2023-08-14 14:00:10
“The Seal of Flaubert”, by Georges Guitton (Rennes University Press, 2021).
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In 2022, suffering from dazzling “phocomania”, I rushed to the Bay of Somme to observe seals there. It was only ecstasy and joy. My case is far from isolated; many of us have been so bewitched by the charms of the animal.
Read also the review: “A life, a work”: a barbarian named Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert, for example, was also fascinated by a cross pinniped in Rennes in 1847. In By the fields and by the shores (ed. G. Charpentier et Cie, 1886), he describes this animal, for once captive, whose wet head he sees emerging from the water of a tub: “His nostrils resembling two symmetrical cuts dilated and contracted noisily, and he looked at you sadly with his two big black eyes. »
At the time, as explained Flaubert’s Seal, by Georges Guitton (Presses universitaire de Rennes, 2021), Europe fell in love with this mammal, which was then shown from town to town by acrobats. If we know that two seals were already wading in the moats of Amboise (Indre-et-Loire) under François I, in the 16th century, the craze for the animal dates back to the 18th century. In the 1840s, it was at its peak. It must be said that he had been found to have other qualities than his soft plastic, his intelligence and his faculties of learning: he was claimed to be able to speak. He was even supposed to say: ” Dad mom. »
sensual perspective
A few years later, however, the Seal’s star faded. He becomes an object of laughing stock, of contempt. His silence annoys and disappoints: he is slowly wasting away. It is the end of a reign and of a world. Then comes the coronation of the Republican sea lion, the circus and the marquee. Flaubert, the antimodern, deplores it.
How not to have a heavy heart, indeed, in front of the spectacle of the seal slowly swallowing eels “eating them through the middle” : “The two ends sticking out of his mouth formed on each side of his muzzle something like two long white mustaches. » Two long mustaches… It looks like a self-portrait. The seal is him. The cover of Georges Guitton’s book attests to this resemblance between “the tub hippopotamus” and Gustave: the round skull, the black eyes, the mustaches, the corpulence, etc.
Read also the review (2009): “Gustave Flaubert”, by Pierre-Marc de Biasi: biography of the work
The relations that the writer maintained with the beast were not, however, limited to an unexpected Breton encounter or to a simple physical resemblance: in a letter to the poetess Louise Colet, he expressed his “great desire to become a seal”. Here is a sensual, animal and marine perspective, which corresponds perfectly to the novelist. Moreover, the mammal is already sticking to his skin: in 1849, during his trip with Maxime Du Camp to the Orient, he carried a bag in “sea calfskin with padded straps”.
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