2 Burials from Barnes' Flaubert

The weary, valetudinarian tone of Flaubert’s letter to

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

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

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

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

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

and reading Montaigne. ,

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

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

three months he heard the battering sound of hobnailed

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

ing was scarcely possible that day: practicalities super-

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

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

great paws of those‘ louts touching her and covering her

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

The trail to the cemetery was familiar from the time

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

Gustave watched as the coffin was lowered. Suddenly,

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

gravediggers got hold of the coffin and shook it; they

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

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

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

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

the grave. e

Snap! ' 73

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thento the Cimetiere Monumental, where the picket of

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

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

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

judged on this occasion but the gravediggers had skimped

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

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

a few embarrassed minutes the mourners slowly de-

parted, leaving Flaubert jammed into the -ground at an

oblique angle.

The Normans are a famously stingy race, and doubtless

their gravediggers are no exception; perhaps they resent

every superfluous sod they cut, and maintained this re-

sentment as a professional tradition from 1846 to 1880.

Perhaps Nabokov had read Flaubert’s letters before writ-

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

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

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

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

Flaubert took Monsieur Humbert’s business-card all die

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

chuckling advertisement for his own sensibility; a tease

about the gritty, unpolishable surface of the desert; or

might it just have been a joke on us?

More from Sybille

A Visit to Don Ottavio:

That Customs inspection is a malevolent rigmarole. One

fails to see its practical point. The peso is considered hard

currency and Mexico has no money restrictions. Cigarettes,

spirits, French scent, textiles, tea and coffee are all much

cheaper in Mexico than in the United States, so no one would

bother to bring them in contraband. Everybody has registered

their visible cameras. Indeed,’it is revealed that few of these

hopeful spinsters have brought much besides the print dresses,

the one warm tailored suit and the raincoat prescribed by

Terry Guide, which most sensibly admonishes one to travel

light, and it seems futile to suspect them of smuggling sewing

machines, harvesters and electric wash tubs. All they are bent

on is spending their dollars on a huge loot of native arts and

crafts, and bringing them home in original Mexican baskets.

To subject the luggage of these benefactresses to those thorough

and callous indiscretions can have no other purpose than using

power and inflicting discomfort on the temporarily powerless

by the temporarily powerful.

British passport officials sometimes bring to bear the pressure

of their better accents and better clothes on the elderly refugee

fumbling in her handbag for that letter of invitation from the

lady at Great Marlborough. Here, the passportees are borne

down upon by the underpaid, the brutish and the ignorant.

One might be in the Balkans or the East. For the individual

there is more danger, more degradation, more delay, but also

more hope—there is always the bribe. There is also no hope at

all. Among Anglo-Saxon officials the decencies are often

replaced by loyalties and so turn to ashes; here, the decencies

civic or human do not exist. There is corruption as a matter of

course, cynicism without thought, ill-will as a first reaction,

life and pain held cheap, and the invincible ignorance of man

of man.

* * ** * * *

The first stop is a town called Saltillo. It is the capital of one

of those enormous territories stretching from the U.S. frontier

roughly to the. Tropic of Cancer: the States of Coahuila,

Chihuahua, Baja California, Sonora and Durango, which are

the limbo and ante-room to Mexico. Chihuahua alone is the

size of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the others

afinount to a good chunk of Western Europe. Between them,

the population is rather less than that of the city of Birmingham;

which means that there is just about one person to every barren

square mile. It is hot, stony, dry country, almost without rivers

or rain, part desert, part mountain, part mining district

Innocent of art and architecture, yet innocent also of the

amenities, these states are a kind of natural poor relations to the

Western American ones across the border, and a reminder that

a very large portion of the earth’s surface is, if not uninhabit-

able, unattractive to inhabit. Some are born there, no one

goes to Sahuaripa or Santa Maria del Oro except to drill a

shaft, lay a railway or quell a rebellion.

********

Since 1810 and Secession from Spain, Mexico has had a dozen

full-blown Constitutions and a larger number of Declarations

of Independence, Principle and Reform. Many of the con-

stitutions were modelled after that of the United States. In

their time, some were called liberal, some radical, some

centralizing. All were wonders of theoretical perfection; all

followed as well as initiated a great deal of bloodshed. The

Constitutional Assembly would sit in a besieged mountain

town while two rebel generals advanced on it from the North;

another general of yet uncertain allegiance would be advancing

from the Coast; there would be a Counter-President at Vera

Cruz and a Revolt in Mexico City. There would be a Con-

stitutional Party and a Reform Party, an Agrarian Party and

a Liberal Party. There would be Church interests and Land-

owners’ interests and Creole interests, and the interests of

foreign capital.

Some of these interests combined, others did

not. There would be an elected President whose election was

illegal, a constitutionally elected President who was murdered

after election, and a President by pronunciamento. One would

not be recognized by the American administration, another

not supported by British oil interests, a third would be fought

by the French. Between actual sieges and pitched battles,

liberators, reformers and upholders of the Faith rushed

about the countryside with armed bands, burning crops and

villages, murdering everyone in sight. Meanwhile the people

got poorer and confused, and in turn more frightened, angry,

fatalistic, murderous and cowed. This millennium continued

for a hundred and twenty years, from Hidalgo’s revolt against

Spanish rule until Calle’s suppression of the Spring Revolution

of 1929. Sometimes a general would be more victorious than

usual and have a chance to look around and create Order.

Sometimes more people would be involved in the actual

killing, sometimes less. BUT THERE WAS NEVER ANY PEACE. The

unhappy country only enjoyed two breathing spaces: the

U.S. Mexican War of 1848 in which it was defeated and lost

half its territory, and the forty years’ despotism of the Diaz

Dictatorship.

(Only once again did Providence spare Mexico. In the war

of 1.914, Germany drafted a secret note proposing an alliance

against the United States, offering in return the restitution of

what could hardly be _called the Mexican Alsace-Lorraine,

the states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Utah

and Nevada. In a moment of abstraction, Dr. Albrecht, a

member of the German Embassy, left the dispatch case with

the draft in a carriage of the Third Avenue Elevated Railway

of New York City. The contents were published in the New York

World. Mexico remained neutral.)

Sybille Bedford in Mexico

We are now on the through train to Mexico City. It is called

the Sunshine Special, and is a slowish, shabby sort of train.

We no longer have a compartment, only a section of a sleeping-

car, which means a lower and an upper bunk in one of those

faintly comic dormitories known from the films, where men and

women undress and sleep, buttoned inside curtained recesses.

In day-time bed, draperies and partitions are somehow

doubled‘ back and tucked away in a cumbersome, ingenious

manner, and the car takes on the aspect of a tram with tables.

The arrangement is as old as the American railroads. The

distances made it necessary to devise an inexpensive way for

every person on the train to lay his head during the many

nights. It is not bad at all. The air is cool and neutral, and

although there are some forty people to a car, one is anony-

mously semi-private the way one would be on a large bus.

We felt like hot food that night and went to the dining-car,

which turned out to be an apartment decorated with machine-

carved Spanish Renaissance woodwork of astonishing gloom

and ugliness. Dinner, which you are supposed to order like a

deaf-mute scribbling your unattainable wishes on a pad of

paper, was a nondescript travesty of food served with the quite

imaginative disregard of what goes with what that seems to be

the tradition of the American table d’hote. The one starch and

vegetable of the day is supposed to be eaten as an accompani-

ment to any of the main dishes on the menu. So if it is cauli-

flower and F rench-fried potatoes, cauliflower and French-fried

potatoes will appear on your plate whether you are having the

Broiled Halibut Steak, the Corned-beef Hash, the Omelet or

the Lamb Chops. I have seen—not eaten———such inspired

misalliances as tinned asparagus tips and spaghetti curled

around a fried mackerel. This is not a traveller’s tale.

Last night somewhere in the depths of Arkansas, the machine

broke down. Something went wrong with the air-cooling. It

stopped, and as there is no way of letting in the outer air, the

temperature in the car quietly rose to what we were later told

was 110° Fahrenheit. When I woke I thought I was in the

inside of a haystack, and of course delirious. Such a scene.

Faces peering from behind curtains, calling for ladders _and

explanation; purple faces on the verge of apoplexy, livid faces

gasping for air; babies squalling, men in underclothes struggling

in upper bunks, angelic Negro porters helping ladies in kimonos

down the aisle.

One woman went on sleeping through it all. “Lady, Lady,”

a porter crooned to her, “you’s better wake up, Lady, or you

find you’self with a lily in you’ hand.”

Flaubert says:

“Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it"