after child into the world; the white Protestant upper-middle-class
world had achieved a few more or less successful methods of birth control
by that time and six or more children were beginning to be regarded as
evidence of a deplorable carelessness, not to say lubricity.
++++++++++
Meanwhile, furniture for the Administration Building was being con-
structed according to Wright’s designs. As he had done in the case of the
Larkin building, Wright had persuaded Johnson that the building and its
contents must be seen to be of one nature. The furniture that he designed,
mostly of metal, shared the same streamlining as the building: desks and
chairs were either rounded or curved and in their emphasis upon horizontal-
ity somewhat resembled the biplanes and triplanes designed by aeronautical
engineers early in the century—heavy as the furniture might be, one sus-
pected it of being capable of flight. Despite much advice to the contrary
Wright insisted ondesigning a chair with three legs, remarkable for its
instability. With his usual gift for employing any argument, however implau-
sible, in order to have his way, Wright claimed that the chair would improve
the alertness and efficiency of the employees by forcing them to adopt a
correct posture in order not to tip over. The chair having spilled enough
people unceremoniously onto the floor (Wright himself is said to have
been one of them), he was at last obliged to approve the design of a
comparatively normal four-legged chair.
The Administration Building officially opened in May 1939 after
almost three years of construction and at a cost approaching three million
dollars. Neither time nor money mattered—the building was an instanta-
neous triumph, both with the executives and employees of the company
and with the world at large. To this day, it gives delight and no amount
of criticism, whether of its oddity in aesthetic terms or its elitism in philosoph-
ical terms, is likely to diminish that delight. As far as I know, few writers
have concerned themselves with the question of Wright’s sudden and unex-
pected espousal of streamlining, which he carried to such extraordinary
lengths in the Administration Building and, later, in the Research Tower.
(In the Capital’ journal project, upon which the Administration Building
was based, the shell of the building was severely rectilinear.)
Streamlining was known to be of practical value in the design of automo-
biles, airplanes, and trains, but in the nineteen thirties it became the fashion
to design stationary objects whether large or small (refrigerators, furnaces
electric toasters, and even pencil sharpeners) with so-called aerodynamic
contours; the fashion spread to architecture, colliding with the weaponlike
Zigzags of Art Deco and sometimes marrying them. But what has streamlin-
ing to do with architecture except as an expression of meretricious faddish-
negss? The Administration Building wasn’t going anywhere and had no
need for reduced wind resistance; in its relentless multiplicity of suave
roundnesses, it embodied some playful whim in Wright’s unconcious-
one that was wholly at odds with the no less playful whim that led to the
vivid angularities of Fallingwater, designed at precise the same time.
is tempting to find a clue to Wright’s streamlining of the ]ohnson Wax
building in the fact that Hib Johnson and he, both devotees of fine cars
owned Lincoln Zephyrs, which have entered ‘history as among
handsome streamlined cars ever designed. Wright claimed, without adduc-
ing proof ilhat he was the first to apply the term “streamlining” to build-
ings—the,first use of the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
goes back to the early years of the present century—and he certainly took
pride in the virtuosity with which he manipulated it. He was delighted
when Life magazine described the interior of the building as “like a woman
swimming naked in a stream”
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Futility by Gerhardie
All is tumbling, going to ruin. In a month or so all business
will stop, works will close down. The rouble will be value-
less. There will be nothing. . . ’
‘ Now don’t lose courage, Nikolai,’ said Fanny Ivanovna
hopefully. ‘ We shall pull through; somehow we shall;
and then on the other side of the grave we shall be safe.’
‘ Her most optimistic moment in lifel ’ jeered Nikolai
Vasilievich.
‘ It’s a surprising thing what the human soul will stand,
Andrei Andreiech,’ she said. ‘ I can venture only this
explanation; it is habit. You see, the cup is ever filled to
the brim, but—1o I the miracle l the cup expands. No
trouble. None !—And here we are.’ '
‘ Life gets you,’ came from the window ; ‘ sooner or later
it gets you all the same.’
‘ I don’t know what it’s for, why, or who wants it. It
seems so unnecessary, useless, even silly. And yet I cannot
think that it’s all in vain. There must be—perhaps a larger
pattern somewhere in which all these futilities, these shifting
incongruities are somehow reconciled. But shall we know P
Shall we ever know the reason? ’
‘ Philosophy l ’ jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly.
‘ Perhaps,’ I said, ‘ when we awaken on the other side of
death and ask to be told the reason, they will shrug their
shoulders and say, “ We don’t know. It is beyond us. D
-------
Admiral in person and asked for two additional coupés, to
accommodate her and the three sisters. The Admiral was a
sailor and a gentleman. He promised her two coupés.
I forget which wing of the family was the next to apply.
I remember that every day that week our waiting-room was
crowded with petitioners. The Admiral said No. He found
himself saying No innumerable times each day. Now it is an
intrinsic part of the Russian character that it does not accept
No for No. It is constitutionally incapable of doing so. Its
institutions are all a negation of that principle. And what
is more, it refuses to confine that fact to within the Russian
border. It regards it in the light of world-wide applica-
tion, assuming that it is indeed nothing less than human
nature.
The Admiral still said N0. He held that it was not human
nature but just Russian nature, and as an illustration of his
point he meant to show that when an Englishman says No
he does mean N 0. But none of them would understand the
Admiral’s interpretation of No. They had all grown up
with the idea that N o meant Yes after an adequate amount
of pressure and insistence. The pressure was of various
kinds, according to the age, sex and nature of the applicant.
There were tears, entreaties. There were questions, such as
the ‘ object ’ of the Allies in Siberia, since they monopolized
the best trains and refused to help the Russians in their
primary needs. There were direct questions which it was
thought must needs shatter the impregnability of the
Admiral’s N 0, such as, for instance : Did the Admiral wish
to starve them, as he evidently did, by cutting them adrift
from Nikolai Vasilievich, the bread~winner?
The Admiral still said that No was No, and would they
please understand it ? They all replied that No was not the
point, the point being: What were they to do without Nikolai
Vasilievich? Whereon the Admiral replied that when he
said a thing he meant it, this being the sterling value of
British character. But they persisted all the same, treating
him as if he were just human like the rest of them. Then the
Admiral became a little angry. It annoyed him that they
should fail to understand the primary fact that an English-
man was not a Russian and that hence any laxity that held
good in Russian character did not hold good in that of a
native of the British Isles. But the Russians hammered on
in spite of all; till the Admiral was heartily amused that
they should indeed know no better than to think that he
would give in just because they persisted, for the ignorance
of human nature that, he thought, such a belief implied-
a quaint and childish ignorance—began to fascinate him. He
looked at them and looked at them again, as they poured
forth their woes—and marvelled. Indeed, their touching
innocence fascinated him so much that finally he felt he
wanted to humour them, as one is inclined to humour quaint,
unreasonable children who know no better. And it was by
way of humouring them that the Admiral gave way. No
(for once only) was to mean Yes. They thanked him cordi-
ally. He sighed and wiped his forehead with his handker-
chief. The Russian character had won the day.
will stop, works will close down. The rouble will be value-
less. There will be nothing. . . ’
‘ Now don’t lose courage, Nikolai,’ said Fanny Ivanovna
hopefully. ‘ We shall pull through; somehow we shall;
and then on the other side of the grave we shall be safe.’
‘ Her most optimistic moment in lifel ’ jeered Nikolai
Vasilievich.
‘ It’s a surprising thing what the human soul will stand,
Andrei Andreiech,’ she said. ‘ I can venture only this
explanation; it is habit. You see, the cup is ever filled to
the brim, but—1o I the miracle l the cup expands. No
trouble. None !—And here we are.’ '
‘ Life gets you,’ came from the window ; ‘ sooner or later
it gets you all the same.’
‘ I don’t know what it’s for, why, or who wants it. It
seems so unnecessary, useless, even silly. And yet I cannot
think that it’s all in vain. There must be—perhaps a larger
pattern somewhere in which all these futilities, these shifting
incongruities are somehow reconciled. But shall we know P
Shall we ever know the reason? ’
‘ Philosophy l ’ jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly.
‘ Perhaps,’ I said, ‘ when we awaken on the other side of
death and ask to be told the reason, they will shrug their
shoulders and say, “ We don’t know. It is beyond us. D
-------
Admiral in person and asked for two additional coupés, to
accommodate her and the three sisters. The Admiral was a
sailor and a gentleman. He promised her two coupés.
I forget which wing of the family was the next to apply.
I remember that every day that week our waiting-room was
crowded with petitioners. The Admiral said No. He found
himself saying No innumerable times each day. Now it is an
intrinsic part of the Russian character that it does not accept
No for No. It is constitutionally incapable of doing so. Its
institutions are all a negation of that principle. And what
is more, it refuses to confine that fact to within the Russian
border. It regards it in the light of world-wide applica-
tion, assuming that it is indeed nothing less than human
nature.
The Admiral still said N0. He held that it was not human
nature but just Russian nature, and as an illustration of his
point he meant to show that when an Englishman says No
he does mean N 0. But none of them would understand the
Admiral’s interpretation of No. They had all grown up
with the idea that N o meant Yes after an adequate amount
of pressure and insistence. The pressure was of various
kinds, according to the age, sex and nature of the applicant.
There were tears, entreaties. There were questions, such as
the ‘ object ’ of the Allies in Siberia, since they monopolized
the best trains and refused to help the Russians in their
primary needs. There were direct questions which it was
thought must needs shatter the impregnability of the
Admiral’s N 0, such as, for instance : Did the Admiral wish
to starve them, as he evidently did, by cutting them adrift
from Nikolai Vasilievich, the bread~winner?
The Admiral still said that No was No, and would they
please understand it ? They all replied that No was not the
point, the point being: What were they to do without Nikolai
Vasilievich? Whereon the Admiral replied that when he
said a thing he meant it, this being the sterling value of
British character. But they persisted all the same, treating
him as if he were just human like the rest of them. Then the
Admiral became a little angry. It annoyed him that they
should fail to understand the primary fact that an English-
man was not a Russian and that hence any laxity that held
good in Russian character did not hold good in that of a
native of the British Isles. But the Russians hammered on
in spite of all; till the Admiral was heartily amused that
they should indeed know no better than to think that he
would give in just because they persisted, for the ignorance
of human nature that, he thought, such a belief implied-
a quaint and childish ignorance—began to fascinate him. He
looked at them and looked at them again, as they poured
forth their woes—and marvelled. Indeed, their touching
innocence fascinated him so much that finally he felt he
wanted to humour them, as one is inclined to humour quaint,
unreasonable children who know no better. And it was by
way of humouring them that the Admiral gave way. No
(for once only) was to mean Yes. They thanked him cordi-
ally. He sighed and wiped his forehead with his handker-
chief. The Russian character had won the day.
Flaubert by Brown
Excerpts:
Dismayed by their son’s self-squander, her unhappy marriage, and their
rootless life in a community of privileged transients, Elisa showed signs of
mental derangement. Everything caused her pain: people’s conversation,
slight breezes, birdsong. Unable to cry, to read, to write, to wash herself, to
assuage stinging pains in her arms or banish the idea that her veins had been
emptied of blood, she was committed to a sanatorium near Achern
in Wurttemberg. The staff diagnosed her as a hypersensitive melancholic
whose recovery called for a period of complete separation from an in-
compatible husband.
+ + +
Born to minor gentry rooted in the western Loire valley,
Marie-Sophie lived near Angers on property that afforded her an inde-
pendence and knew almost nothing of the world beyond Anjou except
through books. Catholicism, socialism, and literature had variously guided
her mind to the cul-de-sac in which she found herself when Madame Bo-
vary entered her life. Educated at convent school, where live embers of joy
had been efficiently stamped out, she devoted herself well past her twenties
to a mother guilt-ridden for having divorced her first husband during the
Revolution, when divorce briefly became legal and easily accomplished,
Marie Catherine Leroyer de Chantepie exacerbated Marie-Sophie’s reli-
gious scruples with her own obsessive fear of damnation. During the 18305
an alternative faith presented itself in the form of socialism, to which
Marie-Sophie was led by her physician. George Sand, with whom she ini-
tiated a correspondence as prolific as the one with Flaubert, encouraged her
social radicalism, and after the death of Marie Catherine, Marie—Sophie
estate, Tertre Saint-Laurent, became a ramshackle phalanstery housing
fourteen dependents, among them her godson, an adopted orphan, and
Polish refugee. “They have no livelihood and count on me for
they need,” she told Flaubert. “My father left me ten thousand francs of
come from farmland, which isn’t enough to support a throng that
sumes without earning. I must have recourse to expedients and deny
everything.” Everything included conjugal love. She had been in love
an opera singer named Eugene, and there had been one or two prospects
marriage, but her misgivings gained the upper hand when George
whom she asked for advice, declared marriage to be an “odious”
tion. Fourteen people did not fill the emotional void. Nor had
freed her from the influence of Catholic demonology. Haunted by
even for imaginary sins, she could neither confess them nor cease to
absolution.
Dismayed by their son’s self-squander, her unhappy marriage, and their
rootless life in a community of privileged transients, Elisa showed signs of
mental derangement. Everything caused her pain: people’s conversation,
slight breezes, birdsong. Unable to cry, to read, to write, to wash herself, to
assuage stinging pains in her arms or banish the idea that her veins had been
emptied of blood, she was committed to a sanatorium near Achern
in Wurttemberg. The staff diagnosed her as a hypersensitive melancholic
whose recovery called for a period of complete separation from an in-
compatible husband.
+ + +
Born to minor gentry rooted in the western Loire valley,
Marie-Sophie lived near Angers on property that afforded her an inde-
pendence and knew almost nothing of the world beyond Anjou except
through books. Catholicism, socialism, and literature had variously guided
her mind to the cul-de-sac in which she found herself when Madame Bo-
vary entered her life. Educated at convent school, where live embers of joy
had been efficiently stamped out, she devoted herself well past her twenties
to a mother guilt-ridden for having divorced her first husband during the
Revolution, when divorce briefly became legal and easily accomplished,
Marie Catherine Leroyer de Chantepie exacerbated Marie-Sophie’s reli-
gious scruples with her own obsessive fear of damnation. During the 18305
an alternative faith presented itself in the form of socialism, to which
Marie-Sophie was led by her physician. George Sand, with whom she ini-
tiated a correspondence as prolific as the one with Flaubert, encouraged her
social radicalism, and after the death of Marie Catherine, Marie—Sophie
estate, Tertre Saint-Laurent, became a ramshackle phalanstery housing
fourteen dependents, among them her godson, an adopted orphan, and
Polish refugee. “They have no livelihood and count on me for
they need,” she told Flaubert. “My father left me ten thousand francs of
come from farmland, which isn’t enough to support a throng that
sumes without earning. I must have recourse to expedients and deny
everything.” Everything included conjugal love. She had been in love
an opera singer named Eugene, and there had been one or two prospects
marriage, but her misgivings gained the upper hand when George
whom she asked for advice, declared marriage to be an “odious”
tion. Fourteen people did not fill the emotional void. Nor had
freed her from the influence of Catholic demonology. Haunted by
even for imaginary sins, she could neither confess them nor cease to
absolution.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
And endlessly quotable
that speculation had become a substitute for religious exaltation, the Bourse
a profane temple, the broker a shaman, financial jargon an incantatory lan-
guage, and the mass of French a worshipful throng.
More conservative writers did not quarrel with Zola’s metaphor, inclined
though some might have been to qualify it or turn it against the godless
doctrine on which he relied for the grand design of his fictional saga. Tra-
dition had unquestionably been dealt a blow by circumstances beyond any-
body’s control. Where bourgeois wisdom held that the virtuous man
planned, labored, saved; that he placed his faith in tangible things; that he
found the reward for all he begrudged himself in his children’s advance-
ment; and that he set posterity a shining example of the golden rule, cir-
cumstances now urged men to believe that the magic attending stock
market numbers augured a new dispensation. Paris swarmed with immi-
grants from provincial France who had come by railroad seeking fortune in
the capital, only to end up in some squalid tenement outside the customs
barrier eating dust all the days of their life. More Parisians than not went to
bed hungry at night. But a gambler could always cite that other swarm on
whom fortune had smiled, the golden dustmen who had struck it rich, the
parvenus who justified Tocqueville’s contention, “There is no longer a race
of wealthy men, just as there is no longer a race of poor people; the former
emerge every day from the bosom of the crowd and constantly return to
it.” Not since Revolutionary days, when the Convention made sang, or
aristocratic blood, and naissance, or high birth, obsolete by decreeing
Year 1, had Frenchmen with nothing to lose, but something to wager;‘]j1i';/
greeted so warmly the prospect of losing their past. v i
. Otherwise, dra-
matic art went into serious decline, as interest shifted from theater to con-
jury, with playwrights relying more and more on the technician who
devised special effects. Victor Séjour’s The Madonna of the Roses, for exam-
ple, owed its entire success to a fire simulated with bengal lights, bellows,
“spark,” and lycopodium. When Dennery’s The Battle of Marengo played at
the Chatelet, the manager requisitioned several four-inch artillery pieces
from the War Ministry and arranged to have their gun crews fire blank
shells, without any assurance that the theater’s glass roof could withstand
the shock wave. A production of Meyerbeer’s The African I/l/01/nan at the
Opera took place on a stage transformed into an enormous ship that was
made to rock fore and aft by hands working machinery underneath it. King
Carrot, a féerie, or extravaganza, written by Victorien Sardou and Jacques
Offenbach, in which an old magician who is dismembered and burned
piecemeal emerges from the fire a young man, inspired devices of the ut-
most ingenuity. “The machinist’s art uses all its resources in the construction
of tmcs. Some of them are veritable masterpieces,” declared one technician.
“The machinist is at once a carpenter, a cabinetmaker, and a mechanic. The
study of design and of dynamics is indispensable to him. Physics and even
chemistry furnish him many effects.”
While the church was accrediting Bernadette’s vision at Lourdes in hopes
of recovering something of its authority from science, theater was discred-
iting occultism with gimmicks that enhanced the prestige of the engineer.
Those who turned a deaf ear to Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors got all the magic
they wanted on the Boulevard, where the supernatural, like everything else,
became big business. Behind the backdrop and beneath the floorboards of
several dozen stages, machinists and electricians, scene painters and uphol-
Sterers, locksmiths and blacksmiths, smoke-and-fire makers, fountain keep-
§Y$, and lighting masters all did yeomen work in the service of yet another
industry, the entertainment industry, which made fairy-tale scenes for the
Caffiage trade, manufacturing them with the same fastidiousness that
Vlollet-le-Duc applied to his restoration of medieval fortresses and
Napoleon III to the trappings of Napoleonic glory.
* * * * * *
“This publication has convinced me once
again of women’s deep—seated immorality,” he declared to Feydeau, sparing.
not even those women whom we know he held in high esteem. “You will
object that that one [Louise Colet] is a monster, which I deny. There aren’t
any monsters, alas, and if there were, as many men could fill the role as
women. But one thing no man would do is treat a former mistress as she has
her ex-lover. Women have no notion of rectitude. The best among them
have no compunctions about listening at doors, unsealing letters, counsel-
ing and practicing a thousand little deceits, etc. It all goes back to their
organ. Where man has an Eminence, they have a Hole! That eminence is
Reason, Order, Science, the Phallus-Sun, and the hole is night, humidity,
confusion.”
a profane temple, the broker a shaman, financial jargon an incantatory lan-
guage, and the mass of French a worshipful throng.
More conservative writers did not quarrel with Zola’s metaphor, inclined
though some might have been to qualify it or turn it against the godless
doctrine on which he relied for the grand design of his fictional saga. Tra-
dition had unquestionably been dealt a blow by circumstances beyond any-
body’s control. Where bourgeois wisdom held that the virtuous man
planned, labored, saved; that he placed his faith in tangible things; that he
found the reward for all he begrudged himself in his children’s advance-
ment; and that he set posterity a shining example of the golden rule, cir-
cumstances now urged men to believe that the magic attending stock
market numbers augured a new dispensation. Paris swarmed with immi-
grants from provincial France who had come by railroad seeking fortune in
the capital, only to end up in some squalid tenement outside the customs
barrier eating dust all the days of their life. More Parisians than not went to
bed hungry at night. But a gambler could always cite that other swarm on
whom fortune had smiled, the golden dustmen who had struck it rich, the
parvenus who justified Tocqueville’s contention, “There is no longer a race
of wealthy men, just as there is no longer a race of poor people; the former
emerge every day from the bosom of the crowd and constantly return to
it.” Not since Revolutionary days, when the Convention made sang, or
aristocratic blood, and naissance, or high birth, obsolete by decreeing
Year 1, had Frenchmen with nothing to lose, but something to wager;‘]j1i';/
greeted so warmly the prospect of losing their past. v i
. Otherwise, dra-
matic art went into serious decline, as interest shifted from theater to con-
jury, with playwrights relying more and more on the technician who
devised special effects. Victor Séjour’s The Madonna of the Roses, for exam-
ple, owed its entire success to a fire simulated with bengal lights, bellows,
“spark,” and lycopodium. When Dennery’s The Battle of Marengo played at
the Chatelet, the manager requisitioned several four-inch artillery pieces
from the War Ministry and arranged to have their gun crews fire blank
shells, without any assurance that the theater’s glass roof could withstand
the shock wave. A production of Meyerbeer’s The African I/l/01/nan at the
Opera took place on a stage transformed into an enormous ship that was
made to rock fore and aft by hands working machinery underneath it. King
Carrot, a féerie, or extravaganza, written by Victorien Sardou and Jacques
Offenbach, in which an old magician who is dismembered and burned
piecemeal emerges from the fire a young man, inspired devices of the ut-
most ingenuity. “The machinist’s art uses all its resources in the construction
of tmcs. Some of them are veritable masterpieces,” declared one technician.
“The machinist is at once a carpenter, a cabinetmaker, and a mechanic. The
study of design and of dynamics is indispensable to him. Physics and even
chemistry furnish him many effects.”
While the church was accrediting Bernadette’s vision at Lourdes in hopes
of recovering something of its authority from science, theater was discred-
iting occultism with gimmicks that enhanced the prestige of the engineer.
Those who turned a deaf ear to Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors got all the magic
they wanted on the Boulevard, where the supernatural, like everything else,
became big business. Behind the backdrop and beneath the floorboards of
several dozen stages, machinists and electricians, scene painters and uphol-
Sterers, locksmiths and blacksmiths, smoke-and-fire makers, fountain keep-
§Y$, and lighting masters all did yeomen work in the service of yet another
industry, the entertainment industry, which made fairy-tale scenes for the
Caffiage trade, manufacturing them with the same fastidiousness that
Vlollet-le-Duc applied to his restoration of medieval fortresses and
Napoleon III to the trappings of Napoleonic glory.
* * * * * *
“This publication has convinced me once
again of women’s deep—seated immorality,” he declared to Feydeau, sparing.
not even those women whom we know he held in high esteem. “You will
object that that one [Louise Colet] is a monster, which I deny. There aren’t
any monsters, alas, and if there were, as many men could fill the role as
women. But one thing no man would do is treat a former mistress as she has
her ex-lover. Women have no notion of rectitude. The best among them
have no compunctions about listening at doors, unsealing letters, counsel-
ing and practicing a thousand little deceits, etc. It all goes back to their
organ. Where man has an Eminence, they have a Hole! That eminence is
Reason, Order, Science, the Phallus-Sun, and the hole is night, humidity,
confusion.”
So beautifully written....
In admiration of Frederick Brown:
Flaubert’s last chapters round out a perfectly coherent vision. His heroines? »
suicide and the way she kills herself are of a piece with her desire for some-
thing transcendently fulfilling, which had shaped her character around a des-Q?‘
perate emptiness. Poison suits Emma. Throughout the novel food tends toi‘ 1
sicken her or, on the contrary, to lose all material relevance in her
world. When guests at her wedding feast eat, she sees peasant mouths
stuffed, but when patricians at the Andervilliers chateau gather around a
with victuals piled high amid bouquets of flowers, cut crystal, and
cloches, she sees a beautiful tableau mort. The woman who starves, hating
body, cannot nourish others, least of all the unwanted daughter farmed
to a wet nurse for suckling. Only once does she eat with appetite, and that
the meal she makes of death. “[She] seized the blue jar, tore out the
stuck her hand inside and, bringing out a fistful of arsenic, wolfed down
white powder.” The anorexic gluttony of her last supper prepares one for
incorporeal lust of her farewell. “The priest got up with a crucifix in
whereupon she craned her neck as if to have her thirst quenched and
all that was left of her strength in one last kiss, the most passionate she
ever given, planting her lips on the body of the Man-God.“
*Many years later, answering a questionnaire from Hippolyte Taine about the
fl
After Emma’s ultimate Charles’s n grie , an erein s
the conceptual beauty of Madame B01/ary. Forming a circle of incompre-
hension, it begins with Charles the dim-witted country boy mocked by
younger classmates at a Rouen collegiate school and ends with Charles the
mourner bereft of a wife he had never known, whose infidelities, once re-
vealed to him, make her at once more inaccessible and more desirable. As
Emma had always sought reality in romantic communion with paltry stand-
ins for the Man-God, so had poor Charles always sought his own image in
the opaque mirror of his idol’s mind. Especially poignant is Flaubert’s de-
scription of Charles as a young husband peering into Emma’s eyes when
she opens them in the morning.
Mornings lying face-to-face, he’d watch the sunlight play over the golden down
on her cheeks, partly covered by the scallops of her nightcap. Seen from so close,
her eyes loomed large, especially when she fluttered her lids upon awakening.
Black in the shade and dark blue in broad daylight, it’s as if their color were lay-
ered in depth, more opaque toward the back but brightening as it approached
the enameled surface. His own eye got lost in these depths, where he saw him-
self from the shoulders up, a miniature bust with a silk scarf wrapped around his
head and his nightshirt open.
The mineral cave of her inner being sightlessly reflects a tiny, insignificant
votary. Idols don’t see, they reflect, like the “inscrutable Sphinx” in Baude-
laire’s poem “La Beauté,” who fascinates her “docile lovers” with “pure
mirrors that make everything more beautiful.” (In a letter to Baudelaire
about Les Fleurs du mal, Flaubert singled out “La Beauté” for praise.) ‘After
Emma’s death, Charles still loses himself in her eyes. The mirror remains, as
Charles, trying to resuscitate Emma in his very person, strikes poses that
might have won him her approval. “To please her, as if she were still alive,
he embraced her predilections, her ideas. He bought patent leather boots,
he took to wearing white cravats, he slicked his mustache with perfumed
Wax, he signed promissory notes, as she had done. She was corrupting him
from beyond the grave.” Finally each dies in character, she by her own
hand, he passively, of a broken heart, hopelessly entranced by the woman
who visited herself on him like a whirlwind, rendering him unfit for a life
proportionate to his nature.
Flaubert’s last chapters round out a perfectly coherent vision. His heroines? »
suicide and the way she kills herself are of a piece with her desire for some-
thing transcendently fulfilling, which had shaped her character around a des-Q?‘
perate emptiness. Poison suits Emma. Throughout the novel food tends toi‘ 1
sicken her or, on the contrary, to lose all material relevance in her
world. When guests at her wedding feast eat, she sees peasant mouths
stuffed, but when patricians at the Andervilliers chateau gather around a
with victuals piled high amid bouquets of flowers, cut crystal, and
cloches, she sees a beautiful tableau mort. The woman who starves, hating
body, cannot nourish others, least of all the unwanted daughter farmed
to a wet nurse for suckling. Only once does she eat with appetite, and that
the meal she makes of death. “[She] seized the blue jar, tore out the
stuck her hand inside and, bringing out a fistful of arsenic, wolfed down
white powder.” The anorexic gluttony of her last supper prepares one for
incorporeal lust of her farewell. “The priest got up with a crucifix in
whereupon she craned her neck as if to have her thirst quenched and
all that was left of her strength in one last kiss, the most passionate she
ever given, planting her lips on the body of the Man-God.“
*Many years later, answering a questionnaire from Hippolyte Taine about the
fl
After Emma’s ultimate Charles’s n grie , an erein s
the conceptual beauty of Madame B01/ary. Forming a circle of incompre-
hension, it begins with Charles the dim-witted country boy mocked by
younger classmates at a Rouen collegiate school and ends with Charles the
mourner bereft of a wife he had never known, whose infidelities, once re-
vealed to him, make her at once more inaccessible and more desirable. As
Emma had always sought reality in romantic communion with paltry stand-
ins for the Man-God, so had poor Charles always sought his own image in
the opaque mirror of his idol’s mind. Especially poignant is Flaubert’s de-
scription of Charles as a young husband peering into Emma’s eyes when
she opens them in the morning.
Mornings lying face-to-face, he’d watch the sunlight play over the golden down
on her cheeks, partly covered by the scallops of her nightcap. Seen from so close,
her eyes loomed large, especially when she fluttered her lids upon awakening.
Black in the shade and dark blue in broad daylight, it’s as if their color were lay-
ered in depth, more opaque toward the back but brightening as it approached
the enameled surface. His own eye got lost in these depths, where he saw him-
self from the shoulders up, a miniature bust with a silk scarf wrapped around his
head and his nightshirt open.
The mineral cave of her inner being sightlessly reflects a tiny, insignificant
votary. Idols don’t see, they reflect, like the “inscrutable Sphinx” in Baude-
laire’s poem “La Beauté,” who fascinates her “docile lovers” with “pure
mirrors that make everything more beautiful.” (In a letter to Baudelaire
about Les Fleurs du mal, Flaubert singled out “La Beauté” for praise.) ‘After
Emma’s death, Charles still loses himself in her eyes. The mirror remains, as
Charles, trying to resuscitate Emma in his very person, strikes poses that
might have won him her approval. “To please her, as if she were still alive,
he embraced her predilections, her ideas. He bought patent leather boots,
he took to wearing white cravats, he slicked his mustache with perfumed
Wax, he signed promissory notes, as she had done. She was corrupting him
from beyond the grave.” Finally each dies in character, she by her own
hand, he passively, of a broken heart, hopelessly entranced by the woman
who visited herself on him like a whirlwind, rendering him unfit for a life
proportionate to his nature.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Education Sentimental
Everything is energy and bustle on a boat that clearly epitomizes the in-
dustrial age, everything except Frederic, standing by himself, motionless.
While the vessel puffi, sweats, and trembles from the exertion of moving its
cargo forward, against the current, Frederic, who is destined to accumulate
missed opportunities, looks backward amorously at Paris and its unidentifi-
able landmarks as at a beautiful passerby he couldn’t bring himself to ap-
proach. Distance goes hand in hand with immobility. His fellow travelers,
ordinary people living in the moment, contemplate riverine cottages and
wreathe domestic fantasies around them. Some, writes Flaubert, would
have liked to own one and make it their permanent home, “with a good
billiard table, a rowboat, a wife, or some other dreamed—of possession.” Not
Frederic, whose mind is elsewhere. Flaubert’s dreamer sees nothing of the
passing scene, or sees it through an inner fog. His sketchbook remains
blank. “He mused on the room he would occupy [in Nogent], on the plot
for a drama, on subjects for painting, on future passions.” And when he
does move, the impulse to do so is a private twinge rather than an urge to
mingle. “He felt that the happiness that his excellence of soul had earned
him was slow in coming. He recited melancholy verse to himself; he
crossed the deck in rapid steps; he walked right up to the bow, on the bell
side.” It’s as if this jerky sequence, punctuated by sernicolons, were keeping
the beat of inner turmoil. Frederic can be either motionless or rapid. .
His walk across the deck proves to be fateful. Regaling people at the bow
end is jacques Arnoux — a demonstrative character, part bon vivant and
part mountebank, modeled after Macaire (Daumier’s, if not Frederick
Lemaitre’s) as well as Maurice Schlesinger. Frederic meets Arnoux, then
spies his little daughter and his wife, Marie, who instantly becomes an ob-
ject of rapturous scrutiny. “Her whole person was silhouetted against a
background of blue air” is how Flaubert, using the same image that had
Served fifteen years earlier to describe his first glimpse of Kuchiuk-Hanem
at Esna,* introduces the woman Frederic will woo in vain.
Never had he seen anything like the splendor of her dusky complexion, the se-
ductiveness of her figure, fingers so delicate that light passed through them. He
regarded her workbasket with astonishment, as no common object. What was
her name? Where did she live? What had her life been, her past? He wanted to
acquaint himself with the furniture in her room, all the dresses she had ever
worn, the people she habitually saw. Subdued by some deeper longing, the de-
sire for physical possession gave rise to a painful and unlimited curiosity.
just as young Gustave saved Elisa Schlesinger’s shawl from the sea, so here
Frederic saves Mme Arnoux’s from the Seine, in a gesture that prefigures his
fantasy of rescuing the beloved herself from a vulgar, unfaithful husband.
Her laconic acknowledgment of his gallantry only reinforces his convic-
tion that he is a superfluous man. To contemplate his idol is to feel all the
more irrelevant. “The more he regarded her, the more he felt abysses open-
ing between them,” writes Flaubert. “He thought that it would soon be
necessary to part, before extracting a word from her, even before leaving
any memory of himselfl” When at length they reach Nogent, he sees her
lost in thought at the spot he had occupied earlier. “On the quay, Frederic
turned around. She was standing near the tiller. He packed a glance with his
entire soul and sent it toward her. She remained motionless, as if he hadn’t
done anything whatever.”
It makes perfect sense that a young man who runs before himself or lags
behind should experience the voyage most vividly when it’s over, in his
mind’s eye. The entire episode is relived, as by a novelist seeing more at
an imaginative remove than close up.
he career of this feckless dreamer drifting in a
WOr1d that spoils his dreams and pretentions at every turn can then 1-@Sun'le_
However different in other respects, Flaubert’s protagonists are alike in
their sentimental ineducability. Feeling at one with the world or falling out
iisilt, they svgell or deflate but never really. grow. Where everything is bound-
Y one t mg Or another—an oceanic fullness or a Sahara of depriva-
tion— there is hardly room for development. Adventures are redundant,
experience does not beget maturity or knowledge, and, indeed, the
Flaubertian novel tends to come full round, like horses on a carousel. The
white dress Emma wore as a virgin at convent school is the white dress in
which she has herself buried. Salammbé begins with a feast in Carthage for
the victorious mercenaries at which Matho is transfixed by Salammbé; it
ends with another feast at which a chained, flayed Matho remains transfixed,
his battles having been waged for naught. The last chapters of L’E/ducation
sentimentale find Frederic Moreau adrift in middle age and revisiting his ado-
lescent transports, first in a reunion with Mme Arnoux, then in conversation
with Charles Deslauriers, his bosom friend since childhood, who has also
run a futile course through life. They agree that their lackluster existence is
to be blamed on chance, on circumstances, on France, on the nineteenth
century. Then they evoke naive school days and delightedly recall their visit
to a whorehouse just outside Nogent on a Sunday during Vespers when
townspeople wouldn’t see them, all dressed up, carrying bouquets for the
bawd. It came to nothing. “The summer heat, fear of the unknown, a kind
of remorse and even the pleasure of seeing at a glance so many women at his
disposal made such an impression on him that he turned pale and stood there
motionless, dumbstruck.” Charmed by his embarrassment, the women had
burst into laughter, which to him sounded like mockery. He turned tail and
fled, with Charles following, and their misadventure became an article‘ of lo-
cal lore. “That’s when we had it best!” Frederic exclaims. “Yes, maybe so,
that’s when we had it best!” Charles concurs in a closing whimper. Nogent,
seen at the outset as Frederic’s oppressive destination, thus reappears at the
end as the prelapsarian homeland from which he fell into his pursuit of an
unachievable consummation. He had fallen into history, into the quotidian,
and into Paris. “He moved in society, and he had other loves,” writes
Flaubert, “but his persistent memory of the first one rendered all that fol-
lowed insipid. And when the vehemence of desire abated, the bloom went
off it. His intellectual ambition had likewise failed. Years passed, and he came
to tolerate the unemployment of his mind and the inertia of his heart.”
dustrial age, everything except Frederic, standing by himself, motionless.
While the vessel puffi, sweats, and trembles from the exertion of moving its
cargo forward, against the current, Frederic, who is destined to accumulate
missed opportunities, looks backward amorously at Paris and its unidentifi-
able landmarks as at a beautiful passerby he couldn’t bring himself to ap-
proach. Distance goes hand in hand with immobility. His fellow travelers,
ordinary people living in the moment, contemplate riverine cottages and
wreathe domestic fantasies around them. Some, writes Flaubert, would
have liked to own one and make it their permanent home, “with a good
billiard table, a rowboat, a wife, or some other dreamed—of possession.” Not
Frederic, whose mind is elsewhere. Flaubert’s dreamer sees nothing of the
passing scene, or sees it through an inner fog. His sketchbook remains
blank. “He mused on the room he would occupy [in Nogent], on the plot
for a drama, on subjects for painting, on future passions.” And when he
does move, the impulse to do so is a private twinge rather than an urge to
mingle. “He felt that the happiness that his excellence of soul had earned
him was slow in coming. He recited melancholy verse to himself; he
crossed the deck in rapid steps; he walked right up to the bow, on the bell
side.” It’s as if this jerky sequence, punctuated by sernicolons, were keeping
the beat of inner turmoil. Frederic can be either motionless or rapid. .
His walk across the deck proves to be fateful. Regaling people at the bow
end is jacques Arnoux — a demonstrative character, part bon vivant and
part mountebank, modeled after Macaire (Daumier’s, if not Frederick
Lemaitre’s) as well as Maurice Schlesinger. Frederic meets Arnoux, then
spies his little daughter and his wife, Marie, who instantly becomes an ob-
ject of rapturous scrutiny. “Her whole person was silhouetted against a
background of blue air” is how Flaubert, using the same image that had
Served fifteen years earlier to describe his first glimpse of Kuchiuk-Hanem
at Esna,* introduces the woman Frederic will woo in vain.
Never had he seen anything like the splendor of her dusky complexion, the se-
ductiveness of her figure, fingers so delicate that light passed through them. He
regarded her workbasket with astonishment, as no common object. What was
her name? Where did she live? What had her life been, her past? He wanted to
acquaint himself with the furniture in her room, all the dresses she had ever
worn, the people she habitually saw. Subdued by some deeper longing, the de-
sire for physical possession gave rise to a painful and unlimited curiosity.
just as young Gustave saved Elisa Schlesinger’s shawl from the sea, so here
Frederic saves Mme Arnoux’s from the Seine, in a gesture that prefigures his
fantasy of rescuing the beloved herself from a vulgar, unfaithful husband.
Her laconic acknowledgment of his gallantry only reinforces his convic-
tion that he is a superfluous man. To contemplate his idol is to feel all the
more irrelevant. “The more he regarded her, the more he felt abysses open-
ing between them,” writes Flaubert. “He thought that it would soon be
necessary to part, before extracting a word from her, even before leaving
any memory of himselfl” When at length they reach Nogent, he sees her
lost in thought at the spot he had occupied earlier. “On the quay, Frederic
turned around. She was standing near the tiller. He packed a glance with his
entire soul and sent it toward her. She remained motionless, as if he hadn’t
done anything whatever.”
It makes perfect sense that a young man who runs before himself or lags
behind should experience the voyage most vividly when it’s over, in his
mind’s eye. The entire episode is relived, as by a novelist seeing more at
an imaginative remove than close up.
he career of this feckless dreamer drifting in a
WOr1d that spoils his dreams and pretentions at every turn can then 1-@Sun'le_
However different in other respects, Flaubert’s protagonists are alike in
their sentimental ineducability. Feeling at one with the world or falling out
iisilt, they svgell or deflate but never really. grow. Where everything is bound-
Y one t mg Or another—an oceanic fullness or a Sahara of depriva-
tion— there is hardly room for development. Adventures are redundant,
experience does not beget maturity or knowledge, and, indeed, the
Flaubertian novel tends to come full round, like horses on a carousel. The
white dress Emma wore as a virgin at convent school is the white dress in
which she has herself buried. Salammbé begins with a feast in Carthage for
the victorious mercenaries at which Matho is transfixed by Salammbé; it
ends with another feast at which a chained, flayed Matho remains transfixed,
his battles having been waged for naught. The last chapters of L’E/ducation
sentimentale find Frederic Moreau adrift in middle age and revisiting his ado-
lescent transports, first in a reunion with Mme Arnoux, then in conversation
with Charles Deslauriers, his bosom friend since childhood, who has also
run a futile course through life. They agree that their lackluster existence is
to be blamed on chance, on circumstances, on France, on the nineteenth
century. Then they evoke naive school days and delightedly recall their visit
to a whorehouse just outside Nogent on a Sunday during Vespers when
townspeople wouldn’t see them, all dressed up, carrying bouquets for the
bawd. It came to nothing. “The summer heat, fear of the unknown, a kind
of remorse and even the pleasure of seeing at a glance so many women at his
disposal made such an impression on him that he turned pale and stood there
motionless, dumbstruck.” Charmed by his embarrassment, the women had
burst into laughter, which to him sounded like mockery. He turned tail and
fled, with Charles following, and their misadventure became an article‘ of lo-
cal lore. “That’s when we had it best!” Frederic exclaims. “Yes, maybe so,
that’s when we had it best!” Charles concurs in a closing whimper. Nogent,
seen at the outset as Frederic’s oppressive destination, thus reappears at the
end as the prelapsarian homeland from which he fell into his pursuit of an
unachievable consummation. He had fallen into history, into the quotidian,
and into Paris. “He moved in society, and he had other loves,” writes
Flaubert, “but his persistent memory of the first one rendered all that fol-
lowed insipid. And when the vehemence of desire abated, the bloom went
off it. His intellectual ambition had likewise failed. Years passed, and he came
to tolerate the unemployment of his mind and the inertia of his heart.”
Politics and religion from 'Flaubert'
IN THE early 1870s, when the National Assembly couldn’t bring itself to
leave Versailles and monarchists held out against the official proclamation of
a republic, France was obsessed with parliamentary debate about this fun-
damental issue. The fact that politics could bother him, Flaubert wrote to a
friend in january 1873, was a sure sign of decadence. “I am exasperated
with the Right, to the point of understanding why the communards
wanted to burn down Paris.” Raving madmen were preferable to idiots in
his opinion, if only because their reign did not generally last as long.
What had parliamentary debate accomplished since the fall of the Com-
mune? Observers who thought that the entire left had been fatally com-
promised Were soon proven wrong. By-elections held on ]uly 2, 1871, saw
republicans emerge victorious, the most prominent among them being
Léon Gambetta. After five mute months he had found his voice again,
though civil war had meanwhile persuaded him that only a republic built
along conservative lines stood any chance of surviving opposition from
rnonarchist ranks. It soon became obvious that the fallen demagogue was
determined to find his account in making common cause with the adroit
strategist of conservative republicanism, Adolphe Thiers. These two formed
a tenuous marriage of convenience. Gambetta minded himself during par-
liamentary debate but felt freer outside the Assembly, and on campaigns
through provincial France he made speeches that could not fail to rattle
Thiers in Versailles. “Haven’t we seen laborers in the cities and fields win
the vote?” he asked a sympathetic crowd at Grenoble. “Don’t the omens
suggest that our land, which has tried every other alternative, intends at last
to risk a republic and call upon the new social reserves [now/elles souches so-
ciales]? Yes, I descry, I feel, I proclaim the emergence of new social re-
serves.” Thiers was later to complain that Gambetta never had the clear-cut
ideas of a real statesman, that he always retreated into the role of tribune,
which he played most naturally.
Lest the “new social reserves” emerge right away, the heterogeneous
right, which still greatly outnumbered the left, sought to act in concert. At
daggers drawn since 1830, Legitimists (supporting the Bourbon pretender,
Charles X’s childless heir Henri, comte de Chambord) and Orleanists (sup-
porting Louis-Philippe’s grandson, the comte de Paris) now agreed that
Chambord should reign as a constitutional monarch and be succeeded by
the comte de Paris. What this arrangement, called fusion, did not consider
was the obstinacy of Chambord, who lived in a castle near Vienna, as cut off
from the world as a Pirandellian solipsist. Chambord wanted all or nothing.
Either restoration would be a faithful restoration of the kingdom France had
abolished in 1830 along with Charles X, or it would enthrone someone
other than himself. His absolute proviso was that the country raise the white
lily-spangled flag, and rational heads tried in vain to make him compromise
when he came home after four decades abroad. “[That flag] has always been
for me inseparable from the absent fatherland; it flew over my cradle, I want
it to shade my tomb,” he declared in a statement published on July 6 by the
royalist paper Union. “[Under that flag] the unification of the nation was
achieved; with it your fathers, led by mine, conquered Alsace—L0rraine,
Whose loyalty will be the consolation of our misfortunes . . . I have received
it as a sacred trust from the old king, my grandfather, dying in exile . . . In
the glorious folds of this unblemished standard I shall bring you order and
liberty! Frenchmen! Henri V cannot abandon the flag of Henri IV!” Eighty
die—hard Legitimists in the parliament stood firm behind Chambord, but a
majority of conservative deputies dissociated themselves from his manifesto.
As patriotic gentlemen repelled by anachronism on the one hand and revo-
lution on the other, they pledged allegiance to the tricolor flag and
paigned for a state that would be neither lily-white nor republican blue_
an age of dumb ideas, Flaubert wrote to Sand in 1873, that of fusion was
crowning stupidity, an assertion upon which he enlarged two months
in a letter to his niece. “How ignorant of history can one be to believe 513111
in the efiicaciousness of one man, to await a Messiah, a Savior! Long live the
good Lord and down with Gods! Can one brush against the nap of a whole
nation? Deny eighty years of democratic development? Return to the age
charters granted by the high and mighty? Chambord’s partisans being ang
with their liege lord is a comic spectacle . . . No matter! Saint-Louis’s de_
scendant . . . spared us some major disasters.” The restoration of monarch
and the Commune were both historical inanities, he asserted. So he thou 112,
was a Napoleon IV l g ’
The schism in conservative ranks involved not only monarchical abSO_
lutism but Catholic orthodoxy, and here the manifesto that divided the par;
ties was a papal bull. Seven years earlier, in his Syllabus ofErro1/s, Pius IX had
declared war against secular Europe by denouncing the separation of
church and state; claiming for his church control of all culture and science;
rejecting freedom of faith, conscience, and worship; enumerating eighty
“errors” altogether; and insisting that the pontiff neither could nor should
make any concession whatever to progress, liberalism, and modern civiliza-
tion. The Syllabus marked France profoundly. Cultivated prelates resisted
Rome, but the lower clergy embraced popish obscurantism with fervor,
and in rural parishes, where miraculous visitations were regularly reported,’
it was the lower clergy who made themselves heard. “Of all the mysteries
that fill Church history, I don’t know any that equals or surpasses this swift
and complete transformation of Catholic France into a farmyard annex of
the Vatican’s anticamera,” one liberal Catholic wrote shortly before the Vat-
ican Council proclaimed the pope to be infallible and his episcopate uni-
versal. “I won’t immolate justice and truth, reason and history in a sacrificial
offering to the idol whom lay theologians have enthroned at the Vatican.”
While accumulating multifarious religious creeds for La Tlmtation de Saint
Antoine, Flaubert inveighed against Lamennais’s Essai sur l’indQ%rence, in
which the church is represented as the repository of all truth.
War did not halt the ultramontane movement. On the contrary, it gave it
further impetus, as Catholic clergy used France’s defeat to advance the view
that God had thus punished a wayward child. The imperial saturnalia was
over, repentance was in order, and devout souls, many of whom wore the
insignia of the Sacred Heart, flocked to holy sites throughout France.
Flaubert thought that Catholicism, with its worship of sacred entrails, had
come to resemble the cult of Isis. In 1873 a national pilgrimage sponsored
by the Assumptionists saw thousands descend upon Lourdes, La Salettfi,
Pontmain, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, and Paray-le-Monial for eXpia-
gory demonstrations that became political rallies. “Suspended in midair,
equally incapable of adopting the republican format that promises terror
and the monarchical format that demands obedience and respect,” declared
Monsignor Pie at Chartres, “the French are a people [who] await a leader,
who invoke a master.” One hundred fifty deputies heard Pie preach this
message and soon afterward went farther afield to hear Monsignor de Lese-
leuc bless them at Paray-le-Monial. “Since assembling in Versailles, you
have often asked forgiveness of God for France’s crimes,” said the bishop.
“You have often made honorable amends to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for
the ingratitude shown him, especially during the last eighty years.” It did
not escape those present that eighty years earlier, in Year 1 according to the
Revolutionary calendar, Louis XVI had been guillotined.
Liberal Catholics as well believed that France would fall apart if she did
not harness herself to religious principles, and the quasi-official term for
the government they exercised, l’Ordre Moral, bespoke their staunchly pa-
triarchal agenda. Men like Albert de Broglie, who was eventually to replace
Thiers as prime minister, regarded the church as society’s frontline defense
against havoc wrought in the name of liberty, fraternity, and equality—
above all, equality Universal suffrage exasperated them. (But it also exas-
perated anticlerical elitists like Flaubert, who insisted that when the masses,
being collectively devoid of intelligence, ceased to believe in the Immacu-
late Conception, they would, none the wiser, vest their belief in the hocus-
pocus of spiritualist seances.)
leave Versailles and monarchists held out against the official proclamation of
a republic, France was obsessed with parliamentary debate about this fun-
damental issue. The fact that politics could bother him, Flaubert wrote to a
friend in january 1873, was a sure sign of decadence. “I am exasperated
with the Right, to the point of understanding why the communards
wanted to burn down Paris.” Raving madmen were preferable to idiots in
his opinion, if only because their reign did not generally last as long.
What had parliamentary debate accomplished since the fall of the Com-
mune? Observers who thought that the entire left had been fatally com-
promised Were soon proven wrong. By-elections held on ]uly 2, 1871, saw
republicans emerge victorious, the most prominent among them being
Léon Gambetta. After five mute months he had found his voice again,
though civil war had meanwhile persuaded him that only a republic built
along conservative lines stood any chance of surviving opposition from
rnonarchist ranks. It soon became obvious that the fallen demagogue was
determined to find his account in making common cause with the adroit
strategist of conservative republicanism, Adolphe Thiers. These two formed
a tenuous marriage of convenience. Gambetta minded himself during par-
liamentary debate but felt freer outside the Assembly, and on campaigns
through provincial France he made speeches that could not fail to rattle
Thiers in Versailles. “Haven’t we seen laborers in the cities and fields win
the vote?” he asked a sympathetic crowd at Grenoble. “Don’t the omens
suggest that our land, which has tried every other alternative, intends at last
to risk a republic and call upon the new social reserves [now/elles souches so-
ciales]? Yes, I descry, I feel, I proclaim the emergence of new social re-
serves.” Thiers was later to complain that Gambetta never had the clear-cut
ideas of a real statesman, that he always retreated into the role of tribune,
which he played most naturally.
Lest the “new social reserves” emerge right away, the heterogeneous
right, which still greatly outnumbered the left, sought to act in concert. At
daggers drawn since 1830, Legitimists (supporting the Bourbon pretender,
Charles X’s childless heir Henri, comte de Chambord) and Orleanists (sup-
porting Louis-Philippe’s grandson, the comte de Paris) now agreed that
Chambord should reign as a constitutional monarch and be succeeded by
the comte de Paris. What this arrangement, called fusion, did not consider
was the obstinacy of Chambord, who lived in a castle near Vienna, as cut off
from the world as a Pirandellian solipsist. Chambord wanted all or nothing.
Either restoration would be a faithful restoration of the kingdom France had
abolished in 1830 along with Charles X, or it would enthrone someone
other than himself. His absolute proviso was that the country raise the white
lily-spangled flag, and rational heads tried in vain to make him compromise
when he came home after four decades abroad. “[That flag] has always been
for me inseparable from the absent fatherland; it flew over my cradle, I want
it to shade my tomb,” he declared in a statement published on July 6 by the
royalist paper Union. “[Under that flag] the unification of the nation was
achieved; with it your fathers, led by mine, conquered Alsace—L0rraine,
Whose loyalty will be the consolation of our misfortunes . . . I have received
it as a sacred trust from the old king, my grandfather, dying in exile . . . In
the glorious folds of this unblemished standard I shall bring you order and
liberty! Frenchmen! Henri V cannot abandon the flag of Henri IV!” Eighty
die—hard Legitimists in the parliament stood firm behind Chambord, but a
majority of conservative deputies dissociated themselves from his manifesto.
As patriotic gentlemen repelled by anachronism on the one hand and revo-
lution on the other, they pledged allegiance to the tricolor flag and
paigned for a state that would be neither lily-white nor republican blue_
an age of dumb ideas, Flaubert wrote to Sand in 1873, that of fusion was
crowning stupidity, an assertion upon which he enlarged two months
in a letter to his niece. “How ignorant of history can one be to believe 513111
in the efiicaciousness of one man, to await a Messiah, a Savior! Long live the
good Lord and down with Gods! Can one brush against the nap of a whole
nation? Deny eighty years of democratic development? Return to the age
charters granted by the high and mighty? Chambord’s partisans being ang
with their liege lord is a comic spectacle . . . No matter! Saint-Louis’s de_
scendant . . . spared us some major disasters.” The restoration of monarch
and the Commune were both historical inanities, he asserted. So he thou 112,
was a Napoleon IV l g ’
The schism in conservative ranks involved not only monarchical abSO_
lutism but Catholic orthodoxy, and here the manifesto that divided the par;
ties was a papal bull. Seven years earlier, in his Syllabus ofErro1/s, Pius IX had
declared war against secular Europe by denouncing the separation of
church and state; claiming for his church control of all culture and science;
rejecting freedom of faith, conscience, and worship; enumerating eighty
“errors” altogether; and insisting that the pontiff neither could nor should
make any concession whatever to progress, liberalism, and modern civiliza-
tion. The Syllabus marked France profoundly. Cultivated prelates resisted
Rome, but the lower clergy embraced popish obscurantism with fervor,
and in rural parishes, where miraculous visitations were regularly reported,’
it was the lower clergy who made themselves heard. “Of all the mysteries
that fill Church history, I don’t know any that equals or surpasses this swift
and complete transformation of Catholic France into a farmyard annex of
the Vatican’s anticamera,” one liberal Catholic wrote shortly before the Vat-
ican Council proclaimed the pope to be infallible and his episcopate uni-
versal. “I won’t immolate justice and truth, reason and history in a sacrificial
offering to the idol whom lay theologians have enthroned at the Vatican.”
While accumulating multifarious religious creeds for La Tlmtation de Saint
Antoine, Flaubert inveighed against Lamennais’s Essai sur l’indQ%rence, in
which the church is represented as the repository of all truth.
War did not halt the ultramontane movement. On the contrary, it gave it
further impetus, as Catholic clergy used France’s defeat to advance the view
that God had thus punished a wayward child. The imperial saturnalia was
over, repentance was in order, and devout souls, many of whom wore the
insignia of the Sacred Heart, flocked to holy sites throughout France.
Flaubert thought that Catholicism, with its worship of sacred entrails, had
come to resemble the cult of Isis. In 1873 a national pilgrimage sponsored
by the Assumptionists saw thousands descend upon Lourdes, La Salettfi,
Pontmain, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, and Paray-le-Monial for eXpia-
gory demonstrations that became political rallies. “Suspended in midair,
equally incapable of adopting the republican format that promises terror
and the monarchical format that demands obedience and respect,” declared
Monsignor Pie at Chartres, “the French are a people [who] await a leader,
who invoke a master.” One hundred fifty deputies heard Pie preach this
message and soon afterward went farther afield to hear Monsignor de Lese-
leuc bless them at Paray-le-Monial. “Since assembling in Versailles, you
have often asked forgiveness of God for France’s crimes,” said the bishop.
“You have often made honorable amends to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for
the ingratitude shown him, especially during the last eighty years.” It did
not escape those present that eighty years earlier, in Year 1 according to the
Revolutionary calendar, Louis XVI had been guillotined.
Liberal Catholics as well believed that France would fall apart if she did
not harness herself to religious principles, and the quasi-official term for
the government they exercised, l’Ordre Moral, bespoke their staunchly pa-
triarchal agenda. Men like Albert de Broglie, who was eventually to replace
Thiers as prime minister, regarded the church as society’s frontline defense
against havoc wrought in the name of liberty, fraternity, and equality—
above all, equality Universal suffrage exasperated them. (But it also exas-
perated anticlerical elitists like Flaubert, who insisted that when the masses,
being collectively devoid of intelligence, ceased to believe in the Immacu-
late Conception, they would, none the wiser, vest their belief in the hocus-
pocus of spiritualist seances.)
Flaubert's Day from Brown's 'Flaubert'
ACCUSTOMED
AS a child to hearing that her uncle was preoccupied with
“La Bovary,” Flaubert’s niece Liline took the
name to be a French word for
“work.” And that mysterious work was understood
to dictate not only the
permissible volume of household noise but, in
general, the rituals of daily
life at Croisset. Mme Flaubert might complain
about it. She might even de-
clareat times that the goose quill from which
her son could not long be
parted had sapped his humanity.* Still, she
never failed to come and sit be-
side him, like a chamberlain at the prince’s
petite lei/ée, when he summoned
her, as he did every morning soon after waking
up, by tapping the wall that
separated their bedrooms.
Days were as unvaried as the notes of the
cuckoo. Plaubert, a man of
nocturnal habits, usually awoke at 10 a.m. and
announced the event with
his bell cord. Only then did people dare speak
above a whisper. His valet,
N arcisse, straightaway brought him water,
filled his pipe, drew the curtains,
and delivered the morning mail. Conversation
with Mother, which took
place in clouds of tobacco smoke particularly
noxious to the migraine suf-
ferer, preceded a very hot bath and a long,
careful toilette involving the reg-
ular application of a tonic reputed to arrest
hair loss. At 11 a.m. he entered
the dining room, where Mme Flaubert; Liline; her
English governess, Is-
abel Hutton; and very often Uncle Parain would
have gathered. Unable to
work well on a full stomach, he ate lightly, or
what passed for such.in the
Flaubert household, meaning that his first meal
consisted of eggs, vegeta-
bles, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold
chocolate. The family then lounged
on the terrace, unless foul weather kept them
indoors, or climbed a steep
path through woods behind their espaliered
kitchen garden to a glade
dubbed La Mercure after the statue of Mercury
that once stood there.
Shaded by chestnut trees, near their hillside
orchard, they would argue,
joke, gossip, and watch vessels sail up and down
the river. Another site of
open-air refreshment was the eighteenth-century
pavilion. After dinner,
which generally lasted from seven to nine, dusk
often found them there,
looking out at moonlight flecking the water and
fishermen casting their
hoop nets for eel.
In june 1852, Flaubert told Louise Colet that he
worked from 1 p.m. to
1 a.m. A year later, when he assumed partial
responsibility for Liline’s edu-
cation and gave her an hour or more of his time
each day, he may not have
put pen to paper at his large round writing
table until two o’clock or later.
The tutorial was important, no less to Flaubert,
who in that familiar role
*Flaubert’s need to dissociate the enterprise of
writing from what he regarded as mechani-
Cal tools was extreme. He hated not only metal
nibs but also metal type and hated to visit
printing plants.
Louis-Napoleon
From F Brown:
on December 2, when Louis-Napoleon, president of the
republic, launched a coup d’état and dissolved the National Assembly.
Prominent opponents were arrested. France’s most famous writer, Victor
Hugo, who served as a peer, might have been jailed along with them had
he not eluded capture and found refuge on the Channel Islands, where he
ultimately spent almost two decades in exile.
Louis—Napoleon’s rise from megalomaniacal nuisance to prince—president
Was the stuff of Romantic drama, or, as Marx saw it, of farce. Having es-
caped the Ham prison fortress by a daring ruse and fled to England, he
marked time there with an entourage of true believers. Only the true could
believe that this cryptic little man dressed in a buttoned-up frock coat,
strapped trousers, and tight shoes (and whose recommendation of a chi-
ropodist named Eisenberg for the removal of painful corns appeared in a
London Times advertisement) might one day wear the imperial crown. He
made his first move on February 27, 1848, entering France incognito and
registering at a Paris hotel. His identity was soon revealed, word spread,
Crowds gathered for a glimpse of him, and overnight, “as if by magic,”
wrote one observer, his portrait, entitled simply “Lui, Went on sale in ,
shopwindows and kiosks. Reluctant to detain him lest it thereby stir the live
embers of Bonapartist sentiment, the provisional government requested
that he leave France at once, and Louis-Napoleon, eager to store up good-
will, acquiesced. “The people . . . are intoxicated with victory and hope,”
he told a conspiratorial friend who had urged him to stay. “All these illu-
sions must perish before a ‘man of order’ can make himself heard.” They
perished soon enough, during four June days at the barricades, when tens
of thousands died in the rebellion against a conservative legislature largely
unsympathetic to republican institutions and the plight of workers. With a
propaganda campaign conducted by his agents, who pictured him as all
things to all men —— as the author of a book entitled L’Extincti0n du pau-
perisme but also as the very symbol of “order, glory, and patriotism” — he
won a seat in the Assembly. Thereafter, everything worked to his advantage,
despite the poor figure he cut on a public rostrum speaking in Swiss-
accented French. The banishment of the Bonaparte family was repealed,
the committee charged with drafting a new constitution recommended that
the French president be elected not by the legislature but by universal suf-
frage, the Constituent Assembly adopted that proposal for fear of alienating
the country at large, and forward on a rising tide of public opinion rode
Napoleon’_s nephew, whom Hugo dubbed “Napoleon le Petit.” Among his
more enthusiastic supporters was Maxime Du Camp’s close friend Louis de
Cormenin, whose lawyer father, a staunch Bonapartist, had chaired the
constitutional committee. In December, voters cast almost four times as’
many ballots for Louis—Napoleon as for Cavaignac, the general with blood, '
on his hands from the ]une 1848 civil war. 1
Seasoned politicians were soon disabused of their assumption that the
new president was a cypher whom they could easily manipulate. Once in
office he exhibited his Napoleonic gene for administration, appointing
loyal prefects who constituted an intelligence network, surrounding himself‘
with henchmen in a kitchen cabinet that included his shrewd, ruthless half
brother, the duc de Morny, and transforming the gendarmerie into a mili-
tary force more reliable than the National Guard. Hand in hand with sabo-
tage went panache; while the sapper busied himself underground, the
showman seemed to transcend party politics. Contemptuous of right and
left, he represented Catholic France when sending troops against Italian re-
publicans who had driven the pope from Rome and spoke for republican
France when directing Pius IX to endorse a general amnesty, a secularized
administration, the Napoleonic Code, and a liberal government. On a tri-
umphant tour of the prison fortress at Ham, he attended a Mass of thanks-
giving in his honor, then liberated the Algerian chief of the Kabyles,
Abd-al—Qadir, from the apartment in which he himself had been impris-
oned for six years. His utopian dream of extinguishing pauperism was glibly
reconciled with his advocacy of a residence requirement calculated to dis-
enfranchise three million workers. “The great events of history are like ‘la
grande cuisine,”’ he confided to the Austrian ambassador. “One must not
look at it too closely, for the details are of no importance; it is the result that
matters.”
During Flaubert’s voyage in the East, events at home had hastened the
implementation of Louis—Napoleon’s grand design. In March 1850, repub-
licans soundly defeated government candidates to gain twenty seats in the
Assembly, provoking a red scare and a widespread flight of capital. More
ominous for Bonapartists was the refusal of a legislature still monarchical in
the majority to amend a constitutional article that barred the president from
serving two consecutive terms. Louis would obligatorily retire after May
1852 unless the republic fell, and plans for its execution, code-named Op-
eration Rubicon, were therefore set in motion. This coup d’état was so
widely anticipated that when George Sand, walking past the Elysee on De-
cember 2 at 1 a.m., saw a darkened palace, she remarked facetiously: “It
won’t be tomorrow, then.” Her mistake should have been borne in on her
later that morning by the tolling of bells and the beating of drums; how-
ever, arrangements had been made to slash the drumheads overnight and
to post guards around belfries. Before dawn, gendarmes fanned out across
the city with warrants of arrest for seventy-eight well-respected men——
journalists, deputies, generals —-whose words might have inspired resist-
ance. The printing presses of opposition papers were closed. The Palais
Bourbon, where the National Assembly met, was surrounded by Louis-
Napoleon’s faithful constabulary. Had National Guardsmen tried to arm
themselves at posts around the capital, they would have found barrels of wet
powder. It was midmorning when France’s new savior, wearing a general’s
uniform, emerged from the Blysée with his uncle Jerome and mounted his
horse. A proclamation from the president of the republic to the people de-
claring that the present situation could not continue any longer had already
been posted in every arrondissement. “Frenchmen!” it began. “With every
passing day the dangers to the country mount. The Assembly, which should
be the backbone of order, has become a center of conspiracy. Instead of
passing laws in the public interest, it is forging weapons for civil war; it is
encouraging all manner of wicked passions; it is destroying the peace of
France. I have dissolved it, and I leave it to the public to judge between it
and me.” To the army, which couldn’t have been more compliant, Louis-
Napoleon portrayed himself as the embodiment of national sovereignity.
on December 2, when Louis-Napoleon, president of the
republic, launched a coup d’état and dissolved the National Assembly.
Prominent opponents were arrested. France’s most famous writer, Victor
Hugo, who served as a peer, might have been jailed along with them had
he not eluded capture and found refuge on the Channel Islands, where he
ultimately spent almost two decades in exile.
Louis—Napoleon’s rise from megalomaniacal nuisance to prince—president
Was the stuff of Romantic drama, or, as Marx saw it, of farce. Having es-
caped the Ham prison fortress by a daring ruse and fled to England, he
marked time there with an entourage of true believers. Only the true could
believe that this cryptic little man dressed in a buttoned-up frock coat,
strapped trousers, and tight shoes (and whose recommendation of a chi-
ropodist named Eisenberg for the removal of painful corns appeared in a
London Times advertisement) might one day wear the imperial crown. He
made his first move on February 27, 1848, entering France incognito and
registering at a Paris hotel. His identity was soon revealed, word spread,
Crowds gathered for a glimpse of him, and overnight, “as if by magic,”
wrote one observer, his portrait, entitled simply “Lui, Went on sale in ,
shopwindows and kiosks. Reluctant to detain him lest it thereby stir the live
embers of Bonapartist sentiment, the provisional government requested
that he leave France at once, and Louis-Napoleon, eager to store up good-
will, acquiesced. “The people . . . are intoxicated with victory and hope,”
he told a conspiratorial friend who had urged him to stay. “All these illu-
sions must perish before a ‘man of order’ can make himself heard.” They
perished soon enough, during four June days at the barricades, when tens
of thousands died in the rebellion against a conservative legislature largely
unsympathetic to republican institutions and the plight of workers. With a
propaganda campaign conducted by his agents, who pictured him as all
things to all men —— as the author of a book entitled L’Extincti0n du pau-
perisme but also as the very symbol of “order, glory, and patriotism” — he
won a seat in the Assembly. Thereafter, everything worked to his advantage,
despite the poor figure he cut on a public rostrum speaking in Swiss-
accented French. The banishment of the Bonaparte family was repealed,
the committee charged with drafting a new constitution recommended that
the French president be elected not by the legislature but by universal suf-
frage, the Constituent Assembly adopted that proposal for fear of alienating
the country at large, and forward on a rising tide of public opinion rode
Napoleon’_s nephew, whom Hugo dubbed “Napoleon le Petit.” Among his
more enthusiastic supporters was Maxime Du Camp’s close friend Louis de
Cormenin, whose lawyer father, a staunch Bonapartist, had chaired the
constitutional committee. In December, voters cast almost four times as’
many ballots for Louis—Napoleon as for Cavaignac, the general with blood, '
on his hands from the ]une 1848 civil war. 1
Seasoned politicians were soon disabused of their assumption that the
new president was a cypher whom they could easily manipulate. Once in
office he exhibited his Napoleonic gene for administration, appointing
loyal prefects who constituted an intelligence network, surrounding himself‘
with henchmen in a kitchen cabinet that included his shrewd, ruthless half
brother, the duc de Morny, and transforming the gendarmerie into a mili-
tary force more reliable than the National Guard. Hand in hand with sabo-
tage went panache; while the sapper busied himself underground, the
showman seemed to transcend party politics. Contemptuous of right and
left, he represented Catholic France when sending troops against Italian re-
publicans who had driven the pope from Rome and spoke for republican
France when directing Pius IX to endorse a general amnesty, a secularized
administration, the Napoleonic Code, and a liberal government. On a tri-
umphant tour of the prison fortress at Ham, he attended a Mass of thanks-
giving in his honor, then liberated the Algerian chief of the Kabyles,
Abd-al—Qadir, from the apartment in which he himself had been impris-
oned for six years. His utopian dream of extinguishing pauperism was glibly
reconciled with his advocacy of a residence requirement calculated to dis-
enfranchise three million workers. “The great events of history are like ‘la
grande cuisine,”’ he confided to the Austrian ambassador. “One must not
look at it too closely, for the details are of no importance; it is the result that
matters.”
During Flaubert’s voyage in the East, events at home had hastened the
implementation of Louis—Napoleon’s grand design. In March 1850, repub-
licans soundly defeated government candidates to gain twenty seats in the
Assembly, provoking a red scare and a widespread flight of capital. More
ominous for Bonapartists was the refusal of a legislature still monarchical in
the majority to amend a constitutional article that barred the president from
serving two consecutive terms. Louis would obligatorily retire after May
1852 unless the republic fell, and plans for its execution, code-named Op-
eration Rubicon, were therefore set in motion. This coup d’état was so
widely anticipated that when George Sand, walking past the Elysee on De-
cember 2 at 1 a.m., saw a darkened palace, she remarked facetiously: “It
won’t be tomorrow, then.” Her mistake should have been borne in on her
later that morning by the tolling of bells and the beating of drums; how-
ever, arrangements had been made to slash the drumheads overnight and
to post guards around belfries. Before dawn, gendarmes fanned out across
the city with warrants of arrest for seventy-eight well-respected men——
journalists, deputies, generals —-whose words might have inspired resist-
ance. The printing presses of opposition papers were closed. The Palais
Bourbon, where the National Assembly met, was surrounded by Louis-
Napoleon’s faithful constabulary. Had National Guardsmen tried to arm
themselves at posts around the capital, they would have found barrels of wet
powder. It was midmorning when France’s new savior, wearing a general’s
uniform, emerged from the Blysée with his uncle Jerome and mounted his
horse. A proclamation from the president of the republic to the people de-
claring that the present situation could not continue any longer had already
been posted in every arrondissement. “Frenchmen!” it began. “With every
passing day the dangers to the country mount. The Assembly, which should
be the backbone of order, has become a center of conspiracy. Instead of
passing laws in the public interest, it is forging weapons for civil war; it is
encouraging all manner of wicked passions; it is destroying the peace of
France. I have dissolved it, and I leave it to the public to judge between it
and me.” To the army, which couldn’t have been more compliant, Louis-
Napoleon portrayed himself as the embodiment of national sovereignity.
Friday, November 08, 2013
Flaubert
Style
Was uppermost in his mind. Tied to a subject that did
not comport With his taste for exuberant prose,
he struggled for sobriety
like a dipsomaniac married to a temperance
Worker. But under this regime
of self—imposed prohibition, Words eluded him,
and expressing clearly What
his mind saw obscurely Was painful, he
complained. “I have sketched,
botched, slogged, groped. Perhaps I’m on the
right track noW. Oh, What a
rascally thing is style. I don’t believe you
have any idea What kind of book
this one is. l’m trying to be as buttoned—up in
it as I Was unbuttoned in the
others and to follow a geometrically straight
line. No lyricism, no reflec-
tions, the personality of the author absent. It
Won’t be fun to read.” Imper-
sonality encompassed polar opposites. In
Plaubert a dream of making the
World materially present through language — of
abolishing the space be-
tWeen Words and What they represent — had to
compete with his vision of
formal perfection embodied in a Work
representing nothing externall
Even as he Was assembling a portrait of rural
Normandy so meticulously
furnished that it Would not, he feared,
entertain readers, he spoke of Want-
ing to produce a book so hermetic that it Would
be altogether unreadable.
Louise Colet might have agreed With Maxime Du
Camp that her epistolary
lover pushed everything to extremes. “What
strikes me as beautiful,” he
Wrote to her on January 16,
What I Would like to create is a book about
nothing, a book Without external at-
tachments held aloft by the internal force of
its style, as the earth stays aloft on
its own, a book that Would have almost no
subject or at least in Which the sub-
ject would, if possible, evaporate. The most
beautiful Works are those that have
the least matter; the closer expression hugs
thought, the more Words cleave to it
and disappear, the more beautiful it is. Therein
lies the future of Art. As it grows,
it grows more ethereal, from Egyptian pylons to
Gothic lancet Windows, from
Hindu poems twenty thousand lines long to
Byron’s ejaculations.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Enough of himself Went into the composition of Emma to
vindicate his alleged quip, “La Bovary, c’est
moi,” and available as models
for one Bovarian feature or another were
adulteresses of his acquaintance;
Louise Colet comes to mind of course, but so
more specifically does Louise
Pradier. In March 1845, before the family’s
nuptial voyage With Caroline,
Flaubert had visited Mme Pradier, a notoriously
indiscreet Woman, in
hopes of collecting bedroom stories about her
recent quarrel With her hus-I
band, Who had caught her in flagrante delicto and
begun divorce proceecla
ings. “Ah, What a great study I made there! And
What a face I put on!” he
to be the champion of adultery, and may even
have astonished her by my
indulgence. What is certain is that she found my
visit extremely flattering
and invited me back to dine With her. . .All of
this should be painted,
chiseled, narrated in detail . . . How
deplorable, the baseness of these people
baying at the poor Woman just because she spread
her legs for a dick other
than the one designated by His Honor the Mayor.
Her children, every-
thing, have been taken aWay from her.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Enough of himself Went into the composition of Emma to
From Frederick Brown's Flaubert
He
considered it axiomatic that beauty and ugliness reside not in subjects
but in style, style being all by itself “an
absolute way of seeing things.”
These thoughts would leach into the substance of
Emma Bovary, who is
seen almost immediately as an anxious soul
longing for salvation outside the
wet, rustic world through which men and horses
slog and outside the wet
female body in which she feels imprisoned.
Outside all of that is her con_
vent school, where the sounds, sights, and odors
of the family farm yield to
the perfumed envelopments of chapel service, the
whisperings of confes-
sion, the vocabulary of celestial love, the
prattle of an old aristocratic dame
marooned in nineteenth-century France with
eighteenth—century memo
ries and contraband Walter Scott novels for the
lending. “She wished she
could have lived in some old manor house, like
those chatelaines in low.
waisted bodices under their trefoiled Gothic
arches, spending their days, el
bows on the parapet and chin in hand, peering
across the fields for the
white-plumed rider galloping toward her on his
black steed. In those days
she worshipped Mary Stuart and venerated other
illustrious or ill-fated
women. For her, Joan of Arc, Heloise, Agnes
Sorel, La Belle Eerronniere,
and Clémence Isaure blazed like comets against
the vast dark backcloth of
history.” Already condemned to mimic
transcendence, to wear the trap-
pings of grace over an emptiness of belief, Emma
leaves convent school, re-
joins her family, and is presently rescued from
the farm by a lovesick
country doctor named Charles Bovary, who makes
his rounds not gallop-
ing on a black steed but dozing on an old nag.
The gluttonous wedding
feast that inaugurates her marriage with
barnyard humor, and the preg-
nancy announced at the end of part 1 like a
death knell or a brutal non se-
quitur (given her aversion to sex with Charles),
show her sinking into,
corporeality before her fall into infidelity To
be sure, she briefly plays the
perfect spouse as she once played the perfect
neophyte, but she tires of one
as she tired of the other. All is theater. Only
in dramatic epiphanies can she
feel real, never in dailiness or routine. Too
earthbound for flight, and too
flighty for happiness on earth, she is an actress
living life “as if.”
Emma the actress finds a proper stage for her
character early in the novel,
at a ball in the chateau of a local blueblood,
the marquis d’Andervilliers.
Elaubert escorts her and Charles through the
scene brilliantly, participating
in her excitement while depicting events from an
ironical remove. It
with their arrival in a one-horse buggy at the
mansion, which is a
counterpart to Emma’s convent chapel. She steps
across the threshold into
the space of elevation.
Its floor was of marble and its ceiling very
high; footsteps and voices echoed
in a church. At the far end rose a straight
flight of stairs, and to the left a
facing the garden led to the billiard room, from
which a clickety-clack of
balls became audible as one drew near. There, on
her way to the salon, Emma
saw grave—faced men gathered around a table with
their chins poised on high
cravats; they all wore decorations and smiled
silently when wielding their cue
sticks. On the dark wainscot panels hung large
gilded frames with names in-
scribed at the bottom in black letters. She
read: “jean-Antoine d’Andervilliers
d’Yverbonville, Comte de la Vaubyessard and
Baron de la Presnaye, slain at the
Battle of Coutras on 20 October 1587.” And
beneath another: “_]ean-Antoine-
Henry—Guy d’Andervilliers de la Vaubyessard,
Admiral of the Fleet and Knight
of the Order of St. Michael, wounded at the
Battle of Hougue-Saint-Vaast, 29
May 1692, died at La Vaubyessard on 23 January
1693.” She could barely make
out those farther down the line, for the lamps
were suspended low over the
green felt of the billiard table. What light
shone on the canvases splintered into
fine lines along ridges of cracked varnish,
randomly illuminating one feature or
another: here a pale brow, there two eyes trained
on the spectator, elsewhere
wigs curling over the powder-flecked shoulder of
a scarlet coat, or the buckle of
a garter above a well—turned calf.
This billiard room enshrines Emma’s idea of
history as a series of mo-
mentous occasions starring romantic heroes, with
dead time in between.
That the portraits illustrating a martial
tradition hang ignored in a game
room full of beribboned guests who do battle at
a billiard table is the ironic
prelude to her escape from ordinariness, and
irony informs everydetail.
Nobiliary particles ——the profusion of
“de”s——are all that link past to
present. The great warriors of a heroic age died
in battle; the feckless de-
scendants, armed With cue sticks rather than
swords or lances, wield them
against ivory balls, their only field of honor
being an expanse of green felt.
Indeed, Flaubert’s painted characters exhibit
more élan than his live ones.
While the latter, with heads “poised” on high
cravats like another set of bil-
liard balls, stand grave—faced around a table,
the former move combatively
as light “splinters” against the canvases, over
a landscape of ridges, and body
parts leap into view Nothing indicates that Emma
can tell the difference.
Where all is theater, all ribbons denote
privilege, all particles signify place.
Neither is she disillusioned at another table —
a dinner table as heavily
laden as the groaning board of her wedding feast
— by the spectacle of an
old duke with red-rimmed eyes got up in a bib to
catch the sauce drooling
from his pendulous lips. In much the same Way
that Proust’s Marcel repairs
his ideal image of the duchesse de Guermantes
after seeing her in the flesh,
blemishes and all, Emma smuggles the duc de
Laverdiere out of his senile
incarnation. “Great and glorious before the days
of Charlemagne, the
Guermantes had the right of life and death over
their vassals; the duchesse
de Guermantes descends from Genevieve de
Brabant” is Marcel’s self-
hypnotic litany, and Emma likewise reminds
herself that Laverdiere, who
before the Revolution, was rumored to have been Marie-
Antoinette’s lover.
The climactic event is the ball itself, for
which Emma, in the bedroom
she and her husband have been assigned, primps
“with the fastidiousness of
an actress making her debut.” Sharply rebuked
when he plants a kiss on her
bare shoulder and instructed to keep off the
dance floor, the extraneous
Charles can play no part in her performance,
which will last all night long.
Transported by music, by the glint of diamonds,
the scent of jasmine, the
froufrou of satin, the varnish of antiques, the
porcelain white of complex-
ions, she enters a second state culminating in
vertigo as a titled partner
Waltzes her, spellbound, around the ballroom.
Only once does anything of
the real world impinge upon Emma’s
consciousness.
From the ballroom, where the air was stuffy and
the gaslight dimming, people
began to flow toward the billiard room. A
servant stood on a chair and broke
two panes; at the sound of shattering glass she
turned her head and saw peasants
in the garden with their faces pressed against
the window. Memories of Les
Bertaux [the family farm] sprang to mind. She
saw the muddy pond, her father
in his smock under the apple trees and herself
in the dairy skimining cream ofi"
the milk churns with her finger. But the
fulguration of the present hour dis-
pelled her past life, which had until then been
clearly etched in her memory She
came close to doubting that she had ever lived
it.
In breaking windowpanes, the servant breaks the
mirror at which Emma
had composed herself for the evening. What
shatters is the illusion, the
mask, the new being achievable only onstage, in
a role. Once open to the
outside world, the ballroom—cum-theater is
opened to the gaping face of
history — not the glorious history recounted by
patrician portraits but that
which betrays humble origins. Flaubert’s concern
with absolutes of interi-
ority and exteriority as they bear upon fictional
creation—upon lan-
guage —— thus came to inform a central scene of
Madame Bovary,
dramatizing his heroine’s relentless attempts at
self-creation. Windows al-
most invariably frame her futility While mirrors
befriend the imagination,
windows show her what she is or isn’t, and this
adventure ends with Emma
looking through one, in a guest room, after the
ball. “The first light of
dawn found her looking at the windows of the
chateau and trying to place
behind each one the people she had remarked that
evening,” writes
Flaubert. “She would like to have known how they
lived, to have pene-
trated their existences, mingled in them.” The
window emblemizes a dis-
tance from Being, from la 1/raie 1/ie. When in
due course the squire wh0
makes her his mistress jilts her, she will read
his letter of farewell at a win-
dow and stop just short of defenestrating herself.
before the Revolution, was rumored to have been Marie-
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