"The ladies of the city admired her housewifely taste, the patients her
courtesy, the poor her benevolence. But she herself was full of desire,
full of rage and hatred. Her dress, with its rigid folds, concealed a
troubled heart, whose pangs these chaste lips of hers did not reveal.
She was in love with Léon.... She investigated his every footstep; she
searched his countenance; she invented a whole history in order to have
a pretext for a visit to his room. She esteemed the apothecary's wife
happy because she slept under the same roof with him; and her thoughts
were continually alighting on the house, precisely as the doves of the
'Golden Lion' that were always flying there to moisten their rosy feet
and their white wings in the muddy water of the eaves."
This is not a striking general comparison; it is a comparison borrowed
from a positive occurrence in the village where Emma lives. So vividly
does this village present itself to the mind's eye of the author.
Sometimes he condenses an entire description into one powerful
poetic phrase. So it is in the passage where he introduces the old
maid-servant who has been summoned to a meeting of the agricultural
union in order to receive for her faithful service of fifty-four years
on one farm a silver medal valued at twenty-five francs.
Katharina Niçaise Elizabeth Leroux, a little old woman who looks all
shrivelled up in her poor garments, appears upon the estrade. We see
her thin face with its deep wrinkles beneath her cap, and her long
hands with their knotted joints, which had been coated by the dust of
the barn, the grease of wool-picking, and the potash of the wash-tub,
with so hard a crust that, although they had been washed in pure
spring water, they still seemed dirty, and which could no longer be
wholly closed, but always remained open, as though in testimony of too
much toil. We see the nun-like rigidity of her expression, the animal
stupidity of her wan visage, her motionless bewilderment at the unusual
spectacle of banners, flourish of trumpets, and smiling gentlemen in
black coats, decorated with the cross of the Legion of Honor. Then
Flaubert condenses the picture into this one sentence:--
"Thus stood in the presence of these well-to-do old fogies this
half-century of slavery."
Trivially accurate as are the details of the description, the style of
this recapitulating sentence is grand and finished. We feel plainly
that for this author the art of literary composition was the highest of
all arts.
Not only was literary composition his unconditional, his sole calling,
but, as may be stated without any undue exaggeration, his conception of
the world was equivalent to the thought: The world exists in order that
it may be described.
He once gave expression to this opinion of his in a thoroughly
suggestive manner. In his introduction to the posthumous poems of Louis
Bouilhet, alluding to his friendship with the author, he addresses the
following words to youth:--
"And since upon every occasion a moral is demanded, here follows mine:
"If there be anywhere two young people who pass their Sundays in
reading the poets together, who confide to each other all their efforts
and their plans, all the striking similes and every pertinent word
that may occur to them, and who, although otherwise indifferent to
the opinion of the world, conceal this passion of theirs with virgin
modesty, I would give them this advice.
"Go, side by side, into the forests, repeat verses to each other, take
into your souls the sap of the trees, and the everlasting might of
the masterworks of creation, yield to the impression of the sublime.
Should you ever progress so far that, in all the occurrences about you,
as soon as they fall under your observation, you see only an illusion
that is to be described, and this to so great a degree that nothing,
not even your own existence seems to you to have any other purpose than
to serve as an object for description, and you become firmly resolved
to make whatever sacrifice the calling may demand, then come boldly
forward and give books to the world."
Rarely has an author, without making a direct effort to that effect,
more keenly characterized his own peculiarity. He has consecrated his
life to the calling of describing illusions. I know very well that,
in his estimation, everything that transpires is for the true author
an image, merely a phantom to be held fast by art. We can, however,
unhesitatingly invest his words with the wider significance that life,
as a whole, is to be conceived as a series of dissolving phantoms, and
then the sentence applies accurately to himself. Take a mental survey
of his materials from the first unworldly and worldly dreams through
which Emma Bovary strives to rise above the emptiness of provincial
life and the insipidity of her marriage, to the hallucinations of a
St. Antonius,--what else have they all been to him than illusions for
description!
An illusion has the dual character that corresponds to Flaubert's
temperament. The phantom, apart from its delusive attribute, is
beautiful; it has coloring and perfume; it fills the mind and
communicates to it an increase of life. Thus tempered, it attracted
the adorer of beauty in Flaubert. But an illusion is, furthermore,
hollow and empty, is often foolish and hideous, is not rarely, at the
same time, comic; and thus conceived it captivated the realist in
Flaubert, the man whose gaze penetrated the soul's life, and who found
satisfaction in dissolving the air-castles of fancy into their simplest
elements.