Flaubert's Parrot

  I felt like Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: someone had lent me a fur overcoat and a repeating watch for a few days, then cruelly snatched them back. It was lucky that the waiter returned at that point. Besides, Winterton was not as stupid as all that: he had pushed his chair well back from the table and was playing with his fingernails. ‘The pity of it is,’ he said, as I tucked away my credit card, ‘that I probably now won’t be able to finance Mr Gosse. But I’m sure you’ll agree it’s been an interesting moral decision.’

  I think the remark I then made was deeply unfair to Mr Gosse both as a writer and as a sexual being; but I do not see how I could have avoided it.

  4

  The Flaubert Bestiary

  I attract mad people and animals.

  Letter to Alfred Le Poittevin, 26 May 1845

  THE BEAR

  Gustave was the Bear. His sister Caroline was the Rat – ‘your dear rat’, ‘your faithful rat’ she signs herself; ‘little rat’, ‘Ah, rat, good rat, old rat’, ‘old rat, naughty old rat, good rat, poor old rat’ he addresses her – but Gustave was the Bear. When he was only twenty, people found him ‘an odd fellow, a bear, a young man out of the ordinary’; and even before his epileptic seizure and confinement at Croisset, the image had established itself: ‘I am a bear and I want to stay a bear in my den, in my lair, in my skin, in my old bear’s skin; I want to live quietly, far away from the bourgeois and the bourgeoises.’ After his attack, the beast confirmed itself: ‘I live alone, like a bear.’ (The word ‘alone’ in this sentence is best glossed as: ‘alone except for my parents, my sister, the servants, our dog, Caroline’s goat, and my regular visits from Alfred Le Poittevin’.)

  He recovered, he was allowed to travel; in December 1850 he wrote to his mother from Constantinople, expanding the image of the Bear. It now explained not just his character, but also his literary strategy:

  If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubbornness in denying that maxim … So (and this is my conclusion) I am resigned to living as I have lived: alone, with my throng of great men as my only cronies – a bear, with my bear-rug for company.

  The ‘throng of cronies’, needless to say, aren’t house-guests but companions picked from his library shelves. As for the bear-rug, he was always concerned about it: he wrote twice from the East (Constantinople, April 1850; Benisouëf, June 1850) asking his mother to take care of it. His niece Caroline also remembered this central feature of his study. She would be taken there for her lessons at one o’clock: the shutters would be closed to keep out the heat, and the darkened room filled with the smell of joss-sticks and tobacco. ‘With one bound I would throw myself on the large white bearskin, which I adored, and cover its great head with kisses.’

  Once you catch your bear, says the Macedonian proverb, it will dance for you. Gustave didn’t dance; Flaubear was nobody’s bear. (How would you fiddle that into French? Gourstave, perhaps.)

  BEAR: Generally called Martin. Quote the story of the old soldier who saw that a watch had fallen into a bear-pit, climbed down into it, and was eaten.

  Dictionnaire des idées reçues

  Gustave is other animals as well. In his youth he is clusters of beasts: hungry to see Ernest Chevalier, he is ‘a lion, a tiger – a tiger from India, a boa constrictor’ (1841); feeling a rare plenitude of strength, he is ‘an ox, sphinx, bittern, elephant, whale’ (1841). Subsequently, he takes them one at a time. He is an oyster in its shell (1845); a snail in its shell (1851); a hedgehog rolling up to protect itself (1853, 1857). He is a literary lizard basking in the sun of Beauty (1846), and a warbler with a shrill cry which hides in the depths of the woods and is heard only by itself (also 1846). He becomes as soft and nervous as a cow (1867); he feels as worn out as a donkey (1867); yet still he splashes in the Seine like a porpoise (1870). He works like a mule (1852); he lives a life which would kill three rhinos (1872); he works ‘like XV oxen’ (1878); though he advises Louise Colet to burrow away at her work like a mole (1853). To Louise he resembles ‘a wild buffalo of the American prairie’ (1846). To George Sand, however, he seems ‘gentle as a lamb’ (1866) – which he denies (1869) – and the pair of them chatter away like magpies (1866); ten years later, at her funeral, he weeps like a calf (1876). Alone in his study, he finishes the story he wrote especially for her, the story about the parrot; he bellows it out ‘like a gorilla’ (1876).

  He flirts occasionally with the rhinoceros and the camel as self-images, but mainly, secretly, essentially, he is the Bear: a stubborn bear (1852), a bear thrust deeper into bearishness by the stupidity of his age (1853), a mangy bear (1854), even a stuffed bear (1869); and so on down to the very last year of his life, when he is still ‘roaring as loudly as any bear in its cave’ (1880). Note that in Hérodias, Flaubert’s last completed work, the imprisoned prophet Iaokanann, when ordered to stop howling his denunciations against a corrupt world, replies that he too will continue crying out ‘like a bear’.

  Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

  Madame Bovary

  There were still bears around in Gourstave’s time: brown bears in the Alps, reddish bears in Savoy. Bear hams were available from superior dealers in salted provisions. Alexandre Dumas ate bear steak at the Hôtel de la Poste, Marigny, in 1832; later, in his Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1870), he noted that ‘bear meat is now eaten by all the peoples of Europe’. From the chef to Their Majesties of Prussia Dumas obtained a recipe for bear’s paws, Moscow style. Buy the paws skinned. Wash, salt, and marinade for three days. Casserole with bacon and vegetables for seven or eight hours; drain, wipe, sprinkle with pepper, and turn in melted lard. Roll in breadcrumbs and grill for half an hour. Serve with a piquant sauce and two spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly.

  It is not known whether Flaubear ever ate his namesake. He ate dromedary in Damascus in 1850. It seems a reasonable guess that if he had eaten bear he would have commented on such ipsophagy.

  Exactly what species of bear was Flaubear? We can track his spoor through the Letters. At first he is just an unspecified ours, a bear (1841). He’s still unspecified – though owner of a den – in 1843, in January 1845, and in May 1845 (by now he boasts a triple layer of fur). In June 1845 he wants to buy a painting of a bear for his room and entitle it ‘Portrait of Gustave Flaubert’ – ‘to indicate my moral disposition and my social temperament’. So far we (and he too, perhaps) have been imagining a dark animal: an American brown bear, a Russian black bear, a reddish bear from Savoy. But in September 1845 Gustave firmly announces himself to be ‘a white bear’.

  Why? Is it because he’s a bear who is also a white European? Is it perhaps an identity taken from the white bearskin rug on his study floor (which he first mentions in a letter to Louise Colet of August 1846, telling her that he likes to stretch out on it during the day. Maybe he chose his species so that he could lie on his rug, punning and camouflaged)? Or is this coloration indicative of a further shift away from humanity, a progression to the extremes of ursinity? The brown, the black, the reddish bear are not that far from man, from man’s cities, man’s friendship even. The coloured bears can mostly be tamed. But the white, the polar bear? It doesn’t dance for man’s pleasure; it doesn’t eat berries; it can’t be trapped by a weakness for honey.

  Other bears are used. The Romans imported bears from Britain for their games. The Kamchatkans, a people of eastern Siberia, used to employ the intestines of bears as face-masks to protect them from the glare of the sun; and they used the sharpened shoulder-blade for cutting grass. But the white bear, Thalarctos maritimus, is the aristocrat of bears. Aloof, distant, stylishly diving for fish, roughly ambushing seals when they come up for air. The maritime bear. They travel great distances, carried along on floating pack-ice. One winte
r in the last century twelve great white bears got as far south as Iceland by this method; imagine them riding down on their melting thrones to make a terrifying, godlike landfall. William Scoresby, the Arctic explorer, noted that the liver of the bear is poisonous – the only part of any quadruped known to be so. Among zoo-keepers there is no known test for pregnancy in the polar bear. Strange facts that Flaubert might not have found strange.

  When the Yakuts, a Siberian people, meet a bear, they doff their caps, greet him, call him master, old man or grandfather, and promise not to attack him or even speak ill of him. But if he looks as though he may pounce on them, they shoot at him, and if they kill him, they cut him in pieces and roast him and regale themselves, repeating all the while, ‘It is the Russians who are eating you, not us.’

  A.-F. Aulagnier, Dictionnaire des aliments et boissons

  Were there other reasons why he chose to be a bear? The figurative sense of ours is much the same as in English: a rough, wild fellow. Ours is slang for a police cell. Avoir ses ours, to have one’s bears, means ‘to have the curse’ (presumably because at such times a woman is supposed to behave like a bear with a sore head). Etymologists trace this colloquialism to the turn of the century (Flaubert doesn’t use it; he prefers the redcoats have landed, and other humorous variations thereon. On one occasion, having worried over Louise Colet’s irregularity, he finally notes with relief that Lord Palmerston has arrived). Un ours mal léché, a badly licked bear, is someone uncouth and misanthropic. More apt for Flaubert, un ours was nineteenth-century slang for a play which had been frequently submitted and turned down, but eventually accepted.

  No doubt Flaubert knew La Fontaine’s fable of the Bear and the Man Who Delighted in Gardens. There once was a bear, an ugly and deformed creature, who hid from the world and lived all alone in a wood. After a while he became melancholy and frantic – ‘for indeed, Reason seldom resides long among Anchorites’. So he set off and met a gardener, who had also lived a hermetic life, and also longed for company. The bear moved into the gardener’s hovel. The gardener had become a hermit because he could not abide fools; but since the bear spoke scarcely three words in the course of the day, he was able to get on with his work without disturbance. The bear used to go hunting, and bring home game for both of them. When the gardener went to sleep, the bear would sit beside him devotedly and chase away the flies that tried to settle on his face. One day, a fly landed on the tip of the man’s nose, and declined to be driven away. The bear became extremely angry with the fly, and eventually seized a huge stone and succeeded in killing it. Unfortunately, in the process he beat the gardener’s brains out.

  Perhaps Louise Colet knew the story too.

  THE CAMEL

  If Gustave hadn’t been the Bear, he might have been the Camel. In January 1852 he writes to Louise and explains, yet again, his incorrigibility: he is as he is, he cannot change, he does not have a say in the matter, he is subject to the gravity of things, that gravity ‘which makes the polar bear inhabit the icy regions and the camel walk upon the sand’. Why the camel? Perhaps because it is a fine example of the Flaubertian grotesque: it cannot help being serious and comic at the same time. He reports from Cairo: ‘One of the finest things is the camel. I never tire of watching this strange beast that lurches like a turkey and sways its neck like a swan. Its cry is something I wear myself out trying to imitate – I hope to bring it back with me – but it’s hard to reproduce – a rattle with a kind of tremendous gargling as an accompaniment.’

  The species also exhibited a character trait which was familiar to Gustave: ‘I am, in both my physical and my mental activity, like the dromedary, which it is very hard to get going and very hard, once it is going, to stop; continuity is what I need, whether of rest or of motion.’ This 1853 analogy, once it has got going, also proves hard to stop: it is still running in a letter to George Sand of 1868.

  Chameau, camel, was slang for an old courtesan. I do not think this association would have put Flaubert off.

  THE SHEEP

  Flaubert loved fairs: the tumblers, the giantesses, the freaks, the dancing bears. In Marseilles he visited a quayside booth advertising ‘sheep-women’, who ran around while sailors tugged at their fleeces to see if they were real. This was not a high-class show: ‘nothing could be stupider or filthier’, he reported. He was far more impressed at the fair in Guérande, an old fortified town north-west of St Nazaire, which he visited during his walking tour of Brittany with Du Camp in 1847. A booth run by a sly peasant with a Picardy accent advertised ‘a young phenomenon’: it turned out to be a five-legged sheep with a tail in the shape of a trumpet. Flaubert was delighted, both with the freak and with its owner. He admired the beast rapturously; he took the owner out to dinner, assured him he would make a fortune, and advised him to write to King Louis Philippe on the matter. By the end of the evening, to Du Camp’s clear disapproval, they were calling one another tu.

  ‘The young phenomenon’ fascinated Flaubert, and became part of his teasing vocabulary. As he and Du Camp tramped along, he would introduce his friend to the trees and the bushes with mock gravity: ‘May I present the young phenomenon?’ At Brest, Gustave fell in with the sly Picard and his freak once again, dined and got drunk with him, and further praised the magnificence of his animal. He was often thus overcome by frivolous manias; Du Camp waited for this one to run its course like a fever.

  The following year, in Paris, Du Camp was ill, and confined to bed in his apartment. At four o’clock one afternoon he heard a commotion on the landing outside, and his door was flung open. Gustave strode in, followed by the five-legged sheep and the showman in the blue blouse. Some fair at the Invalides or the Champs-Elysées had disgorged them, and Flaubert was eager to share their rediscovery with his friend. Du Camp drily notes that the sheep ‘did not conduct itself well’. Nor did Gustave – shouting for wine, leading the animal round the room and bellowing its virtues: ‘The young phenomenon is three years old, has passed the Académie de Médecine, and has been honoured by visits from several crowned heads, etc.’ After a quarter of an hour the sick Du Camp had had enough. ‘I dismissed the sheep and its proprietor, and had my room swept.’

  But the sheep had left its droppings in Flaubert’s memory as well. A year before his death he was still reminding Du Camp about his surprise arrival with the young phenomenon, and still laughing as much as the day it had happened.

  THE MONKEY, THE DONKEY, THE OSTRICH, THE SECOND DONKEY, AND MAXIME DU CAMP

  A week ago I saw a monkey in the street jump on a donkey and try to wank him off – the donkey brayed and kicked, the monkey’s owner shouted, the monkey itself squealed – apart from two or three children who laughed and me who found it very funny, no one paid any attention. When I described this to M. Bellin, the secretary at the consulate, he told me of having seen an ostrich trying to rape a donkey. Max had himself wanked off the other day in a deserted section among some ruins and said it was very good.

  Letter to Louis Bouilhet, Cairo, January 15th, 1850

  THE PARROT

  Parrots are human to begin with; etymologically, that is. Perroquet is a diminutive of Pierrot; parrot comes from Pierre; Spanish perico derives from Pedro. For the Greeks, their ability to speak was an item in the philosophical debate over the differences between man and the animals. Aelian reports that ‘the Brahmins honour them above all other birds. And they add that it is only reasonable to do so; for the parrot alone can give a good imitation of the human voice.’ Aristotle and Pliny note that the bird is extremely lecherous when drunk. More pertinently, Buffon observes that it is prone to epilepsy. Flaubert knew of this fraternal weakness: the notes he took on parrots when researching Un cœur simple include a list of their maladies – gout, epilepsy, aphtha and throat ulcers.

  To recapitulate. First there is Loulou, Félicité’s parrot. Then there are the two contending stuffed parrots, one at the Hôtel-Dieu and one at Croisset. Then there are the three live parrots, two at Trouville and one at Veni
ce; plus the sick parakeet at Antibes. As a possible source for Loulou we can, I think, eliminate the mother of a ‘hideous’ English family encountered by Gustave on the boat from Alexandria to Cairo: with a green eyeshade attached to her bonnet, she looked ‘like a sick old parrot’.

  Caroline, in her Souvenirs intimes, remarks that ‘Félicité and her parrot really lived’ and directs us towards the first Trouville parrot, that of Captain Barbey, as the true ancestor of Loulou. But this doesn’t answer the more important question: how, and when, did a simple (if magnificent) living bird of the 1830s get turned into a complicated, transcendent parrot of the 1870s? We probably shan’t ever find out; but we can suggest a point at which the transformation might have begun.

  The second, uncompleted part of Bouvard et Pécuchet was to consist mainly of ‘La Copie’, an enormous dossier of oddities, idiocies and self-condemning quotations, which the two clerks were solemnly to copy out for their own edification, and which Flaubert would reproduce with a more sardonic intent. Among the thousands of press cuttings he collected for possible inclusion in the dossier is the following story, clipped from L’Opinion nationale of June 20th, 1863:

  ‘In Gérouville, near Arlon, there lived a man who owned a magnificent parrot. It was his sole love. As a young man, he had been the victim of an ill-starred passion; the experience had made him misanthropic, and now he lived alone with his parrot. He had taught the bird to pronounce the name of his lost love, and this name was repeated a hundred times a day. This was the bird’s only talent, but in the eyes of its owner, the unfortunate Henri K—, it was a talent worth all the others. Every time he heard the sacred name pronounced by this strange voice, Henri thrilled with joy; it seemed to him like a voice from beyond the grave, something mysterious and superhuman.