Gustave Flaubert

From Philosopedia

Gustave Flaubert (12 December 1821— 8 May 1880)

Flaubert took five years to write his masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1867), about a romantic young woman married to a dull provincial doctor. The book resulted in his being prosecuted on moral grounds.

Prior to this, when in 1846 his friend Alfred Le Poittevin married (but who once had written him, “We are something like one single man, and we live of the same life”), Flaubert was enraged and wrote, “I experienced, when he married, a very deep stab of jealousy.”

Also, after having a homosexual experience in Egypt, Flaubert wrote to Bouilhet,

• You ask me whether I consummated that piece of work in the baths. Yes, I did. It was with a big young guy covered with smallpox marks who wore an enormous white turban.

In a letter to a friend about visiting the Turkish baths, Flaubert confided,

• One admits one’s sodomy, though sometimes you do a bit of denying, and then everybody teases you and you end up confessing.

In her correspondence with Flaubert, George Sand advised him to get married, and he complained to the Princesse Mathile that her “perpetual pious optimism . . . sometimes sets my teeth on edge.” Their unlikely friendship has been described by Barbara Bray in Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence (1993), leading critic Julian Barnes to observe,

• George Sand continues to trip–how could she not?—like an aesthetic Florence Nightingale. She is his old, devoted friend, still and always; yet in literary matters she is no replacement for his lost ‘left testicle,’ the poet Louis Bouilhet, who had died in 1869. Increasingly she comes across as something between an agony aunt and Little Mary Sunshine.

In Salammbo (1863), he writes about ancient Carthage. L’Éducation sentimentale (1870) was a revision of an earlier novel. The Temptation of St. Anthony (1874) was written three times. Three Tales (1877) contains his short story, “A Simple Heart.” All of his output shows him to have been a slow writer, one intent on finding le mot juste, the exact word.

Quite the worldly author, Flaubert was a master of the realistic novel, one who did not spend all his time simply moving his quill. He also did not approve the guilt-clad morals of his time, quipping, “A man has missed something if he has never woken up in an anonymous bed beside a face he’ll never see again, and if he has never left a brothel at dawn feeling like jumping off a bridge into the river out of sheer physical disgust with life.” In Madame Bovary, the pharmacist is given these lines:

• I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all the others with their mummeries and their juggling. . . . I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfill our duties as citizens and parents; but I don’t need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the ethereal heavens like the ancients. My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I support the Profession du Foi du Vicaire Savoyard and the immortal principles of ’89. And I can’t admit of an old boy God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again after three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in squalid ignorance, and tried to drag whole nations down after them.

Commenting upon letters with George Sand which are in Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence (1993), The Economist (5 June 1993) observed,

• They had their differences. Flaubert was a vehemently reactionary anti-Christian, arguing always against the need to assist or promote the weak and meek. Sand (who was seventeen years Flaubert’s senior) was a true daughter of the French revolution; Flaubert, examining it with his head rather than his heart, saw dismal proof of human stupidity, the failing he excoriated in Bouvard et Pécuchet. He was appalled by modern life; Sand, although older, embraced it wholeheartedly.

New Yorker (26 July 1993) added that she had been called “a latrine” by Baudelaire but praised as “France’s Byron” by Chateaubriand for her much publicized liaisons with Frédéric Chopin and Alfred de Musset.

Meanwhile, there were Flaubert’s pathological ties to his mother, or his inclination to seek out (for either sexual or platonic bonds) viragoesque older women, such as Eulalie Foucaud, Elisa Schlésinger, Louise Pradier, Louise Colet, and Sand. He and Sand also had views on sexual abstinence, on the nature of the literary vocation, and on the afterlife. Flaubert once wrote,

• Artists (who are priests) risk nothing by being chaste, on the contrary!

On reincarnation:

• I was boatman on the Nile, procurer in Rome at the time of the Punic wars, then Greek rhetorician in Suburra. . . . I was pirate and monk, mountebank and coachman–perhaps Emperor of the East. . . . Many things would be explained if we could know our real genealogy.

To which Sand starkly replies, “I think I was once a plant or a stone.”

Neither J. M. Robertson nor Jacqueline Marchand cite Flaubert as clearly being a freethinker, although his works have appealed to freethinkers. Skeptics like his view that “It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.” Joseph McCabe particularly liked The Temptation of St. Anthony, which he states “sufficiently shows what he thought of the Church.”

A 2001 biography by Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert: A Life, ends with a comic scene at Flaubert's funeral, although the exact cause of the death is uncertain. According to Wall, Flaubert's coffin was too wide to fit into the grave that had been dug, so the coffin had to be left "stuck at an angle, headfirst, and only halfway into the earth."

A 2006 biography by Frederick Brown, Flaubert, describes Flaubert as the originator of the modern novel, a master of dialogue and description. Like his father (who had been the chief surgeon of the hospital in Rouen), he received the Legion of Honor and a funeral replete with soldiers. He also was neurotic and epileptic, suffered from boils, had a distinctive sense of humor, lived like a monk alone in a room much of his time, pored over his manuscripts, drank syrup of mercury because he feared he had syphilis, loathed his bourgeois creations, and was a perfectionist who agonized over technique.

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