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.

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.” 

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.