Reading contempt

Why books are for schnooks

When he died (8 May 1880, stroke, Croisset, 58), Flaubert was pretty much broke. Five years before he had been forced to sell off his two main assets—his Paris apartment and the farm he inherited from his father in Deauville—to save from disgrace his orphaned niece, Caroline, whose idiot timber-baron husband, Ernest Commanville, through dubious business dealings, had lost his family’s fortune, and Flaubert’s.

Few things mattered more to Flaubert than the welfare and happiness of Caroline, whom he had raised as his own daughter (her mother, Flaubert’s sister, died two months after Caroline’s birth). Next to Flaubert’s mother, she was the greatest love of his relatively love-free life.

So, reluctantly, he cashed in, gave the Commanvilles the bulk of the proceeds, and, determined to remake his fortunes through his writing—a longshot, given his success to that point—moved into the summerhouse of his late mother—she had died in 1872—in Croisset, on the right bank of the Seine, four kilometres from Rouen.

Flaubert, however, wasn’t just motivated by avuncular largesse. His mother had bequeathed the Croisset manor to Caroline, but the will stipulated that Flaubert could continue living there during his lifetime. He loved Croisset more than any material object in his universe. The quiet garden, the elegant row of lime trees, and, especially, the little pavilion, actually a garden shed, pictured above, his haven on the river, where he had written every one of his books. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

Commanville’s bankruptcy threatened to take it from him. He had already lost it once, in late 1870, when enemy soldiers occupied it during the Franco-Prussian war. “Croisset has lost all its charm for me,” he had written Caroline at the time, “and I wouldn't set foot there again for anything in the world. If you only knew what it was like to see Prussian helmets on your bed! How maddening! How miserable! There will be no end to this dreadful war!”

But the war did end, and in April 1871, he moved back.

Contrary to my expectations, I find myself very well in Croisset, and I don't think any more about the Prussians than if they had never been here! It is very gratifying to find myself in my old study and to see all my little things again!… If nothing disturbs me, I'll have finished my Heresies by the end of the month… All I need is the presence of those I love, a small group in which you occupy the front row, my beautiful lady.—Letter to Caroline, 5 April 1871

“Heresies” was the manuscript of La Tentation de Saint Antoine (“The Temptation of Saint Anthony”), which he had started in 1849, the year before his trip to the Middle East, and four years after seeing Breughel the Younger’s painting of the subject at the Balbi Palazzo in Genoa.

From his travel carnet:

In the background, on both sides, on each of the hills, two monstrous heads of devils, half living, half mountains. At the bottom left, Saint Anthony, between three women, turning his head away to avoid their caresses. They are naked, white, smiling and about to wrap their arms around him. Opposite the viewer, at the very bottom of the painting, Gourmandise, naked to the waist, lean, her head adorned with red and green ornaments, a sad figure, her neck disproportionately long and taut, like a crane's, bending towards the nape of her neck - her collarbones protruding - presents him with a dish laden with coloured food.

Man on horseback in a barrel, beasts emerging from the bellies of animals, frogs with arms and jumping on the ground. - Red-nosed man on a horse surrounded by devils. - Hovering winged dragon. Everything seems to be on the same level. All swarming, swarming and cackling in a grotesque and wild way, in the bonhomie of every detail. - At first this picture seems confusing, then it becomes strange for most, funny for some, something more for others. For me, it has obliterated the entire gallery in which it stands. I already don't remember the rest.

Over his writing desk in Croisset he kept an engraving of another version of the painting, by Breughel’s assistant Jacques Callot.

And, famously, on his writing desk, he kept Louou, a stuffed parrot borrowed from the public library in Rouen.

The Temptation had stymied Flaubert through three decades. After the first attempt, he read it to two of his best literary friends, who, after enduring a ten-hour-straight lecture in his grave booming voice, suggested that he “throw it into the fire and never mention it again.” He went back to it in 1856. Then again in 1869, before the war, and then again after it.

He finally finished it in 1872, just before the death of his mother, and by which time he was absorbed, or rather reabsorbed, in another project, which he had begun to think about in 1839, and then again in 1863, but hadn’t been able to focus on until now.

He described the project in letters to two other best friends (the second letter gives a clue as to why, at this point in his life, his social circle had been much reduced):

I'm going to start a book that will keep me busy for several years—It's about these two guys who copy a kind of critical encyclopaedia as a joke. To do that, I'm going to have to study a lot of things I don't know anything about: chemistry, medicine, agriculture. I'm in medicine now. But you'd have to be mad and three times phrenic to undertake a book like this!—Letter to Edma Roger de Genettes, 19 August 1872

I am studying the history of medical theories and treatises on education—after which I shall move on to other reading. I'm swallowing volumes and taking notes. I'll be doing this for two or three years, after which I'll start writing, all with the sole aim of spitting my disgust at my contemporaries. At last I'm going to say what I think, exhale my resentment, vomit my hatred, expectorate my gall, ejaculate my anger, dig up my indignation.— Letter to Léonie Brainne, 8 November 1872

A year later, he told Edma that his “colossal readings” for his novel had continued apace. “Do you know how many volumes I've swallowed since 20 September? 194!” And in all of them, I've taken notes!”

Two years later, he told Ivan Turgenev, that “there is no turning back. But what fear I feel! What trances! It seems to me that I am about to embark on a very great journey towards unknown regions and that I will not return.” Then to his other remaining ally, George Sand—by now most of his writer friends had all but abandoned him (as would soon Sand, a year later, by dying of stomach cancer): "[it] is leading me very quietly, or rather relentlessly, to the abode of the shades. It will be the death of me!"

“My heart is becoming a necropolis,” he wrote to another. 

Meanwhile, La Tentation de Saint Antoine was published, in April 1873. It was quickly “torn to shreds in the papers and exalted by two or three people”. After an initial spurt of about a thousand copies, sales slowed to a trickle. Flaubert was devastated. Money was scarce. What little his two semi-successful novels had brought him, the scandalous Madame Bovary (1856) and the critically slammed Salammbô (1862), was long, long gone. L'Éducation sentimentale (1869) was met with universal incomprehension, and only sold a couple of hundred copies. Just a month before Tentation’s release, his vaudeville play, Le Candidat (1873), closed after four performances.

He would have a bit more luck with Trois Contes (1877), which received glowing reviews (except, most notably, from the Revue des Deux Mondes, whose hatchet man Brunetière saw in it “the mark of a dried-up imagination”). But it didn’t sell enough to keep the wolves—and the bailiffs—from the door.

Turgenev remained steadfast in his support. Zola, Hugo, Maupassant, Huysmans, Céard, Mirbeau and the Goncourts all recognized him as a master. But none of that faire bouillir la marmite—brought the pot to the boil—so to speak. Though Hugo, the year before Flaubert’s death, managed to secure him a secret pension—Flaubert had sworn to never accept handouts from the state—disguised as a position as assistant librarian at the Bibliothèque Mazarine (“3,000 francs, no lodgings, and no obligation, not even to come to the offices”). But the wolves and bailiffs kept knocking.

“In the name of Christ,” he wrote to Caroline three weeks before his death. “Why won’t they leave me the fuck alone? They’re screwing me. Let this harassment end!… Sometimes I think I’m liquefying like an old Camembert.”

Add to the overripe-cheese feeling the constant eruptions of syphilitic chancres on his penis—he had been first infected in Beirut three decades before—and epileptic seizures of increasing duration and severity. 

But. He had his masterpiece. Four thousand manuscript pages. Another 4,000 pages of supplementary materials, including a complete Encyclopédie de la bêtise humaine (“Encyclopaedia of Human Stupidity”) and a Sottisier, "a collection of nonsense, especially nonsense or platitudes that have escaped well-known authors".

This would be, he was convinced, once the final chapter was assembled from his copious notes, and everything else boiled down and properly organized, his greatest work ever.

And then, on 8 May, while writing the final chapter at his desk in the garden shed, under the etching by Callot and the glass eyes of Loulou, his brain, overloaded with the contents of the 1,500 titles he had by then stuffed into it while researching the novel—books on agronomy, arboriculture, gardening, canning, distillery, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, medicine, nutrition, astronomy, zoology, geology, archaeology, architecture, museology, Celtic religion, antiquities, history, biography, politics, love, philosophy, theatre, literary criticism, grammar, aesthetics, gymnastics, spiritualism, magnetism, mesmerism, logic, religion, education, phrenology, drawing, natural history, morality, music and town planning—after ingesting all that, plus a stack of insipid historical fiction, his brain burst an artery, and he died on the spot.

Within weeks, Ernest sold and razed the house, but not before cutting down and selling all the trees. A corn liquor distillery was built on the site, later converted into a paper mill.

The garden shed was spared; today it is a museum; you can still see Flaubert’s parrot (or, according to Julian Barnes, a parrot).

Meanwhile, Caroline, his executrice, cut, rewrote and expanded on the mountainous manuscript, and a version of Bouvard et Pécuchet saw the light of day.

Next week, in Chapter 2, we’ll look more closely at Bouvard et Pécuchet. I’d write more about it now but I haven’t finished reading it. So far, a third of the way in, it is a howl, a slapstick Phenomenology of Spirit in comic novel form, mixed in with Dumb & Dumber, Seinfeld, Abbot & Costello, and Withnail & I. It is also an exhaustive and exhausting takedown of almost every crackpot theory still currently befouling the Internet. Misanthropic, hilariously bleak, and essential, a must-read in our post-truth era. Book group anyone?

We will also look at France’s hunting season, which has just begun. The three most prized big-game quarries? Wild boar, roe deer and literary novels.

To those who have read this far, thank you. To those who will now hit the Like, Share and Comment buttons, thank you. To those who will hit the Subscribe button, or who have already done so, thank you.

To those who are Paid Subscribers or are about to become Paid Subscribers, the words “thank” and “you” do not come close to expressing my gratitude. So I will invent new ones—and send them to each and every one of you, in a pretty envelope postmarked Paris, along with a collectible token of my appreciation.

Founding Members?

Yike.

I’m open to suggestions.