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.”