Something to Declare

  Indeed, Flaubert's dealings with his publisher Michel Lévy provide the most purely comic passages in the volume. When negotiations over Salammbô begin, the novelist is fully aware of his power and marketability. Even so, his first and main demand remains exceptional in the annals of authorial vanity and paranoia: it is that Lévy must on no account be permitted to read his manuscript. This had happened to the novelist once before, with Madame Bovary, when an editor at the Librairie Nouvelle to whom he had shown the book had had the impertinence to comment favourably on it. “A publisher may exploit you,” Flaubert explained to the Goncourts, “but he doesn't have the right to judge you.” Lévy's superiority as a publisher on that occasion was “never to have said a single word about my book.” Now Lévy has the audacity to expect the right to read Salammbô. Flaubert feels “a repugnance and extreme exasperation at being judged by M. Lévy” When Jules Duplan tries to change his mind, Flaubert repeats: “The idea of that blockhead Lévy getting his bloody paws on my pages revolts me more than the worst review could do. It's as if he was asking me to French-kiss him.” Bouilhet suggests that Flaubert merely read fragments of the book out loud to Lévy, Duplan that the publisher be allowed to contemplate the book only in the office of Flaubert's lawyer; but the novelist is adamant. Though he says he wants 20,000 francs for the novel, he insists on first finding out what Lévy will offer sight unseen. Lévy proposes 10,000 francs, which Flaubert accepts rather than suffer the humiliation of being appreciated. The squabble broadens. Lévy wants a two-book contract, the option being on Flaubert's next “roman moderne.” Flaubert tries for just having “volume” in the contract, but Lévy wins out, additionally specifying that by “roman mod-erne” the parties are to understand “not set before 1750.” Flaubert's other inflexible demand—for a fixed sum rather than a royalty (for who, he argues, can ever prove the number of copies sold?)—also works against him. By 1866, when Salammbô has been a success for four years, Flaubert is agitating for an ex gratia payment to make up for lost royalties.

  This volume contains many of Flaubert's famous and echoing pronouncements: on fucking your inkwell, on the religion of despair, the royal chamber of the heart, the folly of wanting to come to conclusions, the invisibility of the writer within his creation, the submission of the writer to a particular subject (rather than his active choice of it), the belief that “a novel is … a particular way of living.” As always, Flaubert is wonderfully free, vigorous, and stern in his opinions. With his motto Merde, merde et archimerde, he dumps on the ineradicable imbecility of his time: on the medieval and despotic nature of socialism; on the chic modern rage to parler sport; on Béranger and the wider cult of golden mediocrity; on Musset (a sentimental hairdresser); on the inanities of Pre-Raphaelite theory; on the “infantile” Les Misérables. Praise is restricted: to Shakespeare (le maître des maîtres), Voltaire (but not Voltaireans), Montaigne, Dickens, Zola. He playfully attributes made-up quotes to those he admires: so L'Esprit des lois is given as the source for “that bitch was wanking at the sight of other people's pleasure,” and Voltaire rewarded with (the so far untraced and therefore presumably invented) “the history of the human mind is the history of human folly.” Flaubert is just as free with his predictions, whose wonkiness flatters posterity's hindsight. During this decade he foresees the death of Islam, the division of France into two like Belgium, and the impossibility of war with Prussia: “As for war, who with? With Prussia? Prussia wouldn't be so stupid.” This last is from 1868. An odder, longer-term prediction is that a time will come when mankind will abandon its quest for happiness—“which will not amount to progress, but at least mankind will be calmer.”

  However, if we read this volume as a book rather than as an assemblage to be filleted for aesthetic dicta and handy tips on the fiction, then it becomes richer and stranger, gayer and grimmer. For a start, we notice the wide range of letter-writers who coexist within Flaubert: he has categories of address according to his categories of friendship. With Ernest Feydeau he is the laddish cocks-man, dreaming of depilated cunts beneath an eastern sky; with Amélie Bosquet and Aglaé Sabatier the mischievous gallant, going so far but not, in words anyway, farther (“a thousand kisses in places of your choosing”); with Princesse Mathilde the humble courtier and gift-bearer (one wonders what she did with a delivery of turnip seeds); with Jules Duplan, friend and general gofer, he is the impatient, seigneurial employer, occasionally dispensing robust consolation—“You poor old fellow, you look as if life has given you a right buggering”; with Bouilhet the profound friend, literary operator, and also obscenity recidivist, bursting into lubricity as a sign-off; with his niece Caroline mostly the loving Nuncle; with Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie the wise agony uncle, even though she is old enough to be his aunt; with George Sand the affectionate confrère, keen to play down any reputation for vice; with the Goncourts (“I grasp you by all four hands”) a slightly edgier confrère, keen to play up such a reputation. These constant changes of register sometimes lead to comical rephrasings. Summarizing his difficulties with L'Education sentimentale to Duplan in April 1863,he writes: “I'm wanking my brain to no purpose.” The next year, for Caroline's benefit, he softens the image: “I have never tugged my poor brain so much.” By 1866, still on the same book, he sanitizes the phrase completely for George Sand: “You don't know what it's like to spend a whole day with your hands pressed against your head, just to find a single word.”

  Once the main lines of the decade are established, the correspondents who make the most impact in this volume are not, surprisingly, Flaubert's literary and social companions, but two of the quieter characters: Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie and Caroline. At first sight, Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, who wrote to him out of the blue in 1856, seems an unlikely long-term correspondent. Though she admires his work, she is not immune from fandom's twittering, and can be whoppingly wrong-headed (thus “The ending [of Madame Bovary] should keep women firmly on the path of duty”). She is a fifty-six-year-old spinster at the time of their first contact, living in Angers with up to eighteen hangers-on who exploit her generosity; she is religious but spiritually blocked, neurotic and repetitively complaining; in the emptiness of her life she ardently seeks Flaubert's advice; but when she gets it, she invariably doesn't take it, and then complains anew about her unchanged moral and spiritual condition. At first it seems that Flaubert is merely indulging himself as the wise author being consulted about life. But his concern is genuine, and the pair of them are less dissimilar than they appear to be. She tells him how she finds reality disappointing and can only live in idéalité (for her, religion, for him, literature); he observes that each of their lives is sombre and solitary, marked by a hidden wound. If she seems at times a hysterical old woman, then that is precisely how a doctor once described him—an observation he judged “profound.” And so, finding priests an insuperable obstacle between her and God, unable to confess in a church, she confesses with brutal wholeness to Flaubert. The kindliness of his replies and his sympathy for her suffering should temper any reflections on his generalized misanthropy. Her tone is frequently valetudinarian; she fears she will die without going to the opera,like the man in the Nadaud song who thought he would die without seeing Carcassonne. (Why is that city so emblematic, incidentally? The narrator of The Good Soldier, Ford's “French” novel, suddenly announces, “I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.”) They never met, despite mutual assurances that they would. Surprisingly, given that she is always about to expire, she outlived him, dying in 1888 at the age of eighty-seven. It is a touching relationship, a side-story having little to do with Flaubert's creativity. Although when, summarizing her life yet again for her illustrious, unglimpsed correspondent, she writes, “My life has been spent in acts of pointless devotion,” we might sense a pre-echo of Félicité in Un Coeur simple.

  Letters to and from Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie survive in equal numbers; the exchange with Caroline is completely one-sided. This is not a new problem; there
are voluminous speaking absences elsewhere in the Correspondance, absences where the reader must act creatively, as with a novel. Most of Louise Colet's letters were destroyed, while in the case of Juliet Herbert not a single letter survives on either side (and yet, as Hermia Oliver has shown, the relationship can still be plausibly reconstructed). Flaubert's letters to his niece—tender, proud, hortatory, cajoling—exist in some quantity; only one of her replies has come down to us. There is nothing immediately sinister in this: most of the family letters have disappeared. Bruneau comments: “Flaubert's two nieces were responsible, but not blameworthy. That such letters might be published was unthinkable to the bourgeoisie at that time.” But there seems a little more to the destruction of Caroline's letters—and to the survival of the one that exists—than general family pudeur; and as we track her in and out of Bruneau's scrupulous annotations, her poignant and instructive story becomes the secret drama of this volume.

  When Flaubert wrote to George Sand in 1866 that “I am sometimes truly bothered by how bourgeois I am beneath my skin,” he was partly trying to defuse Sainte-Beuve's judgement on him as “depraved.” But the years 1859–68 show Flaubert more than ready to exploit the advantages and connections of his place in the upper bourgeoisie, to use his influence, push friends, play the system. This is normal—even de rigueur—in French literary life; but Flaubert also had no compunction about nobbling Rouen judges, or putting a word in with Princesse Mathilde to help the husband of a friend of Caroline's get promoted chef de bataillon. And when it came to Caroline herself, the bourgeois within him lay very close beneath the skin. He adored her; he brought her up to value the artistic life; he urged her to avoid the un-joined-up thinking he found characteristic of her sex, and paid her the highest compliment of writing to her “as if to a sensible young man.” But when the lessons of her artistic upbringing looked like they were being applied in real life—when, still only seventeen, she fell in love with her art teacher Johanny Maisiat, a man twenty-two years her senior and manifestly lacking a fortune—Flaubert conspired with his mother to marry her off to Ernest Commanville and into social safety. Decades later, Caroline wrote in her memoir Heures d'autre-fois (still for some reason unpublished), “They suggested a proper, honourable, indeed bourgeois marriage”; as a result of which “I was thrown out of Parnassus.” Mme Flaubert, a tough old bird, was certainly the chief fixer, just as she brusquely paid off Caroline 's banished father when he expressed the unacceptable desire to come to his daughter's wedding; but Flaubert's collaboration, his influence over the effectively orphaned Caroline, was central. In October 1863, two months before the drama, he was recording to Amélie Bosquet his proud loathing of “the assembled cream of Rouen, Le Havre and Elbeuf.” In December he sends Caroline a letter which for all its initial non-advice-giving, tells her plainly that “I would rather you married a millionaire grocer than a penniless great man”; better, he says, to be rich in Rouen than a pauper in Paris. Six days after this he writes complacently to Duplan of the crisis, “Everything will work out in the best bourgeois manner.”

  Caroline's sole surviving letter, written while trying to make up her mind on what was proposed, is a touching, naïve document,revealing deep uncertainty and an equally deep desire to please her uncle. She has played music with M. Commanville, she says; he is harmonious in this respect. “But I'm afraid, so afraid of making a mistake. And the idea of leaving you, my poor old uncle, really hurts. But you'll always come and see me, won't you? Even if you found my husband too bourgeois, you'd come to see your Liline, wouldn't you? And you'd always have your own room at my house, with big armchairs just as you like them.” No doubt the thoughtful railroading of Caroline into marriage was not so unusual for the time; but she did suffer one extra, humiliating betrayal. Before the marriage Caroline went to her grandmother and explained that she did not want children; Commanville should be informed of her decision and its necessary consequences for him. Mme Flaubert led Caroline to believe that she would square the husband-to-be; but when her granddaughter, dressed in her going-away clothes, found herself in the pavillon at Croisset, alone for the first time with her new husband, she discovered that the bad news had not been transmitted. “My avowal to M. Commanville was harsh and cruel,” she recalled, “and our honeymoon voyage was a sad one.” The marriage was not a success, and Caroline's subsequent life followed the same unfortunate pattern: twice more she fell in love, once more she married, but the two conditions never coincided.

  How far should we blame Flaubert? Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie once complained that those who loved her had done her more harm than those who hated her, and this seems to have been Caroline's case; perhaps it always is. Flaubert was certainly in awe of his mother (“So, you are guarded like a young girl?” was Louise Colet's taunt), and the marriage was convenient to him: if Caroline remained in Rouen, she could help him out with mother-care. What the writer wanted most of all from his immediate family was calm. When a dispute arose over Caroline's dowry, he retreated swiftly into the irritable vagueness of the artist who must not be bothered with quotidian concerns. Let everything arrange itself in the best bourgeois manner while he gets on with his work. This might be understandable, and sub specie aeternitatis almost forgivable, if he had been writing Madame Bovary at the time; but the dismal irony of his role in Caroline's marriage is that the art he needed to concentrate on was that duff féerie called Le Château des coeurs. The Goncourts' verdict on the play was snobbish but fair. When Flaubert read it to them, they judged it “A work of which we would have judged him incapable, given our opinion of him. To have read your way through every single féerie and then produce the most vulgar of all of them …”

  Everything did, in a sense, for a time, go in the best bourgeois manner. Caroline wrote comforting letters from her honeymoon implying that all was well. She returned to Rouen and settled into the life of “a fashionable young lady much in demand.” But a breach with her uncle has been opened. Flaubert now begins to rebuke her for being what he had encouraged her to be: an independent bourgeois wife rather than a dependent and adoring niece. He recognizes her new status by using her increasingly as an intermediary in dealing with his mother; but he also finds that she doesn't do what he expects. She comes to Paris when it would be more useful to him if she stayed and looked after his mother. When Commanville is away in Dieppe and he invites her to lunch, she declines. He rebukes her thus: “Lui, bon oncle pourtant. Lui bon nègre. Lui aimer petite nièce. Mais petite nièce oublier lui. Elle pas gentille! Elle cacatte! Lui presque pleurer! Lui faire bécots, tout de même.” This retreat into baby-talk, or Little Black Sambo–speak, is peculiar and revealing. By using it, he is seeking to corral his niece back into obedient childhood, but in fact it is he who emerges sounding childish, the whiner not getting his own way.

  Caroline continues with the life allotted to her, while Flaubert makes uneasy remarks about her sumptuous carriage and the fact that “Tomorrow Madame is having a big party for all the grand monde. Will she even have time to read the love and kisses her poor uncle sends her?” What makes such comments distasteful is that while Caroline is disporting herself with the despised rouennerie, havrerie, and elbeuferie, Flaubert is simultaneously relaying rather self-congratulatory accounts of his own progress in the truer grand monde. He ticks her off for abandoning her study of Montaigne, and in the next letter writes preeningly to her: “Two princesses made fun of me.” This is one of the periods from which Flaubert comes out least well. That solitary, plaintive letter from Caroline contrives to haunt a long stretch of the Correspondance, and makes the manner of its survival intriguing. Did Flaubert keep only this single letter from his niece? Unlikely. Did he keep all or most of them, and did she then destroy the rest, preserving only this one? And so should we imagine her burning all those cheerful honeymoon lies while saving this true appeal for help, letting it stand thereafter as a rebuke against her famous uncle?

  We could not trace Caroline's story so clearly without the extraordinar
y completeness of the Pléiade edition. Inevitable moments of repetitiousness are balanced by the way we are allowed to follow the life of even a phrase: how “Fuck your inkwell!” (to Feydeau, 1859) becomes “The inkwell is the true vagina for men of letters” (Feydeau 1859) becomes “Drink ink! it makes you drunker than wine” (Feydeau 1861) becomes “Ink is a wine that makes us drunk, let's plunge into dreams since life is so appalling” (Amélie Bosquet 1861) becomes “Let's get drunk on ink, since we haven't got any nectar of the gods” (Bosquet 1861). Or we may watch the creation of an image: when Mme Flaubert is ill in August 1861, Flaubert reports to Caroline that she is given a vesicatory (an irritating ointment or plaster designed to blister the skin—the dying M. Dambreuse is given one in L'Education sentimentale). Two days later she is better; two weeks later the writer has appropriated the image to himself, writing to the Goncourts, “My work isn't going too badly. My literary vesicatory brings relief.”

  Completeness also allows us to follow the volte-faces, ironic juxtapositions, and quiet hypocrisies that bestrew a long correspondence. Flaubert mocks Michelet in a letter to Gautier, but not long afterwards the historian becomes “cher Maître” (Flaubert also goes into turn-around over George Sand). When Froehner denounces Salammbô and also calls it “the illegitimate daughter of Les Misérables” we can better imagine Flaubert's double wrath by having read his earlier private trashing of Hugo's book to Edma Roger des Genettes. Equally, the wrong praise can produce a squirm: Flaubert explains to Sainte-Beuve that his approach to antiquity in Salammbô is diametrically opposed to Chateaubriand's method; a few months later Maurice Schlesinger innocently congratulates Flaubert on the novel—“People are quite right to compare it to Chateaubriand.” And after reading Flaubert's slightly patronizing teases of Caroline over le grand monde, it seems like an act of editorial justice when Bruneau helps us understand the figure the novelist actually cut as he joked with his princesses. The comtesse Stéphanie de Tascher de la Pagerie, for instance, in her Mon Séjour aux Tuileries (1894) recalled: “Gustave Flaubert … was showing off amongst us. He has a penetrating glance, but the complexion of a drunkard … His books are heavy-going and so is he.” In 1867, after a ball at the Tuileries which he clearly regarded as a social peak, Flaubert thanks the Princesse Mathilde: “The Tuileries ball stays in my mind like an enchanting dream.” (Comte Primoli, editing this letter, gratuitously inserted the words, “I felt like Madame Bovary, knocked out by her first ball.” A new gloss on “Madame Bovary, c'est moi.”)