How did he become what in his first novel we learned him to be?
His father was a celebrated surgeon in Rouen, a strictly upright, and
kind-hearted man, who brought up his son independently and well. That
his first home was the house of a physician is felt in his books. He
studied medicine himself for a little while, later took up the study
of law, but even in his school-days cast himself passionately into
literature; and in this enthusiasm of his he met a friend of his own
age, who became a friend for life,--the poet Louis Bouilhet. Without
doubt there are autobiographical elements in the description of the
friendship between Frédéric and Deslauriers in his novel, "L'éducation
sentimentale." Flaubert, like Frédéric, went to Paris when nineteen
years old, to pursue his studies. His father purchased the villa
Croisset at Rouen, which he afterward inherited; he passed his life
alternately in Rouen and in Paris, a life in which there were but two
external events,--a journey to the Orient, which he undertook when he
was thirty years of age, and a later journey to northern Africa, which
preceded the completion of "Salammbô." In Rouen he took delight in
shutting himself up for months at a time, to study and to write; in
Paris he chiefly sought diversion. He was in youth persevering in his
labors and violent in his pleasures.
His temperament corresponded to his exterior. I only saw him in his
later years, and then I had but a cursory view of him. But no one
could forget this large-eyed, blue-eyed Hercules, with his rosy-hued
complexion, his high, bald brow, and his long mustache, which concealed
the large mouth and the vigorous jaws. He carried his head high and
slightly thrown back; his abdomen protruded somewhat. He was not fond
of walking; but he inclined to violent gestures; and he beat the air
wildly with his arms, when hurling forth monstrous paradoxes in tones
of thunder. Like all blustering giants, he was good-natured. His wrath,
says one of his friends, boiled over and fell like milk.
He had, indeed, grown up at the time when the French romantic school
was in its prime. He had received his first stamp from this school,
and retained traces of it in his style and in his manner of abusing
the _bourgeoisie,_ which recalled Théophile Gautier's "truculent" form
of speech, as well as in his mode of dress. He was fond of wearing
large, broad-brimmed hats, enormously wide pantaloons, and coats that
were made to fit tight at the waist. In the summer time he went about
his own dwelling in broad, white and red striped breeches, and a sort
of jacket that made him resemble a Turk. There was a report among
his friends that the citizens of Rouen, when preparing for Sunday
excursions into the country, would promise their children to let them
see M. Flaubert in his garden if they were good.
I said that some journeys were the main events of his life. Women have
taken less place in it than in the lives of most men. He had, when
he was twenty years old, loved them as a troubadour. At that time
he had repeatedly walked several miles in order to kiss the muzzle
of a Newfoundland dog that a lady he admired was in the habit of
caressing. Later he accustomed himself to a more matter-of-fact mode
of contemplation and practice in erotic matters. He was a friend of
anecdotes and stories of the manner of Rabelais, and in his books the
erotic illusion was grasped by him with quite as hardy hands as all
other illusions.
Nevertheless, in this point, as in so many others in the character
of Flaubert, there was an abiding duality. He, the old bachelor, the
passionate tobacco-smoker, who held intimate, friendly relations with
men alone, and who felt at ease in no other female society than in that
of certain pretty but not over-fastidious ladies,--held the belief,
apparently the result of personal experience as well as of a deeply
rooted abstract conviction, that it was the natural, so to say proper,
thing for man to cherish for life one grand amatory passion, which must
forever remain unrequited.
Fully in accord with this, we find in a letter to a lady, dating from
the last year of Flaubert's life, the playful, yet at the same time
mournfully true, words: "We poor laborers of literature! Why is that
denied to us which is so readily granted to commonplace people? They
have a heart! We have none at all! So I repeat to you once again that
I, for my part, am an uncomprehended soul, the last _grisette,_ the
sole survivor of the old race of troubadours."
This "uncomprehended soul," however, was not in the habit of turning
to women for comprehension. He dreaded love as a danger and a burden.
Friendship alone was to him a religion, and among his friends there
was no one who stood so near to him as that first and enduring friend,
Bouilhet.
I do not exactly know if there have been times that were especially
propitious to independent minds. But this much I do know: these two
young men, who stepped forth into life when the _bourgeoisie_ under
Louis Philippe had gained the dominion and acquired a poetic expression
partly from the feeble and righteously inclined _École de bon sens_,
and partly from the "Vaudevilles" of Scribe, found the period it was
their destiny to live in, the worst of all times. The romantic school
had outlived itself and produced its own caricature. It was the fashion
everywhere to praise common sense and to deride poesy. Inspiration and
passion were out of date, and consequently laughable. Everything that
was not commonplace was found tiresome. The two youths conceived the
age in which they lived to be that of the sway of mediocrity and of the
commonplace; they saw the victorious mediocrity, like a monstrous black
water-spout, absorb all things, and whirl all things away with it.
This gave them both a fund of melancholy and deep earnestness, an
under-current of contempt for humanity, a sensation of spiritual
isolation, and through it an inclination for productions of an
impersonal, objective kind.