Dhe five volumes of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence, which appeared in the “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” of the Gallimard publishing house, comprise more than 7,000 pages and it took 34 years to publish them. The first letter is the eight-year-old’s New Year’s greeting to his grandmother at the beginning of 1830, the last is a short message that Flaubert sent to a friend on May 7, 1880, to tell him that his book, presumably “Bouvard et Pécuchet”, is almost finished, he doesn’t have much to do with it. Flaubert dies a day later. After reading the letters I understand why critics could write that the main work of the author of “Madame Bovary”, “Salammbô” and “L’Éducation sentimentale” is his correspondence.
In many of the young Flaubert’s letters, one anticipates the adult author. The 16-year-old writes to a friend that he is “anti-prose”, nothing weighs two verses by Lamartine or Victor Hugo. 15 years later Flaubert calls himself a poor “prosateur” – desperately looking for the perfect sentence, a sentence like a good verse, “unchangeable, just as rhythmic, just as sonorous”. Flaubert mocked the same friend when he wrote that he was satisfied with his life: “Yes, only believe in the integrity of the ministers, the chastity of the hookers, the goodness of people, the happiness of life and the truthfulness of all possible Lies – then you will be really happy. “This anticipates the letter from old Flaubert to George Sand:” I am sick of them all, the unworthy worker, the incompetent bourgeoisie, the stupid peasant and the hideous cleric “- an outburst of rage that also meets the staff in “Madame Bovary”.
The son of a surgeon
Flaubert’s father was an anatomist and surgeon at the Hospital Hôtel-Dieu in his native Rouen. From the garden, little Gustave and his sister Caroline tried to take a look at the corpses on which their father carried out his dissections. The 17-year-old later wrote that he was “dissecting incessantly” – what was meant was the section of the social body: “When I have finally discovered what is corrupt in something that is believed to be pure, I lift my head and laugh.”
Dissecting society became the novelist’s trademark. When Flaubert was accused in 1857 of having insulted public and religious morality and good manners with “Madame Bovary”, the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve wrote a review of the novel in defense of Flaubert. For him the author was an “anatomist of morals”.
The hatred of the bourgeois runs like a red thread through Flaubert’s work. The 21-year-old writes to Caroline that the more he can annoy the bourgeoisie, the happier he is. The law student flees upstairs from the bourgeoisie: “Let us let the Empire march, we close our door, we climb very high on our ivory tower, up to the last step, very close to heaven.” “Bourgeois” is not a sociological one, but a one moral concept, as old Flaubert will affirm to George Sand: “Virtue begins with hatred of the bourgeoisie. By the ‘bourgeois’ I understand both the bourgeois in a work smock and the bourgeois in a frock coat. “
Flaubert was not a peaceful one, he was an angry author. The 17-year-old explains that he only appreciates two authors, Rabelais and Byron, “the only ones who wrote with the intention of harming the human race and laughing in their faces.” If he should ever play a role in the world, it would be as a “thinker and as a demoralizing. All I will do is tell the truth, it will be horrible, cruel and naked. ”
He did everything possible to play the role of demoralizing meet. In 1857 Flaubert shocked an elderly lady who admired him limitlessly with the confession that he hated democracy, he detested industrial society, everything “mandatory”, every law, every government, every rule was anathema to him: “Who are you, society to force me to do something? ”Of all politics, claims Flaubert, he only understands one thing: the“ émeute ”, the riot. Flaubert called 1848 the happiest year of his life. During the February Revolution he was an eyewitness to the storm on the Tuileries. He described the raging of the mob in a central chapter of the “Éducation sentimentale”.
Flaubert’s last, unfinished project is the trivial epic “Bouvard et Pécuchet”. It is the story of two copyists – Flaubert calls them “mes bonhommes” or the “basement lice” – who struggle through all the sciences in search of truth, fail again and again and finally return to their copyists’ desk. They want to pass on to posterity the stupidities they have experienced and suffered in a “dictionary of platitudes”. The 16-year-old Flaubert anticipated the moral of his later work: “What a sad thing it is to go down to the bottom of science and discover nothing there but vanity.”
“Everything you invent is true”
Flaubert’s correspondence accompanies the creation of his novels like a basso continuo. An aesthetic and an ethic in letters. Her leitmotifs include: the uncompromising stepping back from the author behind his work, the renunciation of any “mission sociale”, the respect for details and the search for the perfect, lyric-like rhythm of prose.
“Hopefully when you read Salammbô you will not think of the author. Few readers will guess how sad one had to be to attempt to revive Carthage, ”wrote Flaubert in November 1859 to Ernest Feydeau. The artist had to work in such a way that posterity would believe he had not lived. In 1852 Flaubert had assured his lover, the “femme de lettres” Louise Colet: “The thought that I will remain unknown all my life does not sadden me. The main thing is that my manuscripts survive with me. I’ll need a big grave and have them buried with me, like the savage does with his horse. ”George Sand let her friend, the“ old troubadour, ”know that behind the pathos of such utterances there is usually a little complacency hides. But Flaubert doesn’t just want to step back behind his work – at the same time he wants to step into his novels.
This blurs the line between imagination and reality. “Everything that is invented is true, you can be sure of that”, Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet in August 1853. “Without a doubt, my poor Bovary is suffering and crying in 20 villages in France at this very hour.” “Madame Bovary, that’s me”, there is no evidence from Flaubert. But he could have said it. Trying to “get into the soul of things” also had unpleasant results. In November 1866, Flaubert complained to Hippolyte Taine that he was always in the skin of his imaginary people and lived and suffered with them: “When I described the poisoning of Mme Bovary, I felt the taste of arsenic in my mouth so much that I immediately got an upset stomach twice – one real one, because I vomited all of my dinner. ”
„Emma Bovary“, Illustration
Those: De Agostini via Getty Images
It was uncomfortable to have to slip into the skin of those you couldn’t stand. Often, however, it was “delicious to no longer be yourself, but to merge into your own creation”. Flaubert achieved a masterpiece of empathy in the description of the riding excursion that Emma and Rodolphe undertook on an October day in the woods of Yonville. “I was husband and wife, I was lover and mistress at the same time,” enthuses Flaubert, “I rode through the forest, one autumn afternoon, under yellow leaves and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, I was the words, the ones they said to each other, and the red sun that closed their love-drowned eyelids. “
In order to succeed, the empathy required a precise, detailed knowledge of the reality described. Flaubert had to attend an annual farmers meeting to be able to describe the fictional meeting at which Rodolphe prepared the seduction of Emma. With the contrapuntal amalgamation of market noise and oaths of love, Flaubert succeeds in creating a masterpiece. Here he found the musical rhythm he wanted for his prose. He proudly writes to Louise Colet: “If it has ever been possible to transfer the effects of a symphony into a book, it is here.”
“I’ll be as stupid as the two of them”
The search for reality has its comical sides. When Bouvard and Pécuchet decide to move from Paris to the countryside, Flaubert cannot simply invent the right place. He has to find him, as he writes to his friend Ivan Turgenev: “In 14 days I want to go on a trip to Lower Normandy, just for this purpose.” The two copyists want to go on archaeological and geological excursions to the Norman chalk coast , Flaubert asks Guy de Maupassant for a precise description of the place. He is dissatisfied with that and travels to Étretat himself, “pour faire de la vraie littérature”.
Before Bouvard and Pécuchet do it, Flaubert has to find his way around a vegetable garden with the help of a lantern on the pitch dark night. Because the “cellar lobsters” want to write a biography of the Duke of Angoulême, Flaubert also has to deal with him. “I’m going to be as stupid as the two of them,” he sighs, “I’m going on the dogs.” Flaubert, this seeker and inventor of reality, will have liked the letter he received from Turgenev, once again plagued by gout, in July 1877 wrote: “What a shame that Bouvard and Pécuchet have already completed their foray into medicine, I would have loved to ask their advice.”
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